Mud

Rush Pearson is an earthy guy with one of the dirtiest, grittiest jobs in the Baltimore area each fall.The pony-tailed actor plays Old Beggar Joe -- one of three "Bedlam Beggars" at the Renaissance Festival playing weekends through mid-October in Crownsville.The act: joking around and carrying on, but what people $H remember most is his plunging into a vat of mud, raking his face through it -- and even chomping on the yuk-stuff.He and his two "partners in grime," Mark McKenna, as Gonzo DiMedici, and Dave Stilberger, as Wacka-Ding-Hoy, do five performances a day. The actors' bawdy show builds on competition between segments of the audience.

MANILA, Philippines -- As many as 1,800 villagers were missing today after a sea of mud crushed a remote mountain village on the Philippine island of Leyte, authorities said. The mud was as deep as 30 feet in some areas, covering houses and an elementary school in the village of Guinsaugon. Rescuers who dug with their hands in the soft mud yesterday rescued about 80 people, many with broken limbs. "There are no signs of life, no rooftops, no nothing," Rosette Lerias, governor of Southern Leyte province, said after visiting the scene.

WARMTH and comfort are watchwords of the holiday season. Far from many minds are thoughts of nature's potential savagery. Nature has its way of reminding us, though. Last Wednesday was a momentous day in Venezuela's history. The people, sick of corrupt and vacillating politicians of the supposedly democratic parties, ratified a new constitution that makes President Hugo Chavez a dictator. And while they voted, the rains came, torrents following weeks of rain that had continued past the traditional wet season.

OCEAN CITY -- Federal and state regulators yesterday ordered the developer of a waterfront golf course to take immediate action to correct harm that his project has been causing to one of Maryland's fragile coastal bays.Tom Ruark of Salisbury, who is building an 18-hole golf course and nine homes on a 372-acre former farm south of Maryland's ocean resort, agreed to begin work starting today. Mud has been washing into Sinepuxent Bay since his workers bulldozed 2,450 feet of shoreline a few weeks ago.Rep.

Fallston softball coach Spike Updegrove has seen more than his share of bad luck during his team's 12-8 season. "I've seen line drives in center field hit a rock and go over my center fielder's head," said Updegrove, who guided C. Milton Wright to four state titles in 10 years before taking over the Fallston program two years ago. "I'd say, `What in the world was that?' and we'd go out and there was a rock. We had a mud game which nobody would ever believe." A mud game? "We let Rising Sun get four runs in the mud, and then we didn't get up in the bottom of the second, so we couldn't use the mud as an offensive weapon," he said.

OCEAN CITY -- Ralph Giove says he used to catch a dozen crabs in every pot he put out near his home on the western shore of Isle of Wight Bay.But, in the past couple of years, says Giove, his catch has dwindled by half. His crab pots get clogged with mud and silt carried into the shallow coastal bay by a nearby stream."Sometimes it gets so heavy you can't lift the pot out of the water," says Giove, a retired Coca-Cola worker who moved here from the Washington suburbs four years ago.Not far upstream from where Giove crabs, a drainage ditch dumps muddy water into the creek from a former farm field where houses are sprouting now. The new development is called Oyster Harbor.

Mucking about with archeologists plucking artifacts from the Confederate submarine Hunley leaves Mark Ragan as happy as a kid making mud pies. About a year ago, Ragan helped raise the Hunley from harbor waters off Charleston, S.C., where it had lain 136 years after sinking the Union blockade ship Housatonic - the first time in history a submarine had sunk an enemy warship. Now he's helping sort out the stuff that's coming out of the sub. Ragan, who lives in a hillside house overlooking Glebe Creek in Edgewater, wrote the definitive book on the Hunley and he's the Hunley project historian.

The best part of school yesterday was the mud. Or maybe the kites. Or perhaps the candy. Or just that there were no classes at Arthur Slade Regional Catholic School.The Glen Burnie school held "Earth Art" day and devoted it to showing its 840 students how the environment influences and inspires the visual arts.Students thought they were having fun flitting from one art project to the next all day. But teachers, artisans and parents said the events surreptitiously taught students to apply skills and consider the world around them.

Jackie Carrera was standing in nearly two feet of mud.Trudging all day, she and about 130 other volunteer surveyors fanned out along 50 miles of the Winters Run stream yesterday. The survey was organized by Maryland Save Our Streams, Baltimore Gas and Electric and Harford County to identify potential water quality problems like the one pulling Jackie Carrera into the hazy muck.She was standing in a deposit of silt, sediment and mud from area construction sites that end up in the stream.Silt is among the main pollution problems facing the 17,000 miles of streams in Maryland, 95 percent of which feed into the Chesapeake Bay."

LAUREL -- Starfield won the $100,000 Chrysanthemum Handicap on a sloppy main track at Laurel Race Course yesterday, after a couple of decisions by trainer Richard Small and jockey Andrea Seefeldt worked out right.The first decision was made Friday before the rain started. Seefeldt, told by the stewards that she would receive a seven-day suspension because of a ride Thursday, chose to ride yesterday and start her week off today. She was to catch a flight to Bermuda early this morning.Her ride on Starfield was her richest victory.