Mud

Cataclysmic comparisons came quick and easy yesterday for business owners recovering from a torrent of water and mud that descended on a Lutherville shopping center. "At its worst, it was like Niagara Falls," said Sheila Landers, manager of the Maytag Store in Yorkridge Shopping Center, part of which was slimed Saturday by a wall of cascading mud churned up by a broken water main on York Road. Landers - who described the water as "nasty muddy" - and other business people on the shopping center's eastern perimeter were forced to plug their rear doorways with trash bags and whatever else came to hand in an effort to stop the treacly mess from seeping in. Some succeeded, some did not. Yesterday, the task turned toward cleaning up, both inside some of the stores and in a parking lot behind them, where a Baltimore County Bureau of Utilities crew used bulldozers, excavators and a huge vacuum-cleaner truck to get rid of the mud, much of it now dried, caked and almost impenetrable in the heat.

We recently bought an old house in the country that needs some serious renovations. Among its charms is a large eat-in kitchen with a rustic look that we'd like to retain. There's no attached mud room, but there is a sizable closet right next to the back door that leads directly into the kitchen. Although the closet has a brick floor, it's not in very good condition otherwise. Can you help us decide what to do about storage space for boots, coats and hats? Storage areas such as closets and enclosed cabinets may seem ideal places for stowing all sorts of stuff.

In the debate of Democratic presidential candidates in Nevada, Sen. Hillary Clinton rebuked John Edwards for his charge that she was "part of a corrupt political class." She said, "I don't mind taking hits on my record on issues, but when somebody starts throwing mud, at least we can hope that it's both accurate and out of the Republican playbook." Ahh, mud. Where would this nation without it? No one knows. We have never not had it. Dirty politics is more American than your mother's apple pie and booing the Brooklyn Dodgers.

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.

Rising at dawn yesterday, Paul Roberts climbed into a skid loader to start clearing out the muddy remnants of a storm that less than 12 hours earlier had caused several feet of floodwater to wash through his White Hall neighborhood in northern Baltimore County. "It's like a slurry," said Roberts, 40. "With this flood, the mud is particularly bad. I've never seen it like this before." By afternoon, he had managed to clear enough mud to free two of his cars - including a restored 1976 MG that had a water line up to the top of its windows - from the parking lot adjacent to the Gunpowder Falls State Park Trail and Department of Natural Resources' maintenance building where he works.

RISING SUN -- Sis, the Siberian tiger, paced back and forth, stalking the stretch of chain link fence between her and the sunken pool where a zookeeper was dropping bucket-size chunks of ice into the water. Released back into her main pen, the majestic feline circled the pool, dipped one huge paw as if to test the temperature and then took a long, lapping drink of newly cooled water. "She's very perky and excited when it's going to snow," Nancy Sepulvado, director of the Plumpton Park Zoo in Cecil County, explained yesterday.

People who live in mud huts should not throw mud, especially if it comes from their own roofs. As Scripture says, don't point to the speck in your neighbor's eye when you have a piece of kindling in your own. I see by the papers that the Republicans want to make an issue of Nancy Pelosi in the congressional races this fall: Would you want a San Francisco woman to be speaker of the House? Will the podium be repainted in lavender stripes with a disco ball overhead? Will she be borne into the chamber by male dancers with glistening torsos and wearing pink tutus?

There wasn't any rain. In fact, the conditions were nearly perfect for the Preakness yesterday. But, as usual, there was only one way to describe portions of Pimlico's infield and a number of its inhabitants for the day - sloppy. Ryan Hain arrived early from Owings Mills to attend his third Preakness with a group of friends who - with the help of large amounts of spilled beer - turned the ground around them into mud. "I've been to the last three," said Hain, 26, "and this is the best one yet."

Ah Day came flying out of the fog yesterday evening, spraying mud and not holding back. It was a sight trainer King Leatherbury wasn't expecting but was happy to see. "I wasn't that confident today," Leatherbury said after Ah Day had won by 5 1/2 lengths over Vegas Play in the $150,000 Federico Tesio Stakes at Pimlico Race Course. "He was coming off a big effort 10 days ago, running in the mud and going a mile and an eighth for the first time. I was criticizing myself for running him in that allowance race [April 12]

If the scandal was, as gossip writers themselves might say, delicious, then the fallout was to die for. As soon as the news broke last week that Jared Paul Stern, a gossip columnist for the New York Post, was being investigated by federal authorities for allegedly trying to extort a small fortune from a California billionaire, the mud slinging began. New York's other newspapers, particularly The New York Times and the Daily News, have feasted on the revelations about Stern and have gleefully uncovered additional dirt about him, his boss, Richard Johnson, and the Post.