Offspring

The appropriate horse won the biggest race on the second-biggest day of racing in Maryland. His name: Perfect to a Tee.The 7-year-old gelding captured the $200,000 Maryland Million Classic yesterday at Laurel Park, holding off the dramatic late charge of Steak Scam, a gelding 2 years younger.Perfect to a Tee's trainer, rising star Linda Albert, said afterward that she worried early in the race that her horse, running snug against the rail, might become stuck inside traffic. But when Perfect to a Tee reached the final turn of the 1 3/16-mile race, his jockey Alcibiades Cortez swung the favorite to the outside and into the clear.

Radio hits make strange bedfellows.There was a time when the only place you'd hear a song by the Offspring was on an alt-rock or underground station. Nobody thought that odd, either, as the California punk quartet was not aiming for the Top-40. These guys made music for their own amusement, not to push their album to the top of the charts.Imagine their surprise, then, when "Pretty Fly (For a White Guy)" -- a cranky satire of suburban wannabe- homeboys from the band's latest album, "Americana" -- wound up becoming one of the winter's biggest hits.

IT WAS 5 a.m. the day after Thanksgiving. The fog was thick, the rain was pouring, and I was driving up Reisterstown Road, headed toward Owings Mills Mall, wondering why I wasn't still in bed.To paraphrase one especially cogent writer, Christmas was at my throat once again. My No. 1 grandson, my beloved Kaine, had seen a commercial for a talking Pokemon doll called "I Choose You Pikachu." His mother, now my formerly beloved daughter Jennifer, passed the news on to my wife, who informed me. I responded with my usual passion regarding Christmas gift-giving.

Today: The $60,000 Rollicking Stakes spotlights some of the better Maryland-bred youngsters who may wind up on the Triple Crown trail. Look out for Cayman Cat, sired by Mountain Cat, who has already had success on the New York circuit, and Jovial Brush, another Broad Brush offspring with talent.Tomorrow: Another 2-year-old race, the Heavenly Cause Stakes for Maryland-bred fillies, highlights the card. The Hamilton Smith-trained entry of Mysterious Jak and Jana looms strong, along with Maryland Million Lassie winner Perfect Challenge.

In the fall of 1991, a 4-year-old bay colt named Polish Numbers, boasting one of the most desirable pedigrees in the American Stud Book, first set foot on Maryland soil.But the son of the country's leading sire, Danzig, out of the champion filly Numbered Account, was still essentially a former racehorse nursing an injured ankle.He was set to be bred to his first group of mares in the spring, but his future was as uncertain as his ankle.Now 8, Polish Numbers is the most valuable thorough bred in Maryland.

Two peregrine falcons born in different years to the same set of parents in Baltimore are nesting together on the James River Bridge in Newport News, Va.It is the first time since the endangered birds began breeding in Baltimore in 1984 that any of the offspring born here are known to have paired with siblings.Scientists are monitoring the birds, but have no plans to break up the match to prevent inbreeding. Peregrine experts say there is nothing to worry about.Captive breeding experiments once paired brother-and-sister peregrines "and there's no problem with their offspring," said Bill Heinrich, release coordinator at the Peregrine Fund's World Center for Birds of Prey in Boise, Idaho.

Waco, Texas -- FAT SQUIRRELS frolicked on the expansive lush green lawn below. In a dead limb at eye level a pair of pileated woodpeckers ignored the smoke from our cigars and the squeaks from our rocking chairs while they fulfilled their genetic duties.White and pink dogwoods were in full blossom. Twining wisteria vines festooned with heavy clusters of bluish, purplish flowers swayed easily in the early morning breezes. And like teen-age girls in a new convertible, neon pink and deep red azalea bushes demanded attention.

Breeders now will be paying more for the services of the stallion Citidancer.When three of the horse's offspring -- Urbane, Mystic Rhythms and Short Stay -- won on Saturday's Maryland Million card, it was the best performance by a sire's progeny since four sons and daughters of the deceased stallion Rollicking won in 1988."

At one point, Josh Pons was wondering what he was doing in the horse farm business. His family's Country Life Farm in Bel Air was striking out with its stallions. The future was uncertain.But a half-hour on Sept. 9, 1990, helped change all that.On that day, offspring from the first crop of a new Country Life stallion, Allen's Prospect, won both Maryland Million 2-year-old races and earned $140,000."Without question, that was the watershed day, not only for that horse, but also this farm," Pons said of the victories by Xray and Ameri Allen.

FUNKDAFIEDDa Brat (So So Def/Columbia 66164)There's no arguing with Jermaine Dupri's pop instincts. As the musical mastermind behind Kris Kross, TLC and Xscape, he's the leading authority on how to convert cutting-edge hip hop into commercially accessible kids' stuff. So it's no surprise that Da Brat, Dupri's latest teen discovery, is yet another straight-to-the-top pop success; it is, however, a disappointment note how nasty Da Brat's "Funkdafied" is beneath its radio-friendly surface. Sure, the beats are phat and funky, updating the old-school groove of gangsta rap just enough to make Da Brat's rat-a-tat delivery seem as tough as it pretends to be. Unfortunately, she doesn't use that groove to make a point, just to cop an attitude -- and a bad attitude at that.

WASHINGTON -- Meat and milk from cloned farm animals are safe to eat, the government said yesterday in a move that paves the way for the sale of the food. But limits on production are expected to keep the products from reaching grocer's shelves for years, and continuing consumer skepticism prompted the U.S. Department of Agriculture to ask yesterday for an indefinite delay so it can educate shoppers before they face the choice. After reviewing numerous scientific studies, the Food and Drug and Administration decided that food derived from cloned cows, pigs, goats and their offspring is as safe to eat as products from conventionally bred livestock.

Arecord crowd of 26,788 came out to Laurel Park on Saturday for the 22nd annual Maryland Million Day races. The horses participating in the Maryland Million - a racing day second only to the Preakness - are offspring of Maryland-based stallions. The races were founded in 1986 by ABC Sports' Jim McKay, who is still a driving force in the event.

TEHRAN -- Atefeh is one of the younger members of Iran's merchant class. Her sales territory is the notorious traffic jams of north Tehran. She moves in on potential clients when the light turns red, pressing her face to car windows, cocking her head to one side and putting on a plaintive face. At 12, she isn't as good at plaintive as some of her younger competitors, two boys who are hawking Quranic inscriptions and balloons just up the street. Sometimes her face looks more furious than sad. But she still can clear 55 cents a day selling her packages of pink-and-red strawberry chewing gum to bored and surly drivers.

George W. Bush mishandled the war in Iraq and doesn't appear to have a clue about how to extricate the United States from the wreckage. But he's still president. He's still our main man, the boss man, the chief -- not to mention Michael Steele's homeboy. Say what you will about Bush; he's still America's No. 1, duly elected -- at least the second time -- rush chairman. We are stuck with him for the next couple of years. So, while Bush remains leader of the free world, we need to listen to what he says and, to the extent that it remains possible, give his statements sober consideration.

Thurl Metzger, 90, a former farmer who went on to lead charity Heifer International for three decades, died of heart failure Wednesday in Little Rock, Ark. Mr. Metzger, who farmed and worked as a high school history teacher in Indiana, began his work with Heifer as an unpaid volunteer in 1946. Five years later, he become the nonprofit's executive director, a post he held until 1981. Little Rock-based Heifer International fights hunger and poverty and has provided livestock and agricultural training to people in 128 countries.

PHILADELPHIA -- As we branched off from each other on the evolutionary tree, our ancestors look to have made a messy break from those of chimpanzees. By comparing samples of chimp, gorilla and human DNA, scientists from MIT and Harvard say they see possible evidence of interspecies sex. But there's a problem with this finding, say paleontologists who study human origins. The geneticists are proposing that our ancestors were still mixing it up with those of the chimps until 6 million years ago -- a time when one lineage was on all fours, the other walking upright.

Penguins have registered for a century as the premier deadpan farceurs of the animal kingdom: Buster Keatons to the Charlie Chaplins who are chimpanzees. The low-slung waddle of their torpedo bodies and shimmy of their water-wings blend improbably with necks that curve and extend the reach of their beak-with-bullet heads. Their oddly dignified air can be irresistibly uproarious. So March of the Penguins comes as a wonderful surprise. This sentiment-filled yet unsentimental testament to animal nature records the annual trek of the emperor penguins to their breeding ground in the Antarctic waste, where the ice is thick enough to carry all their tribe.

THERE COMES a time when fathers have to acknowledge that their sons have surpassed them, that they can run faster, lift more weight, hit balls farther. That is the pattern of the ages, each succeeding generation advancing over its predecessor. But this dynamic, I thought, was not supposed to apply to picking winners in the NCAA men's college basketball tournament. Picking winners is a sedentary activity. It requires planting yourself in a chair, pondering the world, then making declarations full of self-inflated wisdom.

SEATTLE - As federal investigators search for cows that were imported from Canada with the Holstein that was found to have the nation's first case of mad cow disease, Washington state officials have begun a process that will kill the sick animal's offspring. The cow - which was sent from a dairy farm in Mabton, Wash., and slaughtered Dec. 9 - gave birth to a bull calf shortly before slaughter. That calf was sent to a feedlot in Sunnyside, about 10 miles north of the Mabton ranch. But because officials cannot pinpoint the calf, they plan to kill all bull calves in the feedlot herd of 464 animals that are younger than 30 days, the same age as the sick cow's offspring, said Linda Waring, a spokeswoman for the state's Department of Agriculture.

Iggy Pop has proven there's punk life after 50 with still-explosive performances at 56, yet the question of how long a punk rocker can stay angry remains relevant to many of his musical offspring. "I think we have a few good years left," says Bryan "Dexter" Holland, lead singer and songwriter of the Offspring, the Orange County, Calif., punk outfit that will reach its 20th anniversary next year. "It's always hard to imagine still doing this more than a few years out," Holland, 37, says.