Paul Revere

WE ARE chowderheads today. We are Brahmins. We are Southies. We are Paul Revere, Samuel Adams, John F. Kennedy and Aerosmith. We love Old Ironsides, Faneuil Hall and swan boats in the Public Garden. We might even consider eating a meal of baked beans and brown bread. But, hey, there are limits. The Boston Red Sox did something no team in the history of Major League Baseball had ever done before. After losing the first three games in the seven-game American League Championship Series, they won the final four to defeat the New York Yankees.

I don't think I'm being Paul Revere here in bringing you news of the Red Sox's World Series sweep of Colorado or the undefeated Patriots' 52-7 trouncing of Washington. In fact, Boston's outrageously successful teams have been so good, there might be only one meaningful sports debate: Which is the better team, the BoSox or the Pats (we'll worry about the Colts game later). Team numbers Red Sox: Tied for the major leagues' best regular-season record but had the best run differential, outscoring the opposition by 210 runs.

How slow was Maryland's counting of votes in the Nov. 8 election? It was so slow that Paul Revere, riding horseback from Boston, could have given us swifter voting results. It was so slow people started wondering how long Maryland would be saddled with three governors (the present one, the apparent winner and the almost-winner). It was so slow we almost forget there had been an election.There was no excuse for the failure of election officials to give voters fast and accurate results. Their primary purpose is to facilitate the voting process and to get the news of who won and who lost to the public quickly.

"Think of the future," implore signs in Chestertown that have a big slash through the word "Wal-Mart."Yet the battle raging in that Eastern Shore town has nothing to do with the future; it is all about clinging to the past. Some of the town's 4,000 inhabitants are as bitter about the prospect of a Wal-Mart entering their market as they were melancholy about seeing the old McCrory's burn to the ground last summer. The Wal-Mart fight has become unconscionably nasty; the mayor, a friend of one of the potential developers, reported receiving death threats and having his car tampered with.

MANY MILE MEWS. Tinted Hill. Oven Bird Green. Pressed Gentian. What do these phrases have in common? The answer is easy, if you live in Columbia. They're local street names. There's a reason for Columbia's unusual names, of course. And it wasn't that the city's planners got roaring drunk one night and tried to outdo one another in outlandishness. The reason was an agreement with postal officials that Columbia wouldn't repeat names already in use in Baltimore City and in Baltimore and Anne Arundel counties.

Too often, we tend to romanticize our past. We remember the stoic Pilgrims seeking religious freedom and the gallant Paul Revere galloping through the streets.But this week, the Colonial Williamsburg Foundation set out to portray one of the more sordid sides of our history by recreating a slave auction. The skit was a controversial and emotional departure for the normally conservative Colonial Williamsburg, which until now tended to present programs on such innocuous topics as 18th-century barrel making and tobacco farming.

The cluttered, cavernous workshop in Glen Burnie hardly looks impressive.The Michelob poster girls pinned up on sooty walls, smudged wooden and cast-iron equipment strewn everywhere -- the whole get-up says small-time.But from McShane Bell Foundry have come more than 300,000 huge bells since 1856, bells that now ring in churches, city halls, statehouses and fire stations throughout the 50 states and in at least seven foreign countries.The foundry, at 100 Arundel Corporation Road, is the only large Western-style bell maker in the United States, one of about seven in the world.

It's officially time to go downy ocean again. At least it is as far as officials of the Ocean City Chamber of Commerce are concerned. They're the people organizing this weekend's 20 t h annual Springfest, four days (it opened Thursday) of food, frolic and non-stop entertainment that pretty-much kicks-off the resort's summer season. And they're hoping this weekend will act as something of a starting gun. "Absolutely," says John "Sully" Sullivan, the chamber's special events director.

Just in time to ring in the year 2000, a huge bell cast in Baltimore more than 70 years ago finds renewed life Sunday at a historic Anglican Church in Halifax, Nova Scotia.Sadie A. Muir ordered the 1,500-pound bell from the McShane Bell Foundry in 1922 and donated it to Zion Presbyterian Church in the small town of Eureka, Pictou County, Nova Scotia, as a memorial to her family.Still going strong in Glen Burnie, the 143-year-old McShane company is the last large bell foundry in the United States and only one of a half-dozen in the world.

Cal Ripken Jr. was there. So were Kristi Yamaguchi, Mickey Mantle and Michael Jordan. Even Babe Ruth swung a bat or two.I saw these famous people and many others at the "wax museum" recently at Freedom Elementary School.During February, Freedom third-graders studied biographies, reading about famous people in sports, politics, science, music, art, literature and medicine.After researching the life of a famous person and writing a report to show what they had learned, the students became the historical figures during the wax museum event.