Pigeons

The ground beneath quietly crumbled and sank,the soil rotted from too many high heels,cigarette butts jammed down the cracks.The Pride quickly veered left to avoidany collision while paddle-boaters sped uptheir legs and peddled back to the pier.Reptiles broke from glass cages,slithered smoothly to the bottom,their last chance for freedom.Families watching an IMAX presentation awedas the thick waves of the Atlantictrickled in from the walls.Harborplace waitresses tried to balanceice cream sundaes while watersplashed around their ankles.

Daniel Perez is on a roll.In fact, Perez, 35, is being sought today by police in Baltimore and Baltimore County following his escape from a local hospital in a wheelchair.To add insult to injury, Perez allegedly stole the wheelchair and has been charged thusly.Perez was in Union Memorial Hospital on Tuesday being treated for two fractured heels he sustained during a police chase in the county. Details of why Perez was being chased were not available. Upon release from the hospital, he was to be charged in connection with that incident.

1. Any commercial that references The Godfather has got to rate high. The Audi spot goes to a mansion's bedroom with a man waking up to pull back the blankets and find sheets covered in oil and the torn-off grill of a car. He unleashes a blood-curdling scream. Not sure I'm buying an Audi because of it, but entertaining. 2. Feel that beat of "What Is Love." Look at the bobblehead dolls, then the people's heads bobbing as they start to doze off. Until they drink Diet Pepsi Max. Then everyone is in the old Saturday Night Live sketch, bobbing along energetically to the Haddaway hit. SNL alum Chris Kattan shows up at the end to tell everybody to stop it. 3. Peanuts, get your peanuts.

Richard J. Whitely, a retired telephone technician, died Monday of complications from colon and liver cancer at his home in Joppa. He was 74. A Baltimore native, Mr. Whitely was a graduate of Polytechnic Institute. As a young man, he raised homing pigeons and was a member of the Hamilton Homing Pigeon Club. For more than 30 years, he was a telephone technician and cable splicer in the Baltimore area for C&P Telephone Co., now Verizon Inc. After retiring in the late 1980s, he was a consultant in communications for the federal government.

There is a legendary tale in psychology circles about the woman aboard the vessel sailing the North Atlantic who, at the instant the ship struck an iceberg, was calling for room service. She survived, but all her days were tortured by the knowledge that, by making that call, she had sunk the Titanic. In Chicago, as the proud ship of the baseball Cubs postseason play slipped beneath the waves tantalizingly short of its destination earlier this month, such guilt had many voices. Notoriously, there was the heartbroken fan who may - or may not - have launched the disasters of the eighth inning in the sixth game against the Marlins by trying to catch a foul ball.

I built a birdhouse this week. In these ecologically sensitive times, being a bird-watcher has become a sign that you are in tune with the pulsations of the planet. But it wasn't peer pressure that had me hammering away. It was the Cub Scouts, or maybe the first-grade science teacher. Some authority figure had presented one of my kids with a birdhouse kit, and the kid, in turn, had brought the kit home and ordered me to help him assemble it.I worked on it during a snow day, one of those no-school occasions when the husband and wife flip a coin at breakfast to see who stays home from work to mind the kids.

THE NBA MADE history this week by becoming the first major sports league ever to learn from somebody else's mistakes. The NBA, apparently sobered by the fact that no one is even wondering what happened to the NHL anymore, settled its simmering labor dispute with the players quickly and relatively quietly ... without resorting to an 11th-hour game of chicken or months of public recriminations. "We decided to back away from the abyss," said union chief Billy Hunter. The compromise was in stark contrast to the NHL labor impasse, in which negotiators were still arguing over the specific meaning of the word "abyss" when the sport tumbled into a vast bottomless crevice and vanished for the entire 2004-05 season.

At Mount Vernon Square, a pigeon is perched on the forehead of Roger Brooke Taney's statue, cooing with contentment. One can only hope that somewhere -- possibly down there where it is hot, down there where the sun never shines -- Taney's spirit is aware of the indignity.In my view, the former chief justice of the United States is one of the great villains of American history and I refuse to let him rest. Each February since 1992, I have suggested an inglorious fate for the statues erected in Taney's honor over 100 years ago. Once, I suggested that the statues be toppled from their pedestals, dragged through the streets and dumped into the limpid waters of the Inner Harbor.

Santa Fe, Argentina.-- I try to return often to this town where I lived when I first came to Latin America nearly 30 years ago, for the perspective: It encourages me to re-examine some of the elements of my point of view.There is a small plaza in Santa Fe with an aviary called the park of the pigeons. The park has benches, a statue of a mother and child, a garden in the shade of an immense tree. Now and then pigeons rise out of the aviary, circle the plaza then reascend. The sound of their wings is metronomic.

Albert F. Smolko, 74, General Motors inspector Albert F. Smolko, a retired General Motors Corp. inspector who enjoyed racing pigeons, died May 16 at his Dundalk home after suffering a heart attack. He was 74. Mr. Smolko worked for 30 years as an inspector at GM's Broening Highway plant and retired in 1977. An avid homing pigeon fancier, he was secretary of the Hamilton Pigeon Club at his death. He trained birds and entered them in racing competitions. The birds often flew 600 miles or more to return to their Dundalk rookery.