Reveal

I'M NO PRUDE. But it still seems shocking when I read the classified advertising in this newspaper -- my home away from home for 23 years -- to see the "personals" and "escort" services ads sunk so low.Maybe it's a measure of how tough times are that advertisements for $3-a-minute "single girls" and $2.49-a-minute "hot 1-on-1" help pay my reporter's salary.And maybe it's a measure of how deranged this society has become that one recent edition had more than 30 different ads for the likes of "the wildest adult messages," "do me," "exotic nasty girls" and "hot talk -- live girls" (must be 18, and non-necrophiliac)

ST. PETERSBURG, Fla. - Orioles pitcher Sidney Ponson is expected to throw today for the first time since being diagnosed with tendinitis in his right elbow, and club officials remain confident that he'll be ready to come off the disabled list when eligible in nine days. Ponson, named the No. 2 starter before the season, will play catch in his most strenuous activity since being shut down after complaining of soreness in the elbow. "He wanted to throw today and we backed him off it, so he'll probably do that tomorrow," said manager Mike Hargrove.

WASHINGTON -- It's really getting wacky in Washington these days, folks. New York Times reporter Judith Miller has been sentenced to jail in connection with a story that she reported and researched but, for whatever reason, never got around to publishing. Earlier, Time magazine correspondent Matt Cooper also was sentenced to jail for refusing to reveal his sources for a story about a story that already had broken elsewhere. Welcome to the latest outrages that we Americans have to put up with, all in the name of "national security."

WASHINGTON - Invoking the wisdom of the walrus in Lewis Carroll's Through the Looking Glass, a federal judge said yesterday that the "time has come" to decide the fate of two reporters whom he found in contempt last fall for declining to reveal the name of a Bush administration source. The leak is believed to have blown the cover of a CIA agent. For a moment during the hearing in U.S. District Court, Judge Thomas F. Hogan sounded as though he was about to send the two reporters, Matthew Cooper of Time magazine and Judith Miller of The New York Times, to jail right away.

ONCE AGAIN, I find myself in the strange position of being disappointed that big-name major league players do not know how to lie effectively. Isn't that something they practice on the backfields during spring training? Rafael Palmeiro barely got his accidental ingestion theory out of his mouth last week before somebody - presumably inside Major League Baseball's central authority - leaked the identity of the offending steroid (stanozolol, and try to pronounce that after a couple of Zimas)

What would you make of a book titled "The Secret Life of Victorian Houses: Authentic and Inspiring Interiors and What They Reveal" ($22.95 soft-cover, Viking Studio)? That sort of National Enquirer come-on isn't usually paired with beautifully photographed interiors. But looking at Tim Fields' sophisticated pictures, I thought that maybe his book's title would actually deliver. Maybe, finally, someone would tell me if that button-tufted furniture was comfortable. Or how it felt to live in a room with five different wallpapers plus a plethora of patterns, throws and foliage.

The Birth of Venus, by Sarah Dunant. Random House. 416 pages. $21.95. From its first arresting sentence, this rich historical novel set in Renaissance Italy compels us to witness preparations for burial of an aged nun, dead after an agonizing illness her convent understands as breast cancer, for which the reclusive Sister Lucrezia has refused all treatment. The description is not for the squeamish. As the convent's nursing sister and her assistant cut away Sister Lucrezia's habit and the encrusted cotton shift beneath, releasing an appalling stench in the heat of Tuscan summer, they and the reader are assaulted by shocking sights that simultaneously reveal the secret of Sister Lucrezia's terminal course, and suggest other, more disturbing enigmas utterly at variance with rules governing the life of a cloistered nun. We are thus hooked, within a few seductively well-written pages, by Sarah Dunant, a skilled storyteller who spins out her almost operatic tale by means of a memoir written by Sister Lucrezia and bequeathed to a faithful servant.

WASHINGTON -- In a culture in which sports supply the metaphors for just about everything, it's not surprising that presidential debates are talked about like heavyweight VTC championship fights, media-hyped events that create exaggerated expectations.Can defending champ George Bush deliver a knockout punch in his final fight? Will the less experienced Democratic challenger, Bill Clinton, make a fatal mistake?Questions like these heighten the suspense leading up to the first debate tonight, but they create a misleading impression that debates transform elections.

RED IS AN APPROPRIATE color for the ''Brunst and Bowen for school board'' campaign signs that have sprouted up all over Carroll County. Red signals danger. Red means stop, as in stop long enough between now and November 5 to learn more than their campaign literature reveals about William M. Bowen Jr. and Jerry Brunst.Stop and look at Mr. Bowen's record on the Harford County Council. From 1982 to 1986 he accomplished nothing because he attempted nothing other than foisting his Christian Right views on the government.

The genius of Mozart is never difficult to find. In a memorable scene from the awfully fanciful play Amadeus, Mozart's supposed arch rival Salieri realizes that genius when a deceptively simple melodic line suddenly emerges from an oboe, boring into his very soul. In Idomeneo, Mozart's first great opera, the genius shows itself perhaps most compellingly at the end of Act 2, when the chorus finishes registering its fright over a sea monster not with one last big chord, but an eerie fade-out.