Spit

WAS WATCHING the World Series last night and ... excuse me for a moment. PA-TOO! Sorry, had to spit. Been doing that a lot lately. Don't know what's come over me. Maybe it's subliminal. Watching too much baseball. Boy, those Red Sox and Cardinals love to spit, don't they? Have you ever seen so much spitting in your life? They spit in the dugout. They spit at the plate. They spit in the field. And the TV cameras seem to capture every single stream of saliva from both teams. You've got close-ups of players spitting.

Edouard August Caldwell Gauthier, an artist and prison educator, died of Alzheimer's disease Tuesday at Pickersgill Retirement Community in Towson. The Butler resident was 70. Mr. Gauthier was born in Ottawa and raised in Detroit. He was a graduate of Mont St. Louis, a Montreal boarding school. He became an American citizen in 1961 and served in the Army as a clerk in France. After leaving the Army, he studied philosophy at the Sorbonne in Paris and then returned to Detroit where he earned a master's degree in the discipline from Wayne State University.

A belligerent Baltimore man who spit in the face of an assistant state's attorney and put a curse on her during a probation hearing this year was sentenced to three years in prison yesterday for the incident. Michael Williams, 34, of the 3000 block of W. North Ave. pleaded guilty to second-degree assault and was sentenced by city Circuit Judge John M. Glynn. At yesterday's hearing, Williams apologized to prosecutor Carrie Bower for his actions. "He said he was sorry and hoped I accepted his apology, which I did," said Bower, who brought assault charges against Williams.

Still recovering from the travel falloff and coping with security measures instituted after the 2001 terrorist attacks, airlines are installing a record number of check-in kiosks this year as they race to make the machines more available to wait-weary passengers and to trim their labor costs. The machines also are getting more versatile. Kiosks that previously could only print boarding passes can now automatically rebook passengers who have missed flights, let them choose a seat, and spit out coupons that can be redeemed for a beer or headphones onboard.

These galaxies are not only long ago and far away. They're also the earliest and most distant ever photographed. And there are thousands of them. They're the galaxies of the Hubble Ultra Deep Field - the first fruits of a continuing project at the Space Telescope Science Institute in Baltimore. Eventually, astronomers expect to capture the glow of tens of thousands of them. And the systems are all waiting in what looks like an "empty" spot of sky just one-tenth of the diameter of the moon.

He is the engine driving Navy's dramatic reversal on the football field, a two-sport player who excels with a baseball bat, a devoutly religious man who helps lead a weekly Bible study, a patriot who aims to defend his country from the cockpit of a naval fighter jet. Then there is the neatly cropped blond hair, blue eyes, striking smile, easygoing charm. No, this is not a script outline of a fictitious golden boy. Senior quarterback Craig Candeto is quite real. "He's pretty squared away.

After 40 years or so in a house so close to the Chesapeake Bay that they could just about launch boats from their living room, Raymond and Elizabeth Walker have figured out the most effective way to prepare for a hurricane: A little after noon yesterday, as Isabel was hitting the North Carolina coast, they were making meatloaf. "We might lose electricity, so I said, 'Let's do it now,'" Raymond Walker said. Flood-prone location The Walkers live on the end of Millers Island, the very tip of the North Point peninsula east of Edgemere in Baltimore County, about as flood-prone a spot as can be found.

BEIJING -- The scene was orderly and civilized and most definitely manufactured, exactly what the Communist Party wants when it puts on a rally. Wu Lixin, a construction company boss, was exhorting his troops -- about 60 migrant workers in their hard hats -- to live up to the rally's prevailing message: "We must be civilized with our language, behavior and appearance!" It sounded good, but one person in the second row couldn't help himself. As his boss spoke, the construction worker from Jiangsu province quietly worked up some saliva in his mouth and spit on the pavement next to his left foot, quickly concealing it with his dusty black work shoe.

BEFORE WE GET to this business of a ballplayer's chewed bubble gum fetching thousands of dollars in an online auction, a word about baseball memorabilia from a simpler time. One day, when I was a young boy living in southern New York, my uncle took me to a game at Yankee Stadium. As we walked near the players' entrance a few hours before the game, I spotted the great Mickey Mantle and asked him for an autograph. At first, Mantle looked at me the way you'd look at a fingernail in your soup.

SOMETIMES THE federal government proves itself to be so deeply, impossibly, thoroughly incompetent that insulting it is redundant, because it has already humiliated itself to within an inch of its life. Sometimes you're surprised to wake up in the morning and realize that the government hasn't simply dissolved because of embarrassment. Sometimes being an anarchist is just too easy. Imagine the pleasure with which, exactly six months after he piloted a plane into a skyscraper and died a fiery death, Mohamed Atta received the news that he had been granted a visa by the Immigration and Naturalization Service.