Big Year

HAPPY BIRTHDAY on Monday to Ukee Washington, who'll wake up with the city (or, as he says, his "morning family") by celebrating his 54th on "Eyewitness News This Morning. " The West Philly-born news vet's been at Channel 3 since 1986, first as a sports anchor, now as the anchorman for both "This Morning" and "Talk Philly. " (You can also catch him on the CW.) Recently recovered from a left-hip replacement, Washington has a big year ahead of him, starting with a few more squats and lots more fabulous Fridays.

Nineteen-eighty-eight is shaping up to be another banner year for Beatlemania - in movies, records and television. Fans can look forward to an animated musical titled Strawberry Fields Forever. Produced by Yellow Submarine producer Al Brodax, the film's soundtrack features new artists singing "Blackbird," "Hey Jude" and other Beatles favorites. Michael Jackson, who owns the Beatles song catalogue, is reportedly investigating the possibility of making feature-length films based on Fool on the Hill and Eleanor Rigby.

As Ross Grimsley once proved, almost anybody can win 20 games. But you have to be somebody special to lose 20. That must be true, or else it wouldn't be 10 years since anybody has done it, right? When you think of all the lousy pitchers who have passed through baseball in the last decade, you recognize how impressive it was that Oakland's Brian Kingman was the only 20-game loser of the '80s. Why, Kingman did it way back in 1980, and people still talk about him in reverent tones.

I VIEWED "The Big Year" and for the first time in my life left a movie thinking: needs more bird-watching. Weird, since it's putatively ABOUT competitive bird-watching, loosely based on a nonfiction book about three actual people who devoted a year of their lives to an obsessive, continental bird-spotting contest. There is a rich premise here for a distinctive comedy about a singular subculture - think of how "Best in Show," for example, looked for laughs by delving into the details of dog-show culture.

Max von Sydow can do more with a walk than most actors can do with 10 pages of dialogue. See him in "Pelle the Conqueror," and you'll know just what that means. As Lasse Karlsson, Pelle's itinerant farm-worker father, he shambles across the screen, all elbows and knees, hands flapping, duck-footed, head bobbing down in habitual obeisance with every step. It's a walk that speaks of a lifetime of oppression. It shouldn't surprise you to learn that that is not the way that he walks as Max von Sydow.

This hasn't been easy for Ryan Luzinski. The starting catcher for the Los Angeles Dodgers' double-A farm team in San Antonio, Texas, missed 11 games because of injury. It's been a seemingly interminable stretch. Sure, he has a fractured right cheekbone. But hey, Luzinski played for two weeks after the home-plate collision in El Paso, Texas, on April 15 before realizing how serious it was. Luzinski was activated prior to last night's game against Jackson, Miss., the second of a five-game series.

AND NOW THE least surprising turn of events in the Phillies' season: Charlie Manuel digs the long ball. A former longtime, big-league hitting coach and a power hitter in Japan, Manuel can't help but be intrigued with Double A slugger Darin Ruf, who tied Ryan Howard's Reading franchise record with his 37th homer on Tuesday night against the Binghamton Mets. Of Ruf's 37 blasts, he has hit 19 of them in 28 games in August. With Reading's regular season set to end on Monday, Manuel said he'll bring up Ruf's name when the Phillies make decisions on September call-ups this week.

Spotlight: Triton RB/DB James Burns It's easy to overlook James Burns. On a Triton team that features quarterback Brian Keller and running back Josh Woods, Burns is the guy who does a little bit of everything. And all of it well. "I think people do overlook me sometimes," Burns said. "I'm a guy who fills in the gaps. " Triton (4-1) will need Burns to play his typical complete game Friday night at Bishop Eustace (3-2) in what looms as a tough WJFL interdivision clash.

Brett Myers does not want to talk about whether he will start for the Phillies against Atlanta on opening night. "What, am I going to say no? I'll do whatever they need," Myers said when asked if he wanted the ball April 5. The righthander threw five innings in yesterday's 3-0 loss to Boston, allowing five hits and two runs. He walked five and struck out one. Asked which pitches he was unhappy with in yesterday's loss, Myers said: "Every one of them, but I think I made the pitch when I had to. . . . I'm going to have games like that during the year.

Don't try to stop me. For better or worse, for right and wrong, it's once again time for bold and occasionally boneheaded predictions for golf in the coming season. First, let me say that I am flush from victory in 2000, if I do say so myself. Personally, I had forgotten that I had written so much as a word forecasting the year, until a reader was kind enough to send me a copy of last year's handiwork. He had not only saved the page from that week, he'd gone to the trouble of evaluating every prediction on a scale of 1 to 10. Among my dead-on predictions were my forecast of a big year for Tiger Woods (I figured eight wins and more than $7 million in winnings)

FOR JAKE VORACEK, the one benefit of the NHL's 119-day lockout was a chance to play in his native Czech Republic. "It was something I hadn't done since I was 18 or 19 years old," Voracek said. "It isn't every day that you have a chance to play at home, and play in the best league [KHL] in the world at the time, since there was no NHL. " There were a few downsides, though. One of them was living at home. "I lived with my mom, downstairs at their house," Voracek said with a smile.

What a year for Powerball. The cash jackpot for Saturday's drawing is the game's second biggest cash jackpot ever - $212.8 million. And the record of $224.6 million was just set in August. Because no one matched Wednesday night's numbers (8, 18, 24, 30 and 39, with a Powerball of 26), the annuity prize rose again, to $325 million. That's the fifth biggest in the game's history - and two of the others also came this year, including $337 million in that August drawing and $336 million in February.

AND NOW THE least surprising turn of events in the Phillies' season: Charlie Manuel digs the long ball. A former longtime, big-league hitting coach and a power hitter in Japan, Manuel can't help but be intrigued with Double A slugger Darin Ruf, who tied Ryan Howard's Reading franchise record with his 37th homer on Tuesday night against the Binghamton Mets. Of Ruf's 37 blasts, he has hit 19 of them in 28 games in August. With Reading's regular season set to end on Monday, Manuel said he'll bring up Ruf's name when the Phillies make decisions on September call-ups this week.

HAPPY BIRTHDAY on Monday to Ukee Washington, who'll wake up with the city (or, as he says, his "morning family") by celebrating his 54th on "Eyewitness News This Morning. " The West Philly-born news vet's been at Channel 3 since 1986, first as a sports anchor, now as the anchorman for both "This Morning" and "Talk Philly. " (You can also catch him on the CW.) Recently recovered from a left-hip replacement, Washington has a big year ahead of him, starting with a few more squats and lots more fabulous Fridays.

STATE COLLEGE - Pennsylvania State University received more than $208 million in donations for the fiscal year that just ended, the second-highest total in university history despite the upheaval after the arrest of Jerry Sandusky on child sex-abuse charges. The school said Monday there was a slight uptick in the number of alumni who donated money or gifts in the fiscal year that ended June 30 to more than 75,500, reversing two years of slight declines. "We're very grateful - humbled, really - to have this kind of response from Penn Staters, who I think have rallied to the cause . . . by the side of the institution through a very difficult time," said Rod Kirsch, senior vice president for development and alumni relations.

"You can't get a hotel room in Philadelphia this week. We're having to put people at the airport, and over in Jersey," says John Beauchamp, who weighs and prices weather damage and other environmental risks for companies as an underwriter in the Philadelphia office of New York specialty insurer Beazley Group. He's talking about RIMS 12, the New York-based Risk Management Society's annual conference at the Pennsylvania Convention Center, which has collected crowds of pros who track floods, fires, storms, financial fraud, medical-data security, fear of terrorism, global warming, and other modern ills for their living.

WIMBLEDON champion Petra Kvitova won her first WTA Championships title yesterday in Istanbul, beating Victoria Azarenka , 7-5, 4-6, 6-3, for a victory that also will put her at No. 2 in the world rankings. Kvitova started the year outside the top 30 and was playing in the season-ending tournament for the first time. "It's unbelievable to play here," said Kvitova, who beat Azarenka in the Wimbledon semifinals on her way to winning her first Grand Slam title this year.

Tom Reed was recently spared a six-hour round-trip drive to North Jersey. He'd been headed there to see a bird. And not just any bird, but a calliope hummingbird, which normally doesn't come anywhere near here. But someone claimed to have spotted one near I-80. Shortly after leaving his home in Cape May County, however, Reed got a call. False alarm. It was a common rufous hummingbird. He was glad he didn't have to buck rush hour traffic around Newark. But, boy, he needed that bird.

Spotlight: Triton RB/DB James Burns It's easy to overlook James Burns. On a Triton team that features quarterback Brian Keller and running back Josh Woods, Burns is the guy who does a little bit of everything. And all of it well. "I think people do overlook me sometimes," Burns said. "I'm a guy who fills in the gaps. " Triton (4-1) will need Burns to play his typical complete game Friday night at Bishop Eustace (3-2) in what looms as a tough WJFL interdivision clash.

I VIEWED "The Big Year" and for the first time in my life left a movie thinking: needs more bird-watching. Weird, since it's putatively ABOUT competitive bird-watching, loosely based on a nonfiction book about three actual people who devoted a year of their lives to an obsessive, continental bird-spotting contest. There is a rich premise here for a distinctive comedy about a singular subculture - think of how "Best in Show," for example, looked for laughs by delving into the details of dog-show culture.