Nuisance

On Sept. 11, 2001, I turned on the television just after the first plane had hit the World Trade Center, and my view of our world changed. The terrorists made it perfectly clear: we're at war. The President told us way back in September 2001 that this war on terrorism was going to go on in various ways for years, and may not end in our lifetimes. Go look at the speeches. This isn't a little thing that will be over in one fell swoop. It's not a 4 month war after which we go home with our movies and medals.

Sen. John Kerry and President Bush yesterday took their campaigns to New Mexico, a state with five precious electoral votes and an electorate so divided that Al Gore won it by a mere 366 votes four years ago. Kerry pushed his energy policy, comparing the ambition of his plan for energy independence to Franklin Delano Roosevelt's Manhattan Project, a scientific undertaking that gave birth to the atomic bomb. Bush, in the oil-patch town of Hobbs just across the Texas border, kept up his criticism of Kerry as soft on terrorism and ridiculed Kerry's recently stated goal of reducing terrorism to "a nuisance.

Purple-splattered windows. Red-pocked mailboxes. Multicolored globs covering parking lots and cars. Paint ball, one of the world's fastest-growing and most popular extreme sports, has spilled into the street as a messy form of vandalism that is a nuisance for homeowners and police regionally and nationally. Targets have included a church in South Jersey, vehicles in Montgomery County, and new housing - and even a police car - in Bucks County. State laws governing the sale of paint-ball guns, or "markers," make them easy to acquire, although some municipalities have responded with their own ordinances to govern how owners use them - particularly when the drive-by attacks have been aimed at pedestrians.

Lorng Meng heard four gunshots shortly after 2 a.m. yesterday. She was afraid of what she might see if she peered through her window that faces the nightclub across the street. Another shot rang out. "I heard a woman screaming," said Meng, who lives above the Red Circle Discount Liquor Store on Federal Street in East Camden. "I peeked out. It was chaos. " Dozens of people were fighting their way out of the Tierra Dominicana, knocking each other down, climbing over one another, Meng said, trying to flee through the club's narrow door.

Dominic Verdi stood outside Club Noche in South Philadelphia and stared at the bars on the second-floor windows. He didn't like what he saw. "If there were a fire on the first floor, everybody on the second floor would be dead," said Verdi, deputy commissioner of the city's Department of Licenses and Inspections, which shut down the club in the 1200 block of Reed Street just before dawn Sunday. In addition to the fire-code violations, state and local police cited 18 minors for underage drinking and arrested one man on charges of aggravated assault and another for disorderly conduct.

WILLIAM DEVLIN should be ashamed of himself for instigating the court case that led to the overturning of the city's domestic-partnership law. People will now suffer for want of affordable medical treatment because of this bigoted medievalist's prejudices. This clown, with his holier-than-thou self-righteous priggishness, is an absolute public nuisance. Frank J. Bower, Media

David George Gordon, insect epicure, chopped off a desert hairy scorpion's tail, dipped the creepy-crawly in milk, rolled it around in cornmeal. Dropping butter into a skillet, he sighed happily at the ingredients lined up around him: pasta, mushrooms, tomatoes, bee-pollen granules, dried ants, grasshoppers, and crickets. Already under way was scorpion scallopini. Next up: Crickets in orzo pasta, then sauteed grasshopper kabobs. Lunchtime was coming at the bug gala. The pest-management professionals - please don't call them exterminators - at yesterday's New Jersey Pest Management Association's Clinic, Tradeshow and Clambake at Rutgers University mostly sat on picnic tables, eating boxed lunches of tuna and turkey.

Nine cars disappeared from Juanita Butler's neighborhood yesterday. "I love it," she said. "They'd been here ages and ages. Maybe we can have a block party now. " Butler, 75, has lived on the 1100 block of Lansdowne Avenue in South Camden for 25 years. Over the last five, she watched as a fleet of abandoned vehicles collected on her block - a Nissan Maxima, a Hyundai Excel, two Buick Regals, a Ford Escort, a Ford Econoline van, a Pontiac Grand Am, a Chevrolet Monte Carlo, a Plymouth Voyager.

At 11, I learned to punch the green-gray keys on my father's 1956 Smith Corona. The portable case, upholstered gray-and-black tweed, came complete with a detachable lid. Often, I carried it around the house pretending to go off to work or college. As I tapped the keys, my heart raced to the staccato beat marching to the end of the page. My right hand shot up, touched the silver return, and slammed it to the left. I then banged out the beginning of another sentence as the bell rang.

Dane Fife is a pest, a nuisance not only to the players who have to compete against him but to the guys on his Indiana team. "His locker is right beside mine," teammate Kyle Hornsby said yesterday. "He throws trash in it every day. I get mad at him every day. He usually does something to annoy me, once a week at least. In practice, he tries to get you mad and he never backs down. " During his four years at Indiana, Fife has developed a reputation as the player every opponent loves to hate.