Gino Fava has for a while been a proponent of the underhand serve, the use of which often is viewed as an underhanded tactic by receivers.

“We can either win everything or we can bomb,” Kevin Bunce said of the Section XI Warriors the other day.

Kal Lewis, Shelter Island High School’s star long-distance runner, topped all public high school contestants in the state’s 1,600-meter indoor race at the Ocean Breeze Athletic Complex on Staten Island Saturday.

Boys tennis plays at Half Hollow Hills East Tuesday, and the girls lacrosse team is home Wednesday for a scrimmage.

For the past two years, the Guild Hall Members Exhibition has allowed a peek behind the curtain just after the appraisal of the winners has finished. On Friday, this year’s jurist, Susan Thompson, an associate curator at the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, offered insights into her methodology in a forthright and thoughtful way.

Xenophobia, at its rotten core, is ignorance. And ignorance, as Anna Sewell’s “Black Beauty” has taught children since its 1877 publication, is the worst thing in the world, next to wickedness.

The Southampton Cultural Center is offering three-course dinner-theater packages with “Sherlock’s Secret Life,” its current production from Boots on the Ground Theater. This critic’s advice: Skip the dessert course, because the play is a delightful and satisfying confection.

Just what exactly is the legacy of Harry Houdini, this remarkable magician, escape artist, movie star, aviator, author, and investigator of the paranormal?