Blob

Nearly 30 years ago, The Blob was a parasite, a lethal lump of interplanetary plum preserve, a crawling roomful of Jell-O that ate you instead of the other way around. Now it's a potential gold mine, one Warren Windham hopes will put his Chester County diner up there with Rosie's Diner in Hackensack, N.J, The Diner in Baltimore or the Melrose Diner in South Philadelphia. Windham, a 31-year-old chap with a protruding stomach and a staccato laugh, plunked down $235,000 recently for King's Kountry Kitchen, a well-worn Downingtown eatery with gold-flecked Formica counters, stainless steel walls and stools, and booths covered in orange Naugahyde.

So now you know. Her name's Patricia Bowman, and she has a real face - not just a blue blob over a squeaky voice. Officially, she's a non-rapee - a jury said so. Or at least the jury said there was insufficient evidence to prove she was, which is not necessarily the same thing. Public opinion is divided, but that's irrelevant. The only opinion that matters is the jury's, and - no matter how any of us feels about the William Kennedy Smith trial - we should be grateful for that.

The cars and clothes are vintage '50s, and the title on the marquee of the little Mojave, Calif., moviehouse announces the Ike-era sci-fi cheeseball classic The Blob . R.W. Goodwin's Alien Trespass is a campy homage to those days of malt shops, drive-ins, and saucer-shaped UFOs - you know, the ones that go crashing into nearby buttes, unleashing terrible terrors from another galaxy. Presenting itself as a long-lost '50s find (there's even a phony black-and-white newsreel before the "film" gets under way)

"Morons from Outer Space. " A fantasy starring Mel Smith and Griff Rhys- Jones. Directed by Mike Hodges from a screenplay by Smith and Jones. Photographed by Phil Meheux. Edited by Peter Boyle. Music by Peter Brewes. Running time: 91 minutes. A Universal release. Starting today for one week only at the Theater of the Living Arts, 334 South St. Not all space creatures are monsters, as they are in "Aliens," or candidates for sainthood, as in "E.T. - The Extraterrestrial. " Some of them merely are slobs, an idea entertained in Mike Hodges' good- natured British farce, "Morons from Outer Space.

Running side by side with the Philadelphia Fringe Festival is Philadelphia Glass Week, which begins today and continues through Sept. 20 at a half-dozen local galleries. One of its prime attractions is an exhibition by Gene Koss at Tyler School of Art. Koss is showing sculptures he calls "gizmos," steel contraptions he designed to manipulate molten glass. The result of each manipulation is a contorted blob that becomes part of the sculpture. Koss grew up on a farm, so it's no coincidence that the dull gray gizmos evoke farm machinery.

Members of the Anti-Graffiti Network work yesterday on restoring the paint- splattered mural of Mayor Goode. Sometime early Sunday vandals hurled paint bottles at the 70-by-30-foot mural, which had been created by the Network and unveiled last Thursday in North Philadelphia. Network executive director Timothy Spencer said a protective gel would make it relatively easy to clean the mural.

The state says it's most likely a mass of dead algae - a bit unusual, to be sure - but the folks on Daddy Tucker Drive in Little Egg Harbor Township say the thing in the lagoon is one scary-looking blob. And, boy, does it smell. "It's a blob, a mass quite large, about 100 yards off our dock," said Eileen Masterson, 66. "It is colored, gelatinous, decomposing. " "It is not moving and it is in one piece," said Masterson, whose husband, Robert, has marked off the mystery mass with plastic detergent bottles.

It all began on a seemingly innocuous note. Some folks living along one of our municipality's many lagoons noticed something floating just beneath its surface that appeared - and smelled - amiss. When the unidentified and odoriferous mass was found to be the size of a compact car, the residents became concerned and notified the authorities. What has unfolded since in Little Egg Harbor Township can only be compared to that old horror movie The Blob. State environmental officials dismissed the gelatinous mass as nothing more fearsome than decaying algae.

John DeLuca is trying to escape from the Blob. The new owner of the former Cadillac Diner, which gained folk-legend status in the borough from its role as a hideout in the 1957 cult classic The Blob, is sick of having his restaurant known for a heaving pile of slime. So last night, DeLuca performed a colorful ritual to "bury the Blob" once and for good. "I want to move out from under the wing of that thing," said DeLuca, who has named his new restaurant Chef's Diner and plans to crown the steel building with a seven-foot-tall plastic chef's hat. "The new star of this place will be the food and not that awful mess.

Just when you thought it was safe to go back to your video store and rent an original horror film, along comes another remake of a movie that sent you scrambling in terror under your theater seat when you were a child. Last week, The Blob oozed onto the shelves of your video store, leaving confusion in its wake. Why? Because this isn't the 1958 classic The Blob; it's a 1988 remake that, despite some favorable notices, squirmed out of theaters last summer after a few short weeks.

The handcrafted candy cane can be an unforgiving thing. Boil the sugar syrup too hot (or low) or long, and you've got an unholy mess. Forget the cream of tartar, and you've got grainy crystals, a version of which you'll want later, but, whoa !, not at first. You've got to knead in the oil of peppermint (or wintergreen or whatever) until it's well dispersed, a process started by poking a thumb in the doughy blob, then pouring the flavoring in. The red stripes? You've got to flatten out some of the firming candy until it looks like a rasher of cherry bacon, and keep flipping it so it doesn't get brittle.

PEBBLE BEACH, Calif. - Once, in what seems like another lifetime, Lee Westwood was, well, the Rory McIlroy of his day. The next big-time British golfer. Or so it appeared. Funny how that stuff can often take detours. He'd won seven tournaments across the globe in 1998, four more in 1999 and seven others in 2000. And rose to fourth in the world rankings. It was just a matter of time until he became Nick Faldo. Then, it pretty much went poof. By the end of 2002, he was No. 181. He had to reinvent his game.

The cars and clothes are vintage '50s, and the title on the marquee of the little Mojave, Calif., moviehouse announces the Ike-era sci-fi cheeseball classic The Blob. R.W. Goodwin's Alien Trespass is a campy homage to those days of malt shops, drive-ins, and saucer-shaped UFOs - you know, the ones that go crashing into nearby buttes, unleashing terrible terrors from another galaxy. Presenting itself as a long-lost '50s find (there's even a phony black-and-white newsreel before the "film" gets under way)

In Chester County in the summer of 1957, Steve McQueen was insufferable. "He was an absolute horror," producer Jack Harris said yesterday, "but I loved everything he did for us. " That was the summer that Harris gave the 27-year-old McQueen his first starring role, in the sci-fi classic The Blob . For the 50th anniversary of the film's shooting in Chester County, the producer - a 1936 graduate of Central High in Philadelphia and now...

Fifty years ago, Steve McQueen stood in Chester County and uttered an uncanny warning about global warming in his first lead movie role in The Blob. He cautioned the world was safe from the Blob "as long as the Arctic stays cold. " Who knew McQueen would beat Al Gore to the punch? This coming weekend, the Colonial Theatre in Phoenixville pays tribute to the 50th anniversary of the 1957 filming of the movie with Blobfest activities centered on the theme "An Inconvenient Blob," a play on the title of Gore's popular 2006 documentary An Inconvenient Truth.

When The Blob arrived at the Colonial Theatre in Phoenixville in 1957, it literally oozed through the old movie house, swallowing up people and sending extras, playing moviegoers, running into the street, screaming in fear. Today, The Blob symbolizes the renaissance of the historic theater, which fell on hard times after the movie was shot there. The Blob, a sludgelike creature with a vast appetite that arrived in Chester County inside a meteor, put the Colonial on the map for fans of sci-fi flicks and nostalgic Americana.

Starting with the Renningers Mid-Winter Classic in King of Prussia this weekend, three antiques shows in or near Chester County will attract dealers, collectors and browsers in the next few weeks. The others are the Chester County Historical Society's show March 3-4 and the Kimberton show March 17-18. Visitors to Renningers - formally known as Renningers Mid-Winter Classic Antiques and Collectors Show - will be treated to a part of Chester County film history. Among the nearly 300 booths on the main floor of the Valley Forge Convention Center on Saturday and Sunday will be Wes Shank of Broomall, who has helped preserve and collect memorabilia from the 1958 movie The Blob for more than 40 years.

Video art makes demands that most of the fine arts do not, namely, that one must watch a video from beginning to end. This is why, I've realized, the video art I've been moved by invariably borrows from, or at least alludes to, feature films. It's not that I need a narrative, just to experience something familiar. Humor, pathos, fear, or even ennui will do. So I've appreciated Doug Aitken's portentous, moody videos, for example, which suggest that an event of some magnitude is imminent - which, as we all know, can be just as thrilling as anything that ever does happen in art or in life.

At 54, the Spanish architect Santiago Calatrava is on a tear. Among the big-name architects who have walked through the valley of ground zero, he alone has managed to move his project - a transit hub - from concept to groundbreaking. The American Institute of Architects gave him its Gold Medal this year for his biomorphic bridges and buildings. And now the Metropolitan Museum of Art has offered him a virtual crown with an adoring retrospective that casts him as a modern Michelangelo: architect, engineer and sculptor.