Centuries

It's time for one last block party on Wisteria Lane. We've been through so much with our Desperate Housewives over eight madcap seasons. That turns out to be both a good and a bad thing as Sunday's two-hour series finale approaches. The show was such a bold and unique amalgam of drama, mystery, and subversive comedy when it debuted in 2004. The way that Marc Cherry's creation adhered to and exploded the soap-opera genre made Housewives an instant sensation. The debut was watched by 21 million viewers, the season finale by 30 million.

He laughed, and peeled the sides of his Pop-Tart into brown seams. Currency filled the room: toilet paper, orange juice. Plastic crates filled with next week's copies of magazines. In the morning we boarded the windows, smeared the doorposts, anticipated scourge. He still wondered if I could be trusted, eyed my calves for contractions. For moments, throughout the night, I wanted to run away, to place my lips on the Liberty Bell with the rest of the throng, accept the year, the swallow of cold breath, but, even so: we anointed our heads in our nightclothes, the pillow, the approach of the morning.

The Shanghai Acrobatic Troupe, 10 members strong from the People's Republic of China, has brought its balancing, juggling and contortionist acts to Great Adventure in Jackson, N.J. Many of the acts, which have been refined over centuries, date back 2,000 years to the Han Dynasty. The troupe performed last weekend and will perform this weekend and next.

Tamara Crout's recital Sunday covered an astounding range of music plucked from more than four centuries of voice literature. The varied repertoire showed the soprano's considerable stylistic savvy. More impressively, though, it spoke to her taste. Each piece was a little gem, from obscurities such as "Ard'il mio petto" from Le Nuove Musiche by Giulio Caccini, to Barber's beloved Knoxville: Summer of 1915. The music in Purcell's "Sweeter Than Roses," though written in the 17th century, is every bit as descriptive of its text as anything written in the 20th century.

Why do Americans love to sacrifice women on the altar of ancient stereotypes by portraying them as "scorned women" and "congenital liars"? You'd think we could have gotten a little more inventive about women in the past 300 years. By slinging mud at Hillary Rodham Clinton, William Safire became only the latest to engage in this sort of negative name calling. A few years ago, Anita Hill was accused of lying, either because she was "vindictive," had a "martyr-type complex," was a "spurned or scorned woman," or was "out of touch with reality.

Ask Scott Kollins about his fascination with gnomes, and he starts with a disclaimer: "I'm not over the deep end - yet. " But in the dozen or so years he's been collecting statues of these jaunty "little people," Kollins concedes he's occasionally drifted toward that "deep end," a place already inhabited by untold numbers of people around the world. "Gnomes are goofy. They're wacky. I think they're funny," says Kollins, a sales manager for a consulting company, who has 15 gnomes stationed throughout his tiny rowhouse garden in Fairmount.

Lisa Tremper Barnes gazes at the small, sand-colored object in the display case, and has visions of flames shooting skyward and men being put to the sword and women dragged off by the fierce invaders. You can read about it in the Old Testament Book of Jeremiah - the terrible events of the year 586 B.C., when . . . In the ninth year of Zedekiah king of Judah, in the tenth month, Nebuchadnezzar king of Babylon and all his army came against Jerusalem, and besieged it. Here, in an exhibition at the Berman Museum of Art at Ursinus College in Collegeville, you can see the physical evidence of those frightful days, and the centuries before and after.

Strolling along tiny, tree-lined Canal Street in Lubeck's Old Town one balmy spring evening near dusk, I came upon a simple plaster-over-brick home with the year 1776 etched into the door lintel. "I see that house was built in 1776," I said to an older couple sitting in folding chairs outside their own place just a few doors down, enjoying the unseasonably mild weather. "That's about the time America got started - the year of the revolution, anyway. And I bet your home is even older.

Even a skeptic like Mark Twain was enraptured upon seeing Istanbul from the sea - "a noble picture," he called it in Innocents Abroad, "by far the hand-som-est city we have seen. " Now, 128 years later, from the deck of the Radisson Diamond, the city on two continents still foists itself on the eye; it looks much the same - bulbous mosque domes, slender minarets, and the towers of Topkapi Palace silhouetted against a sky of fleecy white clouds, flushed pink with the dying day. From a distance, the only visible concessions to modernity are the yellow rivers of taxis on the streets and, on the roofs, satellite dishes eavesdropping on the world.

I didn't come to Bordeaux looking for Eleanor of Aquitaine. My youthful infatuation with this best-known of medieval queens had been gathering dust in my mental attic, so it was my past as well as hers that came back to haunt me when I found myself walking in her traces on a long weekend in this ancient city. Suddenly there she was, in spirit at least, entering the city through gates in walls whose shadows still linger, wending her way through streets that retain their tangled medieval courses if not their 12th-century houses, and stopping before the Cathedral of St. Andre to arrange her skirts, headdress, and entourage before entering the church to be married - not once but twice, the second time a match with the future Henry II of England that would change the destinies of England and Aquitaine, Eleanor's possession in southwestern France.

A RECENT OPINION piece called into question the Free Library's place in our digital world. A quick stop on freelibrary.org — our "online branch," which receives 8 million unique visits annually — immediately highlights just how relevant and digitally savvy the Free Library is. There, users will quickly and easily find access to: More than 30,000 e-books for checkout. Streaming and downloadable popular music. Hundreds of podcasts from our renowned Author Events series, which are downloaded at a rate of 26,000 per month.

Speaking of the Philadelphia School District recently, Mayor Nutter said, "If we don't take significant action now, the system will collapse. " That "significant action" could include widespread school closings, many more charter schools, and increased local control of the remaining district schools. If this is a case of desperate times calling for desperate measures, we should at least get some perspective on where we've been — and how we got here — before we plow ahead. Consider the Philadelphia School District of a century ago. The city's population then, and the number of students in its public schools, were about the same as they are today.

To say that the Free Library of Philadelphia is doing a subpar job at adapting their service platform for the 21st-century patron would be an understatement. There are more free books you can download from Amazon.com than from the Free Library's website. The library bureaucracy has parallels with the VHS tapes that are most likely collecting dust at your local neighborhood branch: They take up precious space and have over-extended their stay in the system. The current library administrators have proven time and again to present a short-sighted yet costly vision to the Philadelphia community.

  BEACH HAVEN, N.J. - Sondra Beninati and her husband, Steve, have spent the six years they have owned the Gables lovingly restoring the 19th-century landmark, decorating it with priceless antiques and designer furnishings. They turned a neglected backyard into a tranquil garden for weddings and installed a professional kitchen with an impressive refrigeration room and multiple top-of-the-line ranges and grills. But Beninati says she always felt that the enduring structure - built as a lifeguard dormitory in the 1880s and evolved into a bed-and-breakfast and Zagat-rated restaurant - belongs to this Long Beach Island town in a way that transcends time and ownership.

HARRISON, Ark. - When a black man supposedly broke into a white man's home in 1905, a mob ran most black people out of town - and instantly gave this community a lasting reputation as being too dangerous for minorities. More than a century later, only 34 of the nearly 13,000 residents in Harrison are black. But the town desperately wants to overcome its past, hoping a better image will attract more residents and businesses. So leaders are advocating for diversity in a way rarely seen in overwhelmingly white places: creating a task force on race relations, printing posters about the city's ugly history, and bringing in a civil rights speaker.

John B. Thayer III's adult life was framed and scarred by two of the 20th century's great tragedies. He lost his father on the Titanic, his son in World War II. Finally, on Sept. 20, 1945, a rainy night whose gloom mirrored his despair, Thayer parked his car near a Philadelphia Transit Co. trolley-turnaround at 48th and Parkside in West Philadelphia and slashed his wrists and throat. Although the suicide came long after the supposedly unsinkable Titanic sank on April 15, 1912, exactly 100 years ago Sunday, Thayer was no less a victim than the 1,517 fellow passengers and crew who perished that night in the icy North Atlantic.

A century has rolled by since the great ship went down, and for the last 100 years, the story of its sinking has fascinated like no other maritime disaster in history. At 11:40 p.m. on Sunday, April 14, 1912, the Royal Mail Steamer Titanic sideswiped an iceberg while sweeping across the North Atlantic at a speed of about 22 knots, more than 25 m.p.h., on its maiden voyage from Southampton, England, to New York. Within three hours, the supposedly unsinkable liner, a marvel of opulence and technology, was headed to the bottom of the sea, 13,000 feet below.

A century has rolled by since the great ship went down, and for the last 100 years, the story of its sinking has fascinated like no other maritime disaster in history. At 11:40 p.m. on Sunday, April 14, 1912, the Royal Mail Steamer Titanic sideswiped an iceberg while sweeping across the North Atlantic at a speed of around 22 knots, more than 25 m.p.h., on its maiden voyage from Southampton, England, to New York. Within three hours, the supposedly unsinkable liner, a marvel of opulence and technology, was headed to the bottom of the sea, 13,000 feet below.

SAVANNAH, Ga. - Recruited over tea at the mansion of a Georgia widow, the first Girl Scouts went on to earn proficiency badges for cooking meals and caring for babies. In a nod to their changing times, they also learned to shoot rifles and to use self-defense tactics such as "how to secure a burglar with eight inches of cord. " A century has passed, and millions of Americans have taken the Girl Scout promise, sold Samoas and Thin Mints by the truckload, and gone on to careers including CEO and astronaut.

Though unseasonably warm weather over the weekend may have been a blessing on sun-starved Philadelphians, similar balmy temperatures a century ago would have sent businessmen in Montgomery County into a deep fret. That's because the Perkiomen Creek was home to a lucrative ice-making industry that - long before Freon - supplied the city and its suburbs with refrigeration. Ice makers set up shop there in the 1890s, when Pennsylvania was the third-largest ice-producing state in the country.