Cosmos

St. Basil graduate Pat Clayton has made big winners out of the 14 rookies who showed up on her volleyball court for the start of the season at Penn State's Ogontz Campus. Coach Clayton's squad is 22-7 overall and leads the Eastern Pennsylvania Collegiate Conference (EPCC) Northern Division with a 9-1 record. The Little Lions also finished second in the Commonwealth Campus Athletic Conference (CCAC) East Division with a 11-1 mark. "We had 14 brand-new players at the start of the season; not one player returned from last year," said Clayton, who was named the EPCC Coach of the Year for her team's outstanding season.

It once had the reputation of being a girlish kind of art - too "pretty," not serious - and there's still a lot of schlock out there. But classic botanical illustration bears no resemblance to those flower pictures you see on powder-room walls. The real stuff is pure, exquisitely natural, and true to life, pulling you deep inside the ruffly petals of a pink parrot tulip or the velvety throat of a plum-colored foxglove. "It's a fine art, and it's beautiful," says Louisa Rawle Tin?, who teaches botanical illustration at the New York Botanical Garden and at Chanticleer in Wayne.

Thomas B. Troehler, 62, the founder of Audubon Electronics & Cable Systems Inc., one of South Jersey's first cable television companies, died Tuesday at his Berlin Borough home. Born and raised in Audubon, he was a 1953 graduate of Audubon High School. He resided in Haddonfield and Cherry Hill before moving to Berlin. Mr. Troehler developed an interest in electronics while working with radar units in the Air Force. He earned an associate's degree in electronics from Temple University and then founded Audubon Electronics & Cable Systems in 1969 and Cable Systems Inc. in 1971.

Promoter Don King and Lisa McClellan, the sister of boxer Gerald McClellan, got into a shouting match during a conference call yesterday concerning responsibilities for medical bills stemming from brain injuries McClellan sustained in a WBC middleweight title loss to Nigel Benn last Feb. 25 in London. At one point, King accused Lisa McClellan of being "involved with the FBI, which is a conspiracy against me. " Lisa McClellan accused her father, Emmit McClellan, of being paid by King and lying for him. "Lisa told me she talked to the FBI and they offered her $50,000 to talk against Don King," Emmit McClellan said.

Life is good for Pennsylvania State University physicist Lee Smolin. He's thought of a way to explain why the laws of nature are what they are - why electricity, gravity and the other forces are set just right to organize the universe into planets, stars and galaxies, as opposed to, say, a vast swarm of dust grains or inert rocks. He also has a theory to explain the origin of life, but he says he wants to do some more checking before he goes public with it. "I have an optimistic sense," says Smolin, 42, from one of his New York haunts, a Brazilian cafe in SoHo, near his part-time home in Brooklyn.

The perennial advice given to writers is: Stick to what you know. That should include the relationships between women and men since the stressed-out days of Adam and Eve. But would it include trying to solve the moral and philosophical crises of the age? It would if you were Tom Robbins, he of the bestsellers. His newest in paperback, Skinny Legs and All (Bantam, $5.95), is the tale of a pretty young artist with marital difficulties, an Arab-Jewish restaurant at the United Nations Plaza, several sentient but inorganic objects (a shell, a can of beans)

If everything is metaphor, then Laurie Anderson can look in the mirror for material. The composer-writer-actor's short hair standing on end might be a natural expression of terror, for a week before she was scheduled to premiere Stories From the Nerve Bible, opening tomorrow at Zellerbach Theater, she was still writing songs, adding material, refining and ruefully cutting the length of the piece. But then, those wiry shoots could also represent the antennas with which she has scanned her cosmos for signs of life or, at least, irony as she combined composition, writing, acting and dance to become one of the world's pioneer performance artists.

Believers are calling 7/7/07 The Magnificent Seven because it could quite possibly be the luckiest day of the century. Wedding chapels and casinos are bracing for an onslaught of fortune-seekers. Thousands of couples - twice, even three times the average for a summer Saturday - plan to be married in a state of seventh heaven. And, for what it's worth, you can expect a critical mass of people sending out positive vibes. But with Mercury in retrograde, astrologers say, the sevens won't be universally lucky.

Several astute readers have e-mailed me to point out that even if scientists find an explanation for the origin of life from nonliving matter, they haven't explained where the inanimate matter came from. Our universe has a lot of it. Who created all that? "If there are 500 million Earth-like planets, where did any of them come from? Something cannot come from absolute nothing without the concept of a Divine Designer," wrote one reader. Others reminded me of the principle of conservation of energy: "What happened to the First Law of Thermodynamics?

When NASA launched a new space telescope called Kepler this year, mankind took another step in a quest that started 400 years ago with two eyeglass lenses and a piece of lead pipe. It was in 1609 that mathematics professor Galileo Galilei pointed his homemade telescope skyward and saw what looked like mountains on the moon and other wonders no one had imagined. His instrument - marginally more powerful than a cheap pair of modern binoculars - enabled him to shatter cosmological dogma as he carefully catalogued the phases of Venus, the moons of Jupiter, and the stars of the Milky Way. Starting Saturday, visitors to the Franklin Institute in Philadelphia can see one of two surviving original telescopes that allowed Galileo to open the heavens to science - and ultimately led to his house arrest for heresy.