Harp

A baby harp seal stranded two days ago on a floating dock at Penn's Landing will be returned to sea today, the Marine Mammal Stranding Center said. Codirector Sheila Dean said the center, with the help of the Coast Guard, netted the seal yesterday after media attention attracted onlookers, which raised concerns for the seal's safety. "We just had to get it out of there," Dean said. "People were throwing hot dogs and steaks and all the things that a seal wouldn't even think about eating.

Mine was 177. That served - so I didn't have to. In 1972, that fact made me both glad and guilty. Still does today. I speak of my number in the Selective Service lottery. If you lived through that momentous spin of the drum, as I did at the age of 18, you never forget the number that chance assigned you. By that stage of the Vietnam War, the number 177 was high enough to spare me a summons from my nation. If I were to claim that I know what I would have done had my number left me vulnerable, that would be a lie. That's why I try never to judge the choices anyone else made in that time of fire, anguish, chants and armbands.

If the Bush administration had wanted to make the case for going to war against Iraq on purely humanitarian reasons, it could have done so. Saddam Hussein was one of the world's truly bad guys, a horrific leader who brutalized and terrorized his own people. But the administration likely would have found resistance from conservatives who have long argued the United States should not try to act as the world's police department. So the administration made national security its strongest case for launching an exceedingly rare, historically discouraged, internationally frowned-upon preemptive war. Now the administration that had 100 percent certainty there were weapons of mass destruction has zero percent certainty as to where they are. The White House and the President's defenders have reverted to their fallback humanitarian position - that the removal of Saddam was justification enough for the war. The administration has found the human-rights card a compelling rationale - one with which the left finds it difficult to disagree.

This was the Temple team John Chaney had recruited. The result might have been expected. And the coach's reaction was typical. The Owls' matchup zone defense was back in form last night, stopping Rhode Island at every turn in a 71-42 Atlantic Ten Conference victory at Keaney Gymnasium. Yet all Chaney talked about afterward was his team's mistakes: Senior guard Lynn Greer was forced to call a time-out when he was trapped at midcourt just before halftime. The Owls, by the way, had a 30-13 lead at the time.

SONNY ROLLINS, 8 p.m. Saturday, Keswick Theater, Easton Road and Keswick Avenue, Glenside. Tickets: $25. Info: 215-572-7650 Sonny Rollins despises technology, hates it with a passion. So it comes as a bit of a surprise to learn he's using a cellular phone to talk to a caller. "I'm just out in my studio a little ways from my house," the legendary tenor saxophonist explained recently. "I don't have a phone out here. Since I was going to do a call, I brought the cell phone out here.

Chamber music is the stuff that musicians themselves come together and enjoy, making conversation by making music with or without any other audience present. The audience Sunday in the Academy of Music Ballroom was privileged to eavesdrop on half a dozen Philadelphia Orchestra members and a guest pianist engaged in three intensely musical conversations. Harpist Elizabeth Hainen DePeters pulled torrents of sound from her instrument in Louis Spohr's Trio in F minor for Violin, Cello and Harp.

The harp seals swim down from Arctic waters in the dead of winter, headed for Newfoundland. Sometimes they miss their mark and push on, to the waters off New Jersey. Exhausted from 2,000 miles of swimming, they come onto the sand to dry off and rest. There, on the beaches of the Jersey Shore, they encounter a new danger: unleashed dogs. In the last week, two harp seals were mauled by beach-romping dogs, according to Robert Schoelkopf of the Marine Mammal Stranding Center in Brigantine.

Worried about where to draw the line, and the PC police who don't let you talk about it I have to admit it: The new TV rating icons look weird. Little white warnings in the upper-left corner of the television screen linger ominously where they never were before, then vanish after 15 seconds. I imagine that the next generation of children will grow up used to them, never knowing a time when television shows were not rated. Just as I can't remember a time when none of the shows were in color.

Jeannine Harp is Bishop McDevitt's other starting guard. She is often lost in the shadow of senior Jen Zenszer, the Lancers' all-time leading scorer and the 1996 Catholic League North most valuable player. There was no overlooking Harp last night, though. She hit five three-point baskets in the second half - including three in a row - to rally the Lancers to a 69-60 victory over visiting Conwell-Egan in a very physical Catholic League girls' basketball game. The victory clinched at least a tie for the regular-season title for the Lancers (18-6, 10-1)

Truman Capote wanted Marilyn Monroe to star in Breakfast at Tiffany's instead of Audrey Hepburn, and he disliked Richard Brooks' adaptation of In Cold Blood. He was clearly not the soundest judge of the movie fate of his own works. The flamboyant author, who died in 1984, was generally unhappy with the idea of transferring art from one medium to another. But Charles Matthau's version of The Grass Harp is an affectionate rendering of Capote's delicate 1951 autobiographical novel that would surely meet with his approval.