Ice Age

Ice Age: Dawn of the Dinosaurs is the third installment in the animated movies about goofy prehistoric animals who form an interspecies clan. One might call this feeble attempt to wring every last nickel from a moderately enjoyable franchise The Crass Menagerie . The best thing about the Ice Age movies has always been the tangential plotline about Scrat, the very hungry rodent, who stalks an elusive acorn to the ends of the earth. The worst thing about this one is that the film's other wild and woolly characters stalk an even more elusive story.

On Saturday morning I embarked on what had become a dangerous mission in the last month or so - retrieving my morning Inquirer from my driveway. The driveway has been coated with anywhere from 4 to 6 inches of ice since this Ice Age of '94 began. Up until this weekend, I have managed to negotiate the ice-slick driveway on foot without falling. That morning, my luck ran out. When I slipped and fell, I broke not only my dignity, but my left wrist. As I lay on the ground, my immediate reaction was to take inventory of the damage that was done, and the thought occurred to me: Why couldn't the newspaper deliveryman have missed today?

The iceman still cometh to the halls of Congress. Every morning, 900 buckets of ice are placed outside the offices of senators and House members by government-paid lackeys at a cost of at least $14,000 a year, according to Roll Call, a non-partisan newspaper that covers Congress. And despite the Republican contempt for this practice last year - before they were elected - 51 of the Republican freshmen have signed up for the service. Maybe this practice made sense before refrigeration, when ice was harder to come by. But we do have the technology now to make ice in our own offices, don't we?

Ice Age: Dawn of the Dinosaurs is the third installment in the animated movies about goofy prehistoric animals who form an interspecies clan. One might call this feeble attempt to wring every last nickel from a moderately enjoyable franchise The Crass Menagerie. The best thing about the Ice Age movies has always been the tangential plotline about Scrat, the very hungry rodent, who stalks an elusive acorn to the ends of the Earth. The worst thing about this one is that the film's other wild and woolly characters stalk an even more elusive story.

"Ice Age 3" opens this week, so if you want to see a good animated movie, check out  . . . "Up. " Or maybe "Monsters Vs. Aliens," if you can still find it. Anything but "Ice Age: Dawn of the Dinosaurs," packed with ideas as fresh as "Land of the Lost," which we haven't seen for, oh, three weeks now. Sequel No. 2 is in 3-D (glasses required, check theaters), and begins with Manny the Mammoth (Ray Romano) fretting over his pregnant wife (Queen Latifah). A labored subplot finds the impending birth alienating Diego the saber-toothed tiger (Denis Leary)

Ice Age froze out the competition at movie theaters as the animated film about prehistoric pals debuted with a whopping $47.9 million over the weekend, a record for a movie opening in March. The three-day take for Ice Age nearly pays for its production - the film had a $50 million budget. Many movie fans told the New York Post they were really attending Ice Age to see the new trailer for Star Wars: Episode 2 - Attack of the Clones. They included parents, who grew up with Star Wars and normally wouldn't go to an animated movie with their youngsters.

Soft pretzels are a twisted pleasure and cheesesteaks a cholesterol conglomeration, both too enervating to chew on a steamy July day. No, the genuine icon of Philadelphia edibles is a summertime tradition dating to the turn of the century here, born among the Sicilians and Neapolitans. It is not bitten or chomped, but slurped and licked; or sometimes, by the faint of heart, consumed with a spoon or sucked through a straw, a cool relief from ascending temperatures. Ah, water ice. "It's refreshing.

When it comes to personal preference, Queen Latifah's taste in animated films runs more along the lines of "Dungeons & Dragons" than "Alvin and the Chipmunks. " One of her all-time favorites is "Heavy Metal," the 1981 sci-fi/fantasy cult favorite known for its sex, loud music, and horror. "It's not quite a kid's movie, but I did see it as a kid and I thought it was pretty cool," the rapper-turned-Oscar-nominated actress recalled. Still, when 20th-Century Fox approached her about taking on the voice of Ellie the Woolly Mammoth in the sequel to the first "Ice Age," she told her agents to make it happen.

The greenhouse effect is likely to usher in a new Ice Age. First it will get warmer. Then it will get a whole lot colder. So cold, in fact, that giant ice sheets will move south toward the United States. This surprising finding by two scientists is based on an analysis of earlier episodes of global warming using ancient fossils in Europe and North America. Their study, being published today in the British journal Nature, found that massive ice sheets have dramatically grown in size in the Arctic region during periods when global temperatures have increased.

OUR DREADFUL destiny was that we were either going to starve to death or be buried by advancing glaciers in a new ice age. The alleged villain, global cooling, was coming faster than anyone predicted. It wouldn't be all that long before polar bears would be rummaging through Macy's. That was the dire - and now infamous - warning by Newsweek science editor Peter Gwynne in the magazine's April 28, 1975, issue. "There are ominous signs that the Earth's weather patterns have begun to change dramatically and that these changes may portend a drastic decline in food production - with serious political implications for just about every nation on Earth," Gwynne wrote.

TENSIONS BETWEEN Mayor Nutter and the municipal unions ratcheted up a notch on Monday when the city announced a wage freeze for all employees, including pay step increases and longevity payments. Nutter says he has the authority to impose the freeze because contracts for unionized workers have expired. Cathy Scott of AFSCME DC 47 promises a court action to overturn the move. The freeze will last only until a new contract is signed, but the city hopes the new agreements will include this freeze for all city employees.

Ice Age: Dawn of the Dinosaurs is the third installment in the animated movies about goofy prehistoric animals who form an interspecies clan. One might call this feeble attempt to wring every last nickel from a moderately enjoyable franchise The Crass Menagerie. The best thing about the Ice Age movies has always been the tangential plotline about Scrat, the very hungry rodent, who stalks an elusive acorn to the ends of the Earth. The worst thing about this one is that the film's other wild and woolly characters stalk an even more elusive story.

When it comes to personal preference, Queen Latifah's taste in animated films runs more along the lines of "Dungeons & Dragons" than "Alvin and the Chipmunks. " One of her all-time favorites is "Heavy Metal," the 1981 sci-fi/fantasy cult favorite known for its sex, loud music, and horror. "It's not quite a kid's movie, but I did see it as a kid and I thought it was pretty cool," the rapper-turned-Oscar-nominated actress recalled. Still, when 20th-Century Fox approached her about taking on the voice of Ellie the Woolly Mammoth in the sequel to the first "Ice Age," she told her agents to make it happen.

"Ice Age 3" opens this week, so if you want to see a good animated movie, check out  . . . "Up. " Or maybe "Monsters Vs. Aliens," if you can still find it. Anything but "Ice Age: Dawn of the Dinosaurs," packed with ideas as fresh as "Land of the Lost," which we haven't seen for, oh, three weeks now. Sequel No. 2 is in 3-D (glasses required, check theaters), and begins with Manny the Mammoth (Ray Romano) fretting over his pregnant wife (Queen Latifah). A labored subplot finds the impending birth alienating Diego the saber-toothed tiger (Denis Leary)

Ice Age: Dawn of the Dinosaurs is the third installment in the animated movies about goofy prehistoric animals who form an interspecies clan. One might call this feeble attempt to wring every last nickel from a moderately enjoyable franchise The Crass Menagerie . The best thing about the Ice Age movies has always been the tangential plotline about Scrat, the very hungry rodent, who stalks an elusive acorn to the ends of the earth. The worst thing about this one is that the film's other wild and woolly characters stalk an even more elusive story.

As I stood leaning against the railing of my friend's balcony aboard the Dawn Princess, I watched icebergs loom larger as they floated by our ship. Some were pristine white; others were streaked with dark stripes; and some were a color blue that can't be compared to anything else I've seen. Some of the bergs in Glacier Bay looked like crumpled pieces of white paper filling the slate-gray waters of this icy wilderness. I could tell we were making our way deeper into the fjord in Glacier Bay National Park because the air temperature was slowly dropping into the 30s from just a few hours earlier, when we were in the Gulf of Alaska in the Pacific Ocean.

Flash: Al Gore Not Universally Loved. Some scoff at his message on global warming. His film An Inconvenient Truth has been combed by skeptics, curmudgeons and foes, looking for pratfalls and howlers. Truth does stretch the truth. It overstates the rise in sea levels if the world's ice caps melt, stressing a nightmare scenario that would take centuries. There's talk of an ice age; the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, Gore's Nobel Peace Prize co-winner, calls that unlikely.

Dozens of moon jellyfish - diaphanous, graceful, eerily dreamlike in blue light - undulate in the artificial current. Children racing in from a hippopotamus exhibit skid to a halt and gaze at the soundless ballet in Camden's Adventure Aquarium. These are the subjects of Alejandro Vagelli, an ichthyologist whose groundbreaking research has painted new pictures of Aurelia aurita. Moon jellies wash up dead on the beach, all flat and gooey, in sizes ranging from saucers to dinner plates, with cloverleafs visible inside.