Lizard

Did a Newark, N.J., man think he was shooting at lizards when he shot and killed a North Philadelphia man and wounded the man's daughter in 1985? That's the question being debated behind closed doors today, as a Common Pleas jury is trying to decide whether to buy James E. Brown's lizard alibi. Brown, 32, testified that he doesn't recall shooting at anything but "green lizards" inside Luther Guyton's home on Firth Street near 12th, on Feb. 6, 1985. Assistant District Attorney Bashi Buba said Brown's targets were not lizards, but Guyton, 57, and his daughter, Roselyn Peterson, 33. Guyton died of a gunshot wound.

It was not a good night for the iguana. The reptile, which had been used to soothe students sent to the vice principal's office, indirectly unleashed a commotion early Sunday when firefighters discovered that its cage had sparked a fire that destroyed the DeMasi Middle School office. No one was injured, school spokeswoman Jeanne Smith said, and school was held as usual yesterday. The female lizard, named Nasdaq, was at a veterinarian's office at the time of the fire and coincidentally died of natural causes there Sunday night.

Did filmmaker Duncan Gibbins, a retired postal worker and her invalid husband perish in the recent firestorm so the coast-horned lizard might live? No one knows for sure. But that conflagration might have been less deadly had firefighters been free to set "prescribed burns" to clear the thickets of wild foliage that blanket the craggy mountains beside the Pacific Ocean here. Prescribed burn acreage in the Southern California region has dropped from 20,000 acres in 1987 to 5,000 today, largely due to environmental red tape and concerns about wildlife and air quality.

On July 14, 1936, Federico Garcia Lorca, Spain's best-known poet and playwright, arrived in Granada to visit his mother and father for the family's annual celebration of St. Frederick's Day. Just over a month later, in the early morning, in an olive grove on a hill outside the Andalusian city, he was executed by a firing squad. What happened in the period between Lorca's arrival in Granada and his death - which was a tragedy for art, a tragedy for Spain, and a tragic case of Lorca's being in the wrong place at the wrong time - is the subject of Sign of the Lizard, a new play by Louis Lippa opening Friday at People's Light & Theatre Company in Malvern.

It's breakfast time at the Ylang Ylang Beach Resort in Montezuma, Costa Rica, and that means not only fabulous food but also exotic entertainment. Hannah, my 7-year-old daughter, is enjoying tropical banana pancakes, while I savor the tipico breakfast of beans, rice, eggs, tortillas, and plantains. Perched on the back of the third chair at our table is a white-throated magpie-jay. The thunder of Pacific Ocean waves breaking 90 feet away bothers neither us nor the bird. Adjacent to the patio restaurant where we sit, a large spiny-tailed iguana ambles across the lawn.

You recognize him immediately in the crowd: the tall, well-dressed gentleman with a Nat Sherman cigarette delicately dangling from one hand and a frosted-over martini glass of Kettel One vodka cupped in the other. The silver hair greased back. The faint smell of aftershave. The tanned face, bobbing like a boxer to buss the cheeks of fading beauties in tight dresses and the gray-suited, middle-aged lizard men who lust after them - and know him: The Last Playboy. On this night in the Palm Restaurant Bar, Harry Jay Katz, wooer of women, sultan of schmooze, King of Late Night and Early Morning, looks like he hasn't lost a step since one of his dates happened to drown in his hot tub two months ago. "Harry !

David Yow's confrontational noisemaking '90s band The Jesus Lizard have lots to answer for in Pennsylvania. Clockclean Er and Pissed Jeans are proof. Allentown's Pissed Jeans brusquely borrows the Lizard's atonal post-hardcore abrasion as the prime motivation behind its needling recent CD, Hope for Men. North Philly's Clockclean Er has noise and sludgy guitars in spades. But the trio makes that musical morass more melodic while maintaining its angularity and doubling its contentiousness.

Here's the bare-bones plot of Tri-Star Pictures' $100 million sci-fi blockbuster "Godzilla," scheduled for release May 20: A huge lizard with big spiked plates down his back - a dead ringer for a dinosaur - shows up in the middle of New York City. It's up to Matthew Broderick, Jean Reno and Hank Azaria, among others, to stop the creature before it whomps and stomps Manhattan - as well as the rest of the world - into dust. Does this sound familiar? Of course. After all, there have been 22 previous movies about Godzilla.

Colorful, cartoony screens wheel into view and unfold to define the interior of a house. Huge, black-fabric rectangles, outfitted with flapping arms, glide here and there. A quartet of women in outsize masks chants and sings in the manner of a Greek chorus. Before a backdrop on which a handwritten manuscript is overlaid with projections of the Andalusian countryside, silhouetted figures walk silently across the rear of the stage, stooped from the burdens of a world gone mad. And the hero's alter ego - his imagination, his muse, his inner reality - hovers around his corporeal self, offering advice and caution.

Leaping lizards! We all know that Johnny Depp is a chameleon. He plays one, or more precisely, voices him, in Rango . This off-center animation from Gore Verbinski (Depp's director in the Pirates of the Caribbean series) opens with a quartet of owls in mariachi garb singing the legend of the lizard. They pop up at regular intervals to musically comment on the chameleon's exploits in the Southwest, where the land is bone dry and the wit even more so. Rango is best enjoyed by those over 10 who have an idea of what "existential" means and can appreciate a surreal mashup of Chinatown , Gladiator , High Noon , and The Good, the Bad and the Ugly . You know those animated films that have bits that the parents will enjoy?

By K.C. Cole August is a great month for celebrating human stupidity. On Aug. 6, 1945, we all but disappeared Hiroshima with a single atomic bomb, and then did it again, three days later, at Nagasaki. And now we barely seem to care. The sad truth is that we are incapable of understanding exactly what these seemingly ancient events mean - right now, for all of us, today. The August anniversaries are a stark reminder that the brains we inherited from our ancestors simply may not be up to dealing with much of the modern world we (they)

The speedy lizard was streaking across the tabletop when suddenly one foot hit a slippery spot. The reptile skidded but never broke stride, making a split-second adjustment as it darted onward. Not that you could tell just by looking. The true essence of the animal's grace became apparent only afterward, when its movements, recorded with Hollywood-style motion-capture technology, were played back in slow motion. This is the lab of Tonia Hsieh, a Temple University biologist who studies life on the move.

It's breakfast time at the Ylang Ylang Beach Resort in Montezuma, Costa Rica, and that means not only fabulous food but also exotic entertainment. Hannah, my 7-year-old daughter, is enjoying tropical banana pancakes, while I savor the tipico breakfast of beans, rice, eggs, tortillas, and plantains. Perched on the back of the third chair at our table is a white-throated magpie-jay. The thunder of Pacific Ocean waves breaking 90 feet away bothers neither us nor the bird. Adjacent to the patio restaurant where we sit, a large spiny-tailed iguana ambles across the lawn.

Among the deeper questions looming in science is the degree to which the outcome of evolution is governed by chance. Stephen Jay Gould famously addressed the question in his book Wonderful Life , proposing that if time were wound back 500 million years or so and allowed to run again, evolution would produce a completely different mix of living things - one without us. Penn State evolutionary biologist Blair Hedges says his observations have...

The hero of "Rango" is a chameleon and a BS artist, appropriate for this shape-shifting, surreal and weirdly entertaining animated yarn. I won't say it's like nothing you've ever seen before - it has the grown-up cinematic ambition of Pixar, the elbow-in-the-ribs joshing of DreamWorks - but what it borrows and what it builds combine to feel original and strange. The cultural references, for instance, are rarefied - a cameo for Hunter S. Thompson, plot fragments from "Chinatown" (there's a turtle with the visage of John Huston)

Leaping lizards! We all know that Johnny Depp is a chameleon. He plays one, or more precisely, voices him, in Rango . This off-center animation from Gore Verbinski (Depp's director in the Pirates of the Caribbean series) opens with a quartet of owls in mariachi garb singing the legend of the lizard. They pop up at regular intervals to musically comment on the chameleon's exploits in the Southwest, where the land is bone dry and the wit even more so. Rango is best enjoyed by those over 10 who have an idea of what "existential" means and can appreciate a surreal mashup of Chinatown , Gladiator , High Noon , and The Good, the Bad and the Ugly . You know those animated films that have bits that the parents will enjoy?

Primeval, an exciting British sci-fi adventure series, takes place in that, um, primeval time and place where dinosaurs roam - the local shopping center. (Where they hunt down and viciously kill and eat unwary shoppers.) The dangerously addictive and entertaining show, which has its U.S. premiere tonight at 9 on BBC America, is a melange of sci-fi, mystery and comedy genres. It is the brainchild of Tim Haines, the writer and director behind the popular BBC nature docs Walking with Dinosaurs and Walking with Beasts, which show the life of those extinct giants through the magic of computer-generated imagery.

First, Blair Hedges and a colleague discovered the world's smallest frog. Five years later, in 2001, he reported finding the smallest lizard. Now the Pennsylvania State University biology professor has completed what you might call the tiny trifecta: Under a sun-baked rock on the island of Barbados, he and his wife found a new species of reptile that can coil up comfortably on a quarter. Meet Leptotyphlops carlae. The globe's smallest snake. "It's kind of a weird coincidence," admitted Hedges, who published the results yesterday in the scientific journal Zootaxa.

David Yow's confrontational noisemaking '90s band The Jesus Lizard have lots to answer for in Pennsylvania. Clockclean Er and Pissed Jeans are proof. Allentown's Pissed Jeans brusquely borrows the Lizard's atonal post-hardcore abrasion as the prime motivation behind its needling recent CD, Hope for Men. North Philly's Clockclean Er has noise and sludgy guitars in spades. But the trio makes that musical morass more melodic while maintaining its angularity and doubling its contentiousness.

Keith Cromwell scored two goals and added three assists as the Long Island Lizards (3-1) snapped the defending champion Barrage's eight-game regular-season win streak in Major League Lacrosse with a 16-11 victory yesterday. The loss left the Barrage 3-1 and snapped their 10-game win streak, which dated from last season and included a pair of postseason victories. Ryan Boyle led the Barrage with four goals and two assists.