Moon

The LAST full moon of the 1900s appeared over the Philadelphia skyline last night, brighter than usual because it's the winter solstice, meaning the moon is closer to the Earth than normal full moons.

'My mind's been acting kind of weird lately," a worried Sam Bell says to his constant, and only, companion, a robot named Gerty 3000. The sole crew member of a lunar base where helium 3 is being mined for an energy-starved Earth, Sam - a virtuoso turn from Sam Rockwell - is pretty much the only character in Moon , an eerie near-future tale from filmmaker Duncan Jones. In his beard and baseball cap, working the control panels, doing his exercises, watering the plants - and occasionally taking a rover out across the cratered terrain to check a "live one" in the mines - Sam is nearing the end of his three-year tour of duty for Lunar Industries.

The search for extraterrestrial life will start down a new path today. Galileo, which has been traveling around Jupiter for more than a year, will swoop close to the moon Europa. Scientists hope to collect detailed photos giving clues about whether the moon once supported life.

Tomorrow, the moon will swell to its outer rim and gleam down in the night. Lovers will sit and gaze at each other, moon-eyed. Dog walkers will stare at the moon while their pets pause to bay at the magic glow. Farmers will praise the harvest moon, crooners will celebrate its silvery light. But in the world of law enforcement, the principal response to the fullness of the moon will be a collective moan. "I don't even have to look outside," said Colleen Pierce, who has been with the Berlin Police Department for nine years.

The Rev. Sun Myung Moon spoke in Center City last night without a hitch. That's a far cry from Moon's appearance just 11 days ago at Olympic Stadium in Seoul, Korea, where the controversial minister hitched some 30,000 couples - and tens of thousands more via satellite - at his largest mass wedding ceremony ever. There weren't any wedding bells last night at the Philadelphia Marriott Hotel, where Moon kicked off a 15-city U.S. speaking tour before a packed banquet room of about 800 true believers and truly curious.

In 1910, a graduate student at Clark University recorded a wildly improbable prediction in his journal: that the presence of ice on the Moon would allow human explorers an opportunity for autonomy off Earth. That student was Robert H. Goddard, father of practical rocketry. The detection of possible ice deposits by the Pentagon's low-cost Clementine mission has led some to say we are close to realizing Goddard's tempting prospect of a foothold off Earth. Water is the most valuable natural resource in the solar system, key ingredient of rocket propulsion systems and potential space biospheres.

ON DEC. 14, 1972, Apollo astronaut Gene Cernan paused and looked out at the magnificent vista before him, and spoke the last words heard from the surface of the moon: "America's challenge of today has forged man's destiny of tomorrow. We leave as we came, and God willing, as we shall return, with peace and hope for all mankind. " Cernan often laments the fact that he has the dubious distinction of being the last man on the moon because he knows that 31 years have passed, and the farthest that humans have traveled since then has been to low Earth orbit.

"Favorites of the Moon" ("Les Favoris de la Lune"). A comedy directed by Otar Iossliani from a screenplay by Gerard Brach and Iosseliani. Photographed by Philippe Theaudiere. Edited by Dominique Bellfort. Music by Nicolas Zourabichvill. Artistic collaboration: Catherine Foulon, Dimitri Eristavi and Leila Naskidachvill. Running time: 101 minutes. In French with English subtitles. A Spectrafilm release. One week only starting Friday, at the Roxy. The most audacious movie of the summer turns out not to be one of the season's premeditated blockbusters but a rather inaccessible 1984 French- Italian co-production made by a Soviet director.

America had no crack, no AIDS and no Sesame Street. Stamps were 6 cents. Bridge tolls were 50 cents. Haircuts, for males seeking them, were $3.50. There was a Woman's Medical College, a Pennsylvania Military College, and, Lord help us, 29 individual draft boards in Philadelphia. There were Blood, Sweat and Tears, Blind Faith, and Three Dog Night. Elvis and Hendrix were still alive. Judy Garland had just died, and at the top of the pop music charts was an ominous tune about the future, "In the Year 2525.

Mother. Virgin. Whore. This is the repertory of roles the unfortunate Josie Hogan gets to choose from in Eugene O'Neill's late classic, A Moon for the Misbegotten. But, in most respects, the man Josie loves is in far worse shape: James Tyrone Jr. is a dissolute, self-hating drunk, whose charm can't disguise the pain of a man hurtling toward destruction. The third principal character in this lyrical drama, which opened Friday at the Pennsylvania Shakespeare Festival at Allentown College, is no great shakes either.

Don't look to the heavens for signs of apocalyptic prophecies coming true. But over the next month, the skies will offer several interesting sights, including a solar eclipse and a rare view of Venus crossing the sun. Only one sight, though, will be easy to view here. ( Weather-permitting , of course.) That's Saturday night's so-called "super moon," which will rise shortly before 8 p.m. While it's near the horizon will be the ideal time for viewing, says Franklin Institute astronomer Derrick Pitts.

Exercise and music go together nicely for all ages. On Saturday, kids can get motivated to exercise while singing along to some of their favorite songs when Lolly Hopwood and the Let's Play Today Bunch hit the stage at World Cafe Live. The pop and children's music cover band will perform songs from their debut album Go! Go! Go! The album is written by mother and musician Lolly Hopwood and Yvonne Kusters, the founder of the Let's Play Today international children's fitness organization.

On my way to the Painted Bride on Tuesday night, I looked into the cloudless sky to see a lustrous, bulging full moon, and thought, well, of course. Sandra Bernhard's new show was opening. The moon has nothing on Bernhard, the hard-working, outrageous stand-up comic, actor, and chanteuse whose lunacy is all her own. In an evening called I Love Being Me, Don't You? - also the name of her recently released first comedy album in a decade - she is every bit the outspoken, sometimes bizarre persona she has trademarked: the queen of pop-culture commentary, an earthy singer, a hilarious slasher of hypocrisy and everyday nonsense, with a mouth that could launch a thousand embarrassed sailors off course.

LOS ANGELES - The New Year's countdown to the moon has begun. NASA said Wednesday that its twin spacecraft were on course to arrive back-to-back at the moon after a 31/2-month journey. "We're on our way there," said project manager David Lehman of the NASA Jet Propulsion Laboratory, which manages the $496 million mission. The Grail probes - short for Gravity Recovery and Interior Laboratory - won't land on the lunar surface. Instead, they were poised to slip into orbit to study the uneven lunar gravity field.

While I'm away, readers give the advice. On being unable to reciprocate for lavish gifts: Giving extravagant gifts repeatedly to someone who cannot ever reciprocate can be a form of control - and manipulation. I found myself in this situation nearly 20 years ago. Fast forward, and I'm just ending a costly and bitter divorce from someone who thinks he's given me too much and doesn't think I deserve anything, despite my years of sacrifice for his career and our children.

Reprinted from Wednesday's Inquirer. It's not hard to see why Martin Scorsese fell in love with The Invention of Hugo Cabret , Brian Selznick's Caldecott Medal-winning graphic novel for kids. For decades, Scorsese has devoted great energy and effort to the preservation of old films, and in Selznick's voluminous fantasy, French magician-turned-moviemaker Georges Méliès not only figures prominently, but so, too, does his work. Among Méliès' dreamlike flights of filmic whimsy to show up in the book: "A Trip to the Moon," that 1902 one-reel gem with the giant rocket flying right into the Man in the Moon's eye. A 3-D spectacle (yes, be sure to put on those 3-D spectacles!

A thin but fairly diverting entry in the low-fi fakeumentary horror genre, Apollo 18 explains what's really on the moon and why the U.S. space program decided against further study. Why? Because a Blair Witch Project filmmaking seminar set up camp there first, that's why! Spanish director Gonzalo Lopez-Gallego's exercise in "found" footage scares was produced by Timur Bekmambetov, who directed the popular assassins melee Wanted , which I hated. I didn't hate this one at all. Like Blair Witch and the Paranormal Activity pictures, Apollo 18 offers zero characterization and very little narrative.

WASHINGTON - Earth once had two moons, astronomers suggested Wednesday. But in a spectacle that might have beguiled poets, lovers, and songwriters if only they had been around to see it billions of years ago, the smaller one smashed into the other in a "big splat. " The result: a single bulked-up and ever-so-slightly lopsided moon. The astronomers came up with the scenario to explain why the moon's far side is so much hillier than the one that is always facing Earth. The theory, outlined in the journal Nature, comes complete with computer-model runs showing how it might have happened, 4.4 billion years ago, as a small moon that trailed behind a much larger one got pulled in by gravity at 5,000 m.p.h.

The Amazing Story Behind the Most Audacious Heist in History By Ben Mezrich Doubleday. 308 pp. $26.95 Reviewed by Ben Tarnoff In the summer of 2002, three young NASA employees stole a quarter-pound of moon rocks and tried selling them online to a Belgian collector. He alerted the FBI, and together they orchestrated the sting that led to the robbers' arrest. The rocks were returned - lunar samples from the Apollo missions, valued in the vicinity of $20 million - and the ringleader, 25-year-old Thad Roberts, went to prison for eight years.

The U.S. Department of Energy has come up with a clever rhetorical way to muster support for solar energy. Dubbed the SunShot Initiative, its program has the goal of cutting the cost of solar energy by about 75 percent before 2020. The name recalls the "moon shot" speech of President John F. Kennedy in 1962. Affordable solar energy is the "moon shot of our generation," said Arun Majumdar , the agency's acting undersecretary for energy, at a solar-power conference at the Hyatt Regency Philadelphia on Tuesday.