Muddy Waters

Two Buddy Guys shared the Keswick Theatre stage Tuesday night. Both wore overalls, a plaid work shirt, and sneakers, grinned luridly, and wrenched live-wire solos out of a gloriously tacky, black-and-white polka-dot guitar. But while one - the blues maverick, whose high-energy performances have long been the stuff of legend - made an admirable showing, the night was dominated by his underwhelming double. For most of his distended set, the 65-year-old Guy enacted a ritual that was affirming, rather than genuinely moving.

Talk about river sharks! It is wonderful that Camden County has a minor-league baseball team by that name. It's less wonderful that it has politicians roaming like predators around its riverfront. The all-Democratic Camden County board of freeholders is pulling a political power play that is holding up Camden-side construction of the cross-river tram to Philadelphia and could jeopardize related waterfront development in the troubled city. The freeholders are refusing to turn over rights to an underwater patch of land to allow construction of the $26 million aerial tram connecting Camden to Penn's Landing.

When the submarine sets out in search of the legendary city beneath the sea in Atlantis: The Lost Empire, it marks a radical departure in the course of Disney animation. Conspicuous absentees on this trip are the Elton John songs, the cute animals and the comic-relief sidekicks. Instead, the production team behind such smashing Mouse House successes as Beauty and the Beast and Tarzan has gone for a curious melange of New Age myth and old-fashioned Indiana Jones adventure. It leads to a confusion of tone and an occasional incoherence in the plotting.

Citing pretrial publicity, a Montgomery County Court judge agreed yesterday to import an outside jury to hear the case of a Delaware County man charged with third-degree murder in July in what has been called a fit of road rage on the Pennsylvania Turnpike. Defense attorney Rob Donatoni said yesterday that his client, Douglas Heavlow, 58, had been so "vilified" and area residents had been so saturated by inflammatory media coverage that "jury selection in this case . . . would not be a bad dream, it would be a nightmare.

In South Jersey, the word dredge has become a political fireball, conjuring up images of 50-foot piles of contaminated muck on the Delaware River's banks. Elected officials, from U.S. senators to council members in the smallest municipalities, have spoken with one voice: "We don't want it here. " A proposed $311 million project would deepen the river channel from 40 to 45 feet, the first such change since World War II. Over four years, hydraulic dredges would suck up 33 million cubic yards of river bottom for 108 miles, from the Delaware Bay to Philadelphia.

Emerson Eisele's two-acre pond gets nasty. Sediments from upstream make it shallow. Manure creates high levels of fecal coliform bacteria. And thick algae often kill the fish. He has complained to local authorities, who complained to county officials, who said the New Jersey Department of Environmental Protection was responsible. The department in response inspected the problem and concluded last year that landowners upstream were complying with land-use laws. Eisele, who lives in Upper Pittsgrove, Salem County, does not know where to turn.

The message delivered by two Sheriff's Department dive team members to the seventh graders at Glen Landing Middle School yesterday was simple: Never swim or boat alone. Officer Stephen Jeffries, 34, ended the 30-minute presentation in the cafeteria with a message the children could relate to. "If you're messing around in pools or rivers, don't think you're cool," said Jeffries, a member of the Camden County Sheriff's Department Underwater Search and Recovery Dive Team. "Don't do it alone.

Now that a state takeover of Philadelphia public schools is threatened, voucher advocates are trying to advance their cause through polls and surveys claiming to document broad support for vouchers, particularly among the poor and minorities. "School choice programs by most measures are wildly popular with voters, especially minorities," the Wall Street Journal editorialized, citing a 1996 Harvard study that found pupils in Milwaukee's voucher program testing higher than kids in other Milwaukee schools.

Raising questions about the leadership of the McKinley Fire Company, Township Commissioner Michael O'Connor said yesterday that he was opposed to a plan that would give 1 1/2 acres of the old Rydal Country Club property to McKinley for a substation. The parcel is part of the 40 acres at Susquehanna and Huntingdon Roads bought last year by the Gigliotti Group for development. John Gigliotti, vice president of the firm, said his company had made the southern corner of the property with the old clubhouse available to the township for the fire company.

When John Brunner puts his canoe in Perkiomen Creek below Knight Lake each spring, he can see straight through to the bottom. But by the time he reaches Swamp Creek in Schwenksville, the water has turned chocolate brown. At Skippack Creek, it's a shade short of black. "The creeks are in trouble," said Brunner, a Worcester native and the executive director of the Musconetcong River Watershed Association. Brunner is worried about the levels of goo in Perkiomen Creek. Last year, he created the Muddy Waters Project, a group of 14 volunteers who studied sedimentation in Skippack Creek and the east branch of Perkiomen Creek, part of the 360-square-mile Perkiomen Creek watershed.