Outer Space

A retelling of the Cinderella story tops this week's list of new movies on video. Ever After 1/2 (1998) (Fox) $19.98. 101 minutes. Drew Barrymore, Anjelica Huston, Dougray Scott, Patrick Godfrey. Breathing fresh air into the stale saga of Cinderella, Ever After stars Barrymore as the resourceful chargirl who doesn't need a prince to save her, but does have a hand in saving a certain Prince Henry. Enough derring-do for adventurers, and enough courtship to send romantics into raptures.

Cheltenham teacher Roberta Jacoby ventured to Ohio last month to ponder some weighty questions on a weightless matter. Can you microwave brownies in outer space? And does a Slinky actually slink in the final frontier? Those questions can't be answered by just anyone, as Jacoby knows after spending two weeks in a NASA program that forced a select group of teachers to wrack their brains over such intergalactic matters. "It was mind-boggling," Jacoby said. "What's going on in the space industry is amazing.

Micah Zenko, 36, is no astronaut. A fellow at the Council on Foreign Relations in New York, he is an authority on "space junk," the orbiting debris left by disabled satellites, rocket boosters, and manned missions. Orbiting at thousands of miles per hour, a mere splinter holds the force to destroy a craft. So Zenko, concerned about the threat to the military and commercial satellites essential for modern life, in a recent CFR policy paper, proposed "A Code of Conduct for Outer Space.

HILLCREST MEADOWS Worcester Township, Montgomery County 215-643-1289 Hillcrest Meadows should suit suburban folks who have a hankering for the city's bright lights. The view from some second-floor bedrooms at the development offers new suburbanites a faint glimpse of what they left behind. On a clear night, Liberty Place glows dimly in the distance. But little else about Hillcrest Meadows is reminiscent of city living. For starters, the builders created room for people who need to store more than monks' garb in their closets.

Advances in computers, lasers and data processing have made it possible to launch the world's first systematic effort to search for extraterrestrial life in the universe, space experts said yesterday. "As our technology has advanced the possibilities have become ever more real," said James Powell, of Brookhaven National Laboratories in Upton, N.Y., at the annual meeting of the American Association for the Advancement of Science in Philadelphia. Jill Tarter, an astronomer at the University of California at Berkeley, said that during the last 25 years 47 modest attempts have been made to search the heavens for signals emitted from other civilizations.

Ready for a break from the pressure cooker of everyday life? Then how about a little jaunt into outer space? Out-of-this-world tourism may be just around the corner, according to a report released yesterday by NASA and the Space Transportation Association, a private group that represents the interests of companies hoping to develop commercial space travel. "General public space travel and tourism has the potential to emerge as a large and growing commercial business in the early decades of the next century," the report said.

Imagine a constant free-falling feeling for four months. Now imagine feeling that way and also being denied sex, chocolate, a telephone, Monday Night Football, shopping. And cheesesteaks. No, this isn't hell. It's outer space. These are just some of the sacrifices three space pioneers will make, starting this week, to become the first men to live on the International Space Station. About 3 a.m. today Philadelphia time, an American astronaut and two Russian cosmonauts were scheduled to soar into space aboard a Russian rocket.

In 1988, President Bush made famous the phrase "a thousand points of light," a metaphor for the positive energy sparked by volunteers in America. In 1992, Streamlight Inc., a Norristown manufacturer of rechargeable portable lights, illuminated this ideal, literally and figuratively. In August, Streamlight donated an assortment of its products to survivors of Hurricane Andrew. The company sent 700 flashlights to the Salvation Army of South Florida and 100 to parishes in Louisiana.

Schoolchildren in Camden and Audubon have no doubt that humans will be traveling to Mars and maybe even living there within their lifetimes. The planet closest to Earth, which for previous generations was the stuff of science-fiction novels, comic books and B movies, has been demystified for a small group of fifth and sixth graders participating in a NASA-sponsored science program. "This could save us one day," said 11-year-old Sam Bednarchik, a sixth grader at Haviland Avenue School in Audubon.

We are standing at the threshold of the future, looking into the living room of the future, and we see that a time will come when the human race will finally be relieved of the burden of color coordination. In the future, everything will be moon-rock gray. Although we are looking at the future, and everything is the same color, we are pretty certain we are in the living room because there are four chairs surrounding a coffee table. Where else would a coffee table go - even in the future?

AS A WRITER, Matthew Quick has traveled from Collingswood, N.J., to outer space and inner teenage psyche. Quick, who grew up in South Jersey and taught at Haddonfield High School, is the author of "The Silver Linings Playbook," the Collingswood-set novel that recently got the big-picture treatment from Bradley Cooper, Robert De Niro and director David O. Russell (it's slated to hit theaters in November). But Quick's last two books have been young-adult fiction, first with "Sorta Like a Rock Star" and now with "Boy21," which hits bookstores next Tuesday.

Micah Zenko, 36, is no astronaut. A fellow at the Council on Foreign Relations in New York, he is an authority on "space junk," the orbiting debris left by disabled satellites, rocket boosters, and manned missions. Orbiting at thousands of miles per hour, a mere splinter holds the force to destroy a craft. So Zenko, concerned about the threat to the military and commercial satellites essential for modern life, in a recent CFR policy paper, proposed "A Code of Conduct for Outer Space.

Chinese emperors built the Great Wall to keep out rampaging hordes of Mongolian soldiers mounted on horseback streaming down from the north, but no amount of stone and mortar can repel hordes of tourists riding luxury motor coaches. These groups, armed with digital cameras, arrive by the thousands each day. You can avoid them, though, by veering slightly off the beaten path to tour a part of the wall that is less visited. Hiring your own driver will also vastly improve your Great Wall experience.

When we worked full-time, we never seemed to have time for serendipity. We were always trying to cram as much travel as we could into a week or so, racing a vacation clock from museum to cathedral to market, bleary dawn to exhausted dusk. We planned so tightly that now we wonder how we could have hoped the magic of travel would ever catch up to surprise us. Now that we're retired, we still try to get a lot of mileage out of our travels, but we're also learning to reset the clock as we go, leaving time to be taken aback now and then.

MOSCOW - Russia risks losing its edge in space by relying exclusively on Soviet-era achievements and doing little to design new spacecraft, a Russian cosmonaut warned Monday as the nation marked the 50th anniversary of the first human space flight by Yuri Gagarin. Svetlana Savitskaya, who flew two space missions, in 1982 and 1984, and was the first woman to make a space walk, harshly criticized the Kremlin for paying little attention to achievements in space after the 1991 collapse of the Soviet Union.

TV series are like the tubercular poets of yore: They pass too soon. Especially the good ones. As a result, prime-time actors tend to show up again and again, commandeering a new horse as soon as their current one falters. It feels like William Shatner, Sarah Chalke, Greg Grunberg, Holland Taylor, Jimmy Smits, Scott Bakula, Dana Delany, Jerry O'Connell, Kyle Chandler, Gerald McRaney, Scott Wolf, Michael Chiklis, Heather Locklear, Eric Close, and others are always with us. The absolute king of this phenomenon is the late Robert Urich, who starred in everything but The Jeffersons . Urich was recycled more times than a SunnyD jug. Usually, familiarity does not breed contempt.

From the White House to outer space to the City Coffee Shop in Camden, Americans paid homage to the victims of last weekend's shootings in Tucson, Ariz., by halting the buzz and motion of their day for a moment of silence at 11 a.m. Monday. On the White House South Lawn, President Obama and his wife, Michelle, presided over a national moment to pray and reflect on the event. Rep. Gabrielle Giffords (D., Ariz.) was wounded and six people were killed Saturday, including a federal judge and 9-year-old Christina Taylor Green, granddaughter of former Phillies manager Dallas Green.

The Ellen DeGeneres Show (3 p.m., NBC10) - Robert Pattinson; Adam Lambert performs. The Oprah Winfrey Show (4 p.m., 6ABC) - Kirstie Alley. Persons Unknown (8 p.m., NBC10) - After the night manager tells the group that someone will be "checking out," a taxi arrives with instructions to take Janet and the guest of her choice. 90210 (8 p.m., CW57) - Silver and Kelly deal with shocking news about their mother. Two and a Half Men (9 p.m., CBS3) - Charlie returns from Las Vegas with a new wife who definitely isn't Chelsea.

This is a remarkably rich anniversary summer. Even now, from the distance of 40 years, 1969's seems a little unreal. There was simply too much jaw-dropping news to digest: Man on the moon, Woodstock, the Manson murders, Chappaquiddick, disclosure of the My Lai massacre, secret Vietnam peace talks, Hurricane Camille. Anyway, remembering all those monumental events got me thinking about sports. While our attention was fixed on outer space and spaced-out hippies, what was going on in life's toy department that summer of '69?

'I do not come to you as reality; I come to you as the myth. Because that's what black people are: myths. " Baffling as it may seem, this quotation from the 1974 film Space Is the Place is one of Sun Ra's clearer pronouncements. The late pianist and leader of the Sun Ra Arkestra did indeed create his own myth, propagating a mystical, sci-fi worldview that can seem like a put-on, well removed from reality. In fact, Ra's eccentric visions were a response to one of the harshest realities of all, the oppression of African Americans.