Outer Space

An Irving Berlin wartime ditty featured the famous line, "Oh! How I hate to get up in the morning. " We've all had mornings like that, when we felt that it didn't pay to get up. I knew I was having one of those mornings when I found myself wondering why other people were smiling and laughing and, in general, not looking as miserable as I felt. Recognizing these as early symptoms of depression made me even more miserable. Then something stopped me in my tracks. I opened the newspaper and saw the photographs of Saturn sent back by the bus-size Cassini spacecraft as it sped toward that planet at 54,000 m.p.h.

Some important visitors dropped by the Abington Friends School recently. But despite high security, their appearance was not one of any gravity. In fact, these visitors would not have known gravity if it hit them like a meteor shower. They were travelers from the moon. Small bits of rock and soil, they were snatched from the lunar surface by successive Apollo moon missions from 1969 through the early 1970s. And now they were in Jordan Burkey's physics classroom, silent emissaries from outer space encased in a clear, plastic disk.

Living in the Space Age has benefits for all of us. But Tang isn't one of them. Neither is Teflon, nor Velcro. Those inventions, despite oft-repeated myths, did not grow out of space research. But NASA has documented more than 1,300 technologies that have played a role in life on Earth - including more than 100 spin-offs from the space shuttle program. For instance, NASA says, the same rocket fuel that helps launch shuttles can help destroy land mines. An infrared, handheld camera used to observe the shuttle's blazing plumes is also capable of scanning for brushfires.

As the nation mourned yesterday's crash of the space shuttle Columbia, four Norristown middle schoolers experienced the disaster in particularly personal terms. The eighth graders from East Norriton Middle School - Jack Casey, Brian Letrinko, Christopher Delaney and Andrea White - were among about 30 student groups from across the country participating in NASA's Space Experiment Module, an educational program in which children design science projects that are loaded on to the shuttle and shipped into outer space.

Open your Bibles today to Genesis, Chapter 6. It's a strange passage, part of the accounting of sins that presaged the great flood. Here's how it reads in a prominent Jewish translation of the Torah: When men began to increase on earth and daughters were born to them, the divine beings saw how beautiful the daughters of men were and they took wives from among those that pleased them. The Lord said, "My breath shall not abide in man forever, since he too is flesh; let the days allowed him be one hundred and twenty years.

A FIRE BROKE OUT at Buckingham Palace yesterday, forcing the evacuation of hundreds of people and spoiling Queen Elizabeth II's Golden Jubilee celebration. Rockers Phil Collins, Eric Clapton and Queen guitarist Brian May were about to begin rehearsals for the planned tribute concert for Her Royal Highness when the fire broke out, the BBC reported. News reports said it was the first time the palace had been evacuated since World War II. The London Fire Brigade said no members of the royal family were in the palace at the time, but the evacuation disrupted preparations for tonight's star-studded concert.

One day, 10-year-old Jamal Badie may want to be an astronaut. "You get to float around, and you get to see stuff you never saw before," the fourth grader at Evergreen Avenue Elementary School said wistfully. His signature will at least make it into orbit. Jamal's class launched the school's participation in "Student Signatures in Space," the highlight of a national education program to get students interested in outer space. Students from 530 U.S. schools - including Thomas E. Bowe Elementary School in Glassboro, Whitehall Elementary School in Williamstown, Thomas O. Hopkins Middle School in Burlington Township, Kenneth R. Olson Middle School in Tabernacle, Delran Middle School, and St. John's School in Collingswood - signed and decorated posters that will travel aboard a space-shuttle mission in the fall.

Bad news for hockey fans: In the year 2024, the sport with the sticks, the puck, and the body checks on ice will be outlawed. At least, that's what the 25th-century archaeology students who discover the frozen body of one Jason Voorhees, still wearing the "facial armor" of the banned game, report in Jason X - the murky ninth sequel in the Friday the 13th horror series, and the first to propel its cutlery-wielding masked maniac well into the...

"Jimmy Neutron: Boy Genius" is the computer-generated kid with the Bob's Big Boy hairdo who has been playing havoc with the Nickelodeon network's programming for the past several months. That amusing anarchy was actually promotion for Jimmy's first big-screen adventure. Frankly, the whole concept works better on television. Although director John A. Davis and his DNA Productions company try to make the most out of their off-the-shelf-software, digital-animation approach, what may appear stylistically inventive at home often just looks quaint or incompletely rendered in larger doses.

That rock in your backyard. Did it just appear Monday? Is it charred around the edges? Can you see your cat's feet protruding from beneath it? Don't waste time calling the landscaper or your vet. Could be you just hit the space jackpot big-time. See, nature in her fairness doesn't just lash us with rain and hail and globs of lava. Every now and then - actually, hundreds of times each day - she flings down to us rocky little doodads from outer space - called meteorites if they land, meteors if you just see them in the sky. And the one that apparently landed somewhere in Pennsylvania or New York Monday evening was a doozy.