Outer Space

One of the nice things about the Internet and Hollywood is that they make the holidays last so much longer. It's March, and we're still getting gifts ordered through dot-com companies about four months ago. We're also still getting Christmas movies, like "Reindeer Games," set during the holidays but released, rather suspiciously, as the daffodils bud. When a "Christmas" movie is released in March, it can can mean three things: There...

"Martin mania" hasn't swept the U.S. Open yet, not with all the attention on the Williams sisters and Andre Agassi. But if seventh-seeded Todd Martin beats unseeded Cedric Pioline in today's early semifinal, the fans in Arthur Ashe Stadium might adopt Martin as their favorite. New Yorkers clutch to their cynical hearts athletes who don't give up. Martin, a 29-year-old former Northwestern University student, won the hearts of many New Yorkers with his late-night courageous comeback against No. 9 seed Greg Rusedski in the Round of 16. Martin won after dropping the first two sets.

After about 20 minutes of high-energy medley-like treatment of her early-career hits, Brandy finally got a chance to say hi to her E-Centre audience Friday night. You could hardly understand what she was saying, she was so giddy and giggly. It was amazing just how goofy this multimedia pop star is. And that's what is most endearing about 20-year-old Brandy. She's not particularly sexy. She's not nasty, profane or hard. She's Everygirl, at least the filthy rich, NBA-player-dating version.

In a career switch of galactic magnitude, biochemist Baruch Blumberg, renowned for work leading to a hepatitis-B vaccine, will direct a NASA program aimed at searching for life elsewhere in the universe. "It's one of the fundamental questions of biology," said Blumberg, 73, who won the Nobel Prize in 1976 and now acts as an adviser for Fox Chase Cancer Center in Philadelphia. The NASA program he will direct, the Astrobiology Institute, is examining ways to detect signs of life within our solar system and beyond and looking for clues into the extraterrestrial-life question by studying how life on Earth took hold and evolved.

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.

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.

If you're in high school - or in your dotage and still having nightmares about the experience - the proposition that teachers are from another planet will hardly seem like a ludicrous Hollywood fantasy. It would be more an affirmation of your long-held suspicions. Of course, it should be immediately added that if you're a teacher, the idea that the student body is composed entirely of hostile aliens amounts to the only logical explanation for their attire, attention span and attitude.

Are they alive or are they dead? The world anxiously awaits news of the fate of the Northeast High School worms. We all know that John Glenn made it back safely from space. But what of those worms, hurtled into outer space as if they were just some kind of high school science experiment? Sometime today, if all goes well, Northeast science teacher Richard Black will find out the stark truth. He'll open the tiny container holding the 300-500 microscopic worms, and the world will know whether to celebrate or mourn.

An old man who put new life into America's space program has returned. On Saturday, Sen. John Glenn, 77, the first American man to orbit the earth, completed his second trip to space, aboard the shuttle Discovery. His status as very able geriatric, far more than the mission itself, had the whole world focused again on the incredible missions into the cosmos about which the world had come to be blase. It is abundantly appropriate that the excitement of this continuing odyssey has been rekindled by an elder.

Glenn's flight raises concerns on priorities, values Is there something wrong with me that I don't believe we should be spending taxpayer money to send John Glenn into orbit to test the effects of space on health? The media hype would have you believe that every American is for this costly adventure. But I bet there are many Americans who feel that it is a waste. There are so many desperate things here on Earth that we cannot fund, such as antihunger programs and the National Park system, just to name two. Yet we are willing to fund NASA's PR campaign?