Sea

THE SHIRES AT ENGLISH CREEK Egg Harbor Township, Atlantic County 609-641-8316 The Shires at English Creek is 15 minutes from the beaches on the Atlantic. The 176-house development is about the same distance from the casinos at Atlantic City. Residents of the Shires would have a considerable commute to Philadelphia, but come summer when the sea breezes beckon, the proximity to heat relief might make the rest of the year's driving worth the effort. The development's motto is, "Life the way it was meant to be. " Forty-nine souls have bought in and decided it's the way their lives were meant to be, at least for the time being.

Slides of underwater scenes set the stage and "Down by the Sea" was the theme for a talent show put on by Caln Elementary School students in Caln Township. Show director Linda Peppelman guided 45 students in various grades through their performances Friday.

How do you say dread in French? Francois Ozon's See the Sea, set on a sun-bleached Biscay island where a young English mother and her infant daughter encounter a brooding vagabond, practically palpitates with foreboding. An incredibly agile and unsettling piece of work, See the Sea taps into our unconscious fears and fantasies in a way very few films, or filmmakers, manage. Ozon, 31, shows in his just-under-an-hour See the Sea and its 15-minute companion piece A Summer Dress (also situated amid the rustling pines and hot sands of an idyllic beach setting)

As a plot, the one about the gold digger and the romantic who go out together hunting for mates was probably gathering dust in the Jurassic period. But it's still fun, and when, as in Out to Sea, it stars Walter Matthau and Jack Lemmon, it's also quite winning. Though the sound of septuagenarians swearing is not my idea of ha-ha, the spectacle of Matthau and Lemmon as the Golden Guys is. In what amounts to a full-employment act for performers of a certain age, the guys from grumpus are joined by Gloria DeHaven, Hal Linden, Donald O'Connor, and Elaine Stritch.

Sounds like potboiler fiction: A mother who abandoned her child encounters the girl 12 years later. But unlike potboiler fiction, Gillian Armstrong's unforgettable High Tide is no schmaltz-larded tribute to mother love, no Stella Dallas offering on the altar of motherly self-sacrifice. High Tide breaks taboo by probing the depths of maternal ambivalence with a fearlessness and lack of sentimentality that ranks the film with such novels as Sue Miller's The Good Mother and Doris Lessing's The Fifth Child.

Not since Nelson triumphed at Trafalgar have sails at sea captured so much attention around the world. Only recently, muscular men drove powerful yachts through the towering seas of the Indian Ocean off Fremantle, Australia, united in a quest that pitted them against one another - the lust for that ornate hunk of silver called the America's Cup. But as corporate sponsors spent millions to trade off this combat at sea, the true lure of...

Romance is in plentiful supply aboard ship and always has been. Years ago, when unattached British women sailed out to India, their romantic quests began the moment they embarked. Old hands referred to them disparagingly as "the fishing fleet," so determined were they to snare a husband. In our own times, there is something overwhelmingly seductive about finding yourself in an exhilarating new environment, detached from habitual surroundings while being pampered, entertained, and fed to distraction.

In Sea Isle City, the storm left some surreal illustrations of its power. Whatever sand that the storm didn't take out to sea, it seems to have left in preposterous places. Losses in the city alone could total more than $10 million, officials said.

The sea has inspired the artistic imagination forever. The very vastness of that world contains whatever an artist wishes to draw out of it. In the case of composer Robert Capanna, the sea and its environs are a dark and ominous place of shipwrecks and ravenous birds. In his song cycle Songs of an Ancient Mariner, which premiered Sunday afternoon at PNC Bank's Presser Recital Hall, Capanna conjures the dangerous, mysterious ocean of Melville's words and Homer's canvases. Songs of an Ancient Mariner, scored for string quartet and baritone, consists of 26 songs divided into three books.

In the way people speak of "pre-Beatles rock," they might also describe the 1959 Venezuelan film Araya as a "pre-PBS documentary. " Before the invention of public television nonfiction in which talking heads argue the pros and cons and the director is telling you what to think, there were documentaries with images that broke your heart. One such film is Luis Bunuel's Land Without Bread (1932), a possible inspiration for Margot Benacerraf's Araya, which could be called Land Without Vegetation.

EACH SPRING, Louise Clemente grabs a pail of white paint and gets to work, touching up all that time and the salty Sea Isle City air has stripped away from a beloved gazebo in her back yard by the bay. Her brush traces over the intricate gingerbread, around the glass panels she painstakingly etched with images of Sea Isle's past, and over the many names along the ceiling, the people who supported her effort to build a monument to all the memories,...

THE DEAD Sea Scrolls, in short (which they are not, running longer than a politician's promises), are the oldest known biblical manuscripts in existence. Perhaps the greatest archaeological find of the 20th century, they made their North American debut Saturday at the Franklin Institute, where they'll stay through mid-October. To many atheists, they are the Chronicles of Riddick, or a graphic novel. To most believers, the Dead Sea Scrolls — more than 900 parchments and fragments — offer proof (or at least evidence)

One of history's greatest archaeological finds was so improbable that it borders on the miraculous. In 1947, a young Palestinian goatherder discovered a narrow cave entrance by the shores of the Dead Sea, in what is now Israel. Unsure of what he might find, the boy first threw a rock into its shadows and heard something shatter. Entering, he found dozens of tall clay pots packed with ancient writings. Known today as the Dead Sea Scrolls, the 972 parchments and papyrus fragments in this and other nearby caves contained some of the oldest surviving examples of Jewish scripture.

  When the Franklin Institute opens its "Dead Sea Scrolls" exhibit May 12, visitors will catch a glimpse of one of the greatest archaeological discoveries of all time. Centerpiece of the exhibit will be 20 scroll fragments found in the 1940s in Palestine near the Dead Sea. They are part of an extraordinary trove of nearly 1,000 parchments that include the oldest surviving texts of the Jewish Bible, several of which will be on display in Philadelphia. Penned between 150 B.C. and A.D. 70 and sealed in urns, the scrolls make no mention of Jesus of Nazareth.

We took a cruise with 912 children, 911 of whom were not ours. For people who don't like other people's kids in such quantities, or who believe that cruise ships are floating tubs of gluttony and indolence, this must all sound like a nightmare. There was a moment when the poolside noise level was enough to make Davy Jones himself swim up to the surface and tell us to hold it down, but Davy Jones was actually at the party. At least everyone went quiet when the ship launched the fireworks.

Imagine you're in charge of an old postindustrial city with little open land and a perennially anemic economy. Then a vast district you never knew existed is discovered. It's like a scene from an experimental Czech novel: Pass through a secret door and there's a ghost street grid, handsome buildings from a grand era just out of reach, empty warehouses as big as tankers, and ships as grand as castles. Most of all, a broad waterfront, as close to the sea as your city is likely to get. If your city is Philadelphia, and quite a bit more real than surreal, you've merely walked down South Broad Street, under I-95, and into the Navy Yard.

The Orphan Master's Son By Adam Johnson Random House. 464 pp. $26 Reviewed by Mike Fischer   Read any good North Korean fiction lately? I didn't think so. In Adam Johnson's The Orphan Master's Son , a terrific new novel about life under North Korea's recently deceased Kim Jong Il, we're told why: "Real stories," "human ones," "could get you sent to prison, and it didn't matter what they were about. " If a story "diverted emotion from the Dear Leader, it was dangerous.

We hadn't had a vacation since my husband had a hip replacement in fall 2010. Everyone we know had been talking about cruise vacations, so we decided to follow the crowd. Cruise travel is perfect for senior citizens, especially a handicapped one. There's no need to trudge long and far, and it offers freedom from the chores at home. We went to a AAA travel agent and booked a trip in late September to New England/Canada on Caribbean Princess Cruise. It was quite exciting. The cruise was spacious, beautiful, and luxurious.

SEA ISLE CITY, N.J. - Even in the off-season, the constant whirlwind around Carmen Conti - a swirl of fish frying, grandkids on scooters, phones ringing, boats being prepped, friends stopping by - keeps the wiry 82-year-old gliding from one task to the next. He hops onto the stern of a fiberglass fishing boat he has been building in the side yard of his Carmen's restaurant as nimbly as he fillets a batch of tautog and drops the blackfish into a fryer. The second-generation Italian American fisherman, who came to Sea Isle in 1930 wrapped in a baby blanket, has helped turn what was an empty dockside lot into a fishing and dining enterprise in the heart of Fish Alley, a spot where generations of fishermen have landed their catch.

MANILA, Philippines - In a highly symbolic ceremony Wednesday aboard a guided-missile destroyer, Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton underscored America's military and diplomatic backing for the Philippines as it engages in an increasingly tense territorial dispute with China in the resource-rich South China Sea. On board the USS Fitzgerald in Manila Bay, Clinton and Philippine Foreign Secretary Albert del Rosario signed a declaration calling...