Tablets

The phenomenal success of Viagra for men has sparked some sexual envy among women. Many say their sex life isn't what it used to be and they want help, too. Some are even experimenting with Viagra, although the drug isn't approved for use by women. While the little blue pills may spectacularly enhance erections, they do little to remedy the lack of desire that is women's chief sexual complaint. But there's no need for hand-me-down drugs, experts say. Women already have a powerful tool to fuel sexual desire, and it has been on pharmacy shelves for years.

Quigley Corp., the Doylestown marketer of zinc cold lozenges, profited greatly on its customers' colds and sniffles last winter. The maker of Cold-Eeze tablets, which sold out on many drugstore shelves, yesterday reported net income of $6.5 million for the first quarter, compared with a $77,000 loss a year earlier. The company said it now is increasing production to build inventory for next winter's cold season. Last week, Quigley said it had $10 million in cash to spend on producing Cold-Eeze, and has obtained a "multimillion dollar" line of credit if it needs additional financing.

"Commandments" is meant to be a serious-minded examination of what happens when people without faith are forced to confront religious questions. This attempt at spiritual substance is almost historic, given the current climate in Hollywood. Most movies nowadays treat mainstream religion as fodder for pederast dramas or sarcastic humor. "Commandments," on the other hand, is a mostly respectful attempt to bring Judeo-Christian images and ideas to bear on a story about people who have lost contact with their religious roots.

"Hermann here," said Hermann Behrens on the phone. A friend and Roman Catholic priest, the caller also happened to be a world-class scholar on the planet's first known written language. In July he was named editor-in-chief of a long-running University of Pennsylvania Museum project to create a dictionary of the language, Sumerian. Behrens and his team of three other experts look at little triangular marks pressed into clay tablets and decide what each one means. It is slow, frustrating work.

Few objects are as evocative as a musical instrument standing silent. The two lyres in the University of Pennsylvania Museum's exhibit "Ancient Mesopotamia: Royal Tombs of Ur" are especially tantalizing, for scholars have moved closer to understanding just how those instruments sounded and how they were tuned and played by Mesopotamians two thousand years before Christ. The lyres have long been part of the museum's treasures. The larger of the two is for the most part a reconstruction of a large wooden lyre, its strings as long as those of a string bass.

On Sept. 7, 1994, Stella Murphy had a prescription for a drug for Parkinson's disease filled at a Rite Aid Pharmacy near her home in Clifton Heights, Delaware County. The label on the bottle of 100 pills identified the drug as Cogentin and spelled out the instructions: "Take 1 tablet every morning. " Murphy, 76, dutifully took the medication as directed for a month, apparently unaware that it was not Cogentin but Coumadin, a potentially dangerous drug that prevents abnormal blood clotting.

Any decade now, the Sumerian Dictionary of the University Museum of the University of Pennsylvania will be finished. "Some days they ask me," Ake Sjoberg says, "which volume do I want for a memorial?" Sjoberg, an elfin 70, laughs. He doubts he'll ever see the completed product. The landmark effort to create the first dictionary of the earliest written language - dead for a couple of thousand years and read today by only about 100 people worldwide - is slow-going work. Letter B, chosen as the first volume because of its relative brevity, was started in 1976.

QUEST TO SATE HUNGER BEARS A HONEY OF A FIND A hungry bear broke through the wall of an old Japanese Shinto shrine in search of beehives and accidentally exposed rare, 16th-century wooden tablets, the daily Yomiuri Shimbun said yesterday. The two tablets, each the size of a magazine, were hidden with sake cups and wooden bowls inside the wall of the Nagano Imamiya Daimyojin shrine in Kurinocho, a small town north of Tokyo. Inscriptions on the tablets, apparently used as platforms for offering rice cakes to Shinto gods, showed they dated from a summer harvest festival in 1527.

The pair of tablets given by God to Moses and, sometime shortly thereafter, dragged down the mountain by Charlton Heston in the movie "The Ten Commandments," will be auctioned on June 28 by Christie's in New York. In the original story, when he returned from the mountaintop, Moses was so annoyed by the sight of everyone frolicking around the golden calf that he smashed the tablets to bits. Luckily, no such terrible fate befell the movie likenesses. Christie's told the L.A. magazine Buzz that the set of tablets is made from "richly hewn" fiberglass, and that they have stage directions marked on the back (honor thy father and mother and place your right foot on the adhesive tape X)

"I'm a pessimist who desperately searches for hope," Krzysztof Kieslowski confessed in an interview a couple of years ago. It's a telling self- appraisal, at once soul-baring and ironic. The Polish filmmaker's work - including 1991's The Double Life of Veronique and his epic 1994 trilogy Three Colors, Blue, White and Red - are artful embodiments of that dark-but-hopeful philosophy, representing a personal but somehow panoramic view of the human condition. With his longtime writing collaborator, Krzysztof Piesiewicz, Kieslowski shows us people in search of love, of spiritual succor, of the goodness in the soul.