Aliens

Having seen a fair sampling of letters on this page, I think I understand the current local Republican political orthodoxy as follows: Let's see if we can blame everything that goes wrong on monogamous homosexuals and/or undocumented workers. The Bible is often cited as including a prohibition against homosexuality. But the same Good Book makes a strong case for treating aliens with extreme compassion, 36 times in the Old Testament alone. So it seems as if many of the Republican readers make their literalism quite selective.

The article titled "Treading carefully in Egypt response" which appeared in your paper on Jan. 31 completely misses the point of the Lotus Revolution. The people of Egypt spoke in a very clear and loud condemnation of President Hosni Mubarak and his regime. Many have given their lives and thousands more have been beaten and put in jail for wanting freedom and other basic human rights. The American administration, by failing to recognize that Mr. Mubarak has had 30 years during which he and his administration failed to fulfill any reforms toward a Democratic system, is playing a very dangerous game for American security in the region.

When Walter Hill was flipping through the first 40 pages of the science fiction/horror script that became "Alien," he considered it turgid, a snooze. "I thought it was just terrible," said Hill, who co-wrote and co-produced the movie with his partner, David Giler. It barely diverted Hill from watching Jimmy Carter's acceptance speech at the 1976 Democratic convention, which was on his TV in the background. Then Hill got to the now-infamous "chest-burster scene," where a creepy little critter — with a head like a slimy, tiny sperm whale — explodes from the chest of a spaceship's executive officer and traumatizes the crew.

When she was fresh out of nursing school in the early 1970s, the last thing Mary Fridley expected to do with her life was work with the elderly. "How depressing would that be?" she says she thought at the time. Then she took a temporary job at a nursing home, where she met the Caroler. She doesn't remember his name, but Fridley could not recall the man more clearly. He was so far along in his dementia that he needed caregivers to feed him. He had such a bad habit of scraping his knuckles on things that he had to wear mittens.

A Columbia woman faces up to 10 years in prison after pleading guity to harboring illegal aliens in her Hanover restaurant. Yen Wan Cheng, 54, admitted to employing undocumented workers at the Red Parrot Asian Bistro, her restaurant in the 7600 block of Dorchester Blvd., according to the office of U.S. Attorney Rod J. Rosenstein in Baltimore. According to the plea agreement entered Friday in U.S. District Court, Cheng employed as many as 12 cooks, waiters and other staff — five of whom were not permitted to live or work in the country — from February 2009 to February of this year.

I t's no secret that "Avatar" has been stunningly successful on nearly every front. The James Cameron-directed sci-fi epic is already the fourth-highest-grossing film of all time, having earned more than $1 billion around the globe in less than three weeks of theatrical release. The film also has garnered effusive praise from critics, who've been planting its flag on a variety of critics Top 10 lists (it has earned an impressive 83 score on Rotten Tomatoes). The 3-D trip to Pandora is also viewed as a veritable shoo-in for a best picture Oscar nomination when the academy announces its nominees on Feb. 2. But amid this avalanche of praise and popularity, guess who hates the movie?

You can't say "District 9" is even skin-deep because the human characters soon get swamped by swarms of aliens who wear their skeletons and other body parts on the outside. The citizens of Johannesburg have dubbed these creatures "prawns." The government has settled them in a refugee camp known as District 9 and handed over their care to Multi-National United (MNU), a private corporation. It hopes to make a killing from the manufacture of alien weaponry. But the prawns' biological engineering thwarts MNU: To shoot these aliens' guns you need their DNA. From beginning to end, no one knows exactly why the prawns' mother ship flew to Earth and parked above the South African metropolis.

For weeks, it's been obvious Republicans would oppose whoever President Barack Obama picked to replace retiring Supreme Court Justice David Souter. Conservative commentators pounced on the president's use of the word "empathy" to describe one of the qualities he was looking for - as if an ability to put oneself in another person's shoes was somehow undesirable in a judge - and that same sort of reflexive hostility was on view again over the weekend, when a top Senate Republican threatened to filibuster Mr. Obama's choice without even knowing who it was. But with the nomination Tuesday of Sonia Sotomayor, a federal appeals court judge in New York who would become only the third woman and the first Hispanic ever to serve on the nation's highest court, we hope even the president's critics will give his candidate a fair hearing.

Must-sees Shall We Kiss?: *** A Parisian fabric designer meets an affable stranger, with whom she hits it off so well that it seems natural for him to offer a farewell kiss. She says there's no such thing as a kiss without consequences and proceeds to tell a story to prove her point. Adventureland: *** 1/2 In the summer of 1987, a college grad (Jesse Eisenberg) finds love with a sleek, smart young woman (Kristen Stewart) at a seedy Pittsburgh-area amusement park. Sunshine Cleaning : *** A woman struggling to get over life's disappointments (Amy Adams)