Cypher

An indelible icon of the '60s, Janis Joplin chugged Southern Comfort on stage, had affairs with women and men and cruised the streets of Los Angeles in a Porsche 365 Cabriolet painted in a far-out psychedelic design.But the free-spirited blues empress, who died of a heroin overdose at age 27, also talked hopefully of marriage, babies and a home, complete with traditional white-picket fence.No wonder nearly three decades later she remains such a dichotomy -- and her story continues to tantalize Hollywood.

The Inner Harbor was under water, and Thames Street could have passed for the Thames River yesterday morning as the aftermath of Hurricane Isabel washed into downtown Baltimore. From Canton to Fells Point to downtown, a storm surge created the worst flooding in memory and led to at least 24 water rescues by city firefighters. Water pushed to the front door of the Maryland Science Center, flooded hotel rooms and turned major thoroughfares - including Pratt and Light streets - into rivers better suited to canoes than cars.

In Baltimore City Two men's deaths put homicide count in city at 224 Baltimore's homicide tally grew Wednesday with the deaths of two men from earlier violence, police said. Angelo Hill, 41, of the 3200 block of Hayward Ave. died at Sinai Hospital from stab wounds suffered when a man attacked him in the 4600 block of Reisterstown Road on Oct. 20. No arrest has been made in that case. The other victim, Samuel T. Hill, 68, had lived at the Abbey Schaefer Hotel in the 700 block of St. Paul St. He died at an area hospital from the effects of smoke inhalation suffered in a fire Aug. 2, 2001.

Recently, I vowed never again to muse on Courtney Love in this column. The punky grunge diva has been iconized by every popular magazine this side of Seattle since she became a power widow. There was nothing left to say. OK, but I can't resist an angelic Miss World on the cover of June's Vanity Fair, the same magazine that accused her of shooting heroin when pregnant with daughter Frances Bean.Strangely, the new VF contains not a single mention of the 1992 article, which Ms. Love has viciously and repeatedly attacked as untrue, claiming it robbed her of all her happiness.

NOMINEES for this year's G.O.O.F. AWARD are: . . . Matthew McConaughey was touted ad nauseam as the next Paul Newman by everyone except Joanne Woodward -- before McConaughey had appeared as the primary star in even one major movie.. . . Jenny McCarthy can't sing, act, dance or tell a joke, but she can go, "Wooooooo!" while making pig faces and sticking her tongue out. For this she was given at least seven cover stories in national magazines in 1996, while Hollywood stood underneath her balcony, courting her with all its might.

NEW YORK -- On a recent Sunday, Adam Seifer ate an elegant fish meal at a restaurant in Sao Paulo, Brazil. Earlier that same day, he had airplane food - "some kind of Monte Cristo/egg sandwich thing." The day before, he wolfed down a chicken roll at his desk. Care to know what else Seifer, a 38-year-old Manhattan Internet entrepreneur, puts in his stomach? You might not, but 15,000 visitors a week log onto fotolog.com/cypher to check out and comment on his daily food blog, "Get in My Belly."

She kicks, she shoots, she kills. And she looks darn good doing it.She's Nikita, a blond-haired, blue-eyed assassin whose weekly adventures on the USA network have made "La Femme Nikita" cable's highest-rated drama series. Sentenced to death for a crime she didn't commit, Nikita is rescued at the last minute by a mysterious government agency, cryptically referred to as Section One, that specializes in killing for the common good. Given the choice of either dying (this time for sure) or killing, she chooses the latter.

A. Robert Kaufman isn't giving up on socialism, but he has had it with the hardscrabble Walbrook neighborhood where he was twice attacked. He's moving to Northwest Baltimore. The perennial candidate shared that news last week, phoning from a hospital bed where he was recovering from an infection related to the dialysis he has needed since a near-fatal beating and stabbing in 2005 at his home in an apartment building he owns. The mayoral and kidney-transplant hopeful told The Sun's Dave Ettlin that he will become a tenant at the Brookview Apartments on Western Run Drive.

It's 10 o'clock on a Tuesday night on Baltimore's North Avenue, one building away from the Maryland Avenue bridge — not your typical party time or place. But there's a bustle on the Joe Squared patio, and it doesn't just come from late diners scarfing down pizza and risotto. An eclectic group of fun-seekers — bar-hoppers and artists and students — are schmoozing and flirting and greeting fellow regulars for the weekly dance party known as "Dig. " Created by DJ and rock-soul-funk musician Landis Expandis, Dig has become a big draw for breakdancers — or, as they call themselves, b-boys and b-girls, or breakers.

WASHINGTON - London newspapers are up in arms over the movie "U-571" because it changes history and has U.S. commandos capturing a German submarine and a priceless encoding machine, when in fact the feat was performed by British sailors. Ignored in the trans-Atlantic tempest is the fact that it was neither Britons nor Americans who swiped Hitler's famous "Enigma" encoding machine, but Poles. More than a half-century after the end of World War II, the crucial involvement of Polish intelligence in breaking the Enigma code is still largely unknown to the public.