Dust Bowl

The Eighth Annual Jewish Film Festival kicks off tonight at 7: 30 with the first of its five Jewish-interest films at the Gordon Center for Performing Arts.The film, which will be repeated at 7: 30 p.m. March 14, is "All That Really Matters," directed by Robert Glinski. Yaphet Kotto, from "Homicide," will be at tonight's screening to meet viewers.The film is part of what might be called the literature of ordeal, the account of a family's immense suffering between the years 1939 and 1945. Sound familiar?

Gillian Welch moved to Nashville looking for a city that most people have forgotten or relegated to museums. She went to Music Row because, decades ago, her heroes - including Bill Monroe, the Louvin Brothers and the Carter Family - had gone there to make records that became the bedrock of American roots music. She wanted to do the same. Nine years later, Welch feels as though she's finally living in the home she was searching for. She has found the places and people who built Nashville's foundation and has managed to avoid those who are selling the cookie-cutter, cleaned-up version of country music that dominates today.

HORSESHOE BEND, Idaho - The electronic sign flashes at motorists speeding through the hills on their way to raft, kayak or fish in the river running through the green valley below. "Crickets on Highway. Slick Road," it warns. There they are climbing up the guardrail and spilling onto the road - thousands of dark red Mormon crickets, resembling giant grasshoppers. Behind them, the hills are swarming with hordes, more than anyone could possibly count. This is one of nature's cruel surprises in the sea of sagebrush that stretches across southern Idaho, northern Nevada and Utah: infestations of ravenous crickets, which march in armies up to 100,000 strong, eating virtually everything they find that has moisture content, including each other.

Surrealist artworks The lowdown -- Cut flowers, fruits and shells that levitate above glass coffee tables or hover weightlessly over breakers on a beach, plants with stems that disappear into nothingness before reaching their pots - these sound like the surreal hijinks in the paintings of Salvador Dali or Rene Magritte. But these fantastic happenings are the creations of Baltimore artist Jeremiah Stermer, whose canvases that mix precise realism with flights of fancy go on view Sunday at University of Maryland University College.

Caroline Storrie made Dulaney's field hockey opener one to remember yesterday as the senior wing scored the only goal of the game to upset No. 4 Westminster, 1-0. The unranked Lions, co-champions in Baltimore County last season, broke through with 9:30 left in the match. On an assist from Lexi Glaeser, Storrie slapped a shot past host Westminster's All-Metro goalkeeper Emily Chamelin. "This is a big win," said Lions first-year coach Diana Weinapple. "Starting off a new season with a win against a ranked team and a team they haven't beaten in a while encourages the girls and makes them realize that they are capable of playing with teams of that caliber."

It was a city known for revelry, but now it wallows -- thigh-deep, in places -- in a kind of third-world misery rarely seen in America. It was a city of half a million people -- four-fifths of whom got out while doing so was still possible, leaving 100,000 others, including the poorest and most vulnerable, behind to fend for themselves in the floodwaters. It was a city. Hurricane Katrina slammed more ferociously into Mississippi, carving a path of destruction across the Gulf Coast that will devastate its economy for years to come, uprooting oil rigs, shutting down refineries and ripping casinos from their moorings.

AK Slaughter, the dual voices of Emily Slaughter and Aran Keating, have been making music in Baltimore since their college days at Goucher, mixing fast with slow and musical simplicity with quirky complexity. Their answers for this week's Like/Dislike are almost as entertaining as their sharp lyrics and funky beats. Don't miss them at the Fifth Annual All Rap Round Robin at 9 p.m. Friday at Floristree, featuring 12 different talents. They'll be releasing their new split EP with RapDragons there.

Sara Wright has spent years trying to answer a simple question: What is it that makes the good earth good?What gives some soil that moist, granular feel that tells farmers and gardeners when they sift it through their fingers that this is productive and life-sustaining?After five years of research, the Beltsville Agricultural Research Center scientist thinks she has an answer.It is a protein -- unknown until now -- secreted by different types of fungus that holds soils together like a glue.

The driest periods of the past century - the Dust Bowl of the 1930s and the droughts of the 1950s - could become the norm in the Southwest United States within decades due to global warming, according to a study released yesterday. The research suggests the transformation could already be happening. Much of the region has been in a severe drought since 2000, which the study's analysis of computer climate models shows as the beginning of a long drying period. The study, published online in the journal Science, predicted a permanent drought by 2050 throughout the Southwest - one of the fastest-growing regions in the nation.

COLLEGE PARK -- The National Archives building is all high-tech gadgetry, glass and concrete, a far cry from the agency's first home, a grand neoclassical building halfway between the Capitol and the White House on Pennsylvania Avenue.The new, 1.7 million-square-foot building sits on a park-like, 33-acre tract next to the University of Maryland's golf course. Its windows look out on groves of trees and its research rooms are brightened by light that passes through tinted glass in the main atrium.