Dust Bowl

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.

YOU CAN HAVE the '90s; David Gelernter will take the '30s. When I heard him speak a couple of years ago, he was a Yale professor working on whether emotion could be designed into computers. But his topic that day was modern technology. Mr. Gelernter thinks it is pretty mediocre, driven more by narcissism than human need.Thus we have a lot of gee-whiz computer stuff, from virtual shopping to virtual sex, but too few technologies aimed at alleviating social problems -- or even making life easier or more pleasant.

Five John Ford films you won't want to miss this weekend:"How Green Was My Valley" (1941, 8 p.m.-10: 05 p.m. and midnight-2: 05 a.m. tomorrow) -- Ford won the third of his four Best Director Oscars for this sentimental look at life in a Welsh mining town at the turn of the century. Walter Pidgeon, Maureen O'Hara, Donald Crisp, Barry Fitzgerald and Roddy McDowall star in a film that reveals Ford's basic sentimentality better than any other (save perhaps for "The Quiet Man")."Battle of Midway" and "December 7th" (1942 and 1943, 3: 15 p.m.-4: 30 p.m. tomorrow)

The temperatures in Moscow these days are the same as they were 30 years ago in Voronezh -- 250 miles to the south. The city is saving money in winter and doing less environmental damage by using a milder blend of road salt, because of the warmer conditions. At the same time, all of Russia is experiencing an explosion in its tick population. Plagues of locusts have appeared where they never visited before. Flooding becomes ever more commonplace. None of this confirms global warming, much less a human role in global warming -- but the circumstantial evidence is likely to be enough to prod the Russian government into action.

The drought, which has dried lawns and resulted in bans on washing cars in some parts of the state, has caused limited damage to farm crops - so far - the Maryland Department of Agriculture reported yesterday. "We have not been getting a lot of rain," Ray Garibay, state statistician for the Department of Agriculture's crop reporting service, said in releasing the results of a crop survey based on field conditions as of June 23. "But we have been getting timely rains. "It's a situation where we get a half-inch here and a quarter-inch there, and every bit helps.

AT SAND DOLLAR Beach, just another spectacular spot along the wild California coast between San Francisco and Los Angeles, a young surfer plying the waves one morning this summer struck a deep chord. Pick your California dream. If you're of a certain age - and hail from landlocked America - he easily epitomized all that California once seemed to so abundantly offer: endless summer, prolonged youth and, above all, freedom. For waves of Americans - Gold Rush miners, Dust Bowl refugees, Midwestern factory workers, Haight-Ashbury seekers, dot-com innovators - the Golden State has long beckoned.

NATIONAL Buildup of uncertain duration Defense Secretary Robert M. Gates, acknowledging that he was unsure how long the current buildup of U.S. forces in Iraq would last, said that it would not be until the middle of summer that commanders would be able to evaluate whether the increase in forces was working. pg 3a A drier Southwest predicted The driest periods of the last 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 new study.

In these first glorious days of spring I look out at my lawn and realize that I have become a hater.Of squirrels. Red, black, albino, gray -- squirrels of every origin and color.This is when my flower beds are supposed to be crowded with tulips poised to burst into red and yellow elegance in April. But the squirrels, fooled by weathermen predicting a long, hard winter, have stolen most of my tulip bulbs.My flower beds look like a drought-stricken corn field in an Oklahoma dust bowl.Adding insult, these cheeky rodents are back digging up the bulbs they missed in December.

I'M AT A crafts shop and I'm looking at the works of art in the display cabinet. There's a very expensive handmade necklace of sterling. It looks like a string of ordinary paper clips, but of course they aren't ordinary.The necklace is giving me a kind of deja vu.What does it remind me of? Why does it look familiar? It reminds me of a Christmas past.I flash back to a Christmas right after the Depression when things were simple, things were sparse. Things were probably difficult for my parents.

The driest May in Minnesota since the Dust Bowl. Venerable GM slides into bankruptcy and you shudder for the old Pontiac dealers and the retirees in Michigan. In the middle of the night, an Airbus drops out of the air into the Atlantic Ocean, and the veteran traveler shudders to think of it. And the posthumous John Updike appears in the bookstore, a book of short stories and his last poems, written by "my right hand ... faithful old five-fingered beast of burden ... its labors meant to carve from language beauty, that beauty which lifts free of flesh to find itself in print."