Fear

"Fear of a Black Hat," opening today at the Charles, is a kind of rap "This is Spinal Tap!" Yes, I know that "CB4" was supposed to be a rap "This Is Spinal Tap!" Well, neither film is, but "Fear of a Black Hat" comes a lot closer.Written and directed and starring Rusty Cundieff, who has worked with Spike Lee and wrote "House Party II" for Kid n' Play, it's a vividly conceived mock documentary which follows a not terribly good rap group called N.W.H. through good times (a No. 1 hit) and bad (breakup)

Religious bioethicists lost a major battle when President Bush decided to permit federal funding of stem cell research using IVF (in-vitro fertilization) embryos. They lost not because of politics, but because of the brand of religion that gives them inspiration. A confident religion puts the inner life and outer life of human beings in perspective. It knows that nothing science discovers in the outside world will ever change the reality of people's inner experience. Thus, most people live in fear or boredom, no matter how technically advanced a society is. Even a genetically engineered baby is likely destined for a dull childhood in the suburbs, a painful adolescence and a restless adulthood spent staring out an office window.

On top of worries about the Persian Gulf, falling real estate values and slow consumer spending, the big imponderable is the job market. If employment remains strong, the economy may sputter, but it won't slide into reverse. Unfortunately, judging by recent surveys of consumer confidence, a sizable percentage of Americans fear their paychecks are in jeopardy. That has sparked a parsimonious attitude toward spending. Last week, Federal Reserve Chairman Alan Greenspan warned that shrinking employment and a decline in the number of hours worked has caused personal income to shrink.

THE MESSAGE to take from Ellen Young is simple: No matter how old you are, you can get rid of whatever fear is crippling your life - without paying an analyst 200 bucks an hour to lie on a Naugahyde couch and weep into a tissue. Ellen Young's phobia was public speaking. These days, she flies around the country giving talks on Alzheimer`s disease, which took her mother from this earth and became the subject of a book by Young that is part loving memoir, part caregiver's manual. But until a few years ago, the idea of getting up in front of an audience and speaking consumed the Lutherville resident with nauseating, knee-buckling spasms of fear.

We are defined by what we fear. This has never been more evident than with the public reaction to three school shootings in a week. That these occurred in Colorado and Wisconsin high schools and an Amish one-room school in Pennsylvania suggests that it may be hard to identify a common theme or prevention strategy. That two of the shooters were adults apparently intent on molesting girls injects a new variable into the usual perpetrator profile of a student who has been bullied. In our inevitable attempts to make sense of random acts of violence, we are prone to seek "expert" advice.

I'll never forget old what's-her-name. Martha, I think it was. She came from some eastern European country and landed in my elementary school class in the spring of 1956 so naturally, the times being what they were, nobody called her Martha.Everybody called her Commie. In places like my elementary school in those dim post-McCarthy days, they were still holding air raid drills in case of Soviet attack. ("No talking," teachers would say, as you filed into the hallway and placed your head between your knees.

Today, with apologies to David Letterman for stealing his bit with hardly any of the comic value, Media Watch's "NCAA Tournament Hopes and Fears."Hope: That CBS, now that it has entered the modern era and has put the score and clock on screen at virtually all times, will stay with the concept.Fear: That Duke won't lose early enough for its coach, Mike Krzyzewski, to replace Dean Smith in the CBS studio. Smith, the former North Carolina coach, looked rather, well, uncomfortable last weekend, and three more weekends of that will be deadly viewing.

Michael Lutzky, a photographer for The Sun, spent 26 days in January in Sarajevo shooting 5,400 pictures of people living under daily siege of shells and gunfire. Editor John S. Carroll had told him, ''Don't come back with war stories;'' be a ''visual correspondent'' of life, not death.Although snipers shot at him from 250 yards, it wasn't until the last day that he met the war in Bosnia close-up. He was leaving Sarajevo to fly home February 5 when he heard the now-famous market shell that killed 68 people.

Conditions at the Howard County landfill in Marriottsville are worsening so quickly that the county needs to move immediately to bring public water to the area, residents told the Planning Board last night.They asked the board to urge County Executive Charles I. Ecker to move a $6.7 million capital project ahead to the coming fiscal year to bring water to the area. The new fiscal year begins July 1.Public Works Director James M. Irvin asked only for plans and engineering money in the coming budget.

The recent Russian immigrant sat in his Pikesville apartment, the news of his native land blaring from his television and radio in a language he doesn't fully understand.What has happened? he wondered.Sherry Wohlberg, associate director of the Immigrant Resettlement Service of Jewish Family Services, gave him the answer:The coup attempt in Moscow had failed. It was over."He kept saying, 'Thank you, Thank you,' " Wohlberg recalled yesterday from her office on Park Heights Avenue."It was as if me saying it caused it to happen.