Full Moon

A lunar spectacle that will send pagans whirling in spirals and prod astronomers to calibrate their instruments may be barely noticeable to most mortal eyes tonight. Prompted by breathless claims circulated over the Internet, a kind of lunar madness has stirred the country in the past two weeks over news that tonight's full moon should prove to be brighter, larger and fuller than usual. A deluge of e-mail chain letters have heralded "a super bright moon" for tonight unlike any seen in 133 years.

Look to the sky! For one moment tonight near midnight the moon will be "blue." If the sky is clear and you see it, don't expect strange happenings. Don't expect it to actually be the color blue, though that has been known to happen now and then.The blue moon does not provoke weird behavior in man or beast, any more than any other full moon. Astronomically, it is as predictable as the rising of the sun. Meteorologically, it can signal disaster. As a metaphor, it describes two conditions: absurdity and rarity.

The eclipse is back.After going without a total lunar eclipse visible from Maryland back yards during all of 1994 and last year, stargazers will be treated to a pair of them in 1996. Clean up the lawn chairs and set aside the evenings of April 3 and Sept. 26.No solar eclipses will be visible here in 1996, and only two will be visible anywhere. Both are partial, and you'll have to spend the mortgage money to get somewhere to see them.The rest of the year, is sprinkled with celestial events visible here (weather permitting)

Listen here now, I love the blues, but I never associated it with romance. I mean, it's not make-out music. It's not Barry White. If anything, the blues is about romance-gone-sour, love denied.So anyway, at the Full Moon Saloon Monday night, hot guitarist Mad Maxx led off the jam and, three chords into the first number, two couples simultaneously started making out. Don't know what it was, but gotta get me some of it.Saturday sightingsSeen Saturday at Attman's, happily seated behind a bowl of matzo ball soup: "Damn Yankees" star Jerry Lewis.

FULL MOON, DIRTY HEARTSINXS (Atlantic 82541)It's not easy for a band to seem both pop-friendly and artistically daring -- particularly if, like INXS, the band has built a reputation for churning out catchy, chart-savvy singles on a regular basis. Somehow, though, "Full Moon, Dirty Hearts" lets INXS have its cake and eat it, too. There's plenty of edge to the material here, from the dense, dark throb of "The Gift" to the grungy, Stones-like snarl of "The Messenger," but that hardly takes away from the music's melodic appeal.

A celebrity is in town.I'm not talking about some movie star, head of state or athlete. I'm talking about something with substance, texture, and a devoted constituency. I'm talking about the soft-shell crab. It is the best eats in the region, if not the world.Paradoxically, while this week's hard crabs have been hard to find and pricey, by the end of the week soft crabs, crabs without their shells, were both plentiful and relatively inexpensive. Whales, the largest soft crabs, were selling three for $9 on Thursday, jumbos, the next size down, were three for $8.Both Bill Devine at Faidley's seafood in the Lexington Market and Tommy Chagouris of Nick's Inner Harbor Seafood in the Cross Street Market told me they had plenty of local soft crabs.

If you identify with the blues lyric, "Every day I have the blues," you'll want to get your sorry self down to the Full Moon Saloon: Bands are crying the blues at this Fells Point bar every blessed night of the week, and the regulars here wouldn't have it any other way.Walk into the Full Moon and you're likely to hear a couple customers shouting about "hooker" this and "hooker" that. In another setting you might wonder exactly what kind of conversation you'd stumbled into, but here you soon realize they're happily discussing the merits of blues legend John Lee Hooker's latest album.

Tonight, normally sensible people will be transformed into besotted fools. Screaming will fill the streets. Cars will crash. Passions will bubble over. Babies will be conceived.Ah yes, another New Year's Eve. But -- merry revelers, beware -- this in not a typical year's end.There will be strange goings-on aloft, beginning precisely at 4:43 p.m. with the rise of a full moon. It will be the second such in a month -- in astronomical lingo, a "blue moon."Coincidentally, that same moon will be making its second-closest pass around the Earth since 1912, tugging the planet's crust and narrowing the gap between New York and London by several yards.