Ice Age

Club Phoenix is a dumpy two-floor bar in Mount Vernon that's forgotten for most of the week, even by the crowd of older gay men that frequent it. But on weekends, it's become known for hosting dance parties on its rickety, unvarnished upstairs floor. Most Saturdays, a bunch of Maryland Institute College of Art students serve as DJs for the Dance Your [Butt] Off party. And this Friday, it will host, for the second time, Ice Age, a monthly party dedicated to obscure, atmospheric music that marries Goth rock and New Wave — something that might sound like a cut from the Cure's album "Seventeen Seconds.

Club Phoenix is a dumpy two-floor bar in Mount Vernon that's forgotten for most of the week, even by the crowd of older gay men that frequent it. But on weekends, it's become known for hosting dance parties on its rickety, unvarnished upstairs floor. Most Saturdays, a bunch of Maryland Institute College of Art students serve as DJs for the Dance Your [Butt] Off party. And this Friday, it will host, for the second time, Ice Age, a monthly party dedicated to obscure, atmospheric music that marries Goth rock and New Wave — something that might sound like a cut from the Cure's album "Seventeen Seconds.

THE VOYEURS against affirmative action have nearly crushed any chance for equality in our lifetime. The U.S. Supreme Court ruled 5-4 last week that race-based affirmative action programs are essentially unconstitutional unless they are "narrowly tailored" to further a "compelling" interest.Justice Sandra Day O'Connor, who wrote the decision, did not exactly define "narrowly tailored" and "compelling." That was unnecessary, when every affirmative action foe is reaching for champagne and many a proponent is as puckered as a lost soul gripping a flask of Thunderbird.

It takes a while for John Leguizamo to get into sloth. "I've got to walk around the house a lot the day before, working on the lisp so that it's not too much, that it's just right," he says, demonstrating. Sloths have lisps, or didn't you know? The ancient ground sloths did, as Leguizamo interprets Sid the Sloth in the Ice Age animated films. "Sid's a vulnerable character, with a higher-pitched voice than you'd think. So I have to tighten up, get the voice up there so that he doesn't sound like a sloth who's been out partying all night.

WASHINGTON -- On the whole, the Next Ice Age is greater than the sum of its parts.Some of the parts of Baltimore's unique ice-dancing company are very fine indeed. And it's quite a coup for the 9-year-old company to have a week's engagement at the Kennedy Center Opera House, accompanied by the house orchestra, and to showcase Olympic champion Dorothy Hamill as its guest artist.Now all it needs is a choreographer. (A lighting designer would help, too.) The two epic-length works on this program show that co-founder Nathan Birch, who created them, has a reach that far overshoots his grasp.

It takes a while for John Leguizamo to get into sloth. "I've got to walk around the house a lot the day before, working on the lisp so that it's not too much, that it's just right," he says, demonstrating. Sloths have lisps, or didn't you know? The ancient ground sloths did, as Leguizamo interprets Sid the Sloth in the Ice Age animated films. "Sid's a vulnerable character, with a higher-pitched voice than you'd think. So I have to tighten up, get the voice up there so that he doesn't sound like a sloth who's been out partying all night.

Nathan Birch, artistic director of the Next Ice Age skating company, has received $40,000 from the Doris Duke Charitable Foundation under a new grants program for dance sponsored by the American Dance Festival.The Baltimore choreographer is one of six American choreographers to receive an award to support the creation of new work. The other recipients are Paul Taylor and Merce Cunningham, who each received grants of $100,000; Elizabeth Streb, $40,000; and Jawole Willa Jo Zollar and David Grenke, $15,000 each.

Despite the recent trend toward global warming, scientists have long wondered whether the Earth is nearing another ice age - and an end to the 12,000-year temperate spell in which civilizations arose. Some have said that such a transition is overdue, given that each of the three temperate intervals before this one lasted only about 10,000 years. But in an eagerly awaited study, a group of climate and ice experts say they have new evidence that the Earth is not even halfway through this warm era. That evidence comes from the oldest layers of Antarctic ice ever sampled.

The Next Ice Age, Baltimore's ice dance company, opened its six-evening engagement at Columbia's Ice Rink last night.Choreographers/skaters/artistic directors Nathan Birch and Tim Murphy, along with guest artist Dorothy Hamill, have put together a program that blends the best of skating with modern dance, guaranteed to take the chill out of the ice rink temperature.The program of seven dances at the transformed ice rink -- there are wings, as with a true proscenium stage -- was split between the premier of Mr. Birch's nearly hourlong "Sisyphean Victory" and six shorter dances.

CLOTHED IN AN eclectic assortment of warm-up duds, members of the Next Ice Age stroke the virgin ice at the Dominic M. "Mimi" DiPietro Family Skating Center in Patterson Park. Silently, they get a feel for the surface, executing crossovers, counter turns, and other basic skating moves in preparation for the demanding rehearsal ahead.The skaters from throughout the country and Canada have gathered in Baltimore for the artistic skating ensemble's upcoming week of performances at Columbia Ice Rink.

The relentlessly gimmicky use of 3-D in Ice Age: Dawn of the Dinosaurs helps reduce what could have been a genial piece of slapstick into a cartoon that's not just in-your-face, but in-your-eyeballs. You should have been able to treat this film as a grab-bag and pull out some plums. Instead it goes grabbing after you. The film doesn't hurl things at the camera in the manner of Monsters vs. Aliens. But any snout, tongue or tail that lends itself to stretching and snapping gets quite a workout in this movie.

The Washington Capitals were a big part of the Piney Orchard Ice Arena in Odenton from the time it opened in the early 1990s, using it as a practice and training facility until they moved out last year. Even though the Capitals have been gone for more than a year, Piney Orchard has remained busy with a variety of programs from ice hockey to figure skating and public skating. "We're doing a little better," said Piney Orchard general manager Gary Cremen. "We knew the move was coming. The wear and tear on the building is less.

Ice Age: The Meltdown last week became the first movie released in 2006 to bring in more than $100 million at the U.S. box office, with a total take of $114.6 million. This time last year, three movies had broken the $100 million mark: Hitch ($173.7 million), Robots ($111 million) and The Punisher ($100.6 million). Horrors! Certainly, this spells doom for the American motion picture industry. But wait a minute. Total box office receipts are up 2.3 percent over last year, from $2.24 billion to $2.31 billion.

The good news about Ice Age: The Meltdown is that the nut-nutty, saber-toothed squirrel of the first Ice Age - the best, funniest thing in the movie - is back for the sequel. He fights off Ice Age vultures and piranhas for his beloved acorn this time. He takes his lumps, Wile E. Coyote, fashion. He turns ninja, when need be. And his every wordless entrance and ignominious exit is a hoot. Ice Age: The Meltdown (20th Century Fox) Starring the voices of Ray Romano, Queen Latifah, John Leguizamo, Denis Leary.

Look for reviews in tomorrow's Today section. The Chorus Gerard Jugnot is a music teacher who restores the souls of boarding-school students by forming them into a choir. PG-13. Rotunda exclusive. Hostage Bruce Willis stars as a police negotiator who takes a small-town police-chief job - only to find himself in an even more horrifying hostage crisis. R. Nobody Knows This Japanese release tells the fact-inspired story of four children who fend for themselves after their mother abandons them.

Think of Chris Wedge as a suburban superhero from his rival Pixar's The Incredibles. On a recent weekday morning, Wedge, 47, sounds like any other sleepy, harried family man in White Plains, N.Y., getting a slow start on the workday because of an overnight snowfall. He's trying to conduct a phone interview while his 8-year-old son fiddles with the fax machine. (He and his wife also have a 20-year-old daughter, off at college.) But Wedge has an alternate identity as one of the most successful filmmakers on the planet.

I RECENTLY HAD a terrifying experience. It was exactly like a scene from a horror movie, when the actors find themselves in a house that is obviously possessed by Evil, with doors slamming by themselves and blood dripping from the ceiling, but the actors are such morons that they stay in the house anyway. "With these older homes," they tell each other, "you're going to have a certain amount of ceiling blood." And then, of course, something horrible happens to them, such as being sucked down to Hell by the Demon Toilet, and as the last of their body parts disappear in a counterclockwise direction, you, the movie viewer, chew your popcorn and think, "They deserved it."

Reached by phone in his White Plains, N.Y., office, Chris Wedge, director of the computer cartoon Ice Age, acknowledges that he and his Blue Sky Studios are already at work on a new project - though he's so intent on secrecy, he would neither confirm nor deny a report that it centers on robotic creatures from the pen of kids' book great William Joyce. Trying to keep his crew together has been a challenge, Wedge says, because digital animation carries such prodigious overhead and Ice Age prevented them from maintaining their usual connections in the world of TV commercials.

How seriously do you take the threat of global warming? What policy and lifestyle changes would you favor to address it? I take the threat of climate change extremely seriously. There is no doubt that human activity has already changed the Earth's atmosphere profoundly. The effects of these changes on our climate will have serious consequences for the global ecosystem, including humanity. The denial of these changes is only one manifestation of the cavalier attitude we have toward the exploitation of resources.

Despite the recent trend toward global warming, scientists have long wondered whether the Earth is nearing another ice age - and an end to the 12,000-year temperate spell in which civilizations arose. Some have said that such a transition is overdue, given that each of the three temperate intervals before this one lasted only about 10,000 years. But in an eagerly awaited study, a group of climate and ice experts say they have new evidence that the Earth is not even halfway through this warm era. That evidence comes from the oldest layers of Antarctic ice ever sampled.