Kamikaze

NEW YORK -- David Bowie has been a rock god, a philosopher of the pop avant-garde, an actor, a talent scout. But he has a little trouble taking seriously the job description for his new gig: curator of the first High Line Festival. "I love that word `curate,'" he said with a slight sarcastic chuckle. "One of the definitions is someone who oversees a zoo." To put together the High Line, an 11-day series of music, film, comedy and art that begins on Wednesday with a performance by Arcade Fire at Radio City Music Hall, Bowie said he followed his own tastes, booking old and new friends like Laurie Anderson, TV on the Radio and the British comedian Ricky Gervais.

Services for retired Air Force Lt. Col. James Starr III, who worked for 12 years at the Johns Hopkins University Applied Physics Laboratory, will be held at 9:45 a.m. today at the St. Andrews Chapel at the Naval Academy.Colonel Starr, who was 75, died Jan. 14 at the Memorial Hospital in Easton of meningitis.A memorial service is scheduled for 2 p.m. Sunday at Christ Episcopal Church in St. Michaels, where Colonel Starr moved from Annapolis nine years ago.He retired from the Air Force in 1954 as a range safety officer at Cape Canaveral, Fla. He become an Air Force officer in 1949 after serving during World War II as a naval officer who participated in the landings at Normandy, Iwo Jima and Okinawa and aboard a destroyer, the USS Bush, which was sunk in a kamikaze attack in the Pacific.

Dr. John DeCarlo Jr., retired chief of radiology at St. Joseph Medical Center, died of multiple myeloma Feb. 10 at the hospital where he had worked for more than two decades. The longtime Towson resident was 87. Dr. DeCarlo was born and raised in South Philadelphia and earned a bachelor's degree in 1939 from Temple University. In 1944, he earned a degree in radiology from Jefferson Medical School. He served in the Navy from 1944 to 1946 and was assigned as a medical officer aboard the destroyer USS Crosley.

John R. Duffy, a retired Baltimore police officer and Navy veteran who witnessed the Japanese surrender that ended World War II, died Wednesday of a heart attack at Ivy Hall nursing home in Middle River. The longtime Perry Hall resident was 87. The son of a Baltimore police officer and a homemaker, John Robert Duffy was born in Baltimore and raised on Linwood Avenue near Patterson Park. After graduating in 1944 from Patterson High School, Mr. Duffy entered the Navy. He was assigned to the battleship USS Missouri, where he was a gunner's mate and coxswain.

MOSCOW - Russia's military forces bombed Chechen rebels yesterday, imposed a strict curfew in the rebellious province and made numerous arrests in the wake of truck bomb attacks that claimed dozens of lives. The new measures suggested that Russian leaders were taking seriously threats by Chechen rebels to launch more "kamikaze" attacks, as early as today, against Russian military targets and pro-Kremlin Chechens. Russian officials, meanwhile, revised downward the number of servicemen killed in Sunday night's suicide attacks in five Chechen cities.

QUENCH THE LAMP.Alice Taylor.St. Martin's.173 pages. $14.95."Quench the Lamp" reads like a prose poem written to childhood. Here, Alice Taylor looks back to rural Ireland of the late 1940s and early 1950s and writes a sequel to her earlier memoir, "To School Through the Fields." These are simple descriptive stories that show Ms. Taylor bound to her past by countless ties of love.Closely observing friends in County Cork, she focuses on "souls [that] easily awaken to poetry." Take Bridgie washing the heavy lace bedspread and wondering aloud: "How many did you born?

EARTH-BOUND SCIENTISTS managed to pinprick the comet Tempel 1 this week, loosening some 4.6-billion-year-old dust and fueling humanity's drive to understand its cosmos. The closely choreographed kamikaze mission went without a hitch; the data streaming in will be pondered for years to come. It should help astronomers winnow their models of what makes a comet - and what made the universe to begin with. The comet smash is another example of the wisdom of NASA's Discovery Program. The program's relatively cheap missions (another was the Mars Pathfinder in 1997)

Charles J. Thomas, a retired locomotive engineer and athlete, died of leukemia Wednesday at University of Maryland Medical Center. The longtime Dundalk resident was 93. Mr. Thomas was born and raised in Highlandtown, the son of a railroader. He attended parochial schools until the eighth grade, when he left to help support his family. "He worked on a huckster wagon selling vegetables and later drove a laundry truck. During Prohibition, he was a bootlegger and drove trucks with false bottoms where the liquor was hidden," said a son, Charles W. Thomas of York, Pa. Mr. Thomas enlisted in the Navy the day after the attack on Pearl Harbor and served in the Pacific as a gunner's mate aboard the destroyer USS Swearer.

Charles W. Munnerlyn, a retired licensed building engineer and accomplished woodworker, died of heart failure Sept. 3 at Casey House Hospice in Rockville. The longtime Laurel resident was 80. Mr. Munnerlyn was born in Newport News, Va., and was raised there and in Rocky Mount, N.C. He enlisted in the Navy in 1941 at age 17 and was assigned to the engine room crew of the destroyer USS Claxton. He was aboard during the ship's participation in some of the most famous World War II naval engagements of the Pacific war and during a kamikaze attack in 1944 that seriously damaged the ship's compartments, killing five and wounding 23. "He continued to operate the engines below as Japanese planes and submarines attacked the ship above," said David Phillips, his son-in-law.