Kernels

"A Slender Thread,"5) by Diane Ackerman. Random House. $24. Poet-essayist Diane Ackerman's newest book is a quirky but interesting combination of elements: the habits of ground squirrels in her back yard juxtaposed against her accounts of manning a crisis line at a suicide-prevention center.Dropped throughout the book are kernels of wisdom that illustrate the author's familiarity with everything from science to literature, psychology and history. To compare the lives of these furry, nut-gobbling lightweights to suicidal people in deep emotional pain seems a stretch at times, but Ackerman is a skilled enough writer to interweave many facets of life into a book that is lushly narrative and metaphorical.

Sweet corn is great, but it can't hold a candle to the beautiful ornamental corn of fall. Marbled crimson and cream, slate blue, Burgundy, butter yellow swirled with russet, purple, blood red and more, ornamental corn is like a Fauvist painting on a cob. While today we use it primarily for decoration, ornamental corn, also known as Indian corn or field corn, is one of the "three sisters" (corn, beans and squash) that have been Native American diet staples for millenniums. Massasoit brought deerskin bags of popped corn to the first Thanksgiving.

CRISIS? What Persian Gulf crisis?Out in the great American heartland, Saddam Hussein gets the big shrug.After rolling for 11 days, 2,000 miles across the most hauntingly beautiful chunk of the West -- the Great Plains, mountains and salt flats between Chicago and San Francisco -- that's this gypsy's impression of the West's mood.Unworried.Placid.More absorbed in quotidian stuff of daily lives -- lack of rain, gas prices, or how the high school team would do Friday night -- than prospects of a shooting war."

Within a couple of hours of picking up his first ring, Ravens quarterback Joe Flacco was back on a football field, a champagne bottle in his right hand and his bride and his groomsmen crouched down in front of him like hulking offensive linemen. Flacco barked out commands to his tuxedo-clad teammates as he waited for his new wife to toss him the bouquet from underneath her lacy white dress. The steel bleachers at Audubon High School were empty, save for a few friends and family members.

Can I grow corn in a backyard vegetable garden? You sure can. Corn pollen is spread by wind, so you'll get the best kernel production by planting corn in blocks of rows. You'll need at least three or four short rows, 2 to 3 feet apart. Sow seeds every 9 to 12 inches in the row after danger of frost has passed and soil is warm. Corn is a "heavy feeder." Fertilize when plants are 12 to 18 inches high and again when tassels appear. Do not remove suckers; they improve yield. Expect 10 to 20 ears per 10-foot row. I want to add some natives to my flower garden.

About a dozen Baltimore County firefighters, two fire engines and a ladder truck were called to the county courthouse yesterday when smoke alarms in the 130-year-old stone building went off.The culprit?"

Maybe you can help me with an error message I seem to be getting in Windows when I run a specific program. The message says the program has performed an illegal operation and will be shut down. When I click on details, it shows that a page fault occurred in Kernel32.dll. I suspect that I need to replace that driver. However, I have two problems. First, I don't know where to get a good copy of Kernel32.dll, and second, I don't know how to install it if I had a good copy. Kernel32 is the module of Windows 95/98 that kicks in when any program is run. Kernel32 is supposed to load the executable code (.exe)

Do I need to de-tassel our corn for cross pollination, or do the plants do that themselves? Hold off on the tassel removal! Pollen from the tassels is carried by wind to pollinate the silks. Each strand of silk leads to a potential kernel of corn inside the husk, producing each and every kernel. To get good pollination and full ears of corn, it's best to have at least three rows side by side. So let the tassels do their work undisturbed. De-tasseling is usually done by big commercial operations to produce hybrid corn seed.

"Candy corn is the only candy in the history of America that's never been advertised. And there's a reason. All of the candy corn that was ever made was made in 1911." - Comedian Lewis Black Nice try, but that's wrong. Candy corn happened to have been first mass-produced by the Goelitz Candy Co. in 1898. So, technically, all the candy corn ever made dates back to 1898 and not 1911. Wednesday is Halloween, and the candy corn debate once again has raised its ugly cone head. Tomorrow, by the way, is National Candy Corn Day. Some get chills just thinking about it. More than ever in its history, candy corn has needed - no, deserved - a proper defense.

"Popcorn'' is surprisingly good for an inexpensively mad horror film.It is also surprisingly easy on the gore. Yes, there are killings, but these are pre-''Friday the 13th'' killings. By comparison, they are almost humane.''Popcorn'' begins at a film school where the students make pompous remarks about people like Ingmar Bergman. One of them has a grand idea. Why not stage a Horrorthon at a local, dormant movie house? The others think this a great idea and hop to it.Where they get the money to refurbish the place, put in a popcorn machine and procure all the equipment necessary to running a movie house, is never explained, but this is, after all, a horror film.