Mankind

Mozartiana, collected by Joseph Solman (Waller & Co., 201 pages, $12). An enchanting, provocative and perhaps instructive little book for anybody who loves music of any variety at all. Solman is a very significant artist, a New Yorker who was an original member of the American expressionists. His sketches, mostly of Mozart's head, are a delight, running through more than half the pages of the book. But the substance is quotations, delightfully culled, from the master himself and from almost anyone else you might think had something to say about him. Not all agree.

THIS IS THE TIME of year when Americans make a sincere effort to care about the World Series, which determines which baseball team will be the champion of the entire world, except for the part of the world located outside the United States and southeastern Canada. But the heck with that part. This is OUR national pastime, and that's why the World Series arouses our passion, even if we stopped paying attention to pro baseball some years ago, when it started adding mutant teams with names like the Tampa Bay Area Fighting Seaweeds.

Even if I didn't know the title of the exhibition -- "Jesus 2000" -- I would have known the minute I entered the small gallery: I was surrounded by images of Christ. One painting depicts Jesus standing against a royal blue sky amid shafts of sunlit clouds. His coat, made of colorful flags from many nations, billows behind him as he beckons with his right arm. In another image, Jesus, bare-chested and wearing blue jeans and baseball cap, is a carpenter. And from still another work, a collage comprising digital images of the Dead Sea Scrolls, a somber Jesus seems to gaze directly into my eyes.

ROCKVILLE - On the day he puts the finishing touches on the first complete human genetic text, computer wizard Gene Myers knows just what he's going to do. He'll whip off his lucky green scarf and crank up Wagner's "Ride of the Valkyries" at full volume on his office boombox. Myers and other scientists at Celera Genomics Group are a mischievous group: They sometimes wear plastic Viking helmets, ambush one another with foam arrows and call themselves the "Celerian Valkyrians." Myers, a boyish 46-year-old professor at the University of Arizona, has an earring in his left ear and can talk like a California mall rat. "The excitement is, like, palpable; you feel it in your body," he says.

Sure, it's irreverent. But is it funny? Sadly, when the question concerns "God, the Devil and Bob," the answer is not particularly. "God, the Devil and Bob" is an animated half-hour from executive producers Marcy Carsey and Tom Werner, the same folks who brought you that other one-joke wonder, "3rd Rock From the Sun." (That's wonder as in, I wonder how it's managed to hang on this long?) "God" stars God and the Devil as two bored deities whose main sport is making small wagers with each other and Bob as the put-upon human who's usually the one they're betting on. In tonight's premiere, a despairing God (voice of James Garner)

In the ancient city of Ephesus, there lived a particularly loathsome fellow named Herostrat, who burned the local temple simply out of hatred and because he wanted his name to live forever. Terrorism expert Walter Laqueur draws a parallel between Herostrat and today's new breed of terrorist, who seems less interested in using terror for political ends than as a tool for sheer animus. Today's terrorist would not be content with merely burning a temple, but in causing death and destruction on a massive scale.

In an interview on a recent episode of "WWF Smackdown," World Wrestling Federation superstar Mankind spoke with typical bluster and braggadocio about how he had just decimated his competition.But it wasn't a typical WWF foe such as the Rock or the Undertaker that he was running down. Instead, Mankind was talking about the literary leg-lock he'd recently applied to such authors as former President George Bush, former Sen. John Glenn, the Dalai Lama and Frank McCourt.Last Sunday, Mankind, also known as Mick Foley, wrestled his way past McCourt's "Tis" to the top of the New York Times best-seller list with his autobiography, "Have A Nice Day: A Tale of Blood and Sweatsocks"(Regan Books, $26)

RICK SEABY'S quest is a noble one: cooking the perfect rack of pork ribs. Seaby, who is director of broadcast operations and engineering at WJZ-TV in Baltimore, has been on this mission for 15 of his 47 years. He feels he is closing in on success. He has a good cooker. He has good sauces. And he has a few secrets.The search for pork perfection has been long. There have been casualties, among them his first cooker. A few years back, Seaby worked that cooker so hard he burned a hole in it.But right about the time his first cooker went bad, his buddy and cooking partner, Jon Howell, was going to throw out a wood-burning stove.

The following article is taken from the Worldwatch Institute's "State of the World, 1998," released last weekend.The biodiversity around us today is the result of more than 3 billion years of evolution. Species declines and extinctions have always been a natural part of that process, but there is something disturbingly different about the current extinction patterns.Examinations of the fossil record of marine invertebrates suggest that the natural or "background" rate of extinctions -- the rate that has prevailed over millions of years of evolutionary time -- claims something on the order of one to three species per year.

I keep getting them - stories of good deeds that stun people so much they call to break the news. This just in: "A stranger stopped to fix my flat tire. ... Two Goucher students found my purse and drove 50 miles to return it. ... My little girl lost the '' money she saved for a birthday toy, and someone returned it."Personally, I don't have a coronary when people are nice. (I'm not thoroughly jaded yet, though I'm trying to catch up.) But I understand why others find it amazing. So I guess I shouldn't keep these stories to myself.