Pale

The sun is setting and the sky above Dave and Christine McComas' house in Woodbine turns pink, signaling that the curtain is about to go up on tonight's show. Soon, the wildflower meadow behind their home begins to sparkle, hundreds of lightning bugs floating upward. Ten-year-old Gloria and her friend, Mariel Frith, also 10, leap to catch the fireflies before they dim and disappear. "We need to do it gracefully ," Gloria shouts, laughing. Lightning bugs are easier to catch than they are to count.

"Moonlight and Valentino" -- it sounds like a dreamy romance, but be assured, it isn't. A drama? Well, it tries. A comedy? Occasionally. The commercials try to sell it as a romantic comedy, but mostly, "Moonlight and Valentino" features good actresses trying their best to lend some realistic emotion to a contrived drama.Elizabeth Perkins stars as a poetry professor who is suddenly widowed when her husband is struck by a car while he's jogging. Her acting is moving as she is overcome by grief, but it's not moving enough.

THE ALBATROSS known as the space station has scraped through another cycle of congressional skepticism, but only because of Washington's aversion to killing even misbegotten high-tech ventures. Congress is on the way to pruning the budget for the project, but the main effect is to render the space station anemic while it remains extremely expensive.The misfortune is that the costs of even a spartan space station hobble NASA's ability to pursue more promising ventures. In the grand tradition of elastic space accountancy, estimates of the ultimate price range from $7 billion to $37 billion.

If your kitchen is looking a bit tired and worn, it might be time to think about a make-over. The latest kitchen designs leave plenty of room for individual flair. The chef's copycat industrial kitchen is making an exit, replaced with a softer look, antique finishes, decorative tiles and whimsical cabinet accessories. Style is what marks today's kitchens. Cooks want to reflect their personality with kitchens that are traditional, cutting-edge, country or an eclectic extension of a home's exterior like Kathy Abbott and Gary Pushkin's kitchen in Baltimore's Guilford neighborhood.

In jaundice, the skin, whites of the eyes and mucus membranes take on a yellowish color. Jaundice itself is not an illness, but a sign of an underlying disease, says Dr. Richard Mackey, a hepatobiliary surgeon with the Cancer Institute at St. Joseph Medical Center. If you think you or someone else is showing the symptoms of jaundice, you should seek medical attention. What is jaundice? Jaundice is more a sign that something is abnormal than a disease process in itself. It's a sign of an abnormality, of an underlying disease.

For weeks, my inbox, Twitter timeline and ears have burned. Readers and colleagues can't stop talking about WC Harlan, a new bar in Remington. The praise has been gushing and unanimous. To them, WC Harlan is a wonder. But there was something else: The bar's owners - Matt Pierce of the local band Big in Japan and writer Lane Harlan - are not interested in publicity and would prefer we not list its address. During a time when bars hire public relations teams to generate buzz via social media and other outlets, WC Harlan would rather find success through solid execution and word-of-mouth marketing.

Pale Horse Coming, by Stephen Hunter. Simon & Schuster. 491 pages. $25. Fallout from the terrible reality of Sept. 11 could thankfully turn away tastes for shoot-'em-up torture thrillers of the sort produced by Stephen Hunter, poet laureate of the NRA. Who now needs fiction featuring outsized terrorists gleefully wreaking carnage upon mythical objects of hate? Bad as bigotry may have been back then, Pale Horse Coming, set in the deep South of 1951, presents historic fictions that will tweak the most credulous believers.

THIS IS A plea to Democrats. Many are planning to leave the country. Others are threatening to open veins. A few talk of forming survival groups and fleeing to the woods. Most, however, simply sit around weeping.To these Democrats I say, pull yourselves together. The recent Republican victory is not the worst blow to civilization since Attila the Hun popularized sacking and pillage. Not at all.The unterrifying fact is that Republicans are no more inhuman than my Uncle Jack, of whom Aunt Pat used to say, "Jack's not tough, he just needs a shave."

WASHINGTON -- It's been a year since the campaign-finance scandal broke. Since then, everything's changed.There has been a cascade of news disclosures, each more damaging than the last, showing fund-raising excesses within the Democratic National Committee and a river of money flowing through congressional politics. There have been ominous reports of Asian money. There has been the bald statement, made by the chairman of the Senate committee examining campaign finance, that the Chinese government had a plan to affect the outcome of the American elections.

The terrorist attack on the U.S. consulate in Benghazi, Libya, was a tragedy, and four people died. Republicans are sure that Susan Rice and the president are lying about what happened and say they are "not satisfied" with the explanations that were given. But how many American military personnel, contractors and Iraqi citizens have died, and how many more have sustained traumatic, life-changing injuries, because of the lies that got us into the Iraq War? Where is the outrage over that?