Pale

MADRID, Spain -- He is at the top of the television news, even gaining "News Alert" status on the stodgy British Broadcasting Corp. He is in every newspaper in Great Britain and Spain, sometimes even on the sports pages. He is larger than life on the sides of buses chugging through world capitals, his eyes the size of truck lights shining on everybody he passes -- and everybody he passes seeming to bask in the glow. He has become, simply, larger than celebrity. Soccer star David Beckham is more than a sports story in soccer-crazed Europe and Beckham-crazed Asia.

A year ago, Marylanders got a fright from a bizarre fish swimming in their waters, a fish that allegedly walked on land and devoured everything in sight. Little did they know that the northern snakehead found in a Crofton pond is one of the smallest and tamest members of the snakehead family. Lurking deep in the jungles of Thailand, Indonesia and elsewhere in Southeast Asia is the granddaddy of them all, the giant snakehead. I had heard about this remarkable fish and wanted to see it for myself.

NEW YORK - Think of Norah Jones as the anti-diva. On the day her debut album picked up eight Grammy nominations, the petite, soft-spoken pop sensation is enjoying a glass of wine in a quiet Gramercy Park restaurant rather than some upscale celebrity spot. She's dressed simply in a T-shirt and jeans, the same casual attire she usually wears on stage, and there's no entourage in sight. "The record industry has gotten so into image that image becomes more important than the singer," says Jones, 23, with a smile that could make Mona Lisa envious.

SOMETIMES I THINK humans are genetically predisposed to favor technological solutions over limiting themselves, hardwired to spend tons of time and money on cures rather than little bits on caution and prevention. Or maybe there's more money in selling solutions than avoiding problems in the first place - especially because human bookkeeping discounts nature's losses. This week's sermon stems from a conversation with Rob Magnien, a scientist with Maryland's Department of Natural Resources who has taken a new look at where we are going with restoring Chesapeake Bay. Magnien's calculations, which he stresses are more "big picture" than precision math, differ from the official measures of bay cleanup used by Maryland and the federal government.

It has traveled the world, posed for pictures and earned its own link on two state government Web sites. Documentaries have been made about this pile of ash, the most famous trash that ever existed. This week, 2,500 tons of incinerated Philadelphia trash returns home to a Pennsylvania landfill after a 16-year odyssey. The globe-trotting trash has been turned away at port after port from the Caribbean to Asia, dumped and left on a Haitian beach for 12 years, then abandoned on a rusty barge in Florida for two. With much fanfare, the ash is being trucked to Miami, loaded onto trains, hauled by rail to Hagerstown - then trucked to Franklin County, Pa., where it is expected to start arriving tomorrow.

The Sun reported this week, in an article headlined "The cost of conservation," how new restrictions to save blue crabs are taking a bite out of crab pickers' and crab processors' incomes. It won't be the last story on that painful theme, as Maryland and Virginia pursue a commitment to restrain harvests enough to boost spawning female crabs from the perilous, historically low numbers of the past few years. The cost is more than dollars can measure. The loss of income in small, struggling watermen's communities tears at the social fabric and erodes unique lifestyles that are part of the Chesapeake heritage.

I MISSED MOST of Oscar night. I just couldn't stay up and watch. But tell me: Did Jennifer Lopez wear anything at all this year? Did the "old Sean Penn" show up and bust Will Smith in the face? Did Judi Dench play boy-toy to Hugh Grant? Also, I bet someone cash money that this was going to be the year Tom Cruise arrived in a nude-toned Versace thing with plunging-to-navel neckline. Yes? No? Meanwhile, I have my hands full thinking of great performances and cinematic opportunities right here under our noses -- in and around Baltimore, Queen City of the Patapsco Drainage Basin.

I spent days deciding what color to paint the walls of our living room. I held paint chips up to the light and against the wall and near the sofa. I debated with my husband the relative merits of various hues. I argued about this shade and that. I chose white. The walls are what the paint manufacturer calls "oyster" white. The ceiling? "Shell." I considered but rejected "dove," "ivory," "milk," "stone" and "moon" whites. I was tempted by "bone," but it seemed macabre. I liked "china" white by the light of the moon, but not the morning after.

There's very little I don't like about Denzel Washington. But last week, when I emerged from seeing his latest thriller, Training Day, I felt bruised. Washington plays a rotten-to-the-core policeman whose lack of morals and brutality are exceeded only by his ability to rationalize them. As his character tells a rookie narcotics detective, played by Ethan Hawke: "You have to decide if you're a sheep or a wolf; if you want to go to the grave or if you want to go home." The movie, with its high-powered stars and shoot-'em-up plot, was undoubtedly designed to be a blockbuster adventure film, not out-and-out scary.

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.