Reveal

Most filmmakers exploit the make-believe quality of the movies to let them reveal their innermost secrets on the big screen.But that is not the style of student-director Christopher Mosner, who turned the camera squarely on himself and his family to unblinkingly examine the effects of his brother's cocaine addiction in his documentary "Home Movie."This weekend, Mr. Mosner's 45-minute film won the Baltimore Film Forum's Helen Cyr Silver Reel Award for best Maryland filmmaker.Mr. Mosner beat competing films that were shot in color, with budgets near $100,000.

It's been a couple of weeks now since Google Maps' new Street View feature launched, and the mix of enthusiasm and criticism has been constant ever since. Google's latest feature offers people street-level images of the streets and avenues of several American cities. The impressive result allows computer users to travel through neighborhoods and see much of what a person actually in those cities would see. The project is a stunning act of ingenuity and effort on the part of the innovative search giant, which spent more than a year compiling the still images from digital cameras attached to the top of cars and vans.

To: Production staff From: Stage manager Re: Presidential Debates: The Ultimate Reality Show It's the season-ender, folks! Tonight, George and John meet for the final debate before viewers vote. The last politician standing, remember, wins a four-year contract, keys to a D.C. mansion and a vacation home in Maryland, and, oh yeah, a place in history. So let's get it right, OK? To re-cap: Episode 1: George, seemingly unaware the camera was on him, grimaced, squinted and blinked while John spoke.

THE REPORTERS being subpoenaed or actually sentenced to jail time for refusing to reveal their sources to the special prosecutor investigating White House leaks of the name of an undercover CIA agent are all friends of mine. Or at least they were until this column. I do not want them to go to jail. The problem is this. Should it be illegal for a government official to reveal the identity of an undercover CIA agent? Most reasonable people, including most reporters, would probably say yes. Lives can be at stake.

Some years, there have been candlelight vigils. Once, they planted a cherry tree. No matter how they cast their remembrance, a tight-knit band of friends always has found a way to mark the occasion of Nancy Lee Riggins' disappearance each July 1 -- the last time the Elkridge woman was seen alive -- or July 2, the day her husband said he discovered that his 37-year-old wife was missing. This year, they'll mark the anniversary in court. Her husband, Paul Stephen Riggins, has been charged in her death, and his trial is scheduled to begin with jury selection today -- five years to the day since he says he came home and found their daughter, then 5 years old, alone and sleeping, and Nancy Riggins nowhere in sight.

BALTIMOREANS are often accused of living in the past and being hopelessly - even annoyingly - nostalgic. But that's not it. We're thinking future here. If you spend enough time in the gentrified neighborhoods, you see plenty of progress, and a lot of it (the University of Baltimore's plan for the Odorite building notwithstanding) carefully executed - modernization that doesn't blow away the city's heritage altogether. I give us a B-plus for the effort to advance and to preserve. A little theory about why Baltimoreans have a tendency to keep an eye on the past: The past is all around them.

WASHINGTON - The jailing of New York Times reporter Judith Miller for refusing to reveal a source in the drama of the CIA agent "outed" by a leak to columnist Robert Novak has split the journalism community wide open. Ms. Miller's incarceration is defended by some in the news business who say nobody, even a star or celebrity journalist, has a right to defy a direct order by a court. Her jailing is excoriated by others who say a reporter has an ethical obligation to protect a confidential source at all costs.

Tammra Sigler has changed, and for the better. In her last two shows at G. H. Dalsheimer, in 1987 and 1989, she left the figure, a former subject, in favor of landscape that tended increasingly toward abstraction. Her palette was light, and her images were always pleasant, enjoyable, but they seemed at times too light.In the new works in her current Dalsheimer show ("Tammra Sigler," through Jan. 12), she has returned to the figure with good results. Her nudes in indeterminate, often largely abstract settings have a sensuous quality achieved in part by the counterpoint of bright glowing flesh tones set off by rich, dark backgrounds.

I'M NO PRUDE. But it still seems shocking when I read the classified advertising in this newspaper -- my home away from home for 23 years -- to see the "personals" and "escort" services ads sunk so low.Maybe it's a measure of how tough times are that advertisements for $3-a-minute "single girls" and $2.49-a-minute "hot 1-on-1" help pay my reporter's salary.And maybe it's a measure of how deranged this society has become that one recent edition had more than 30 different ads for the likes of "the wildest adult messages," "do me," "exotic nasty girls" and "hot talk -- live girls" (must be 18, and non-necrophiliac)

ST. PETERSBURG, Fla. - Orioles pitcher Sidney Ponson is expected to throw today for the first time since being diagnosed with tendinitis in his right elbow, and club officials remain confident that he'll be ready to come off the disabled list when eligible in nine days. Ponson, named the No. 2 starter before the season, will play catch in his most strenuous activity since being shut down after complaining of soreness in the elbow. "He wanted to throw today and we backed him off it, so he'll probably do that tomorrow," said manager Mike Hargrove.