Safer

In a few weeks, the buzz will be over. No more Janis Joplinesque shrieks from the trees of Baltimore. The cicadas will be gone. Didn't have time to commemorate their emergence with a keepsake? No need to worry. Along with thongs, T-shirts, wall clocks and mugs, you can now purchase a cicada carcass and have it shipped to you via Cicadaville.com. Or so Cicadaville says. For $5.95, the Cincinnati-based Web site says, it will send customers an "attractive" cardboard jewelry box lined with cotton, and containing, of course, an unpreserved cicada.

Performance artSafer and Secrest, a New York-based movement theater company founded by choreographers Daniel Safer and Leigh Secrest, will make its Baltimore debut starting tomorrow at the Theatre Project with "Really Big Shows."A performance-art collage in styles ranging from German Expressionism to MGM movie musicals, "Really Big Shows" is an evening of new works in which the performers "bastardize everything and perform it with a vengeance," according to Safer.Show times at the Theatre Project, 45 W. Preston St., are 8 p.m. tomorrow, Saturday and Oct. 9-11 and 3 p.m. Sundays, through Oct. 12. Tickets are $14. Tomorrow's opening will be followed by an acid jazz party with dancing and refreshments at no extra charge.

BOSTON - Sometimes I wonder what it must be like when the presidential son comes to Kennebunkport, Maine, for a visit. Does George the Younger tell George the Elder what he tells the country? Does he say that we are safer with Saddam Hussein in prison than in power? Does he insist that we are better off having overthrown the dictator rather than having contained him? I suspect it might be just a splash awkward. After all, it was Dad who decided not to topple the Iraqi when he was on the run. It was George the 41st who believed that the chaos might be worse than containment.

BOSTON - Could we rerun the videotape back to Dec. 15 when Howard Dean qualified his pleasure at the capture of Saddam Hussein by saying that it "has not made America safer"? Dr. Dean was instantly lambasted by his opponents, especially Sen. Joseph I. Lieberman, who said the doctor was climbing "into his own spider hole of denial." Well, six days later, after the sort of terrorist "chatter" designed to make your teeth chatter, the country was put on orange alert for a "spectacular" attack rivaling 9/11.

Since 1988, when market surveys showed that gun sales to men had stagnated, the firearms industry has been doing its best to modify its image and turn more women into arms-bearing customers. Gun manufacturers have designed smaller, easier-to-operate guns, complete with accessories to "feminize" or hide the weapons, such as concealment holsters, handgun-sized leather purses and fanny packs.With the media reporting ever-increasing amounts of gun-related violence, fear of crime is the major reason first-time women buyers cite for purchasing a gun. Sophisticated marketing approaches strategically positioned in major women's magazines and elsewhere play to this fear, attempting to tap maternal instincts and family protectionism and responsibility to increase sales.

Menopausal women, scared off traditional hormone therapy by studies showing the pills cause breast cancer and heart disease, are seizing on another approach: "bioidentical" hormones. A recent best-selling book gave a huge impetus to bioidentical hormones, saying the "natural" substances can cure the insomnia, irritability and indifference to romance that often accompany menopause. And many converts believe these hormones are safe because they have the same molecular structure as the hormones their bodies produce.

Sometimes television reporting can be a joy to behold - even stories promoted with an eye for ratings. Take this Sunday's 60 Minutes on CBS, which was the eighth highest rated TV program in the country last week. Longtime correspondent Morley Safer methodically unraveled the cynical marketing genius that has enabled artist Thomas Kinkade to reap a fortune from selling retouched posters of treacly landscapes as though they were original works of art. "A few dabs of paint and -presto! - each canvas: $1,000 to $50,000 framed," Safer told viewers, as the camera showed footage of the factory where more than 400 employees toil to create the reproductions.

WASHINGTON -- The Air National Guard F-16 flying near Atlantic City, N.J., thought it was swooping in unobserved on a Nations Air Boeing 727 on Feb. 5. Instead, it set off computerized anti-collision alarms in the passenger jet's cockpit, and the civilian pilot's emergency maneuvers -- a steep dive, then a climb -- threw three people to the floor of the passenger cabin.The alarms were meant to increase safety, to prevent midair collisions, but instead they created risk. The F-16, for that matter, was also built to keep Americans safe from risk, but from foreign threats, not domestic airliners.

You don't understand," the girl says. She is 16 and already feeling nostalgic for a time, and a gentler lifestyle, she sees slipping away. She says she and her girlfriends are going shopping. I mention a mall; she sneers. Nobody goes there any more, she says. Her girlfriends nod in solemn agreement. They'll go to some other mall, which is more distant, where it's more difficult to negotiate the Beltway traffic, where it's 15 minutes further from home than the first mall. But it's safer."Safer?

DENVER - Democratic presidential candidate John Kerry declared that America is neither safer nor stronger under President Bush's stewardship and said that when he accepts the party's nomination this week he will urge Americans to seriously ask themselves if they are satisfied with the nation's direction and place in the world. The Massachusetts senator said in an interview that the Bush administration has pursued ideologically driven policies that have shattered global alliances, produced a burgeoning federal deficit and placed U.S. security in peril.