Time Capsule

BOBBY -- The Weinstein Company Home Entertainment / $28.95 Writer-director Emilio Estevez's Bobby focuses not on the life of Bobby Kennedy, or on his legacy, but on his example. In an era when the idea of celebrity has become meaningless and role models are a dime a dozen, that alone makes it one of the most important pictures of 2006. Set at Los Angeles' Ambassador Hotel on June 5, 1968, the day of the California primary, Bobby focuses on a handful of guests and workers. Martin Sheen and Helen Hunt portray a well-to-do couple celebrating their 10th anniversary, while Lindsay Lohan and Elijah Wood depict newlyweds, married solely to keep the husband from being drafted and sent overseas to Vietnam.

Serious fiction supposedly avoids gratuitous pop references certain to be incomprehensible to readers 50 years hence, whether to gangsta rap or Britney Spears. Topical touchstones may comfort the reader with the pleasures of the familiar, but they earn, it is assumed, no place in art. No writer depends upon the topical more than Tom Wolfe. Enlisting what has by now become his modus operandi, Wolfe peppers his current best seller, I Am Charlotte Simmons, with faddish buzz words like "globalization."

BUGAAN TSAV, Mongolia -- Pagmin Narmandakh shuffles through the Gobi desert in her bedroom slippers, marching over the bones of dinosaurs slumbering in an ancient seabed just below the silty surface.One of Mongolia's top paleontologists, she has been exploring the Gobi for more than 30 years. With her well-trained eye, she makes finding prehistoric relics seem easy. She has found giant tarbosaurs and tiny archaic turtles; today on her way to a dig in progress, she plucks 70-million-year-old mollusks from the sand as casually as picking seashells off the beach.

For months in the spring and summer of 1814, Commodore Joshua Barney and his ragtag flotilla of gunboats had harassed the mighty British navy on the Chesapeake Bay and its tributaries. But outnumbered and outgunned, Barney and his miniature fleet were bottled up in the Patuxent River with no escape and enemy forces approaching. So following orders from Washington, Barney's men scuttled the estimated 17 vessels — including his flagship, the USS Scorpion — near a place known as Pig Point.

There isn't one way to establish a legacy. You have win-and-run nomads like Larry Brown, who can't sit still in a chair for 10 minutes. Yet, Brown has won titles in the NCAA and the NBA. You have guys like Don Nelson, who have never won it all but have made enough horrible teams competitive to compile more coach-of-the-year trophies than Phil Jackson. Or you can be Jackson, align yourself with four or five of the all-time greatest players and Zen your way to 10 championships.

SHAWNTE WANTS TO win money in 2000. Tanya wishes for world peace. J. and T., who got engaged Dec. 23, hope for "a happy life together." An unnamed baseball fan wants "a decent relief pitcher for the Orioles." Those are a few of the sentiments posted on the Millennium Resolution Sculpture constructed in McKeldin Plaza at Pratt and Calvert streets in downtown Baltimore. The $10,000 sculpture, called "Turning Point: Mankind's Millennium Message," was created as part of Baltimore's celebration of the new year and will be up until this weekend.

Judy Grossman was living happily in her semidetached home in Mount Washington and had no intention of moving, when she saw an ad for a two-bedroom house on two acres in Green Spring Valley."

Leave it to an astronomer to spoil the New Year's party. There you stand with a pointy hat, a glass of Korbel and a nice glow, and here comes some wise guy who has seen the big picture. A picture to dwarf any silly human-centered notion of time. New Year? Stop, already.After peering through the NASA Hubble Space Telescope, a scientist at the Space Telescope Institute in Baltimore said the other day that they now know how much time remains before our solar system dies because the sun has burned out. Nothing special.

Technological change is so rapid these days that long-standing jobs and work traditions are vanishing. In printing, computers have replaced Linotype machines. In shipping, containers have changed the way stevedores work. Such transformations are documented at the Baltimore Museum of Industry along Key Highway. Over the past 17 years, this museum has grown into an informative collection that explains how Baltimore developed.Major changes are occurring at the museum. The most visible is its expansion to an adjoining two-acre parcel that once belonged to the Hercules Ship Building Co. A waterfront park, complete with a picnic pavilion, will be built there.

WHAT DO KIDS predict for their future? Sixth-grade pupils at North Carroll Middle School have plenty to say, and their ideas are far from frivolous. They've all spent weeks researching the past millennium. They've also surfed the Web for scientific research about the future. The millennium was split into 20-year chunks for their historical research. Working independently, the pupils discovered facts about their piece of the past. A selection of books was provided by the North Carroll branch library.