Black Widow

Re "Snakes, Pests Rattling Nerves: Shelter-Seeking Critters Pose Danger, Nuisance Near Homes," Sept. 1. The person quoted in this story as saying someone who finds a spider in their house should "get something and smash it" must prefer the fly and the mosquito. There are only two spiders in Southern California with a dangerous bite: the black widow and the brown recluse. And you'd have to put your hand in some unlikely places to find either one. Every other spider is your harmless and often beautiful friend.

IN an announcement about the opening of the Spider Pavilion at the Natural History Museum of Los Angeles County, I recently referred to spiders as insects. It brought this response from a reader in Whittier: "Spiders are not insects! Insects have six legs. " The reader is correct. Spiders have eight legs. Although insects and spiders are both arthropods, spiders belong to a distinct class, Arachnida . Unfortunately, the term became known almost exclusively as a root for a word concerning the pathological fear of spiders: arachnophobia.

Zift Socialist Noir By Vladislav Todorov, translated from the Bulgarian by Joseph Benatov Paul Dry Books: 185 pp., $14.95 paper Of all the places to set a story of intrigue, Bulgaria has served as a choice exotic location for many writers, among them George Bernard Shaw ("Arms and the Man"), Eric Ambler ("Judgment on Deltchev") and Vladislav Todorov, a young Bulgarian writer who, in "Zift," has taken the recent history of his country and wrestled it into a compelling thriller about vague characters with questionable motives.

I worry a lot. I worry about the world, the nation, L.A. and eating fish imported from China. No one worries more than I do about whatever there is to worry about. And that worries me. "Don't worry about it," my wife, the calming Cinelli, said the other day as I was peering skyward and worrying about possible falling meteors. "You're a newspaper columnist. You're supposed to worry. If you didn't worry, you'd be a hod carrier." There are no gradients with her. Either a columnist or a hod carrier.

What red-blooded aficionado of James Bond can forget the deadly tarantula in "Thunderball" crawling across the hairy forearm of 007 only to be whipped off the bed and crushed beneath a Bondian shoe, accompanied by a tattoo of orchestral sforzandos? Who among us can forget Sean Connery, armed in that scene with only a shoe and his pajama bottoms, stumbling into the bathroom to vomit? No shame to that. The tarantula is the deadliest spider known to man. Isn't it?

Birds do it. Bees do it. Even dandelions and trees do it. This much we know. But people? Do people do it? Absolutely, says entrepreneur Joe Anders. Don't be silly, says organic chemist George Preti. In question are pheromones, minute chemical secretions (odorless "smells," if you will) released by the bodies of everything from earwigs to earls; secretions that influence the physical and/or social behavior of others of the same species.

The "black widows" are back. These are their faces, charred and streaked with blood, shown in gruesome photographs circulated to the public Tuesday by investigators. Their heads were severed, blown off their bodies by the force of the suicide bombs they detonated in crowded subway cars. Their eyes are closed as if in prayer. The return of female suicide bombers from the Caucasus thrusts Moscow back into the grip of terror that this city had tried to leave behind six years ago. For a time, there was a pervasive fear of Muslim women who might be stalking the streets, indistinguishable until they detonated their explosives.

A Rockville woman who allegedly enticed lovers to kill two husbands and a boyfriend and kept witnesses quiet with threats of voodoo was charged with murder, a prosecutor said. Josephine Gray enlisted the men to commit murder in 1974, 1990 and 1996, court documents said. Gray was charged with first-degree murder in the first two deaths, said Montgomery County State's Atty. Douglas Gansler.