Glint

E.F. Kitchen, a Venice-based fine arts photographer who works with platinum prints, spent years fascinated by the glint of light off of handmade armor. "It was a purely visual concept," says Kitchen, whose first name is Elizabeth and who loved "the materials, the craftsmanship, the creativity of the designs." But as she got to know one of her craftsmen better, she was exposed to a world of retro-medievalists who are a kind of West Coast equivalent of Civil War reenactors. "Oh, my God," she said to herself when she encountered the Society for Creative Anachronism, which stages historically informed mock battles involving thousands of troops.

Saturn's rings may be vintage jewelry as old as the solar system, and they're practically sparkling with water ice, according to data from NASA's Cassini spacecraft. The findings, released this week in the Astrophysical Journal, give planetary scientists a window into the solar system's birth and development, and show that the formation of at least one of the planet's 62 known moons may have been a little more complicated than thought. Launched in 1997, the Cassini mission spacecraft is now on its third lifetime exploring Saturn's complex system and still turning up remarkable new information about the ringed gas giant.

On Oscar night, the women preferred blond, going for retro waves and locks pulled off the face to highlight eyes, lips and cheekbones.

E.F. Kitchen, a Venice-based fine arts photographer who works with platinum prints, spent years fascinated by the glint of light off of handmade armor. "It was a purely visual concept," says Kitchen, whose first name is Elizabeth and who loved "the materials, the craftsmanship, the creativity of the designs." But as she got to know one of her craftsmen better, she was exposed to a world of retro-medievalists who are a kind of West Coast equivalent of Civil War reenactors. "Oh, my God," she said to herself when she encountered the Society for Creative Anachronism, which stages historically informed mock battles involving thousands of troops.

Place has its undertone. Not all Is sun and surface. There, where across the calm Gold roofs stream in, The lake detains the image: Presence of past, Breath of the celebrated dead. Beneath the sun-gold Lake currents glint . . . Past power, dreaming this trance of consummation, Its sleep unbroken by Voices of swans in passing agitation. TRANSLATED FROM THE RUSSIAN BY CHARLES TOMLINSON From "World Poetry," edited by Katharine Washburn, John S. Major and Clifton Fadiman (W.W. Norton: 1,338 pp.

Picture an island whose chief crop is lavender, whose history traces to the prehistoric Illyrians, whose architecture can best be described as Venetian gothic. Draw this fabled place with a flourishing sweep of nature's paintbrush and color it gold. The wheat-colored stone walls and marble-smooth streets of the town of Hvar glint in the sunlight, golden as the lavender oil that is processed for French perfumeries and other customers of the exotic. The climate is perennially kind and warm.

The ruling old dogs in Hanoi could not learn new tricks, and they never really tried very hard. They gave a new name--doi moi, or open door--to their Communist governing philosophy though they kept the old tools: political oppression and rigid economic order administered by arbitrary rules and corrupt officials. Transforming Communist Vietnam will take years, but the pressure on the power elite is mounting and some of the officials who stood in the way of progress are leaving.

Hope comes to me this season by way of my piano teacher, whose life is not easy and whose future is not assured. Five years ago, when my daughter was 7, a baby-sitter overheard a lesson with a mediocre teacher. She knew a young music student, Martin Stegmaier, and said Susanna should take a lesson with him. Martin, then about 23, came to the house. Immediately the sound of her playing changed and she began to improvise. I was jealous and wanted a lesson, too.

Guerrillas opened fire from all sides at a truck crammed with refugees and soldiers speeding along a jungle highway on Bougainville island. They killed 17, including a 6-year-old girl and her mother, and wounded 26. A soldier bled to death as the rebels fled and his comrades radioed for help. The ambush in March was typical of a civil war that has taken 500 lives in five years on the lush tropical island 600 miles northeast of Port Moresby.

More than 70,000 passengers rode the Metro Rail Gold Line last Saturday, twice the turnout projected for the opening of the 14-mile railway between downtown Los Angeles and Pasadena. Even considering the free fares and inaugural festivities, it was a heady show of enthusiasm for a region famously divided over public transit.

China's last empress dowager, Cixi, was said to have so loved tourmaline that on her deathbed in 1908, the ironfisted ruler demanded that a pink gemstone mined in Pala, Calif., be placed on her finger. The story may be apocryphal, but Yu Chuan Yih, who also goes by Lorenzo, has good reason to promote it. As chief executive of LJ International, Yih has been producing tourmaline, amethyst and other semiprecious jewelry in China for the last two decades.

In the early 1990s, lawyer-bashing was all the rage. And Harriet Miers didn't like it one bit. Then the president of the State Bar of Texas, Miers used her monthly column in the Texas Bar Journal to condemn politicians who were trying to score points by disparaging the legal profession. She suggested the criticism was myopic, and noted that it was coming, by and large, from Republicans. It was time, she wrote, to "fight back."

In "Troy," the current cinematic rendition of "The Iliad," Eric Bana plays one of Western lit's archetypal heroes. Throughout the ancient text that inspired the film he is always "great Hector of the glinting helmet." "With him," the verse goes, "went under arms far the largest army and the bravest fighters." "Those are things that freak you out when you read the script," Bana says. "There are things that you can learn, and then there are things that you can't learn.

On Oscar night, the women preferred blond, going for retro waves and locks pulled off the face to highlight eyes, lips and cheekbones.

More than 70,000 passengers rode the Metro Rail Gold Line last Saturday, twice the turnout projected for the opening of the 14-mile railway between downtown Los Angeles and Pasadena. Even considering the free fares and inaugural festivities, it was a heady show of enthusiasm for a region famously divided over public transit.

"Nothing is funnier than unhappiness," says a character in Samuel Beckett's "Endgame," and "Why this farce, day after day?" becomes a refrain in the enigmatic dialogue. These are signs of the humor glinting in the darkness of this strange and wonderful play, in which four archetypal characters keep playing their empty social roles even though Earth has been decimated and humankind's time is running out.

The theory was that Royal Glint was simply a horse who loved the freeways and byways of the racing circuit. Put a pile of hay in his trailer, give the driver a gasoline credit card and this was one happy nag. How else to explain his victory on this date 23 years ago, when he won the $255,900 Santa Anita Handicap by a nose over Ancient Title? "Widely traveled," the racing writers called Royal Glint. It was his 12th race at a different track since the previous July.

***VARIOUS ARTISTS "End of Days" soundtrack Geffen The rise of a new generation of hard-rockers could well have spelled the end of Axl Rose's days as anything but a "Behind the Music" nostalgia subject. Rose, though, seems determined to join the pack of Korn, Limp Bizkit et al.

The ruling old dogs in Hanoi could not learn new tricks, and they never really tried very hard. They gave a new name--doi moi, or open door--to their Communist governing philosophy though they kept the old tools: political oppression and rigid economic order administered by arbitrary rules and corrupt officials. Transforming Communist Vietnam will take years, but the pressure on the power elite is mounting and some of the officials who stood in the way of progress are leaving.

***VARIOUS ARTISTS "End of Days" soundtrack Geffen The rise of a new generation of hard-rockers could well have spelled the end of Axl Rose's days as anything but a "Behind the Music" nostalgia subject. Rose, though, seems determined to join the pack of Korn, Limp Bizkit et al.