The light turns red and you glance down to see that someone has called or emailed.

Don't touch that phone.

The Philadelphia police started handing out warning notices this weekend, warming up the wired to the new rules that take effect Dec. 1 and will cost you between $75 and $300 if you're using the phone while behind the wheel.

Unless:

you've got a hands-free device.

you've pulled over to the side of the road and are not in gear.

you're a goverment official, doing business, and using the two-way radio.

The rules apply to skateboarders, in-line skaters, and bicyclists. Hands-free devices only.

Today's metro column goes into more detail. Already the e-mails have been interesting.

This came from someone's area-code 609 phone this morning. Please tell me they weren't driving.

It's gratifying to know that the distracted driver who kills me will be a bureaucrat on a 2-way radio. Priorities, right? Police, fire ok.

BOSTON  -- When you haven’t played a meaningful game against a team since 1950, it’s easy to forgot how much pleasure can come from hating them. And where better than Boston could I go for a few lessons in loathing the New York Yankees?

Monday's metro column digs into the uneasiness in Cheltenham township, where local and county officials have  opposed a question from appearing on next week's ballot that would give the people more power to stop development.

Score a victory for a group called "We the People of Cheltenham," which fought officials in court - and won. The question will go to the voters.

So who ARE those guys behind We the People? What do we know about this non-profit law firm based in Chambersburg, PA., which worked pro bono to create a citizens bill of rights then get it on the ballot?

They're called the Community Environmental Legal Defense Fund.

We know they helped Ecuador write laws to protect the environment by granting rights to nature.

This is what the New York Times wrote last December:

Even so, it is a milestone for environmental organizations that seek to rewrite our treatment of nature. In fact, one such group, the Pennsylvania-based Community Environmental Legal Defense Fund, helped draft the new protections in the Ecuadorean Constitution. The C.E.L.D.F. posits that most laws define nature as someone’s property, forcing environmentalists to prove extensive damage before regulations can be put in place. A rights-based approach, it argues, reverses that burden, putting the health of ecosystems first.

We also know that C.E.L.D.F. is helping back a broader bill of rights in Spokane, Wa., that would encompass conditions for healthcare, labor and development.

Here's a profile from The Inlander of leading attorney, Thomas Linzey. Can't vouch for the article, though I note it gets the name of the Pennsylvania town he's from wrong.

And here's the group's Web site.

Today's metro column -  Why I still go to see The Boss -  begins with a line inspired by this video - sitting with the savages in Section 205.

Some genius mashed the German-language film, "Der Untergang," with a problem common to all, even wackos with world power: not getting special access for Springsteen in New Jersey.

The text has some language problems for those sensitive to four-letter words. And there is a possibility you might be offended by anything that makes fun of Hitler, and if that's the case, you'd better move on.

Another day, another insult. Another survey story.

They think we're fat. They think we're ugly. They think we're miserable. No wonder some Yogurt company thought we were constipated.

Today's metro column, a tale of two surveys (we're smarter than we're beautiful), brings to mind the single most reliable indicator of a metropolitan area's worthiness.

I call it the Keith Hollar rule.

Keith was a copy editor in Norfolk, Va., which would win neither a beauty contest nor a college bowl, but was a fun  place nonetheless . He'd moved from Charlotte and had kicked around smaller southern towns before that and probably since.

He judged a place this way:

Is it big enough to warrant a separate Yellow Pages from its White Pages?

Has it synchronized its traffic lights?

How cheezy were its late-night TV ads for local used-car lots?

As good a measure as any - probably more useful, actually.

We love this place as it is. But fix the lights and work on the commercials, huh?

Another academic honor for a Stooge.

As we ponder the Thursday induction of Louis Feinberg, aka 'Larry', into the Hall of Fame of his alma mater, the bookish Central High School, we received this email from a fellow alum, Dr. David Brookstein, dean of engineering at Philadelphia U.:

Turns out that I too visited the Stoogeum several years ago with a friend of Gary Lassin, David Steinbrink….Steinbrink also was a great fan of the Stooges…Then…several months later we were having a BBQ with Dave Steinbrink and his father Rabbi Dick Steinbrink,,,,We start talking bout the Stooges and Rabbi Steinbrink tells us that he was the one who officiated at Larry Fine’s funeral……Of course we asked him if when they through the dirt on his coffin did they say Nyuk, Nyuk, Nyuk….And of course they did.

…..I saw Schemp’s army “discharge papers”……The key word here is discharge.  Turns out the Schemp was discharged from the army for “excessive nocturnal emissions”……Serious as I can be.

Today's metro column, honors for the sublime Larry Fine.

My apologies to the boys of 212. Yes, I knew you have that distinctive way of identifying your class. And yes, I ignored it so the rest of the world might know I was talking about 1959.  

Today's metro column hones in on one particular graduate from the Eisenhower years, Irv Einhorn, chosen because he exhibited the sort of arc of character one can do justice to over 16 newspaper column inches: Smart boy doesn't take serious school too seriously, works as soda jerk, bowling alley mechanic, struggles through Temple, drops out, then finds himself in a brutal job in the Borscht Belt and returns a different person.

This morning I have heard from so many other Central boys from that era, most of them sharing similar heartening stories of slow-release talent and remembered lessons. A couple pointed out that the Class of 1959 should be the 212th Class.  Feh.

I didn't write in the piece, but know for a fact, that Central takes its idiosyncratic nomenclature from the way it used to graduate TWO classes each year over most of its history, which dates to 1836. The January and June commencements ended in 1965. That better?

(and, no, he is not related to Ira Einhorn, my dinner partner for three stimulating meals in France a decade ago, when he was eating and drinking better than he is now, in his cell.)

A friend had told me about Harry. Great painter, great teacher, great character - learned from The Man himself. Or, as I wrote in a May 2007 column, a "sweet, canny link to the quirky, tyrannical Dr. Albert C. Barnes."

When Harry Sefarbi, then just shy of his 90th birthday, answered the door of his Powelton Village home, he must have sensed my shock.

He was a sight - he wore a big patch high on the middle on his forehead, as if he sported a third eye, four layers of shirts, topped by a pointed cap that lent an elfin look, Harry was dealing with vision problems, which were no small thing, given he'd devoted the past 50-plus years to teaching art lovers how to really see.

That same friend e-mailed this morning, the morning of Harry's funeral. Harry died Monday, at age 92. He leaves his wife of 54 years, Ruth, a daughter, a grandson, a sister and a brother.

He was born in Chester in 1917, went to teachers college, then the war in France and took courses from Barnes and his collaborator, Violette de Mazia, at age 40. Three years later the quirky collector wrote Harry: would he sell Barnes one of his portraits?

Harry made $100 on the oil painting, which Barnes hung over a door in Room IX, by the Renoirs and the Rousseaus.

For 54 years Harry taught the Barnes method at the Foundation in Merion. He was not a fan of its planned move, and appeared in the new documentary about the controversy, "The Art of the Steal."

I take no credit for it, but after my column ran, another fine publication caught onto Harry.

At the end of my short course in the Sefarbi Method, I talked with some of Harry students, one of whom provided me with one of my favorite end quotes:

"If you think you understand this," he said, "you're wrong. "

Alice Hershey was injured on her bike.

The hardest part, her father was saying, is that she's always been so vibrant. "The connector," her friend Anneliese calls her. Alice Hershey, 29, has always been the connector, the one to instigate various outings in the city, making sure everyone was involved, flashing that roar of a smile.

You can see a restlessness beginning to emerge, now that the pain meds have been dialed down and the coma has given her brain seven weeks to heal. She's at Bryn Mawr Rehab, and a swirl of activity surrounds her as she curl in her bed. Her eyes are open. It is not clear what she registers.

Her family and an incredible community of friends - more than 850 on Facebook -  have gathered around this 2002 Swarthmore grad to help pull through. There's hope, there's realism, often in the same breath. There really aren't many answers yet. She was hit by an SUV while she pedaled her bicycle through a red light on August 14. So many people are pulling for her. Today's metro column.