January 8, 2006

Residents living at 126 Rivington have developed usually close relationship compared to average New York City apartment-dwellers; relationships and personalities living there described and compared to popular television shows, Friends and Melrose Place; photos (L)

Carolina Panthers prepare to face New York Giants and coach Tom Coughlin in playoff game; photos (M)

FRESHLY returned from the Middle East, where his new film, ''Looking for Comedy in the Muslim World'' had its world premiere as part of the second annual Dubai International Film Festival, Albert Brooks sounded exhausted, elated and relieved. ''This had never happened before,'' said Mr. Brooks from Los Angeles. ''There's been no other American comedy that's made light of anything after 9/11. Nobody knows what will happen. The audience could stand up and walk out, they could boo, who knows? I don't have any road map here. I was told that, 'We think it will be O.K.,' but I was also told that people don't mince words here. If you hit the nail wrongly, it's like your thumb: you know it right away.''

WE nudge the kayaks through the waves off a remote cove in the Galápagos when a pair of mating sea turtles bob to the surface, drifting close enough to reveal gray tongues hanging languidly from green knuckle-like heads. Just a few hours ago, an eight-foot-long shark ducked beneath the bow in a fizz of purple bubbles. And a few hours before that, curious sea lions popped up next to my paddle strokes to flash such sweet faces that I almost jumped in to play. Almost. It can be tough deciding which wildlife encounters are worthy of pause after only a few days in the Galápagos -- those South American islands of evolution cauterized by sun and magma. Nearly any tour that cruises this isolated yet popular chain, 600 miles west of Ecuador, comes packaged with extreme closeups of washer-size tortoises, swimming lizards and crabs the color of rainbows. But this is not one of those tours.

Andrew Ross Sorkin column explores reasons why stock is likely to decline in near term, rather than go up, when company is broken up; Goldman Sachs study examining 10 big companies that split up between 1994 and 1999 shows average company's shares fell 6 percent between announcement and actual split; big shareholders sold their shares because new companies would no longer be one they bought into and big-cap investors no longer want to own collection of small-cap or midcap companies; money can be made in long term from spinoffs despite early drop in stock prices; photo (M)