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Endearing as it is to know that the mightiest minds have their silly side, the imagination still boggles at the thought that Albert Einstein wrote doggerel verse. In 58 letters to his physician and friend Dr. Gustav Bucky, who died in 1963, the physicist sometimes indulged his wry, self-depreciating with—as when he noted that he had the "Pauli effect," after fellow Physicist Wolfgang Pauli, who was said to be able to cause malfunctions in household appliances just by going near them. The poesy is the real stopper, though. Suffering from chronic stomach pains, Einstein labored and brought forth:
A las, I cannot come to town; Skepticism has got me down. Just at the moment I began To think your drugs could cure a man.
France's Médaille de Mérite Agricole usually goes to innovators of hybrid corn, contour-plowing theorists and other worthy agriculturists, but the Gauls have finally got around to someone who knows how to put it all together. In Cambridge, Mass., the French consul-general pinned the green ribbon and bronze star on Superchef Julia Child, 55, TV's leading cuisinere and author of Mastering the Art of French Cooking. The unexpected award called for a party, naturally, and Julia rounded up half a dozen friends to celebrate with champagne and hors d'oeuvres. Ah, the hors d'oeuvres. "Well," said Julia, "I did make some hot little cheese puffs—but I also got some cream cheese and watercress rolls from the caterer because there just wasn't time."
He might not have been the first great orchestra conductor Bombay had ever seen, but he surely was the first ever seen worshiping at the city's Wadiaji Parsi Fire Temple. Ceremonially dressed in dugli, pugree and sudrahi, Los Angeles Philharmonic Conductor Zubin Mehta, 31, celebrated his first trip home in 14 years by accompanying his mother to the Jashan thanksgiving ceremony of the Parsis, a Zoroastrian sect that fled Persia for India a millennium ago. The homecoming was made all the more rousing by the fact that Mehta happened to have his 107-man orchestra with him, winding up a 14-city State Department tour with concerts in New Delhi and Bombay. "This is a landmark of our cultural tradition," glowed the Times of India.