Names make news. Last week these names made this news:
Wanting to celebrate his 38th birthday by getting away from it all, Egypt's blimp-sized ex-King Farouk put on his sunglasses, boarded a 22-seat bus and rolled through the Alps into the tiny principality of Liechtenstein. His fellow riders: his 19-year-old daughter Princess Ferial, two bodyguards, a chauffeur, a maid and an anonymous raven-tressed playmate. Explained His Corpulent Majesty: "People think I and my entourage are an ordinary tourist party."
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At a banquet for Britain's M.P.s in the House of Commons dining hall, London's top-ranking master barber (the guild boss of hairdressers, perfumers and wigmakers) laid all about him with cutting comments on the hair styles of leading politicians, who often look, cried he, "like corn crakes [a short-billed rail] in a gale!" Of Prime Minister Harold Macmillan (see FOREIGN NEWS): "He ruins the whole effect by wings of hair sticking out on either side of his face and by a mustache that one would hardly call elegant." Of Laborites Hugh Gaitskell and Aneurin Bevan: "Quite content to be permanently untidy about the ears."
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On a long foray into Yankee territory to make friends and whoop up "Mississippi Recognition Month," that state's personable Democratic Governor James Plemon Coleman (TIME, March 4. 1957) stopped off in Manhattan to honor nine Mississippians who have made good north of the Mason-Dixon Line. Among the former Magnolia Staters appointed honorary colonels and aides-de-camp to Coleman's staff: the New York Times's Managing Editor Turner Catledge, Musicomedy Director (Jamaica) and Composer Lehman Engel, and the littlest colonel, ten-year-old Eddie Hodges, carrot-topped standout in the new Broadway hit musical The Music Man.
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Ticklish Volume 40 of the new edition of the Big Soviet Encyclopedia, the volume containing the latest box score on Joseph Stalin, was published almost two years behind schedule and in the wake of its 48 companion volumes. Joe's spotty career is now trimmed down to five pages and one picture—a wholesale pruning in comparison with the previous (1947) edition's fat 59 pages and 14 pictures. In the new version, Dictator Stalin made no horrible mistakes until 1934, when "he began to believe in his own infallibility" and grew deaf to his comrades' advice. Among his biggest boners: the purges of the late '30s, trusting Hitler, feuding with Tito, believing in inevitable war between capitalist and socialist states. "Stalinism" is now officially a tainted word, but that is not Joe's fault: "The term is an invention of reactionary imperialist circles."
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