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The telephone company has bagged its biggest trophy. At 12:01 last Saturday, President Lyndon Johnson's NAtional 8-1414 phone number at the White House was changed clickety-zip to 456-1414. Said an anti-digit dialing partisan bitterly: "Prestigewise, we've had it."
Of all the gall. Some punk just walked up and stole this 1963 Ford station wagon, not even considering who the owner was. So Mickey Spillane, 45, had to report the theft to the Sarasota, Fla., cops. Moped he defensively: "I know what you're going to say: 'Go find it yourself.' " Gone with the car were his wife's engagement and wedding rings, his wallet, and the only manuscript of his new book, The Body Lovers. The manuscript he didn't mind. "That just means I've got to sit down and do three more days' work."
"I am weary of intellectualism," Princeton Professor Eric Goldman, 48, once said. And coming from the president of the Society of American Historians, the remark was something of a surprise. But Goldman is likely to be full of surprises in the months to come. He has just been appointed to be a sort of super ideaman for channeling "the nation's best thinking to the White House." The respected author (Rendezvous with Destiny, The Crucial Decade) plans first to recruit 40 experts on domestic and foreign affairs from across the U.S. and start pumping them for ideas. Said he in a half jest he may wish he had never uttered: "If someone in Kansas City has an idea on anything, he should write me."
Just a minor traffic violation, and could he please see the license and registration? The Roman traffic cop's eyebrows lifted, and he pointed out to the signora that her six-month tourist auto permit had expired a few days ago. And that meant Anna Moffo's air-conditioned Lincoln Continental, with built-in bar, had to be impounded by Italian customs. She can get it back any time—by paying a $5,000 fine, a $5,000 import duty and a $10,000 redemption fee. But since the car cost only $9,800 new, the American operatic soprano is having none of it. "I'm planning not to pay one lira of that fine," she told reporters. "I've got lawyers working on it. I'll take this as high as I have to." Meanwhile, sighed Anna conlamenti, "I've bought a bicycle."