Lockheed has plans for a monorail system for Southern California.

Haven in Cyprus

    How does it go, one may wonder, with those resolute citizens who muster the courage to drop everything and leave the rat race for peace and quiet elsewhere?
   
John Plake, Hollywood publicist, who made the big decision some months ago, writes from his haven in Nicosia, Cyprus: "I just saw where the Dodgers were in the World Serious, or am I mistaken?  I don't understand baseball very well but as far as I could tell Charles Neal made two touchdowns.  Looks like L.A. is getting Togetherness through baseball.  Norrie sure made headlines in his clash with Mr. K.  Where was Sheriff Biscailuz all that time?  We're happy here.  We don't have any anxieties about how we're going to pay the rent.  I'm only afraid that at the end of three years I won't be fit for employment in the states.  I've always said I would like to have been born 75 years ago and it's pretty much like that here."
   
One gets the notion that John not only doesn't care about progress but is also opposed to the inalienable right of every American to have a nervous breakdown.

     NOW AND THEN the editors of the erudite Yale Review get out a brochure to prospective subscribers that is itself an experience in reading.  The current one has this passage: "We would by no means imply that we can give you only a filboid studge kind of justification for reading The Yale Review.  We require of our writers lucidity and so far as their matter permits, grace."
   
Who you calling a filboid studge, Mac?

ALTERNATIVE
Our State Dept. says that
    Russia needs
To woo us not with words
    but deeds,
So: what if Pravda's crude
    condemning
Gives way to rude ICMB-
    ing?
–F. MENDELSOHN JR.

    IT WAS, as authorities reported in relief, a safe and sane Halloween.  Oh, maybe a little mischief here and there but no real mass vandalism.
 
   Out my way, for instance, some boisterous boys swiped the huge, hollowed-out pumpkin from a neighbor's doorstep, tossed it high in the air and let it fall with a pistol-shot squash in front of my house.  Quite a mess to clean up next day but you figure on things like that.

    On the other hand there was the group of hysterically babbling teen-age girls, about a dozen of them, who pounded so hard on the door they almost broke it in.  When it was opened they stormed into the house, screaming like outraged witches.  They didn't wait to be handed candy bars, they snatched them rudely out of my hands and, without a thank you, took off into the night, ranting wildly.

    Gave me the frightening feeling that Halloween is no longer so much boisterous as it is girlsterous.

    BY CONTRAST there was the happy 6-year-old boy who came to the door and, on receiving his tribute, held out his hand, containing two jelly beans, and said joyfully, "Here's some for you!"  This youngsters parents are going to have to take him in hand and teach him the rudiments of blackmail or he'll be out of it.

    A LAWYER ran into a police lieutenant he has known for  a long time and said, "I heard you got transferred — what did you do?" 

    "I don't know," the bewildered officer replied.  "All I did was say there was no such thing as the Mafia."

    AT RANDOM — A man phoned the Shrine Auditorium for some information about the opera "Andrea Chenier" and John Northcutt briefly outlined the plot in which two principals are beheaded.  "Is it a tragedy?" the caller inquired . . . If a Santa Monica cutlery shop wants to know who has been phoning and asking for Mack the Knife, I have  a full confession from the culprit . . . A Redondo Beach couple who went into a restaurant in Big Bear for breakfast were puzzled by a note attached to the menu stating, "Please do not order boiled, poached or scrambled eggs today."  They concluded the chef was eggcentric or possibly an eggomaniac . . . Inevitably there's a windshield sticker that states: "Help Stamp Out Traffic Cops."