Saturday Night At The Officers' Club

(FT. MYER, VIRGINIA)-Saturday evening the Officers' Club is packed with couples dressed up for a night out. At first glance, the dimly lit red-carpeted lounge could be part of any Holiday Inn in the country. But there are a few reminders that this is not a civilian establishment: in the lobby an officer with an iron-grey crew cut complains to an employee about the slackness of the Club's organization, comparing it unfavorably with his own command. Wine ordered in the bar is served in the same miniature bottles dispensed by airlines. And every few minutes the MUZAK is interrupted by a loudspeaker announcement that Col. So-and-so's table is ready.

Eskimo Fish Camp

(ON THE KOBUK RIVER)-A fat chum salmon slid over the bottom of the Kobuk River, following tiny trails etched in the sand and leaving yet another trail to mark his passage. Nearby swam scores of other salmon, now silver but growing mottled pink as they left the ocean behind. Females fat with roe broke water and dove again. The shallows rippled in the long evening light as school after school surged upriver.

The Straw In The Chocolate Malt
California Water II

In Los Angeles they had the votes and in the Central Valley they had the money, and so, over the strenuous but hopeless opposition of most of northern California, the inefficient water system which God designed for California was replaced by a much more efficient one designed by man. The transformation was wrought mainly by two immense water projects: the Central Valley Project, which, though begun over forty years ago, is still the most awesome hydrological engineering works in the world; and, in the 1960s and 1970s, the California Water Project, the largest engineering and financing scheme ever attempted by a single state. Both projects bring water from behind reservoirs in northern California over mountains, through tunnels, and across deserts to the southland. They rank with the engineering wonders of the world. And yet, as engineering projects, they share a peculiar weakness, a design element almost astonishing in its careless inefficiency. On its way south, all of the water is flushed through the Delta.

Defining Islamic Terms

This article was written before the seizure of the United States Embassy in Teheran by student followers of the Ayatollah Khomeini.

Some time ago, writers adopted the convenient habit of categorizing Arab states as "moderate" and "radical." For the most part, the distinction was based on the degree of animosity expressed toward Israel. Algeria was "radical" because its leaders were strident, though it probably gave nothing to the support of the PLO. Kuwait was "moderate," because it spoke of peace; though it helped finance the PLO's fighting organizations. Now we know that, if these categories had any utility at all, they are no longer valid. The distinctions are far too narrow. If we insist upon dividing the Arabs into two camps I think we must try to measure not just their attitude toward Israel but toward the Western world as a whole.

(LOS ANGELES) - "More important than even the directors and producers, the writer is crucial to the success of black television shows," says Cleavon Little. (Mr. Little, who starred in the Broadway hit "Purlie", was also a featured performer in the film "Blazing Saddles" as well as television sitcoms such as ABC's "Temperatures Rising.") "Usually when stories are bad, black stories on television, it's because you have white writers who are attempting to write about something they haven't experienced. Now I'm not against white writers, if a writer's good he should work. Still, most writers usually write out of their own experience, that's when they're best. But not with black shows. Here you have white writers trying to imagine experiences they can't conceivably know about… If a writer is writing out of his own experience and I, as an actor, am working with the material, I can act, move my body, get into the emotional feel of an authentic situation.