The Courier-Journal from Louisville, Kentucky • Page 27

C6 THE COURIER-JOURNAL FEATURES TUESDAY, JUNE 22, 1999 Secret drug kills unwitting woman Is stuffing your own teddy bear a family activity for our times? i I. parties or other events where drinks are served. It doesn't matter whether or not you know most of the people there. You never can be sure what someone will do. In a split second, a person's whole life ANN LANDERS "Parents and kids can make the event uniquely theirs." Trend analyst Mary Meehan rating 50th wedding anniversaries.

"Just about everybody loves teddy bears," says Maxine Clark, chief executive of Build-A-Bear Workshop. "People get attached to teddy bears. You don't get emotionally attached to a piece of pottery." The factories provide the bare essentials and more for a personalized stuffed animal: poodle skirts, soccer balls, wedding dresses, tuxedos, even little hearts, and sound chips to bury in the stuffing. Fueling the bear boom are prosperous times and over-scheduled parents seeking wholesome ways to interact with their kids. "It's part of a movement of people looking to identify themselves in a unique manner," says Mary Meehan, a partner in Iconoculture, a Minneapolis firm that follows trends.

"Parents and kids can make the event uniquely theirs. Making a bear yourself is a backlash against our technological culture." Still, not everyone would relish We are all grown now and married, with children of our own. My parents are divorced, and my father has remarried and retired. He has also acquired two very large Rottweilers. These dogs are treated better than he ever treated his own children.

Nothing is too good for them. When we go for a visit, they jump all over us, slobbering and scratching. We asked Dad if he would keep the dogs in the yard or in the basement when we came to visit. His answer was: "Sorry. This is their home, and I will not confine them to the basement.

It would be very upsetting." He has more compassion for his dogs than he has for his grandchildren. We came up with this solution. We go for short visits for a couple of hours once a week on our own. No kids, no spouses. I look at it this way it's his loss.

It's been a year, and he has not once asked about the grandkids. Strange, isn't it? B.L. IN CANADA Dear B.L.: It's also very sad, but he will pay a price. When thy're older, they will have no interest in him. You can bet on it.

Ann Landers appears daily in Features. Write to her at P.O. Box 1 1562, Chicago, III. 60611-0562. Creators Syndicate Dear Ann: Last weekend, I attended the funeral of a young woman I knew growing up.

"Betsy" was 22 years old. Not only was she intelligent and beautiful, but she was a very responsible person. Like most other young people, she liked to have fun. She went out for the evening with a group of friends, and they attended a party where there were about 30 others. Betsy hadn't been there an hour before she started to complain of dizziness and nausea.

She collapsed on the floor and lay there unconscious while her "friends" drank, danced and parried around her. Not one person attempted to help her or call 911. It wasn't until the wee hours of the morning, when the kids were sober and the party was breaking up, that they took her to the hospital. By then, the coroner said she had been dead for over eight hours. Apparently, someone had slipped a drug into Betsy's drink.

The police suspect the drug was much worse than the average "date rape" drug. It is colorless, odorless and tasteless, and has a tendency to cause violent bodily reactions, even death. Local newspapers failed to report that the week before, several other young people had died after attending a club where that same drug was put into their drinks. Please encourage your readers to be cautious when attending clubs, ByJURAKONCIUS The Washington Post Watch for flying fur. The Washington area is becoming a national center for the latest do-it-yourself craft rage: the stuff-your-own teddy bear.

Can you bear this? Truckloads of fuzzy skins, fiberfill and miniature fashions are descending upon two area stores for assembly into custom-designed animals. In 1998, Americans spent more than $1.5 billion on plush toys, according to the Toy Manufacturers of America. Now people are willing to pay $10 to $80 to pad their own. Since last October, they've been busily stuffing at the Leesburg, Gund Teddy Bear Factory, a prototype for a proposed national chain. And a Build-A-Bear Workshop opened recently.

Build-A-Bear, a chain out of St. Louis, plans to open four more Washington-area stores by the end of next year. Elsewhere, Zany Brainy, the multimedia toy-store empire, is testing a Vermont Teddy Bear Co. Make-A-Friend-For- can change or end. If this warning saves even one life, it will be worth the time it took to write this letter.

T.W., HOUSTON Dear T.W.i Many thanks for the opportunity to warn my readers about the dangers of these drugs. If you are drinking anything at a parry even a soft drink be sure it never leaves your hands and that you are aware of what is going on around you. If you notice anyone experiencing dizziness or nausea, get him or her to a hospital immediately. A life could depend on it. Dear Ann: I read the letter from "Protective in the Carolinas," whose in-laws refused to keep their huge dog outside when their young grandson visited.

It prompted me to write to you about my father. When we were kids, my dad was either working or out drinking with his buddies. My mother raised the four of us on her own. Life shop in New Jersey to see if a national push will work. This new bear market is part of a 1990s renaissance in homey entertainment activities, like paint-your-own-pottery emporiums and build-it-yourself woodworking shops.

Bear-making appeals to all ages, including 7-year-olds throwing birthday parties, prom dates wanting souvenirs and even senior citizens commemo- 'Rich Diamond' is a thinking game HOBBIES: COMPUTER GAMES By Ronnie Gill spending an hour at a noisy mall shoving cloud-like fluffs into a limp fuzzy animal shape. To better fathom this we invited a 9-year-old tester to the Gund Teddy Bear Factory. He was delighted. CHOOSING THE skin was the hardest part. At Gund, our tester spent 10 minutes studying barrels filled with faux pelts of monkeys, bunnies, cats, dogs and plenty of bears.

The cost: $12 to $24 for the basic package of animal, stuffing and bow. Our tester's choice: "Cuddles," a nutmeg-colored fuzzy bear ($18) selected because "I like traditional, and this color is a really bearish color." Then it was time to pick out accessories. Battery-activated sound unit: "Take Me Out to the Ball Game" Two-inch foam heart (free) on which to inscribe your own message in this case, "Hit Your Way to the Moon." Outfit: Pinstriped baseball uniform New name: Slugger. After the accessorizing was complete, assistant manager Joan MacA-dams gave the tester a bag of hy-poallergenic fiberfill and a chopstick to push the fiber in through a long slit in Slugger's back. GETTING THE stuffing right was tricky; MacAdams had to pull some out because, she explained, otherwise the outfit wouldn't fit and the bear wouldn't have that typical under-stuffed Gund look.

Total cost of experience, which took less than an hour, including large carrier box and tax: $34.96. Final rating by tester: "It's cool." each step he takes must be carefully considered. Quibblers might argue that this makes the game too graphlike, and, in fact, you can clearly see the lightly marked-out squares on the playing surface. However, this is not only appropriate but also helpful, since your success depends not on dexterity and speed what Core Concepts programmers refer to as "the twitch aspect" of other games but rather on your ability to think through a solution, one step at a time. The game functioned well and was responsive, although the screen sometimes stuttered when we tried to move to get the overview of another play area.

The multiple-player-friendly games, as well as individual levels in progress, can be saved. The controls were easy to access and the 3-D graphics crisp, though somewhat flatter and less detailed than in other games. In the somewhat anachronistic words of Rich Diamond, we found the game "cool" and "groovy" (shades of Austin Powers!) and look forward to Core Concepts' next release. One of the joys of being a software reviewer is discovering companies that design fun, creative and intelligent products. It is even more exciting when the company is new, but already demonstrates those qualities.

"Rich Diamond" (suggested retail $24.95, coregames.com), the premier entry of Core Concepts, a small game-development business founded last year in San Gabriel, suggests the company has a promising future. Rated appropriate for everyone, the game is targeted to ages 14 and older, with a version for younger players, "Richie Diamond." The player assumes the role of the title character, an Indiana Jones-style adventurer searching for gems in a variety of scenarios and mazes booby-trapped with tumbling rocks, arrows set on hair-triggers, bombs, lava, water, pits, zapping robots, slippery and cracked ice and ravenous, tarantula-like spiders. The game's 80 progressively challenging levels are solved by collecting all the treasure while avoiding, destroying or manipulating the various hazards or creatures you encounter. However, parents need not worry about blood, gore or violence. Aimed at "the thinking Do You Have HIGH CHOLESTEROL? Volunteers are needed to participate in a cholesterol research study at L-MARC Research Center at Norton Audubon Hospital.

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Louisville Metabolic Atherosclerosis Research Center Conducting Research in Louisville for Over a Decade gamer," Core Concepts' goal is to produce family games without the violence prevalent in other software. True, you can lose your "life," but everything is done in cartoon-like fashion. Get hit by a boulder and you'll get flattened, as will the spiders and robots you destroy. We were impressed by the ingenuity of the design as the game became increasingly difficult. At first glance, some puzzles seemed obvious and easy, but proved to be far more complex than anticipated.

At other times we would rack our brains trying to figure out a solution when it turned out to be far simpler than first thought. Although it has an adventure theme, "Rich Diamond" challenges you to think and is, at heart, a logical problem-solving game for people who love puzzles. Since all action that takes place on the screen is in reaction to Rich Diamond's movements, literally Ronnie Gill writes for Newsday. PAPERTOWEL HOLDER! PAPER-TOWEL HOLDER! II N0 ONE PURPOSE rTHAT 1 MOTHER 'H FOCUS! UGLY BATHTUB? SAVE $100 MOU'RE RUNNING IN AND GRABBING A CHEAP ONEmiSSIOM! I WILL BE VICTIM OF THE NO TOUCHING-! PAPER. TOWEL HOLDER! 372.15.) HOUSEWARES NO PAPER TOWEL HOLDER? SUPERSTORE NO FANTA.SlZ.tNGr! PAPER TOWEL HOLDER! TRANCE.

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