Daily Press from Newport News, Virginia • Page 27

Dalit! PrtSSP Saturday, March 23, 1991 TVComics Joseph Pryweller Broadcast news 9 a Cr a Photos by KENNETH D. LYONSStaff photographer Scrabble is celebrating its 60th anniversary with many U.S. competitions and the first-ever Scrabble world championship invitational tournament. Under a me WGH-AM swings to country beat WGH-AM (1310) has gone country. The once-dominant station, which has been broadcasting since 1928, is hoping country music will fare better with listeners than its low-rated CNN Headline News.

Last Sunday, the station discarded its 24-hour CNN news reports for "Real Country." Its sports programming, including the daily "Sports Talk" program, stays. Country could be a tough row to hoe. The field is crowded with five other stations WCMS-FM (100.5) and its simulcasted WCMS-AM (1050), WKEZ-FM (94.1) in York County, WPEX-AM (1490) in Phoebus, and WGH's sister station, WGH-FM (97.3). The AM station is intended to complement WGH-FM, said General Manager Russ Schell. The FM station, known as Eagle 97, mainly plays upbeat current country music and crossover pop-country songs.

The AM station plays mainstream country, with about 60 percent of its songs classified as oldies. "Our country listeners will have a choice in country songs," Schell said. "It made sense for WGH's identity to be country on both AM and FM." It's an inexpensive move. The music is piped into the station by satellite. Only during morning and afternoon drive times are the jocks live from the WGH studios, Schell said.

The station hopes country can restore some of WGH's past luster. WGH, which once operated from Newport News but now has its studios in Virginia Beach, was the powerhouse Top 40 station in the area during the 1950s and '60s. Other country programmers said six country stations add up to too many. It's the most this area has seen in recent memory. "I think two or three of them will have to change eventually," said Program Director Tim Morgan at WKEZ.

Waiting period: When public station WHRO-FM moved its frequency to 90.3 in September, it created a waiting game at two school-owned stations. WFOS-FM, a classical music station that's run by the Chesapeake school system, agreed to move down the dial from 90.3 to 88.7 to accommodate WHRO. But after that switch was made, the station found its signal interfering with that of a small, 300-watt religious station in Virginia Beach, WODC-FM (88.5). The Federal Communications Commission asked WFOS to decrease its power to parts of Virginia Beach. Residents there wrote the FCC to complain that they could no longer pick up WFOS.

Sen. John Warner also wrote, at the request of a Virginia Beach constituent. "People out there were going berserk," said chief engineer Dave Desler at WFOS. "It delayed us getting final approval of our license." The FCC has to respond to the complaints before it grants WFOS its final license, Desler said. The station has operating at 88.7 with a temporary permit since October, he added.

THe wait at WFOS affects the power upgrade planned at Hampton University jazz station WHOV-FM (88.3). The Hampton station hopes shortly to increase its strength from 1,250 to 10,000 watts and move to 88.1 on the dial. It will mean a clear signal up to Williamsburg and down to the beach. But the FCC has delayed granting a construction permit to WHOV to build a new antenna while the agency works out the WFOS situation, said WHOV chief engineer Bob Grau. It gets more complicated from there.

The bottom line is if WFOS doesn't get final approval to move to 88.7, then WHOV can't get its upgrade. WHOV hopes to get the matter resolved by the end of March. The station would like to broadcast President Bush's commencement address at the college in May, Grau said. "That's the Please see News, D4 Game's popularity still riding high on its 60th birthday By VINCE KOWALICK LA. Daily News -j our rack contains an with.

Do you cash in your letters for seven new ones and for- feit your turn? An estimated 27 percent of American households contain at least one Scrabble set, according to the NSA, and more than 100 million sets have been sold worldwide. "There's a wide range of people who are absolutely in love with this game," said Joe Edley, a former national champion and currently the editor of Scrabble News, a newsletter for enthusiasts. "Housewives, cabdrivers and secretaries are among the echelon of top players along with lawyers, computer programmers and doctors." This is a milestone year for Scrabble, which was invented in 1931 (the game was called Criss-Cross until 1948) by Alfred M. Butts, an unemployed New York architect. The game is celebrating its 60th anniversary with 75 NSA-sanctioned tournaments in North America, culminating with the 1991 NSA Masters tournament in Cincinnati in August, which will attract about 300 of the nation's top wordsmiths.

In September, the first-ever Scrabble world championship invitational tournament, with an estimated top prize of $10,000, will take place in London and will have 48 players from 20 countries. Meanwhile, Scrabble clubs through out the United States and Canada continue to host regular competition for both casual players and those ranked by the NSA, which rates players according to their success, number of games played and quality of opponent. "It's pretty much turned into a whole social thing across the country," said Ruth Sparer-Stern, a Los Angeles attorney and director of Los Angeles Scrabble Club No. 44, one of 1 1 NSA-sanctioned clubs in Southern California. "I met my husband at a Scrabble club.

I like word games, and I love crossword puzzles." Milton Bradley, which acquired the rights to Scrabble in 1989 from longtime manufacturer Selchow and Righter of New York, will release a Scrabble edition for children ages 5 to 8 this year. Their game includes visual clues on the board. Video-game giant Nintendo will release a Scrabble cartridge for its popular hand-held Game Boy unit. The game's premise is as simple as A-B-C: Form interlocking words in crossword fashion across a 225-square, multicolored grid using letter tiles of different point values and in order to take advantage of premium squares on the board to achieve the highest possible Please see Scrabble, D4 But you can bet that they have the word memorized as one of five eight-letter words that contain six vowels. "A lot of Scrabble experts do not know the meaning of some words at all," said John Williams, president of the National Scrabble Association (NSA), in Greenport, N.Y.

"A lot of people think that expert Scrabble players all have these large vocabularies, and it's pretty much a given that most players do. But great Scrabble players just need to know that something is a word and how to spell it." Since the formation of the NSA in 1978 to organize and promote national competition, would-be experts have trained by cramming their brains with words large and small, common and obscure hoping to one day unleash them during the most crucial, jugular-slashing moments of word-to-word combat. Those who only dabble in Scrabble have remained content to confine the competition to a friendly after-dinner game over a bowl of ice cream. Yet there are no two ways about the fact that Scrabble now played in seven languages worldwide, as well as in Braille undoubtedly is an icon among popular board games. A Scrabble novice might.

But Scrabble experts know their P's and Q's. Spotting that open in the far-flung corner of the board, you spill all of your tiles and assemble them vertically to spell "eulogiae," stretching across two double-letter premium squares as well as a double-word premium. The move earns you 22 points plus an additional 50 for recording a bingo official Scrabble lingo for unloading all of your tiles in one turn. Your opponent is speechless. Who cares or even knows that eulogiae (plural for eulogia) is defined as "holy bread" in the Official Scrabble Players Dictionary (OSPD)? Experts of the game certainly don't.

-fj- J.i Diet tips for fatty feline, chubby canine By DEBRA WARNER Orange County Register You can't trust those advertisers. One minute they offer you sausage biscuits and fishy liver snacks; next, they poke fun at your belly and tell you to switch to diet kibbles. In this thin-is-in world, humans aren't the only ones supposed to have trimmer tummies. Our pets are, too. While we humans licked diet chocolate pops and subsisted on frothy diet drinks in the 1980s, pet-food companies were in the lab devising weight-reducing foods for our pets.

Fat felines and dumpy doggies can nibble "lite" biscuits found in posh pet boutiques or high-fiber foods prescribed by veterinarians. Pet diets aren't a silly luxury, along the lines of mink doggy jackets or art-deco cat furniture, veterinarians say. Pet obesity became a major health problem in the past decade, and recent studies show that about a third of dogs and cats carry too-much flab. You can tell your dog is fat if you can't feel its ribs when you run your hand over its chest, said Wayne W. Smith of the Alamitos Animal Hospital.

"Dogs deposit fat in different areas," Pie we see Fat, D4 Child bridges family's cultural past, present By JILL KEECH Staff Writer Brittany Whitman of York County, adopted from a South Korean orphanage, is becoming a real American girl while learning about her native country. The Dare Elementary School kindergarten student loves pizza and is taking ballet lessons, "just like every other American girl," says Kathy Whitman, Brittany's mother, who was born in Korea. Brittany sleeps in a bed now, instead of the mattress on the floor she insisted on when she came to the Whitmans. She has made good progress at learning English. A Nov.

18, 1988, story told of how Kathy herself was abandoned as a baby and sent to an orphanage; she was adopted by an American couple. "Brittany is kind of like a bridge to my past," Kathy says. She and her American husband, Pete, used Brittany's Korean name, Soo-Jin, as the child's middle name. "Keeping her name helps her have that link between her birth country and this country," Kathy says. For Christmas, Brittany's gifts included a tape of Korean children's songs.

In time, the youngster will start Korean school, which the Whitman's 8- 11 Ml LUCILLE DEVIEW. Visiting a friend's mother in a nursing home proves that time can violently jolt fond memories. SMDB. Above: Kathy Whitman says Brittany is "kind of like a bridge to my past." Photo by JOE FUDGEStatt photographer AFTER THE STORY ENDS RESPONDING TO SHORTAGES. Two arts groups have announced fund-saving changes.

Sec DS. year-old twin sons also have attended, since they are half-Korean. Kathy is learning how to cook native dishes, and the family frequently goes out to eat Korean food. Kathy is at home with both cultures, something she wants for her daughter. "I hope she's comfortable with who she is, with her dual heritage, and is never ashamed by it," Kathy says.

KHffl A WEEKLY SERIES TRAVEL Despite the tragedy the country has seen, visitors to Tibet find one of the world's unique wild places. in.