Honolulu Star-Bulletin from Honolulu, Hawaii • 79

Star-Bullefin Today Features Entertainment Honolulu Wednesday, October 20, 1982 i i a 'i 1 A roquet, Vs Somewhere Pac-Man I Must Be Blushing By Tom Green, Gannett News Service A i nyone? ence is his prime target. Also, if a guy can afford Penthouse, he probably can i afford Kesten's cartridges, priced at $49.95 each, well above kid-game cartridges. Packages will be marked for sale to adults only. "To the video stores, we're a savior right now," says Kesten, who added that dealers and distributors think there's a big market for the adult games. So the age of innocence has ended for the video toy mar- ket.

It was bound to happen, but somewhere Pac-Man must be blushing. Atari, meanwhile, disavows any connection ith X-rated 4 James F. Morgan and Robert and Patsy Bunn have a go at knocking the ball around. Star-Bulletin photos by John Titchen. Sy ios Toyor, Star-Bulletin Writer THE author of "Real Men Don't Eat Quiche" insists that real men don't play croquet, either.

Fat chance. Have you ever seen a croquet player with blood In his eye put his foot on tils own ball, poised in back of an opponent's ball, and knock it into the next county? Sissy, indeed. is more misunderstood than the City Council. It is a game of skill, promoting patience and character-building, most of it bad. Moss Hart once said of Darryl Zanuck, "He has the true croquet spirit.

He trusts no one but himself; never concedes no matter how far behind he may be and hates his opponents with an all-enduring hate." A go-for-the-jugular croquet player makes your average ill-tempered tennis player look like Mother Teresa by comparison. So a day devoted to croquet or croquet-watching is not to be compared to a day of watching haircuts or listening to campaign speeches. Oahu will have its first such event on Saturday, Oct. 30, at the Hawaiian Croquet Tournament and Countryfest, to be held between 10 a.m. and 5 p.m.

at the Mokuleia Polo Club field. The playday is a benefit for the Hawaii Opera Theater with 30 croquet courts to be laid out on the polo field. Each may be rented for the day for a tax-deductible $100, on which as many as 10 people may play. Spectators will pay an admission fee of $2. Jack Osborn, president of the U.S.

Croquet Association, is stopping here On his way to an international match in Australia to Introduce the sport. Osborn, a world-class croquet player, will give a free clinic at a.m. and be available to settle thorny questions of play during the afternoon. Osborn plays the six-wicket game with the pole in the middle, as opposed to the nine-wicket variety generally played in the backyard. But he is broadminded, and players can choose either set-up.

The six-wicket game is faster, but speed has never been considered a factor by the serious croquetier. The playday was the inspiration of James F. Morgan, president of the Hawaii Opvi a Theater and founding member of the absolutely brand new Oahu Croquet Club. "I remember croquet as a game we played as kids in Kahala when it was a place families went for weekends," Bud Morgan reminisced. "There were no houses on the mnuica side, nothing but kiawe trees.

There were no big fences on the Kahala Avenue lots everything was contiguous. The boundaries for the game were Waialae Golf Course. Kahala Avenue, Black Point and the ocean. The object was how far away from home you could hit somebody's ball. "We played barefoot in the kiawe thorns, and you'd usually hobble through the last part of the game There was always somebody at home soaking his foot in hot Indians Fire on 'Custer's Revenge' LOS ANGELES (AP)-Indian groups are protesting what they term a "disgusting" videogame cartridge, but the makers of "Custer's Revenge" say they won't pull their product off the market.

The game, which depicts a naked cavalryman whose goal is to have sex with an Indian woman, have drawn fire from the American Indian Movement and Indians United. "It's absolutely disgusting." said Lois Red Elk of the AIM. She complains that the game, which is marketed by American Multiple Industries, is demeaning to women. The firm was picketed by-Indians during a New York video-game convention. video games that have been advertised as being compatible with the Atari Video Computer System.

The Sunny- vale, firm said its technology was designed only for wholesome family entertainment. (Atari has since announced it is taking legal action against American Multiple Industries' sex-theme games.) "Atari takes a very dim view of this use of our product," said Michael Moone, president of Atari's consumer electronics division. "To say that Atari is responsible for this occurrence would be as illogical as censoring a camera company for making cameras because a few people take pornographic photographs." water from an infected kiawe thorn. "So last year when I was thinking of things opera could do to raise money, so people could know who we are, I remembered croquet. We were looking for something that would bring in a few dollars from sources we don't keep going back to over and over again, and would give people an opportunity to know that opera isn't stuffy, staid and intellectually elite." So Morgan went to the library and borrowed a copy of "Croquet: The Complete Guide to History, Strategy, Rules and Records" by James Charlton and William Thompson.

The book, now out of print, tells everything you ever needed to know about the game along with some cheery little anecdotes about Hollywood croquet in the, 1920s. 1 "In one memorable match," the book relates, "Harpo Marx needed only to hit (Alexander) Woollcott's ball to cinch the match, but there was a maple tree between the two balls. Harpo dragged out an old auto tire, sawed it in half, and put it around the tree, and came out the other side smacking Woollcott's Furious, Alex stamped off." Among croquet players, Woollcott was known to be "irascible in victory, impossible in defeat." Herbert Bayard Swope publisher of the New York World, built a croquet court on his Long Island estate that was practically a small golf course, complete with sand traps and roughs. Once when he and Harpo were playing, it became too dark to continue the match, so Swope had his guests ring the court with their cars and turn on their headlights. Two hours later the game ended and so had five of the auto batteries.

The book also gave the name and address of Osborn as president of the U.S. Croquet Association, and at the same time Morgan saw a paragraph in Business Week stating that croquet was the fastest-growing sport in America. So he called Osborn in New York and the two men met at Kuilima when Osborn was vacationing there. The result was the establishment of the Oahu Croquet Club. At the moment, it has only a handful of members and no court.

The club is looking for some of each, and while membership doesn't promise much of anything, you do get a pretty spiffy looking card and a copy of the book by Charlton and Thompson. Morgan doesn't even have an official croquet set (the kind with the wire hoop wickets doesn't count). But Robert Bunn, a director of Hawaii Opera Theater, and his wife. Patsy, do and it's a state-of-the-art Jacques set imported from Europe. The balls are solid hardwood and the wickets are right-angled with only one-inch clearance for the ball.

Morgan hopes that serious croquet players will surface for the Mokuleia playday, and bring their croquet sets with them. There will be competition among the various courts, with a Weekend at Wailea Intercontinental Hotel going to the winning pair. This, Morgan hastens to assure players, does not compromise one's amateur standing. There aren't any professional croquet players at all. "We hope people will make a sort of Victorian outing of the day," Morgan added, "and that the players will wear white.

Allison Holland is designing a Victorian setting for spectators, and we'll have a lunch wagon and a bar for beer and wine if you don't want to bother packing a picnic." Admission for spectators will be collected at the gate, but anyone interested in reserving a court should call the Hawaii Opera Theater at 521-6537. As Morgan pointed out, that's only $10 apiece for 10 people and you don't need ever to have picked up a croquet mallet. Nobody's going to be terribly good, but they might be mean. NORTHRIDGE, Calif. Since the news got out about his X-rated video games, Stuart Kesten's telephone has been ringing so briskly that he doesn't like to take even a minute to discuss his product for fear of missing another order.

He is marketing the first adult home-video game cartridges for the Atari crowd, a legion thought to number in the neighborhood of 12 million. "Videotape recorders were nothing until the X-rated tapes came along," he said. "The video disc remains comatose today because there's no adult product for them." Kesten has dreamed up three game cartridges that should begin arriving in two weeks, primarily in video and record stores around the country. One is harmless enough. You would hardly have to shoo the kids out of the room.

Called Bachelor Party, it's really a variation of the popular game cartridge Super Breakout. The second, called Custer's Revenge, is more sophisticated and explicit. The object: A naked little guy has to reach the naked Indian maiden before he gets done in by a barrage of arrows. Don't be alarmed by all this nudity. If you've spent time with an Atari, you know it hasn't advanced much beyond cartoon stick figures.

Only the rare cartoon stick figure is erotic. It doesn't matter how naked the Atari people get, they still look like rocket ships. Of course, what happens when the little guy succeeds in reaching his it's not waves crashing on the shore. The third game, Beat 'Em Eat 'Em, abandons good taste and certainly will not be discussed here. "The objective of all of these games is to entertain," Kesten said.

"There's a high level of intensity when you play them. We use the same chip that Atari and Activision use." By the end of next year, his American Multiple Industries firm plans to have 24 adult cartridges available. But is the world ready for computer sex? Kesten's research has determined that a full third of Penthouse subscribers own" Ataris, and that type of audi "What is the advantage to your system?" he asked. There are several advantages, and they go this way: First, you don't have to go shopping very often. At most, I make one shopping trip a month.

I've gone as long as two months between trips. Second, you don't accumulate things that begin piling up in most kitchens those extra cans of stewed tomatoes and soup gathering dust in a cabinet; the smoked Korean oysters; the packages of frozen chicken in the back of the freezer; the half-filled jajs of Welch's grape jelly, side by side in the refrigerator door. Under my system, you cannot accumulate cans of stewed Mike Royko Food and the Single Man Blindness Brings No NEnd to His Images By Mkhiko Kakutani, VN.Y. Times of dried out, slab-like, onion pancakes. Then I fried the two eggs and put them on top of the sort-of-pancakes.

"It sounds awful," my friend said. The advantages to this system are obvious. It's economical, because you never buy anything you don't eventually eat. "But what about your children," my friend said. "Isn't this rough on them?" Actually, my sons were partly responsible for my approach to food shopping.

I discovered a law of eating, which I call Royko's Law. It gocs --this way: Young people will always eat anything that is convenient, then wait until you buy some more convenient foods, and they will eat them, tOO. So under my system, when the' frozen pizzas are gone, they i either eat what is left, or they don't eat, "That's kind of sadistic, isn't it?" my friend Yes, but then, what else are young people good for? I am particularly fond of the memory of the evening my youngest son came home and found me in front of the TV set with a bowl in mv lap. "What'are you having for i supper?" he asked, looking -hungry. "Raisin Bran," 1 said.

"There's 1 still some left in the kitchen." He looked in my bowl and said: "Jeez, there's no milk. It's I Chicago Sun-Times CHICAGO An old friend stopped by recently and went to the refrigerator to get himself a beer. He took the beer but stood looking inside the refrigerator for several seconds. Then he opened the freezer section and looked at that for awhile. And he began opening kitchen cabinets and looking inside.

Finally he shook his head and said: "Are you moving or something?" "No. Why do you ask?" He looked in a couple of more cabinets, then said: "You don't have any food in this place. I mean, absolutely nothing." I nodded. He was right. There wasn't a thing to eat in the entire kitchen.

Not a morsel. Not a crust of stale bread. Not one can of tomato soup or a spoonful of peanut butter to be scraped out of the bottom of a jar. Nothing. He shook his head.

"You don't even have a can of stewad tomatoes or things like that. Everybody's got an old can of something or other in their kitchen. But you don't have a single thing. Don't you ever eat?" Of course I eat. I eat too much.

"Ah, then you eat all your meals in restaurants." No, only lunch. And dinner out maybe once a week. The rest of my meals I have at home. "But there's nothing here to eat. I don't understand." Most people don't.

So I explained the Royko System of Food Shopping for the Single Man. It works on a very simple principle: I buy groceries once in awhile. And in large quantities, too. But then I don't buy another thing until everything is gone. My friend happened to come along the day after I had eaten the last food in the kitchen a can of tuna and a frozen waffle.

tions all share an air of unreality. Indeed, the fantastical events and fabulous beasts that populate his fiction-transparent tigers, wizards who conjure up visions in a bowl of ink, encyclopedias that do not chronicle events but cause them demonstrate that his real literary affinities lie not with the avant-garde, but with those other masters of the marvelous such as Kafka, H.G. Wells and G.K. Chesterton. "I think I share their amazement at things," says Borges.

"Things are a kind of fairy tale to me. I suppose I'm still a boy, though I'm an old man." i This dizzying sense of a sickening awareness of the "'muchness' of the world" Borges explains, was nur- tured by his own childhood nightmares and the dense, stifling atmosphere of Buenos Aires. "You have the plains and the pampas, but it is a tropical city," he says. "You feel the endless number of events, of people, of leaves, of mosquitoes, of all kinds of insects, of serpents." Born into a English-Spanish family that had played an Important role in Argentina's 19th-century struggle for independence "we were not wealthy; my father had only six slaves" Borges was a frail, near-sighted child, who spent most of his time In his father's extensive English library. For several years, Borges worked as an assistant at a small municipal library in Buenos Aires, but lost the job in 1946, when his anti-Peronist activities resulted In his being assigned to work as a government inspector of chickens and rabbits.

In 1955, following President Juan D. Peron's fall, he was appointed director of NEW YORK The key had been misplaced, and Luis Borges was locked lout of his room. Having just 12 hours on a plane 'from Buezos Aires, the world-renowned Argentine author -Vas now feeling tired and a Ibit lost. Still, as his own filled with mazes and 'mirrors, will attest, that feel--ing of dislocation is a common 'one. for him, and he seemed -resigned to sit in the lobby of 'hw host's buildingwaiting for -someone to open the door, as he: passed the afternoon talk-: -Jng to a stranger.

At 83, Borges is a shy, jfragile-seeming man, gentlemanly in manner and locution. Long acknowledged as a literary master with the world, he achieved international recognition in 1961, when he and Samuel Beckett both won the 'International Editors' Prize, 'and since then, has been a Nobel Prize nomi--'nee. Recently, he not only the ranks of prominent foreign writers including W.S. Naipaul, Joseph Brodsky and Czeslaw Milosz who have delivered the William James -lecture at the New York Institute for the Humanities, but he also received a citation from New York University. Such public acclaim comes as something of a surprise to Borges, who has led a unworldly life a life almost only by books.

"To me, reading has been a way of living," he says. "I think the only possible fate for me was a literary life. I can't think of myself in a bookless world. I need books. They mean everything to me." Although the baroque, metaphor-filled prose of his youth has given way to a new concision of style, Borges's fic- Jorge Luis Borges the National Library of Argentina; ironically enough, it was the same year in which he found he could no longer see well enough to read or write.

His father and great-grandfather had gone blind before him, and Borges said he knew for years that blindness was "my fate, my doom." "I know two twilights," he said. "The twilight of the dove morning; and the twilight of the raven evening. One is blindness, the other is old age." Still, he continues, "gradual blindness is hardly a tragedy. First, the colors and shapes begin to go. The first colors I lost were black and red.

Then three colors blue, green and yellow were left. Yellow was the last to go, but now even that has left me. The whole thing turned sort of brownish everything is very dim." "Maybe I feel very lost because the world is meaningless. Those who think of it as a cosmos not a chaos maybe feel very safe. I do Sometimes there are strange hints that there is a secret order in the universe.

Perhaps it is realized after death, but I hope death will blot me out. I would welcome oblivion. I am, tired. After 83 years of put-, ting up with Borges I am sick of him." tomatoes because you have to eat them before you can shop again. "You must have some peculiar meals," he said.

There have been a few unusual meals, yes. One evening. I found that the last edible items in the kitchen were three eggs, a half-stick of margarine, an onion, and some flour. I could have taken the easy way out and had three fried eggs. But I was more creative than that.

It seemed to me that if I mixed a cup of flour with an egg, some margarine and water and chopped onion, I would have a form of dough. So I did. I spread the dough on a pan and put it in the oven, hoping it would become some kind of bread. As it turned out, my creation became something that resembled onion pancakes. Sort I just ary tuisin bran.

"It's not bad," I said, scooping I. my uiuuiu Willi my fingers. "But some does tend to fall on your shirt." My friend went back to the I refrigerator and said: "I notice there's no shortage of beer, so you must do some extra f. shopping for that." "As an ancient wise man once said," I told him, "man cannot not live by. Raisin Bran alone." i.