Tampa Bay Times from St. Petersburg, Florida • 58

6d TIMES SUNDAY. DECEMBER 6, 1992 Don Addis Cancer from 1D Feet Fleet meets U.S. enterprise VeR POTTING TOTHfcR A TRANSITION TEAJ Don Addis When I first saw the headline, "40,000 Nikes wash ashore in Oregon," I was stunned. I thought they meant missiles. How could our security be so lax? But then I read on.

It was Nike shoes that had washed up, the result of a mas I vj i ia sive sneaker spill at sea. When are the world's slipper shippers going to wise up and use double-hulled tankers? To Oregonians on the beach, it must have looked like a Lilliputian re-enactment of the Normandy invasion. The Feet Fleet. The Shoe Villa Flotilla. But typical American enterprise seized the day, and beachcombers soon had set up their card tables for a swap meet to reunite left and right shoes into marketable pairs.

Sort of a shoe-in, you might say. And why not? The footwear was still perfectly wearable, especially if you go for the stone-washed look. They only squeak for a little while. Only problem was dumping out all those hermit crabs who thought they had found their dream homes complete with wall-to-wall cushioning. Marine authorities the people who advise us about oil spills, jel- I WS'C' red tide intrusions suggest that, if Protection Agency's new standard allows "negligible" pesticide residues posing "acceptable" cancer risks.

Even by administration estimates, this is likely to result in tens of thousands of avoidable cancers every year. In March 1992, the White House blocked proposed Occupational Safety and Health Administration standards for more than 500 carcinogenic and toxic air contaminants in agricultural, construction and maritime in dustries. In a bizarre "wealth is theory, the administration says the proposed standards would damage workers' health by forcing industry to cut wages and jobs. In April 1992, Rep. Henry Waxman, accused President Bush of gutting the Clean Air Act.

Meeting secretly with industry lobbyists, Quayle's council developed loopholes permitting oil refineries and thousands of other industries to vastly increase emissions of carcinogens and toxic chemicals. Recent administration proposals have included abrogating the regulating authority of federal agencies and allowing industry to dump millions of tons of untreated carcino-genie and toxic wastes in municipal dumps. Complementing the administration's regulatory "relief is its control of, or at least powerful influence over, federal research. A report last summer by public-interest groups charged that federal researchers, including the Centers for Disease Control, conducted hundreds of deliberately inconclusive studies on the relationship of environmental pollution to cancer and other diseases. Flaws included hiring biased researchers and conducting studies too small to produce significant findings.

The administration's influence extends to the National Cancer Institute (NCI), the chief federal agency for cancer research and poli cy. The White House appoints the director, the three-member executive panel (the late Armand Hammer, CEO of Occidental Petroleum was its last chairman) and the 18-mem-ber advisory board. The NCI allocates less than 10 percent of its $2-billion annual budget to cancer prevention, while misleadingly claiming much higher spending. Environmental pollution and occupational exposures are trivialized as significant causes of cancer. The institute's approach to cancer prevention runs the gamut from indifference to hostility.

Despite strong opposition from independent cancer experts, the NCI supports destroying the national chemical testing program. Following its establishment in this unique program tested an annual average of 40 industrial and consumer products. Federal and state regulators paid close attend tion to chemicals subsequently listed as pos ing cancer risks. This year, only four new chemicals are being tested. Even this is too much for the administration it proposes testing procedures that would all but ensure that no substance, not even asbestos, could be classified as carcinogenic.

An industry spokesman who is a former senior NCI official stated: "We have to use an economic test. If it is useful to society, we will not call it a carcinogen." A report issued in February by around 70 leading experts in cancer prevention and public health expressed "grave concerns over the failure of the war against cancer" and urged radical reforms. Given the national toll of cancer, its prevention, unmentioned during the campaign, should rank high among the new presf-' dent's priorities. Bill Clinton and Al Gore, with their strong commitment to environmental and health concerns, show promise', especially if they recognize the high economic costs and inflationary impact of cancer. tors make when they spit it out.

The good news is, American kids are bigger than they used to be. The bad news is, it's because they're exercising less and eating more. The worse news is, 10.25 percent of them are getting that food with food stamps. When they heard the government was going to allow the drug Depo Provera into the country, many Americans cheered the news. That's because most of them thought Depo Provera was a southpaw pitcher from Santo Domingo.

Bitter bidders: They held an auction in Italy to sell 20 of Hitler's water colors, but nobody bid on 'em. Oh, well. Lots of painters don't get popular 'til long after they're dead. Then there's that unusual leopard frog they found out west that experts say is extremely rare because it has no voice. I guess that means the poor amphibian, being croakless, can't call for a mate and thus doesn't mate often, resulting in a low tadpole count.

Either that or it's not rare at all; it's just so quiet nobody knows it's there. Don't forget her booster chair: A six-week-old girl named Sandra received orders to report for assignment as a Swedish Army armored vehicle driver. Yessir, it's easy to laugh at those dumb Swedes, right? Just remember, it's in America that we punish kids who skip school by not allowing them to come to school. From Absolute Zero Gravity, a collection of scientific humor by Betsy Devine and Joel E. Cohen: "There are three kinds of people in this world those who can count and those who can't." Don Addis is a cartoonist for the Times.

ape peeled off his attire. Well, what would youave done? Argued with him that green slacks don't go with orange hair? Why did the big ape do it? Maybe he was a fashion critic. Maybe he was just taking the stuff to be cleaned and pressed. My guess is his anthropoid buddies put him up to it. "Dare you to de-pants the Frenchman in front of the whole tour bus!" An official commented, "This unusual incident is a warning to all tourists to wear clothes which cannot be removed easily." (Shucks! That takes half the fun out of vacationing.) Me, I'd worry that having trouble getting my trousers off might just irritate the wacky pongid all the more.

The official added, "We will track it and see if the animal attempts to wear the Frenchman's clothes." Seems to me it would be easier just to stake out the tailor shops and wait for a suspicious-looking customer to come in and ask, "Could you lengthen the sleeves on this jacket about 14 inches?" Mother Nature's little helpers: Up in Alaska, they're allowing folks to shoot wolves as a means to "help" the balance of nature and, incidentally, boost the population of moose and caribou for the state's lucrative hunting trade. Surely the wolves would agree the balance of nature already is messed up enough from our putting our thumbs on the scale. Who says women aren't fit for combat? Men had their battles of Bunker Hill, San Juan Hill and Pork Chop Hill. Women have the battle of Anita Hill. Wonder what took science so long to discover the pitohui, the world's only poisonous bird, over in New Guinea.

I understand it got its name for the sound preda there's a shoe infestation at your beach, you should shuffle your feet as you would if there 1 To THE 5HoREi Of TRIPLE -V. were stingrays around. You might just slip into something comfortable. Pickled shoes may not be the wave of the future, but it was Nike, after all, who gave us the slogan, "Just stew it!" Monkey see, monkey wear: A French tourist in Malaysia was stripped of his clothes, underwear and all, by a male orangutan. The beast then fled into the forest with the clothes.

Honest. That's what the story said. Strange, yes, but put it to music and you'd have a great opening act for Madonna. They say the Frenchman stood absolutely still as the Vesperi from 1D the man in the picture. Most likely, however, I was drawn to the fashion ad because of my mother, who couldn't walk far and had to use a wheelchair to venture beyond the yard during the last years of her life.

When we went out, I noticed, the folks we met looked right over her head and spoke to me. She accepted this gracefully, but after awhile I didn't. "She's not deaf!" I would snap at people, especially physicians, whom I thought should know better. My mom had scleroderma, a painful degenerative disease that can alter one's physical appearance. I didn't think she looked much different, and she rarely complained, so I failed to appreciate how self-conscious she felt until a photographer from our hometown newspaper snapped some photos of her gardens while she was outside.

My mother was tremendously interested in horticulture, and in her stronger days our yard was a local showpiece. This particular rock gar den was still very beautiful, and it certainly fit the bill for one of those innocent "summer days" pictures of a cow, a kid on a bike or, in this case, a gardener poking around. I came home to find my mother in a highly uncharacteristic rage, which I failed to quell, after hearing the story, by explaining that the photographer was within his legal rights to shoot any scene that was fully visible from the street. She then phoned the newspaper, a remarkably assertive step for her, and demanded that the pictures not be used. "I'm a disabled person," she announced, venting the humiliation accumulated from a hundred slights and stares.

"I have a right to my privacy." I don't know what was said at the other end, but she hung up satisfied. The photos were never published. Years later, the Hecht's department store chain is saying that people in wheelchairs look good enough to model fancy clothes. Hecht's is the equivalent of Bur-dines for the Washington region, with 43 stores in D.C., Maryland, Virginia and some in North Carolina. Nancy Chistolini said she knew that Kmart uses disabled models in its ad campaigns, but she wasn't aware of a merchandising chain equivalent to Hecht's that did.

"They are our customers," she said. "We never used them in an ad. Why not?" Nothing against Kmart or the specialty catalogs that have featured disabled models for years, but this is modeling and role modeling in the fast lane. Hecht's is the kind of market-researched, image-conscious store that sparkles a lot, never seems overcrowded and even smells expensive. All that matters because, when it comes to setting advertising trends, Hecht's is a leader that other businesses will be eager to copy.

"We hear from customers who say it's so great," Chistolini mused. "I wonder why we didn't do it before?" "There has been a greater movement toward targeting specific economic groups" including the disabled, he said. "My feeling is that everyone is just trying to get a buck, and they do whatever they have to do to get it," he added later, displaying more than a touch of cynicism. Yet, even Shera acknowledged that the Hecht's campaign is different: "Hecht's has been the most routine. There is someone at Hecht's who is really committed." I appreciated that commitment when I saw the ad, perhaps because I admire the determined men and women in wheelchairs who ride the subway to work in downtown Washington.

Maybe it was because I had attended an event at the Vietnam Memorial earlier that week. I saw quite a few men in wheelchairs, some of them wearing nice leather jackets like CROSSWORD 'Casablanca' at 50 By CHARLES E. GERSCH Puzzles edited by Eugene T. Maleska hIe I'm" i It a I I a It I aIrIp ft a In I I six OLA nUs 0 nA A rM 0 WATERSOIL sU RENEgaONTAP En A I 007 JInIG OjU Z3(l i iOei sfjOE rTr Epl IT line oh sh i 1 sQu sis IJ 0 A rfsjE SB ifjJT TITLE U3E eHe EOS 0 a gw TTlId rJs aVieTr sWr a 0 eIssJHM fM A E3m a Nfpfii a mlc A i it a dus 0 1 hje 0 i tis litBseIllersbu vieIr sB SPORT I EHA MESao! I sJaTb OaJx I a FmfJo ill tQr a i nJsIs i In sQo ESS A Sji F0Uf sJE-j sol dICXJ A IS LJA SB HjE IS A I OfiL I TM I ITS A TE I pf A SfjE A tjJaIsIe 6 IeJaIr II tJrIuJsIi die His 1 2 3 4 5 7 8 9 '0 11 12 13 14 15 16 17 IB 19 20 I "24 rj 25 26 "29 JO 31 32 33 34 35 37 38 39 40 41 42 "1 43 "46 mK IpMMfHOnaeitiMMii Md 49 SO 53 54 55 ril it S8 J.yi-gj Jj60- 6. 63-W 66 67 68 69 7() ppr 73 TfT CTMM TeT 77 78 r1 ab si 82 83 84 85 JI86 I i 87 88 89 90 t9 92 93 94 95 i 96 9 98 T99 TOO 101 102 pwK 1 Ibl 104 HK 1m 107 108 109 no "iTi 112 TTi Myi j.

114 115 116 117 118 119 120 121 122 fT T2l Hi.4 1 IE 1 1 1 1 1 1 1 1 t-J 1 I I Solution to the Nov. 29 puzzle, "Opposites Attract" 96 Pulitzer Prize journalist Arthur 100 girl!" 101 Deceitful 103 Travelers' stops 105 Rani's wear 106 Multipurpose bean 107 African antelope 108 Gentle soul 111 R-V connector 113 Spoon or tune follower 114 RICK BLAINE 118 With 121 Across, song that Sam was asked to play 120 Rick's "gin joint" 121 See 118 Across 122 DeMille's Delilah 123 Columnist I Shan 124 Type of prof. 125 tatts' neighbors DOWN 1 Me really makes money 2 Obligate, in a way 3 Those Frenchmen 4 Most August babies 5 Units of force 6 Roller at Reno 7 Do business on Wall Street 8 Some census data 9 Warning sounds from Fido 10 Educator's deg. 1 1 Some members of the reed section 12 Musical mixture 13 Govt, group 14 pectore (from the bottom of the heart) 54 RR depot 55 Asserts without proof 56 "Casablanca" producer 59 Be a good 60 Actress Van Devere 62 Scotsman's negative 63 One side of a coin: Abbr, 66 An Oscar-winning screenwriter of "Casablanca" 67 Revitalized 70 Go wild over 72 Perform Christies 73 Thespians' org. 74 Sahara wanderer 75 Mall unit 76 UGARTE 80 Political alliance 82 Actor Taylor 85 Soak flax 86 Diable 87 the usual suspects" "Casablanca" quote) 88 Pineapples 90 Lilnas' neighbors 91 Knockabout comedy 92 MAJ.

STRASSF.R 93 Wax: Comb, form 94 A seventh-century dale ACROSS I Culinary Julia 6 Slanly type, for short 10 tap dog, for short 13 Broadcasts 17 SAM. with 21 Across 18 II.SA l.UNl) 21 See 17 Across 22 to Rick's" (the film's original title) 24 Me may be tight 25 Part of a part 27 She, in Siena 28 "Now me 29 Noted S. architect 30 Calls at Wimbledon 32 Flindu honorifics 31 Gone up 30 Stun 37 Figure of speech 39 Really enjoy, slang'ily 42 Pigpen 43 looking at you, kid" quote) 44 Sci-fi horror film: 1979 46 Symbols of hardness 48 Make fun of, old style 49 Movie-theater treat 52 Malante's writing implement 53 Summa laude 15 Key watched o'er them 16 Nothing to (important) 17 Resided 19 Month after Nisan 20 Tatum'sdad 23 Midday snooze 26 FERRARI 31 Vessel of the future 33 Actor McKellen 35 as he was ambitious, Shak. 36 Moines 38 Funeral oration 40 a strap 41 VICTOR 1AS7.LO 43 Sphere prcceder 45 Anger 47 Worldwide maritime gp. 48 Mint drink 49 Moscow's Gorky 50 Supermarket choices 51 Alger hero's trait 52 Fraternity letters 53 CAPT.

LOUIS RENAULT 57 Forever day 58 Washday aids 61 Window," Stewart film 64 Red ford is one 65 Someobjets d'art 67 Fearsome threesome 68 Scandinavian 69 Ostrich's cousin 71 Hesitant one's sound 75 Adhered 77 It was: tat. 78 Pseudomaniacs 79 "It's still the same story 81 Neither's companion 90 Sent along 99 Actor who sang 82 Enthrall 83 of Venus," 1940's musical 84 "Li'l Abner" role 89 Tooth specialists' gp. 104 Show-biz medium 107 People generally 109 Would be assassin: 1981 110 "Serpico" author 1 12 G.l.'s hangouts 1 15 Adj. for some' stock 1 16 Bikini part 1 17 Explosive initials 119 A.sian holiday "The Impossible Dream" 101, song (inexpensively) 102 "The Time Machine" race 91 Airfoil 93 Lent, in Lille 95 Ex (book owner's ID) 97 Clumsy 98 Cake topping.