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Tampa Bay Times from St. Petersburg, Florida • 59

Publication:
Tampa Bay Timesi
Location:
St. Petersburg, Florida
Issue Date:
Page:
59
Extracted Article Text (OCR)

FLORIDIAN TO CONTACT US ABOUT FLORIDIAN: By phone: (813)893-8221 or (800) 333-7505, ext 8221 By fax: (813) 892-2327 By e-mail: floridiansptimes.corn SUNDAY, AUGUST 2 3 1 9 9 8 THE TIMES Investmente or has-bsanies? I- Will the bustling Beanie Baby market be bullish or bearish over the long run? The financial bean counters say that recreation, not riches, is the only assured payoff Pinky the flamingo will be bestowed on all kids 14 and younger who attend today's Devil Rays game against the Kansas City Royals. i I That's the big Beanie question. Beanie Babies can be collected for sentimental reasons, as a hobby or for fun, but is there a financial reason to coDect them? Will that $6 cloth sack fifled with PVC pellets that you bought today be worth $100 three months from now? Or are the prices artificially inflated, based solely on what sellers think they can get? Many financial consultants, appraisers and memorabilia collectors wont even talk about Beanie Babies. They see the mass-produced toys strictly as a fad, anything but a sound long-term investment A check through several Internet sites offering Beanie Babies shows that while a few Beanies were priced at more than $2,000, and one (Peanut the royal blue elephant) was ByTOMZUCCO priced at 55200, most were less than $20. "Like anything, you have to get in and out 1 Are they worth it? Ask yourself that as you're rushing madly from one McDonald's to the next like you're on some chofcsterol scavenger hunt Or when you're standing in line today outside Tropicana Field, in the heat and humidity, with the bugs and the boredom and a bladder about to burst When you finally pull those Beanie Babies down from the attic 10 years from now and take them to a collector, will they be worth 10 times what they are today? A hundred times? Or, as some people suspect will you end up sticking them on a card table at next summer's yard sale, next to the G.L Joes and Cabbage Patch dolls, with a sign that reads: Your Choice TlmM photo before the market is saturated," said Eric Lang Peterson, a St Petersburg-based certified appraiser.

"You have to buy and sell real quickly. If you hang on too long, I can't imagine the market wiD hold those values. Please see HAS-6EANIES 3F Fox network is first out of the box If the network's trademark cutting edginess is what you're expecting from its new crop of TV shows, then youll just have to wait a bit longer. By ERIC DEGGANS Tlnm TMvMon Critic For more than 10 years, the Fox network has developed a reputation for edgy, often-groundbreaking series television: from The Simpsons and Married With Children to The files and Ally McBeal the only breakout hit on any network during the 1997-98 TV season. So why does this year's crop of new Fox series look so, weD, disappointing? Hoping to draw blood before the deluge of new fall shows mat begins next month, the spotlight network has scheduled its first two sitcoms to debut tonight the single-daddy-raises-infant comedy Holding the Baby and That 70s Show, a program that tries to do for the 70s what Happy Days did for the 50s.

Although Fox has planned several other new series to debut over the next few weeks with its next-most-promising show, Hollyweird, now reportedly moved off the fall schedule That 70s Show stands as the network's greatest hope for a fall hit That" unfortunate. As innovative as this series about a group of teens growing up in a fictional, 70s-era Wisconsin town can be, the two episodes provided to critics dont yet add up to a consistent comedy. Centered on 17-year-old Eric Foreman (Topher Grace), growing up Please see FOX 8F HISTORY The head of the National Endowment for the Humanities is a Mississippian who appreciates the South's reverence for what has come before. He believes that Florida's history is part of that great legacy. By JOHN FLEMING Tim ffwfomilng Art Critic William Ferris' favorite novel by William Faulkner is Absalom, which contains a famous epitaph for the South: "Tell about the South.

What it like there. What do they do there. Why do -IS 7 I Ybor City cigar rollers, 1920s WORTH p. they live there. Why do they live at al" Ferris, chairman of the National Endowment for the Humanities, has made it his life's work to tell about the South, but some 30 years ago, he felt deep ambivalence, if not downright shame, about coming from Mississippi "You'd get in a taxicab in New York, and the driver would ask, 'Where are you from? and I would say, Tm from and I'd want to say, But I didn't kill those three Ferris said recently, referring to the murders of three civil rights workers that galvanized national outrage against Mississippi and the segregationist South in the 1960s.

But the South has risen again. Since at least the presidency of Jimmy Carter, the region has been busily Wonwn Syndicate Tad Bartimus' writing students at the University of Alaska reminded her that everyone has a story to tell. That simple truth led me full circle back to my own life and my own stories, the impetus for Among Friends." Introducing Timet photo Over the span of his lifetime, William Ferris, 56, has seen the South go from being reviled to being close to the center of the United States' conception. Bartimus Timet Staff Writer Seminole Indians of Florida, 1929 SAVING putting the sins of its past to rest Nowadays everything from the popularity of country music to the 1996 Summer Olympics in Atlanta attests to the acceptance of all things Southern in American culture. Ferris, who grew up on a farm outside Vicksburg, has contributed as much as anyone to the rehabilitation of the South.

For 18 years, he was founding director of the Center for the Study of Southern Culture, a daring academic hybrid of high and low cultural studies at the University of Mississippi, one that treats Elvis Presley's impact on social change as seriously as the influence of industrialization on the region's growth and development He was co-editor of the acclaimed Encyclopedia of Southern Culture, a tome that takes a distinctly populist approach to scholarship, with offbeat entries on such Southern delicacies as Goo Goo Clusters and droDy captioned photos, such as one of a "Stereotypical redneck southerner, in the film Easy Rider" in a section on violence. Ferris wrote essays for the encyclopedia on such subjects as a Mississippi mule trader, voodoo, blues musician James "Son Ford" Thomas and folk painting. Trained as an anthropologist with a doctorate in folklore from the University of Pennsylvania, Ferris is one of America's leading public intellectuals, serving his first year as chairman of the NEH, which finances projects that range from the editing and publication of presidential papers to Ken Burns' TV documentaries on the Civil War and baseball. Over the span of his lifetime, Ferris, 56, has seen the South go from being reviled to being close to the center of the United States' conception of itself. He explains that change in terms of popular culture.

"I think the South has always been more accessible because ifs been written about and sung Please see HISTORY 3F liiili'l 1 i Hiiii" lliHIHj I' She was a hard-driving, nothing-can-stop-me reporter for the Associated Press with 25 years' experience covering major news stories throughout the world when she got slammed to a dead stop by lupus. The illness made Tad Bartimus consider her life. The hlpus has transformed me from a globetrotting journalist into an observer of smaller moments," she says. That sharper focus on small things has resulted in a weekly column called Among Friends, which debuts today in Floridian. Bartimus, 50, describes the column as "the happy result of lemons turning into lemonade." The physical challenges of her chronic illness forced Bartimus to acknowledge that she could no longer do daily journalism She quit the AP and for three years taught writing at the University of Alaska in Anchorage.

She now lives in Hawaii with her liusband, a public school teacher. I Friends, she says, are "God's for relatives. They have seen me Jhrough the good and the terrible. When I write my stories, I imagine Jelling them to my friends. Well laugh together, cry together, puzzle our way Jhrough no matter what lesson life is trying to teach us." i YouU find Tad Bartimus' Among Friends on page 2F of today's Floridian.

7 Photo from Time files Tarpon Springs Sponge Exchange, 1967.

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