The Courier from Waterloo, Iowa • 19

Entertainment I C4 1 Sheldon novel delivers even more than it promises "Make It Legitimate," methods organized crime uses to encroach on businesses. 9p.m. MS-150 Bike Tour of the Bridge of Madison County, Saturday and Sunday. BEGINS IN ANKENY OVERNIGHT IN WINTERSET CALL (800) 798-6677 FOR INFO. OPINION CO DEAR ABDY C4 Section Courier Friday September 16, 1994 Carolyn Cole, Lifestyles Editor Melody Parker, Asst.

Lifestyles Editor CJ Hlnes, Community Editor Waterloo Cedar Falls, Iowa Newsmakers mm P(Q) WE Decorated milk caps are coming from California to a playground near you Playing Pogs (For two or more players) Each player stacks the same number of pogs on top of each other, face down. Hard surfaces work best Players determine who will go first by flipping a pog in the center of the play area and calling heads or tails. One player starts the game by taking a slammer and throwing it at an opposing player's stack. That player may keep any of the opposing player's pogs that fall face up when the stack is toppled by the slammer. Players continue taking turns in a clockwise motion.

The game ends when all pogs have been flipped over. Rules tor pogs may vary, depending on players' Interests. Players may, kr example, choose to return pogs to their original owners after play has ended, or may retain possession of any pogs "won" during the game. 'if 4I i A By ANNE PHILLIPS Courier Staff Writer Gary Ritter knows how to pique the interest of passers-by. For about a week, a sign in his downtown business ominously warned of the coming invasion of something called pogs.

The sign was soon replaced by a second announcing the arrival of the -long-awaited pogs, spurring many who have traversed the downtown area in recent weeks to stop and ask the obvious question: What are pogs? "They're big, big stuff," says Tun Grace, a pog distributor in Coronado, where pogs are de rigueur for California children in elementary school to the preteen years. Pogs, described by some as a cross between marbles and baseball cards, are cardboard milk caps decorated with a variety of images, including sports heroes, comic book characters and popular brand-name logos. They are popular on the West Coast as collectibles and as part of a game played by children. The pog craze was born in Hawaii in 1989, when several companies started distributing milk caps printed with their logos to serve as business cards. The name "pog" is derived from a drink of passion fruit, orange and guava juices produced by a Hawaiian dairy that was promoted through pogs.

"How old are you?" Grace queries, when asked to explain the fascination with pogs. "Remember the old game of marbles? Remember jacks and all that stuff?" he asks. "It's the same thing." Pogs have been spectacularly suc-1 cessful in California for about six months, says Grace, who previously dealt in baseballs cards, and pogs can be purchased just about anywhere in the state, including toy stores, supermarkets and drug stores. Schoolchildren on playgrounds throughout the state play pogs, while pog competitions are held in count- Gary Ritter est investment for the beginning player or collector. At Robin's Surplus, pogs have been in stock for about two weeks.

The milk caps sell for 10 cents each, 10 for $1, 30 for $3, or a bag of 100 for $8. Ritter currently stocks animal pogs, surfing pogs and paper pogs featuring a variety of designs. Foil pogs, which have brightly colored reflective designs, are available for 25 cents each. Plastic slammers, which are required to play pogs, sell for $1 to $2, depending on their size and ornamentation, including iridescent or glow-in-the dark designs. Ritter also is investigating stocking pog carriers, small plastic containers that allow children to easily store and transport their pog collection.

In California, pogs retail for about 15 cents to a quarter apiece, Grace says. The most popular pogs on the West Coast currently feature a skull-and-cross-bones design a graphic warning, Grace says, about the dangers of drug and alcohol or an eight-ball design that is the logo of a popular clothing manufacturer. Ritter says many national corporations, ranging from fast food establishments to major toy franchises, have jumped on the pog bandwagon. Rapper Shakur faces sentence after plea LANSING, Mich. Tupac Shakur faces up to 90 days in jail and a $100 fine after pleading guilty to charges he tried to hit another rapper with a baseball bat Prosecutors said Shakur threw a microphone that belonged to a local rapper on the stage, triggering a fight during an April 1993 concert at Michigan State University.

Shakur's lawyer said the other rapper had repeatedly called Shakur names. Shakur pleaded guilty Thursday in Circuit Court and was to be sentenced on Oct. 26. Shakur had been charged with felonious assault, but the charge was reduced to a misdemeanor. Shakur, who starred in the movies "Poetic Justice" and "Juice," also faces criminal charges in New York and Atlanta.

1 Loretta Lynn links up with theme park plan BENHAM, Ky. Move over Dol-lywood. The coal miner's daughter may get her own theme park. Loretta Lynn has agreed to lend her name to a park along the Kentucky-Virginia border and make at least eight appearances a year, said V. Ray Smith, who is coordinating the project Lynn, who grew up in a Kentucky coal mining town, could not be reached for comment Thursday.

Smith said he is working with a group of British investors and a hotel chain on the project, which he hopes will bring jobs to the area. He said the park would be something along the lines of Tennessee's Dollywood, owned by country star DollyParton. Burns improving, but doctors using caution LOS ANGELES Doctors decided Thursday to keep George Burns in intensive care for one more day but stressed the 98-year-old comic was getting well following brain surgery. Burns underwent the surgery Monday to relieve pressure from fluid that built up in his brain after a July 13 fall in the bathtub of his Beverly Hills home. He was expected to move to a private room Thursday at Cedars-Sinai Medical Center.

"He's doing better. They want to keep him another day in ICU for more observation, just as a precaution. There's a good chance he's going to his own room Friday," said hospital spokeswoman Paula Correia. Bono pays big money for Chaplin costume LONDON Bono paid top dollar for a bit of Charlie Chaplin. The lead singer of U2 paid $55,500 for the military costume Chaplin wore in his 1940 movie "The Great Dictator." Chaplin was Adenoid Hynkel, a parody of Adolf Hitler.

The Irish rocker bought the costume Tuesday at a Sotheby's auction. He plans to display it in a restaurant he owns in Dublin. Comedian completes terms of plea bargain BURBANK, Calif. Bobcat AP PHOTO These ere pogs coming soon to a playground near you. Sort of like marbles and Jacks, pogs have been spectacularly successful In California.

He estimates that pogs may be popu-, lar in the Midwest by Christmas. Elsewhere in the metro area, a spot check of department stores reveals pogs are not widely available, although Venture expects to have pogs on its shelves by the end of the month. Instances in which competition over pogs has spurred heated disagreements have been "few and far between," Grace says, adding that pogs are, for the most part, a safe, harmless and inexpensive game for children. Pog marketers have predicted that children in Texas and Florida will soon become part of the craze, while interest in California remains strong. "At first I thought they were going to be history by the middle of October," Grace says.

"But they keep on going, further, further and further." versation with his sister, who lives in California. He contacted Grace, who soon had a shipment of pogs en route to Iowa. "One lady came in last week who was from California and said she wanted her nephews here to learn how to play," Ritter says. "She set them up. She bought $25 worth." Pogs, however, require only a mod- less California communities.

"The newspapers are filled with -pog Grace says. Pogs were marketed solely as collectibles in Hawaii, Grace says, while they have been marketed primarily as a children's game in California. Waterloo businessman Ritter, owner of Robin's Surplus, decided to investigate the pog market after a con Author finds no great mystery in older women's sleuthing abilities Scholarship benefit will feature 'greatest hits' of Northern Iowa If iu I Mhoolaf Mmk CoAwnflnviUi Vou Jo Attend Knrnrpi I nefit Concerts' Ml eatest Hits FrMar and Saturday 7 StptembarM and October 1,194 8:00 p.m. rk (unell Hill on the lhn Campta New Spotlight Series season starts Oct. 1 1 C3 Carolyn G.

Hart Mystery writer gives Henrie eyes that see and remember I UNI hopes to reach people who attended previous concerts by giving them the chance to hear their favorites again. By MELODY PARKER Courier Assistant Lifestyles Editor CEDAR FALLS A "greatest hits" program is planned for the 13th annual Scholarship Benefit Concerts. Performances are Sept. 30 and Oct. 1 at 8 p.m.

in Russell Hall Auditorium on the University of Northern Iowa campus, featuring "Encore!" tunes from previous concerts. "The idea is to engender some excitement," says Raymond Tymas-Jones, UNI School of Music director. "We want to reach audiences who attended previous concerts with the notion of hearing their favorites again, and attract new audiences with classics." Again this year, concerts will take place at a single site, with refreshments at the concerts' conclusion. Students, alumni, professors and professor emeriti are on the program. UNI faculty member Howard Aibel will return to "beat the clock" on Chopin's "Minute" Waltz in D-flaL He also will reprise his performance of Polonaise in A-flat from the 1988 concerts.

Mezzo-soprano and student competition winner Jennifer Capal-do will sing "Habanera" from "Carmen," accompanied by faculty pianist Miguel Pinto. Baritone Daniel Lickteig, another student competition winner, will perform By CALVIN WOODWARD The Associated Press BETHESDA, Md. Henrie is in a league of her own in the fictional world of elderly female sleuths. She drives her sports car fast, cusses a bit and knits intrigue instead of mittens. In a larger sense, however, Henrie has plenty of company, says her creator, mystery writer Carolyn G.

Hart. Henrietta O'Dwyer Collins represents a generation of women, steeled in their youth by World War II, who populate forgotten shadows of American culture in their olderage. i Cerebral and confident under pressure, Henrie is Hart's tribute to them. "These are the women who survived the most dramatic and terrifying and horrendous years of this century," Hart said after a book-signing event for her new Henrie mystery, "Scandal in Fair Haven." "You look at those women who are now in the late 60s, their 70s and 80s how can you possibly dismiss them? These are people who have been tested by time." "Scandal in Fair Haven" is traditional in many ways murder on a lavish Southern estate, dark secrets in a high-society setting. What sets it apart is its use of a female protagonist in her mid-60s or slightly beyond who is not at all dotty, deferential or spinsterish.

A Miss Marple for the '90s, some reviewers called her after Henrie made her novel-length debut in "Dead Man's Island." This year, the book won Hart her second Agatha mystery award. Agatha Christie's Jane Marple was frail, polite and famously perceptive a woman who, in one typical passage, "averted her eyes from the garden, and picked up her knitting." Not that she missed a thing. In contrast, Henrie a retired newswoman, snaps that "I don't waste time, and I don't waver between choices," and she finds she sometimes intimidates others. "I have a Roman-coin profile, dark hair silvered at the temples, jet-black eyes that have seen much and remembered much, and an angular body with a lean and hungry appearance of forward motion even when at rest." Eyes that see and remember. It's a recurring theme in the two Henrie novels and in Hart's conversation over iced tea in a Bethesda cafe, her warm face framed by short-cropped hair.

Hart, 58, of Oklahoma City, is best known for her continuing "Death on Demand" series, featuring two young sleuths who, for all their lighthearted qualities, lack the Goldthwait's no-contest plea for setting fire to "The Tonight Show" set is now official, and he has handed over TV spots he was ordered to make on behalf of a bum center. The comedian also must pay $3,888 in fines Bobcat Goldthwait "Per Me Giunto" from Verdi's "Don Carlo," also accompanied by Pinto. Four students will perform the overture from Leonard Bernstein's "Candide." They are Tim Gale, bassoonist and one of three winners in the Fort Dodge Area Symphony Orchestra Young Artists Auditions; Melissa Robinson, hor-nist and co-recipient of the Yamaha Young Performing Artist Award; Daniel Kjar, trumpeter, selected to perform with this past summer's Ohio Light Opera Company in Wooster; and Jeff Smith, percussionist, one of six finalists at the 1994 Women's Association of the Minnesota Symphony Orchestra Young Artists Competition. UNI alumnus Troy Thompson is the arranger on the overture. The performance will include faculty members.

Mozart's "Eine Kleine Nachmu- See CONCERTS I page C3 accumulated wisdom of age. "This does give me an opportunity to provide more an appraisal life, to realize the complexity involved ir life that you can't do with younger characters becausi they're mostly oblivious to it," she says. "They're too busy living and learning and enjoying tc see the permutations that are always involved in relation ships." Apart from Jessica Fletcher of "Murder, She Wrote" or the Golden Girls, few spunky elderly women show up on television, in novels or in commercials, a void Hart believes devalues the generation by making it almost invisible. With the population getting older and staying more, active, however, she feels that is changing. "1 think it's going to be a great time to be older." I Hard-boiled American male detectives and genteel British women have long been mystery favorites.

But i trio of tough female private eyes has shaken up the clubj in the last 15 years: Marcia Muller's Sharon McCone, Sue Grafton's Kinsey Millhone and Sara Peretsky's VI. Warshawski. Hart says their work made publishers more receptive See HART I page C3 and restitution, including $698 to NBC for damage to the chair he set on fire with lighter fluid May 6. Jay Leno and guest Lauren Hutton doused the fire with cups of water. Goldthwait, 32, was in Municipal Court on Wednesday to make final the plea bargain, which also includes six months' probation.

"We don't think there was maliciousness here," Deputy City Attorney Robert Walters. "It was reckless. It was a joke gone bad." Goldthwait gave Walters the public service messages. They warn of the dangers of playing with fire. Compiled from Courier wire services i.