The Late Braking News

HEADLINERS....Complete Stories Follow..........

<+> Man in Chicken Suit Cries Foul Over Abuse
<+> Jetliner pilot locked out of cockpit after toilet break
<+> Actor Hugh O'Brian philosophical about marriage at 81
<+> Man Trapped Waist - Deep in Chocolate
<+> A Very Kinky Campaign
<+> Oldest Bach Manuscripts Found
<+> Segway Launches 2 New Scooters
<+> Crusty the Gator Wins Reprieve in Florida
<+> Bad - Tempered Parrot Leaves a Bloody Clue
<+> Massive Manatee Is Spotted in Hudson River
<+> 4 - Time Iditarod Champ Susan Butcher Dies
<+> Woman, 85, Left in Vault at Swiss Bank
<+> A City Wonders What to Do Next With Its 102-Year-Old Firehouse
<+> Fans Fete Papa in Key West Hemingway Days
<+> Emmy winning actor Jack Warden dead at 85
<+> Celebrating Puzzles, in 18,446,744,073,709,551,616 Moves (or So)
<+> Boy George Reports for Trash Duty
<+> Protesters challenge the powerful at exclusive California retreat
<+> Single City Block Hosts World's Longest Race
<+> Magicians Battle It Out for World Title
<+> Breaking a Barrier 60 Years Before Robinson
<+> Transforming the Alchemists
<+> Their Motorcycles Are in the Mail
<+> Chasing the Perfect Taco Up the California Coast
***************
Man in Chicken Suit Cries Foul Over Abuse By THE ASSOCIATED PRESS

SEARCY, Ark. (AP) -- To Steven Turnage, it was bad enough to dress up in a chicken suit and stand along a city street in 105-degree heat. Having passers-by shoot bottle rockets at him has him crying foul.

''People don't take this costume seriously,'' said Turnage, who wears the suit to promote a fast-food restaurant. ''They need to understand that there's a human underneath that suit. It's getting to the point where this is really a dangerous situation.''

One rocket nearly hit him in the eye and another burned part of his suit. Police have heard Turnage's complaints but haven't issued any citations.

''Obviously it is against city ordinance to shoot fireworks inside the city limits,'' police spokeswoman Amber Dillon said. ''Depending on our investigation, other assault-related charges could possibly follow.''

Turnage said that, during the two weeks he has worn the chicken suit, people have thrown smokeless tobacco cans at him and tossed frozen drinks. After a bottle rocket attack, he called police.

''It's challenging,'' Turnage said. ''You've got to be very dedicated and have a high tolerance for heat. You almost have to have a calling from the Lord to do this type of work.''

Still, he said, there are parts of the job he likes.

''Smaller kids really love it,'' he said. ''We've heard of kids coming from Judsonia, Bald Knob and other parts of the county just to see the chicken. Little kids run up and want a hug.''
**************
Jetliner pilot locked out of cockpit after toilet break

OTTAWA, Canada (Reuters) -- The pilot of a Canadian airliner who went to the washroom during a flight found himself locked out of the cockpit, forcing the crew to remove the door from its hinges to let him back in, the airline said on Wednesday.

The incident occurred aboard a flight from Ottawa to Winnipeg on Saturday. The regional jet, capable of carrying 50 people, was operated by Air Canada's Jazz subsidiary.

Jazz spokeswoman Manon Stewart said that with 30 minutes of the flight to go, the pilot went to the washroom, leaving the first officer in charge. But when he tried to get back into the cockpit, the door would not open.

"The door malfunctioned ... this is a very rare occurrence," Stewart said, adding that the crew's decision to remove the door had been in line with company policy.

A report in the Ottawa Citizen newspaper said that for about 10 minutes "passengers described seeing the pilot bang on the door and communicating with the cockpit through an internal telephone, but being unable to open the door."

Stewart said the paper's report was "a bit dramatic" and stressed that at no time had the plane or passengers been in danger. She did not say how many people had been on board.

Copyright 2006 Reuters.
**************
Actor Hugh O'Brian philosophical about marriage at 81

LOS ANGELES (AP) -- Actor Hugh O'Brian, a newlywed at age 81, finds himself philosophical about marriage, so much so that he and his bride spent their honeymoon studying philosophy at England's Oxford University.

"I think, quite frankly, an active mind is as important as an active body," O'Brian said of the unusual honeymoon destination.

"Fortunately, my lady's a teacher and she puts up with me," he added with a chuckle.

O'Brian and 54-year-old Virginia Barber wed in June at the Forest Lawn Memorial Park cemetery in what they quipped was a "wedding to die for."

It was the second marriage for Barber and the first for O'Brian, who is likely best known to baby boomers as the iconic lawman in the 1950s TV series "The Life and Legend of Wyatt Earp." The couple dated for 18 years.

Known for his rugged good looks, O'Brian has appeared in numerous films and TV series, and he notes with pride that he has the distinction of being the last bad guy killed by Western hero John Wayne when the Duke beat him to the draw in the 1976 film "The Shootist."

In recent years he's dedicated considerable time to his Hugh O'Brian Youth Leadership organization, which encourages and helps train high school students to become future leaders.

The Associated Press.
**************
Man Trapped Waist - Deep in Chocolate By THE ASSOCIATED PRESS

KENOSHA, Wis. (AP) -- It might sound like a chocoholic's dream, but stepping into a vat of viscous chocolate became a two-hour nightmare for a 21-year-old man Friday morning. Darmin Garcia, an employee of a company that supplies chocolate ingredients, said he was pushing the chocolate down into the vat at Debelis Corp. because it was stuck. But it became loose and he slid into the hopper.

''It was in my hair, in my ears, my mouth, everywhere,'' said Garcia, who has worked at the company for two years. ''I felt like I weighed 900 pounds. I couldn't move.''

The chocolate was 110 degrees, hotter than a hot tub, said Capt. Greg Sinnen of the Kenosha Fire Department.

Co-workers, police and firefighters tried to free the man but couldn't get him loose until the chocolate was thinned out with cocoa butter.

''It was pretty thick. It was virtually like quicksand,'' said police Capt. Randy Berner.

Garcia was treated for minor injuries and released.

After more than two hours in the chocolate, does he still have a taste for it?

''Not so much anymore,'' Garcia said.
*************
A Very Kinky Campaign, By Holly Bailey, Newsweek
An unpopular incumbent. A lackluster field. Could Kinky Friedman sneak into the Texas statehouse?

July 24, 2006 issue - The temperature gauge reads 93 degrees, and in the blazing Texas sunshine outside Carl's Corner truck stop near Dallas, about 100 people stand sweltering in the dusty gravel parking lot, waiting to celebrate the grand opening of a new biodiesel fuel plant partly owned by Willie Nelson. Most have dressed for the heat, but not Kinky Friedman. The man who aspires to be Texas's first independent governor since Sam Houston arrives looking like an outlaw cousin of Johnny Cash: a long-sleeved black shirt, alligator boots, a black cowboy hat and a leather fringe vest, which he proudly notes was a gift from Waylon Jennings.

"The governor has arrived!" Friedman booms. And with that, the best-selling mystery writer and former lead singer of the Texas Jewboys digs into his vest pocket, which is stuffed with Cuban cigars—fat Montecristo No. 2's, the same kind Fidel used to smoke. "It's gonna be a long day, so I came prepared," Friedman declares and lights up, oblivious to the barrage of no smoking signs plastered on the nearby fuel tanks.

In a state known for its cast of larger-than-life political personalities, Kinky Friedman may be the most eccentric Texan ever to throw his Stetson into the political ring. At the very least, he's the first Jewish cowboy to seek the governor's mansion and probably the only gubernatorial candidate in the country who boasts about never having held a real job. His campaign slogans: "Why the Hell Not?" and "How Hard Can It Be?" Wherever he goes, he spouts corny, populist one-liners that can make him seem like a thawed relic from another era—which, truth be told, he kind of is. "I'm for the little fellers," he exclaims, "not the Rockefellers!"

The other candidates put down his campaign as a novelty act, when they acknowledge he exists at all. "What can he offer besides comic relief?" mocks Texas Democratic Party chair Boyd Richie. But there's one thing his opponents can't ignore: much to their dismay, he's suddenly a serious contender. A Survey USA poll of likely Texas voters conducted last month put Friedman's support at 21 percent, running second to Gov. Rick Perry, the Republican incumbent, who clocked in with only 35 percent. Friedman has climbed to a paper-thin lead over his two other opponents—Democrat Chris Bell, who polled at 20 percent, and Carole Keeton Strayhorn, a Republican turned independent, who checked in at 19 percent.

It's been an ugly year in Texas politics. Voters are tiring of Perry, who has gotten a rep as a do-nothing governor, and antipolitician hostilities are high, especially after Tom DeLay's troubles. But Friedman has another thing going for him: his campaign strategists are Bill Hillsman and Dean Barkley, the brains who turned pro wrestler Jesse Ventura into Minnesota's surprise governor. They know how to make voters take a stranger-than-fiction candidate seriously. "I don't go to work for people who I don't think have a real chance of winning," Hillsman says. "Kinky can win."

Friedman claims he's in the race because he needs the closet space, but the idea to run came after a near-death experience in Cabo San Lucas a few summers ago. Swept to sea by a wave, Kinky ended up stranded on a jagged cliff for more than 24 hours with nothing but a soggy cigar. His friends thought he had faked his own death, but Friedman had an epiphany. "I had achieved a lot of my dreams," he says in a serious tone. "And I decided that I wanted to see younger Texans have the chance to achieve their dreams, just like I did."

It's a story Hillsman and Barkley believe will resonate with voters. Only 29 percent turned out in the last election, and the campaign is looking to attract other disaffected types who could put it over the top. It's vintage Ventura—but Texas isn't Minnesota. Friedman won't benefit from same-day voter registration, which gave Ventura his biggest boost. And he can't beat his rivals in the fund-raising game. He's counting on lots of free publicity and help from his celebrity friends, like Ventura, who will join the campaign next month for a college tour. Willie Nelson and Jimmy Buffett are planning benefit concerts in the fall.

As for Friedman, he'll stick to what he does best: being Kinky. At Carl's Corner, he shakes every hand that comes his way, poses for every picture and signs every autograph. "I feel it!" he says, firing up another stogie. "People are breaking our way!" Reaching into his pocket, he grabs a bandanna and dabs his sweaty brow. "The governor is hot," he says.
(c) 2006 Newsweek, Inc.
**************
Oldest Bach Manuscripts Found By THE ASSOCIATED PRESS

WEIMAR, Germany (AP) -- German researchers said Thursday they have discovered the oldest known handwritten manuscripts of Johann Sebastian Bach.

The two scripts are copies that Bach made of organ music composed by Dietrich Buxtehude and date from around 1700, said Hellmut Seemann, president of the Foundation of Weimar Classics.

Researchers found the documents in the archives of the Duchess Anna Amalia library in Weimar, where a previously unknown work by Bach was discovered last year.

The library, housed in a 16th century palace, was badly damaged by a fire on Sept. 2, 2004. Documents including the Bach scripts survived because they had been stored in the building's vault.
**************
Segway Launches 2 New Scooters By THE ASSOCIATED PRESS

NEW YORK (AP) -- Segway Inc. has overhauled its self-balancing scooter with a new batch of technology that allows riders to start the device with a remote control and steer it simply by leaning in the direction they want to go.

''Some people describe it as very similar to skiing,'' the company's chief technology officer, Doug Field, said of the new ''LeanSteer'' technology that replaces a set of handlebars as the Segway's means of steering.

The new generation of the Segway Personal Transporter was unveiled Monday. It has a sleeker, more futuristic design than its predecessor, and a starting retail price of $4,995.

The company has stopped producing the older models but will continue to offer customer support to owners of older Segways.

Segway wanted to make the new version of the scooter more intuitive and fun to ride, a vehicle that ''truly becomes an extension of your body,'' according to Field.

''The best interface is no interface at all,'' he said.

Like the original version, the rider still stands on a platform between two wheels and holds onto a handlebar supported by a stem that rises vertically from the base. But all of the electronics and wires have been removed from the top part of the machine.

The key to the new steering technology, Field said, is at the pivot point between the stem and the base, where a group of sensors ''reads your body angle'' and communicates the information to the software that controls what direction it travels.

The other major update is a wireless controller called the InfoKey which has four buttons and an LCD screen and looks like a large digital watch. It's used to turn the scooter on, but also serves as ''trip computer'' with such functions as an odometer, speedometer and battery gauge.

It also can be used to activate an anti-theft alarm for when an owner leaves the device unattended. If the device is disturbed while the anti-theft feature is activated, the Segway locks up, sounds an alarm and sends a notice to its owner over the InfoKey.

Field said there has not been widespread problems with Segway thefts, but the device is such a target of curiosity that many users experience anxiety when they leave it unattended in public, even if only for a few minutes to run into a store.

Since its launch in 2001, the Segway has been widely praised for the sophisticated software engineering that allows a rider to balance effortlessly on two wheels. But its persistently high price often is cited as one of the reasons it has not yet lived up to the predictions of its inventor and backers that it would revolutionize personal transportation.

It is also sometimes mocked as the ultimate in tech geekiness. CNet Network Inc.'s technology Web site News.com put the nascent sport of Segway polo at the top of its list of the 10 worst technologies in the second quarter of 2006.

Still, the Segway has attracted an avid group of hardcore users who cherish their time ''gliding'' on the device. It's also found niche markets around the world among police and security departments whose officers who use it to patrol a beat, and entrepreneurs who rent Segways out or lead tour groups of gliders.

The next-generation of Segway comes in two models, the i2 and the x2. The x2 is meant for more rugged terrain. Both have a top speed of 12.5 mph. The i2 can glide for up to 24 miles on a single battery charge, while the x2 can go 12 miles.

By the end of the year, the company plans to have six packages of the next-generation Segway available, including one meant for use as a one-person golf cart and others tailored for commuters, police and to haul cargo in commercial applications.

The company has kept details about its financial health a secret. President and Chief Executive James Norrod told The Associated Press in May that ''tens of thousands'' of Segways have been sold around the world, and that the company's revenue has been growing by at least 50 percent over each of the last few years.

Norrod has made one of his top priorities as CEO to groom the company for an initial public offering or other liquidity event within the next few years.
*************
Crusty the Gator Wins Reprieve in Florida By THE ASSOCIATED PRESS

FORT LAUDERDALE, Fla. (AP) -- Crusty the alligator is getting a second chance.

An anonymous donor has put up $1,150 to catch the elusive reptile, which had become so accustomed to people feeding him that wildlife managers believed he was potentially dangerous, said Todd Hardwick, a Miami-Dade County alligator trapper who helped arrange for Crusty's new home.

Officials thought they would have to take him from a canal along Florida's Alligator Alley in the Everglades and euthanize him.

Instead, Crusty will be sent to an animal exhibit in the Seminole Reservation in Hollywood, along with three other alligators officials have named Speedy, Boomer and Freddy, Hardwick said. Crusty is the only one of the four that remains on the lam.

Officers with the Florida Fish and Wildlife Conservation Commission launched a three-day undercover sting operation earlier this month aimed at catching alligator feeders, which drew attention to Crusty. The publicity brought phone calls to wildlife officials and ultimately the pledge of funds to spare the animal.

In 2004, more than 7,000 alligators had to be killed after becoming too accustomed to people and too dangerous to leave in the wild, according to the commission. Authorities issued more than half a dozen citations on the operation's first day.

Feeding an alligator is a second-degree misdemeanor punishable by a fine and up to 60 days in jail.

Three women were killed by alligators in a single week in May, an unprecedented string of attacks. Florida has recorded only 17 other fatal alligator attacks since 1948.
**************
Bad - Tempered Parrot Leaves a Bloody Clue By THE ASSOCIATED PRESS

LONDON (AP) -- An ill-tempered parrot left English police a vital clue to the thief who took the bird from a pet shop.

Tristand Maidment, 23, pleaded guilty Thursday to stealing a macaw named Mickey from a pet shop in Frome, southwestern England, last month.

Maidment said he couldn't remember being bitten by the parrot, but the wound left a trail of blood, which allowed police to make a DNA match to the suspect.

Mickey's owner, Angus Hart, said the parrot was notoriously bad tempered and about 50 years old.

Maidment also admitted charges of burglary and animal cruelty, and an unrelated count of theft. He was ordered to be held in custody pending a court appearance on Aug. 3.
***************
Massive Manatee Is Spotted in Hudson River By JENNIFER 8. LEE, NY Times

Added to the chronicles of great beasts that have descended upon New York City in the year 2006 is one that is arguably the greatest of them all. A beast, upwards of 1,000 pounds and a cousin to the elephant, which dwarfs the coyote, the deer and the dolphin that preceded it. A beast that, at hundreds of miles north of its natural habitat, has most likely made the longest and most arduous journey among them. A beast, with a pudgy-nosed face and a sweet-potato-shaped body, that could even be considered cute: a manatee.

Over the past week, boaters and bloggers have been energetically tracking a manatee in its lumbering expedition along the Atlantic Coast and up the Hudson River.

John H. Vargo, the publisher of Boating on the Hudson magazine, put out an alert last week, much to the incredulity of some boaters.

"Some were laughing about it, because it couldn't possibly be true," Mr. Vargo said.

The manatee has been spotted at 23rd Street near Chelsea Piers, West 125th Street, and later in Westchester County. It appeared to be healthy.

Randy Shull, a boater from Ossining, spotted the manatee about 4:30 p.m. yesterday while his 21-foot boat was floating at Kingsland Point Park in Sleepy Hollow.

"It was gigantic," Mr. Shull said. "When we saw it surface, its back was just mammoth."

It is unusual, but not unprecedented for manatees to travel this far north — the seaweed-munching sea creatures are commonly associated with the warm waters of Florida.

Manatees have been reported along the shores of Long Island and even as far north as Rhode Island. It is unusual, however, for a manatee to be spotted inland in a river this far north.

"I'm 70 years old, and I've been on the river my entire life," Mr. Vargo said. "I've seen dolphins and everything else, but never a manatee."
***************
4 - Time Iditarod Champ Susan Butcher Dies By THE ASSOCIATED PRESS

ANCHORAGE, Alaska (AP) -- Four-time Iditarod champion Susan Butcher, who in 1986 became the race's second female winner and brought increased national attention to its grueling competition, has died. She was 51.

Butcher died Saturday in a Seattle hospital of a reoccurrence of leukemia after a recent stem-cell transplant, her doctor said.

She dominated the 1,100-mile sled dog race from Anchorage to Nome in the late 1980s. Her other victories came in 1987, '88 and '90, and she finished in the top four through 1993.

''What she did is brought this race to an audience that had never been aware of it before simply because of her personality,'' Iditarod spokesman Chas St. George said.

In 1979, Butcher helped drive the first sled-dog team to the 20,320-foot summit of Mount McKinley, the highest peak in North America.

Dr. Jan Abkowitz said that after a stem-cell transplant May 16, Butcher developed graft-versus-host-disease, in which transplanted cells attacked her digestive system.

''Then to our dismay and surprise, about a week ago, when we did a routine bone marrow test, we found that her leukemia had come back,'' Abkowitz said.

Butcher received chemotherapy for the leukemia and was moved to intensive care Friday at the University of Washington Medical Center.

''At the time she had the transplant, her leukemia was in remission. She was feeling absolutely fine,'' Abkowitz said.

Three years ago, when she was considering a comeback, doctors found Butcher had polycythemia vera, a rare disease that causes the bone marrow to produce excess blood.

Butcher was known as a focused and confident competitor, who loved her dogs, and insisted they remain fit and disciplined.

''Anything she did she'd do with real intensity,'' said Joe Runyan, who broke Butcher's three-year winning streak in 1989. ''She was really able to focus on the job and that's what made her really good at her sport.''

Runyan said the rivalry was always good-natured and that Butcher was more willing than many mushers to share dog-care tips and training methods. During recent Iditarods, she would fly along the trail to chat with old opponents and visit the many friends she had in the Alaska Native villages that serve as checkpoints.

One of the last times Runyan saw Butcher was during this year's Iditarod in the Yukon River town of Ruby.

''We were talking about who was winning the race,'' said Runyan, who was working as a race commentator. ''She's pretty comical, she said, '(Winner) Jeff King's team has left Ruby the best I've ever seen, except for when I left Ruby.'''

Butcher ran her last Iditarod in 1994 when she and husband Davis Monson decided to have children. They have two daughters, Tekla and Chisana.

Butcher planned to compete in a 300-mile race last winter, but was unable to compete after she was diagnosed with leukemia in early December.

''Now my goal is to try and stay alive and fight leukemia,'' she told The Associated Press. ''No questions asked, that's what I am going to do.''

During her chemo treatments, Butcher daydreamed about land in the White Mountains she and her husband bought last fall. They planned to build a bigger cabin on the land that comes with 300 miles of groomed trails -- perfect for mushing dogs -- right out the back door.

''I got the cutest, lovingest group of well-trained females. They are easy to handle and I just enjoy them,'' she said. ''They will be waiting for me.''
***************
Woman, 85, Left in Vault at Swiss Bank By THE ASSOCIATED PRESS

ZURICH, Switzerland (AP) -- An 85-year-old woman was found in the vault of a Swiss bank when she set off motion detectors hours after the bank was already closed, according to a statement released Wednesday.

Employees at the Zuercher Kantonalbank apparently forgot about the woman.

The director of the bank's safe allowed the woman into the vault on Monday before closing it punctually at 4:30 p.m. local time -- with the woman still deep in study of her documents, ZKB said.

She remained so still that she initially failed to activate either the motion detector or the attached camera, the bank said in confirming a report that appeared in the Zurich-based daily ''Tages-Anzeiger.''

She was freed from the room four hours after the vault was closed.

The bank gave the woman a bouquet of flowers for suffering from the ordeal and said it would decide on further nonfinancial compensation.
***************
A City Wonders What to Do Next With Its 102-Year-Old Firehouse By KATIE ZEZIMA, NY Times

BARRE, Vt., Aug. 5 — The property is advertised like any other in the window of a real estate office here, the ultimate fixer-upper with wood ceilings, exposed brick and quite a history.

It was, until recently, the city's lone firehouse.

The Barre City Council is selling the old firehouse to put the building on the tax rolls and generate revenue for this cash-strapped community of 9,000 in central Vermont.

The Council, which is using a local real estate agent to market the site, is asking $250,000 for the 12,000-square-foot building, which, in addition to a garage for firetrucks, has upstairs living quarters and a basement. Built in 1904, it would, however, require extensive renovation before the new owners could move in.

"It's got some of the most beautiful woodwork on the inside, and most of it is original," David Gladding, a firefighter for 28 years, said. "It's got the old wood floors, the creaky floors upstairs. It has a lot of character."

Not just anyone can buy it. Potential purchasers have to submit a plan for the building to the Council by October. The Council will review the plans at hearings and deliver a decision by Dec. 31.

The owner must be able to generate tax revenue and, ideally, employment. The Council is willing to accept a lower price if the bidder's vision squares with what it would like to see.

Council members are leaning against residential development, City Councilor Carol Dawes said, but they are not ruling it out.

"We want it to be a good fit,'' Ms. Dawes said. "We hope it has a significant economic impact, that it maybe creates jobs and encourages people to spend time in downtown Barre. But we don't want to limit anybody's thinking. It really comes down to the only sort of parameters are we want it on the tax rolls and to maintain its historic exterior. Those are the most important things."

The city held public hearings in the spring to learn residents' opinions.

"The No. 1 idea from people 18 to 80 was to have a brew pub," said John Biondolillo of BCK Real Estate, which is showing the property. Other ideas include a fire museum, a community center, a business development center, a nightclub or a high-tech company.

Mr. Biondolillo has had more than 15 calls about the site in the last week, including one from an artist who wants to turn the first floor into a retail store and to live above it, various businesses and a few restaurateurs. The calls have come from as far as Texas. Mr. Biondolillo would not identify the callers.

The firehouse opened when horses pulled all the engines, and their gnaw marks still line the windowsills. The building has three shafts that held fire poles as well as a large shaft where firefighters dried wet hoses.

On top is a bell tower with an original Paul Revere bell that belongs to the city.

The department outgrew the space years ago. It held just one of the city's four firetrucks and one of its two ambulances. The other equipment was housed elsewhere. The entire department moved into a new $4 million public safety complex on the other side of the city a few months ago, but firefighters miss the old building.

"I'm kind of sad,'' Firefighter Gladding said. "It was a sad day when we left it, but I understand why we did. It has a lot of character, and the new one's kind of sterile."

Firefighter Gladding said the new owner would have to carry out some "serious renovations" to make the systems in the building function and meet code requirements.

He, too, would like to see the building turned into a brew pub or a bar and grill, its high ceilings possibly used to hold beer casks and its spacious basement converted into a kitchen.

"I have the plans in my head,'' he said. "I have everything laid out where it should go, but I just can't afford to do it."
**************
Fans Fete Papa in Key West Hemingway Days By THE ASSOCIATED PRESS

KEY WEST, Fla. (AP) -- Ernest Hemingway fans wrap up a five-day celebration Sunday, commemorating both the author's literary prowess and his vigorous lifestyle. Beth McMurray, a graduate student from San Mateo, Calif., won the Lorian Hemingway Short Story Competition, the literary highlight of the Hemingway Days festival.

McMurray, 25, earned the contest's $1,000 first prize for her story ''Mascot,'' which bested 687 other entries. The story recounts how a young girl's bravery and wisdom provided direction to her emotionally adrift parents.

It impressed the judges for its efficient, well-chosen words and images and its offbeat original humor, said Lorian Hemingway, Hemingway's granddaughter.

Other festival events included author readings, a marlin tournament, a one-man play examining Hemingway's life and Saturday's ''Running of the Bulls,'' a short jaunt with mock bulls on wheels.

A Hemingway look-alike contest has attracted 131 stocky, white-bearded contenders to Sloppy Joe's Bar, Hemingway's favorite Key West watering hole, where the newest ''Papa'' was to be chosen Saturday night.

Hemingway lived in Key West throughout the 1930s, writing many of his classic works in a second-story studio adjoining his Whitehead Street home.
***************
Emmy winning actor Jack Warden dead at 85 By ROBERT JABLON, Associated Press

LOS ANGELES (AP) -- Jack Warden, an Emmy-winning and Academy Award-nominated actor who played gruff cops, coaches and soldiers in a career that spanned five decades, has died. He was 85.

Warden, who lived in Manhattan, died Wednesday at a hospital in New York, Sidney Pazoff, his longtime business manager, said here Friday.

"Everything gave out. Old age," Pazoff said. "He really had turned downhill in the past month; heart and then kidney and then all kinds of stuff."

Warden was nominated twice for best supporting actor Oscars in two Warren Beatty movies. He was nominated for his role as a businessman in 1975's "Shampoo" and the good-hearted football trainer Max in 1978's "Heaven Can Wait."

He won a supporting actor Emmy Award for his role as Chicago Bears coach George Halas in the 1971 TV movie "Brian's Song" and was twice nominated in the 1980s for best leading actor in a comedy for his show "Crazy Like a Fox."

Warden, with his wild white hair, weathered face and gravelly voice, was in demand for character parts for decades.

In real life, the former boxer, deckhand and paratrooper was anything but a tough guy.

"Very gentle. Very dapper," Pazoff said.

"Most of them (actors) are pretty true to the characters that they play. He was one who was not," Pazoff said.

Warden was born John H. Lebzelter in 1920 in Newark, N.J. He was still in high school during the Depression when he tried his hand at professional boxing under his mother's maiden name of Costello.

He had 13 welterweight bouts in the Louisville area before joining the Navy, where he was sent to China and patrolled the Yangtze River.

He also had jobs as a nightclub bouncer, a lifeguard and a deck hand on an East River tugboat.

In 1941, he joined the Merchant Marine. He served in the engine room as his ship made convoy runs to Europe.

"The constant bombings were nerve-racking below decks," he recalled for a 1976 studio biography.

He quit in 1942 and enlisted in the Army. He was a paratrooper with the 101st Airborne Division but shortly before D-Day he broke his leg during a nighttime practice jump in Britain.

"They sent me back to the States," he recalled in a 1988 Associated Press interview. "I was in a hospital for nearly a year."

A fellow soldier who had been an actor gave him a play to read and he was hooked. He recovered enough to take part in the Battle of the Bulge and, after the war, went to New York to pursue an acting career.

He attended acting classes and did Tennessee Williams plays in repertory companies and moved on to appear in live TV shows such as the famed "Studio One."

During the 1950s his career flourished. In addition to TV work, he appeared on Broadway in shows such as Clifford Odets' "Golden Boy" and Arthur Miller's "A View From the Bridge."

He had small roles in 1953's Oscar-winning "From Here to Eternity" and the submarine thriller "Run Silent, Run Deep" but his breakthrough role was as Juror No. 7, a salesman who wants a quick decision in a murder case, in 1957's "Twelve Angry Men."

Over the next decades he had a number of recurring or starring TV roles. He was a major in "The Wackiest Ship in the Army"; the coach on "Mr. Peepers"; a coach again on the small-screen version of "The Bad News Bears,"; detectives in "Asphalt Jungle," "N.Y.P.D." and "Jigsaw John"; and a private investigator in "Crazy Like a Fox."

His numerous big-screen roles included a news editor in 1976's "All the President's Men," Paul Newman's law partner in 1982's "The Verdict' and the president in the 1979 Peter Sellers movie "Being There."

His later roles were in Woody Allen's 1994 "Bullets Over Broadway"; Beatty's 1998 political satire "Bulworth" and the 2000 football movie "The Replacements."

Pazoff said Warden is survived by his longtime girlfriend, Marucha Hinds; estranged wife, Vanda; a son, Christopher; and two grandchildren.

At Warden's request, no funeral services were planned, Pazoff said.
***************
Celebrating Puzzles, in 18,446,744,073,709,551,616 Moves (or So) By MARGARET WERTHEIM, NY Times

Christianity sanctifies Sunday as a day of rest and worship. In the early 19th century, some Protestant communities interpreted the Sabbath sobriety as an injunction against dancing, games and other entertainments. But in Massachusetts a loophole was found.

Nowhere in the Bible could the church leaders of Salem find a prohibition against puzzles, and in the absence of a "no," they filled the gap with a resounding "yes."

At the time, Salem was a center of brisk trade with China, and ship captains would often deliver a wooden chest filled with ivory puzzles as a gift for merchants, what came to be known as "Sunday boxes." A particularly fine example of a Sunday box is one of the centerpieces of a major new exhibition of mechanical puzzles to open next week at the Lilly Library at Indiana University.

The exhibition, which contains many world-class specimens of mathematical and physics-based puzzles, is the first taste of a collection of more than 30,000 puzzles being donated to the library by Jerry Slocum, a retired engineer and a former vice president of Hughes Aircraft, who has been collecting puzzles and researching their history for more than half a century.

Mr. Slocum is the author of 10 books on the history of puzzles, including a recently published account of the sudoku-like 15 Puzzle, which precipitated a puzzle mania across America in the 1880's.

Sitting in his private puzzle museum at his home in Beverly Hills, Calif., Mr. Slocum spoke about the exhibition and the convoluted, puzzlelike stories behind some of the pieces. Around him on shelves stacked from floor to ceiling sat thousands of puzzles of almost every conceivable shape and form: wooden, metal, wire, porcelain, plastic, glass and cardboard. There were Russian puzzle rattles, ancient Chinese puzzle mirrors and a rare example of an American Indian puzzle purse used to carry a version of gaming chips.

Of all the puzzles in the Sunday boxes, Mr. Slocum said, one of the most challenging was a deceptively simple-looking toy called Chinese rings. Its solution requires what mathematicians call a recursive sequence of moves.

The Chinese rings example in the library exhibition is particularly finely made. A set of rings are threaded over a long, thin loop with wires attached to each ring, tethering it below. Each ring can be taken off the loop or put back on only if the one next to it is on but the others farther down the chain are off. The goal is to get all the rings off.

According to legend, the puzzle was invented in the second century by a Chinese general who gave it to his wife to keep her busy while he was away at war. Logically, Mr. Slocum said, the puzzle is closely related to the Towers of Hanoi problem, which requires one to move a tower of increasingly smaller blocks from one peg to another.

In recursive puzzles like these, as the number of rings (or blocks) increases, the number of moves required to solve the puzzle increases exponentially. Recursive problems are well known to computer scientists, but it is harder for most of us to get a grip on this elusive concept.

Chinese rings make the problem tangible, Mr. Slocum noted, and reveal in a hands-on fashion the exponential growth entailed. There are typically nine rings in a classic set of Chinese rings; if a player makes no mistakes, the puzzle requires 341 moves to solve. Mr. Slocum can solve it in three to four minutes.

But on a table next to the Sunday box sat a version with 65 rings. A perfect solution in that case would take 18,446,744,073,709,551,616 moves, Mr. Slocum said. "Assuming one move every second, that would be 56 billion years, or four times the age of the universe," he said.

This enigmatic object called to mind the White Queen's advice to Alice about how the more one practices, the better one gets at believing in impossible things. Though solvable in principle, in practice this puzzle can never be completed. Mr. Slocum's collection is a mind-boggling compendium of seemingly impossible, wildly improbable and sometimes breathtakingly difficult puzzles.

Breon Mitchell, director of the Lilly Library, said in an interview that the library was attracted to the collection "because we believe puzzles are important in the history of thought, in the history of mathematics and philosophy, and also the history of science."

Scott Kim, who writes a puzzle column for Discover magazine, said this was the first time a major collection of puzzles would be available in an academic setting.

"Puzzles have always interested scientists and engineers," Mr. Kim said. "Many popular things, such as comic books, eventually become subjects for scholarly and academic study. Puzzles are on that cusp right now."

Among the star pieces in the Lilly Library show is an original Rubik's Cube signed by the Hungarian mathematician Erno Rubik, and a prototype of the first Rubik's Cube with six rows of six blocks on each side. That is an object long believed impossible to make, Mr. Slocum said. Finally, last year, the Greek inventor Panayotis Verdes managed to build one.

The Rubik's Cube is an example of a sequential movement puzzle, one of 10 basic categories in what Mr. Slocum called his "puzzle taxonomy." Other categories include disentanglement puzzles (Chinese rings), interlocking solid puzzles (three-dimensional jigsaws) and take-apart puzzles, which include among their subcategories trick locks, trick knives and secret-compartment puzzles.

A beautiful example of the compartment puzzle is another standout of the Lilly Library show. Made by the Japanese puzzle master Akio Kamei, it appears to be a simple, albeit finely crafted wooden cube. But on the top is a hint of how to gain access to its secret compartment. Inlaid in the dark wood is a series of tiny circles of paler wood. The pattern matches the arrangement of stars in the constellation Cassiopeia, and the box will open only when the constellation is correctly aligned. A mechanism inside the box includes a compass that triggers a hidden lock.

Mr. Kamei has made a specialty of such science-based puzzles, and the library exhibition includes several striking examples.

Perhaps the most famous class of physics-based puzzles is one of the most ancient: puzzle vessels. Usually built in the form of a cup or a jug, these vessels offer the challenge that one must drink from them, or fill them up, without spilling any liquid. They have strategically placed holes, so it is immediately clear that a trick is entailed. Early precursors to the form date to at least the 10th century B.C., and Mr. Slocum's collection includes examples from China, Peru, Germany, France and the Middle East.

Not all puzzles are complex. Mr. Slocum said that many of his favorites were the simplest, and that just because a puzzle was simple to look at did not mean it was easy to solve. He particularly likes one that consists of just two three-dimensional pieces that have to be arranged to form a tetrahedron. Another consists of four flat pieces that have to be arranged in the shape of the letter T.

"Both require geometrical reasoning that is counterintuitive," he said. "Good puzzles always go against the grain of our thinking."

Visitors to the Lilly Library will be able to play with a range of puzzles and view animations of various geometric puzzles. This involvement is a critical feature of the exhibition, said Dr. Mitchell, the library director.

"Generally," he said, "you can only study puzzles from books, but when you have three-dimensional puzzles, it's hard to get a sense of them from books alone."

In keeping with the spirit of the show, the drawers and cupboards that hold the puzzles will themselves be puzzles.

"The first person who tries to open one each day will have to solve it," Mr. Slocum said, his eyebrows arching slyly. "With puzzles, there is really no substitute for trying them out yourself."
****************
Boy George Reports for Trash Duty By THE ASSOCIATED PRESS

NEW YORK (AP) -- With a city-issued broom in his hand, Boy George started his court-ordered community service early Monday, sweeping leaves and trash off the sidewalks of New York.

It took less than an hour for the former Culture Club frontman to get into a spat with the media.

''You think you're better than me?'' he yelled. ''Go home. Let me do my community service.''

Boy George took to the streets of Manhattan as a Department of Sanitation worker wearing an orange vest, dark capri pants, shoes without socks, and without the wild makeup and androgynous style that made him so recognizable as the '80s icon who sang ''Karma Chameleon'' and ''Do You Really Want to Hurt Me?''

''This is supposed to be making me humble. Let me do this,'' he said. ''I just want to do my job.''

The singer, born George O'Dowd, was ordered to spend five days working for the Department of Sanitation after pleading guilty in March to falsely reporting a burglary at his lower Manhattan apartment. The officers who responded found cocaine instead.

At 7 a.m. Monday, a sport utility vehicle pulled up at a Lower East Side sanitation depot. The agency planned to issue the singer a shovel, broom, plastic bags and gloves for the job of picking up trash on the city's streets.

In June, Manhattan Criminal Court Judge Anthony Ferrara issued a warrant for O'Dowd's arrest after he initially failed to complete the requirements of his plea deal. When O'Dowd appeared in court ten days later, Ferrara called off the warrant but warned the singer he could not escape his community service commitment.

''It's up to you whether you make it an exercise in humiliation or in humility,'' Ferrara told O'Dowd.

O'Dowd, 45, initially envisioned a service project more in line with his status as an '80s icon.

He petitioned to spend the time helping teenagers make a public service announcement. Among his other proposals to the court: holding a fashion and makeup workshop, serving as a D.J. at an HIV/AIDS benefit or doing telephone outreach.

Boy George's manager, Jeremy Pearce, told reporters shortly after the singer arrived for his first day on the job: ''He doesn't show any kind of emotion about these things. He takes it in his stride.''

''He doesn't need to be humiliated,'' Pearce said. ''He's a humble person.''
****************
Protesters challenge the powerful at exclusive California retreat By JUSTIN M. NORTON, Associated Press Writer

MONTE RIO, Calif. (AP) -- Hundreds of protesters gathered outside an exclusive California retreat for government and business leaders Saturday to challenge the right of a "ruling elite" to make policy decisions without public scrutiny.

The annual Bohemian Grove retreat has attracted powerful men such as Ronald Reagan, George Bush, former Secretary of State Henry Kissinger, philanthropist David Rockefeller, former West German Chancellor Helmut Schmidt and former House Speaker Newt Gingrich.

It's also become a magnet for all types of activists who increasingly use the event to network and organize their campaigns. Saturday's triple-digit heat didn't stop them from making the trek to Monte Rio, a resort town about 70 miles north of San Francisco.

"I want to take a stand against war and many of the people gathering here are the people pulling the strings," said Maria Potter, 38, of Occidental, Calif. "I don't feel it's fair for them to take refuge when others can't."

Protesters listened to an Indian drum ensemble and speakers and planned to march to the front of the retreat before an afternoon get-together.

For more than a quarter century, summer protests under the towering redwoods here have been a magnet for committed activists. Protesters say the event is quickly becoming a networking spot for leaders from the peace, environmental and immigrant rights movements.

The protests peaked at about 1,000 in 2001 before attendance dropped off. Protesters say interest has picked up in the past two years as activists realized they needed to work together on the waning anti-war movement and immigrants rights.

"Because they are up there networking and getting stronger, we need to network, too," said Mary Moore, 71, who's helped organize the event since 1980. "The idea is for people to get together and realize we have a common antagonist."

Protesters turned to anti-war march organizer Act Now to Stop War and End Racism for help with this year's protest, hoping the group could beef up the anti-war movement.

"What we're trying to do is build a broad grassroots action," said Bill Hackwell, an ANSWER organizer based in San Francisco.

The men who attend the Bohemian Grove retreat spend two weeks performing plays, eating gourmet camp grub, listening to speakers and power-bonding at the 2,700-acre compound near the Russian River in Sonoma County.

The retreat is organized by the exclusive San Francisco-based Bohemian Club. The club and event are shrouded in mystery, much like Yale University's most-famous secret society, Skull and Bones, whose members include President George W. Bush and his presidential rival Sen. John Kerry.

A Nevada man who called himself "the Phantom Patriot" was found guilty of five felonies in recent years after he broke into the grove to stop what he thought were human sacrifices and child abuse.

Matt Oggero, the Bohemian Club's general manager, said a guest list would not be released to protect visitors' privacy, but the organization "respects the right of the protesters to protest."

Bill Strubbe, 51, drove several hours to the protest from Oakland in a 1980 red Volvo covered with painted slogans like "those who would give up their liberties for security deserve neither." Strubbe said he uses his car as "a political weapon."

"I go to practically every demonstration within 100 miles," Strubbe said. "This is probably the highest concentration except for the G-8 of the 'lizard people' as I like to call them."

(c) 2006 The Associated Press.
****************
Single City Block Hosts World's Longest Race By REUTERS

NEW YORK (Reuters) - The longest foot race in the world is 3,100 miles, long enough to stretch from New York to Los Angeles. Those who run it choose a different route: they circle one city block in Queens -- for two months straight.

The athletes lap their block more than 5,000 times. They wear out 12 pairs of shoes. They run more than two marathons daily. In the heat and rain of a New York summer, they stop for virtually nothing except to sleep between midnight and 6 a.m.

``I think this is what they're looking for: The feeling that you're living life for real,'' runner Pranab Vladovic said of himself and 13 other athletes now competing in the 10th annual Self-Transcendence 3,100 Mile Race in Jamaica, Queens.

The 51-day event is sponsored by followers of meditation master Sri Chinmoy, who teaches his students to excel mentally and physically. Some swim the channel between England and France or climb a mountain. Those in the race run under the motto ``Run and Become. Become and Run.''

They eat on the run. They talk on the run. They use a port-a-potty. One athlete cruised into a podiatrist to have two infected, ingrown toenails removed and was back on the course in two hours. He still ran 60 miles that day.

The athletes brave blisters, bandaged toes, weight loss, limited sleep and a chiropractic nightmare while attempting to stay focused and positive for nearly two months. Theirs, they say, is a gift to humanity.

``Not everyone can climb Mount Everest, and not everyone can run this race,'' said race director Rupantar LaRusso. ``But it's a challenge. It's inspiring and shows that there's no limit to what you can do.''

FACTORY WORKERS

All but one of this year's runners are foreigners who left their jobs as postal workers, gardeners and factory workers to run a half-mile circuit around Thomas Edison High School and an adjoining park.

In the process, two worlds interlace: a parade of mostly eastern Europeans laps through one of New York's most diverse neighborhoods, where Greeks, Jews, Koreans and Muslims live side by side. Most residents seem unaware of the athletes and their moments of victory, agony and inspiration.

``To each his own,'' resident Shawn Vernon said as the runners neared their 2,100th mile. Meanwhile, a young girl in her underwear balanced on the balcony railing of her apartment complex and two men rolled a piece of carpet across the street. None seemed to notice the athletes in their ear-flap hats and new shoes, still on the move more than one month into the race, which ends on August 2.

The runners seem more observant. They recognize the people catching rides to work every day at the same time from the same corner. They smile at the Bengali man who takes his son to the park most nights. And in running more than 100 laps a day, they come to know every slope and sidewalk crack in this otherwise unremarkable city block, chosen for its proximity to Chinmoy's home and headquarters.

The runners admire its daily sunrise, the 30-foot pine tree, the fireflies they chase at night. Traveling down one gentle straight was likened to ``running on a country road,'' though it borders the Grand Central Expressway.

``Always in life, you can complain or you can focus on the joy,'' Slovakian runner Ananda Zuscin said. ``This race is all about accepting that you're going to run all day and then forgetting about it.''

SWOLLEN FEET

So the runners move on. They arrive by 6:07 every morning to begin another 60-mile leg. They run, walk, and run-walk. They work their way through shoes, ripping out the toe boxes, sides and any other fabric that might rub against a foot swelling two sizes in this race of 10 million steps.

They know what to eat and when. They gobble down 6,000 calories daily from a vegetarian smorgasbord, much of it bathed in olive oil. Often, they carry aluminum plates and forks as they move. Their faces light up like children in the afternoon when ice creams are handed out.

``They're like little kids in a way,'' assistant race director Bipin Larkin said. ``Their life is really simplified and to keep them moving happily along you have to keep giving them things.''

Above all, they have to stay on the course.

``Every minute, every second counts out here. You have to keep moving,'' Suprabha Beckjord, 50, said, stressing that the competition was not other runners but the clock. The first place finisher wins only a T-shirt and a plastic trophy.

Beckjord is the only person to have completed the race every year and is still not tired after having run nearly 31,000 miles, more than the circumference of the earth.

``Something inside my soul just loves it,'' Beckjord, a U.S. resident, said. ``It's like running on love.''
***************
Magicians Battle It Out for World Title By THE ASSOCIATED PRESS

STOCKHOLM, Sweden (AP) -- Cards sailed through the air to the rhythm of Chopin, and a rabbit -- predictably -- was pulled out of a hat as contestants from China to the Virgin Islands on Monday kicked off the World Championship of Magic.

The prize: lucrative contracts for stage shows in Las Vegas, Paris and Monaco.

Some 156 magicians from 64 countries are taking part in the main event, while thousands of others are performing in public shows, street acts and even workshops.

The performers each get 10 minutes on stage to impress a panel of judges, with the best advancing to a final session on Saturday, when the winners will be decided, said Dag Lofalk, president of the organizing committee.

Seth Engstrom, 18, is competing for Sweden in close-up magic, where magicians use slight-of-hand and small objects such as cards and coins. The other section of the main event is stage magic, with grand illusions involving humans and other props.

''It is always the creative ones who win,'' said Engstrom of his idea of mixing card magic and Chopin's piano music. ''They want you to come up with new ideas.''

The contest is closed to the public, but followed closely by the more than 2,500 magicians -- from as far away as China, New Zealand, Macau and the Virgin Islands -- who have gathered in Stockholm for the event.

The championship began in 1948 and has lately been held every three years.

Magicians use the event to learn from each other -- but keep their closely guarded secrets to themselves. However, the public will get their share of magic as well, with hundreds of magicians taking part in shows, lectures and workshops, and doing tricks on the streets and in parks, Lofalk said.

''This is the first time we try to open the event up a bit more to the public, to give them a chance to see the acts as well,'' he said.
**************
Breaking a Barrier 60 Years Before Robinson By BILL PENNINGTON, NY Times

In 1886, the Buffalo Bisons, a top minor league baseball team, signed a versatile infielder from Massachusetts named Frank Grant. The next day, a local newspaper announced Grant's arrival by describing him as "a Spaniard."

Grant was in fact one of five African-Americans playing in the otherwise all-white minor leagues that year, on teams from Kansas to Connecticut. Their presence was accepted if not widely acknowledged in the 1880's, passed off with a wink and a nod, a dodge that labeled players like Grant as Spaniards, Portuguese or Arabs.

The ruse did not hide what historians now concede, that some 60 years before Jackie Robinson famously broke organized baseball's color barrier, integrated teams of white and black athletes played hundreds of professional games. African-Americans even played in the major leagues.

To most Americans, the history of black baseball means the Negro leagues, an enterprising, culturally rich response to the Jim Crow-era segregation in professional baseball. But blacks played professional baseball for decades after the Civil War, long before the Negro National League began in 1920.

On Sunday in Cooperstown, N.Y., the National Baseball Hall of Fame and Museum will induct by special election 17 stars and team owners who predate modern professional baseball's integration in the mid-1940's.

Two of the special inductees, Grant and a onetime teammate, Sol White, trace their baseball lives to the most obscure period of black baseball — the 1880's, the last decade before the game imposed its color barrier.

The recently documented life stories of Grant and White, 19th-century pioneers who dared not be recognized as such, have helped complete the chronicle of the African-American baseball experience. Theirs are the forgotten tales of men rushing to play at the highest professional tier, aware that their immediate offspring would probably be prohibited such an opportunity.

"They are the players who just vanished from baseball's narrative, like a secret no one talks about," said the baseball historian Jim Overmyer, who specializes in black baseball. "But it is important to know that they are the beginning of baseball desegregation. Somebody had to do the early heavy lifting, and even if few people know it, these guys were there first."

Overmyer and another historian of black baseball, Greg Bond, were among 12 members of a committee that voted for the Hall of Fame's special election.

"It complicates our understanding of race relations in sports to realize that the color barrier was not a natural outcome of mixing races after the Civil War," Bond said. "The fact is there were a lot of blacks on mostly white teams. The color barrier became a choice people made at the expense of people like Grant and White, who then disappeared."

The first black professional baseball player is believed to be John Fowler, who used the nickname Bud and played for minor league teams in Lynn and Worcester, Mass., in 1878. Through recommendations from fans, historians and Hall of Fame members, Fowler was among 94 candidates for the special election, but he was not among the final 17.

Through meticulous work, representatives for the Society for American Baseball Research discovered that Fowler was born John Jackson 20 years earlier in central New York, and that he learned to play baseball, in of all places, the village of Cooperstown during the 1860's.

Fowler played for 18 years in 13 professional leagues, from New England to New Mexico. He was a speedy base stealer who played every position, including pitcher.

It is not clear why he changed his name, but he clearly had a sense of drama and mystery. A barber by trade, Fowler would regale newspaper reporters with claims that his travels had allowed him to play baseball with cowboys and Indians, with fur traders and for bags of gold dust in mining camps.

"He was a tireless self-promoter," said Overmyer, who wrote the early chapters of "Shades of Glory," a new book about African-American baseball. "He was a star player, too, usually batting .300 wherever he went. But no one has ever been able to say why he changed his name. He didn't need it to be remembered. He drew attention wherever he went."

Not all the attention brought comfort to Fowler. While there are pictures of him posing at ease with white teammates, by the time he had advanced to the highest level of the minors, he was a victim of racial bias on and off the field. Some teams simply released him after white teammates complained about playing with a black man.

A piece of equipment that Fowler began carrying from city to city revealed much about his predicament as a black player. He wore handmade wooden shin protectors at second base, his best position, to guard against the violent charges and spikes of base runners.

In 1884, six years after Fowler made his pro debut, the American Association, which was one of three accepted major leagues in the country, expanded to include the Toledo, Ohio, Blue Stockings. On the roster was a 27-year-old black catcher, Moses Fleetwood Walker. Educated at Oberlin College, Walker was valued for his defense. But he, too, had problems with white teammates.

"Some of the pitchers wouldn't let Fleet Walker call pitches for them," Overmyer said. "They would throw whatever they wanted, even purposely trying to cross up Walker. What's interesting is that those players later admitted that Walker caught all the pitches anyway."

Walker played 110 games for Toledo that season and batted .263. His younger brother Welday joined the team in midseason and played five games in the outfield.

"These are the recognized first black major leaguers," Bond said.

Their major league careers ended when Toledo was left out of the American Association the next season. Fleet Walker was also among the 94 candidates for the Hall of Fame but was not selected.

By 1886, several black players had ascended to teams in the International League, the highest level of minor league baseball. Among those one step from the majors was Grant, an acrobatic, sure-handed infielder and power hitter.

Many black players had friendly relationships with their white teammates, especially in the lower minors and on semipro clubs. But the atmosphere around teams in the competitive International League was more charged. Grant, primarily a second baseman whom many baseball experts call the best player in 19th-century black baseball, had also fashioned wooden shin guards.

"This was about jobs and the opportunity to get to the major leagues," Overmyer said. "The stakes had been raised. Baseball had created something that was unheard of in America at the time: black men were taking white men's jobs."

Soon, it appeared that some white players were intentionally making errors in the field behind black pitchers. Some white players refused to pose in the team picture, saying they did not want to be photographed with black teammates. Exhibition games between major league and minor league teams were abruptly canceled when the minor league team signed a black player.

In 1887, the directors of the International League voted to prohibit the signing of additional black players, although blacks under contract, like Grant and Fleet Walker, who was playing in Syracuse, could remain with their teams. They stayed through the 1888 season.

"Then Grant just gave up," Overmyer said. "I think he got tired of getting leveled every time he went to turn a double play."

By 1890, the International League was all white, something that would remain true until 1946, when Jackie Robinson played for the Montreal Royals.

At lower levels of professional baseball, some integrated teams remained into the mid-1890's. Sol White played in some of those leagues, though his greatest fame came as a player for and a founder of top independent all-black teams at the turn of the century.

It was White who helped recruit Grant to the Philadelphia Giants, a celebrated all-black team. These teams, many of which played exhibition games against all-white teams, became the forerunners of the organized Negro leagues.

White, whose full name was King Solomon White, contributed the only known written history of early African-American baseball. His 1907 archive, "Sol White's Official Baseball Guide," is a 128-page almanac rich with details, rosters, records, photographs and an insider's straight talk on the hardships faced and triumphs achieved by the players and personalities of the day.

White went on to become a noted journalist, and manager and team executive in the Negro leagues. He died on Long Island in 1955 at the age of 87 and was buried on Staten Island. According to officials at the Baseball Hall of Fame, White has no surviving relatives.

Grant, who retired from baseball in 1903, died in New York City in 1937 at age 71.

"We don't know a lot about Frank Grant after baseball," said Overmyer, who has devoted hundreds of hours to studying Grant's life. "He was in New York City, and for the census of the 1920's and 1930's, he's always working — as a porter or a hotel worker. His death is acknowledged in newspaper obituaries in 1937. The great pitcher Smokey Joe Williams is a pallbearer at his funeral."

There is no record that Grant ever married or had children. He had nephews and nieces in western Massachusetts, but he rarely communicated with them after the turn of the century.

"All the family knew was that Frank Grant had been a great baseball player," Marion Grant Royston said in a telephone interview from her home in Williamstown, Mass. Her father, William, was Frank's nephew.

"There was no contact with him after a long while. No one knew about it when he died. There were just memories. As a child, I remember my father and aunts talking about some of the things he went through. They mentioned that he would make believe he was Spanish."

Royston, 70, and her sister, Emily Grant Foote, will attend the induction in Cooperstown along with some of their children.

"It's a little sad," Royston said. "I wish some of the people who knew him or watched him play were still around. Frank Grant must have loved the game to put up with everything he had to put up with. It's a great honor. It must have been a difficult time for all of them."

Grant is buried in Clifton, N.J.

"He went there as a charity case," Overmyer said. "Apparently, Frank personally had little money at the time of his death."

Overmyer went to the Clifton cemetery recently, hoping to put a commemorative plaque or stone recognizing Grant's new status as a Hall of Famer.

"The superintendent said that as a charity case from the 1930's, all he could tell me is the area in the cemetery where Frank was buried," Overmyer said. "Unfortunately, he couldn't tell me exactly where. It's an unmarked grave that's going to stay unmarked."
***************
Transforming the Alchemists By JOHN NOBLE WILFORD, NY Times

PHILADELPHIA — Historians of science are taking a new and lively interest in alchemy, the often mystical investigation into the hidden mysteries of nature that reached its heyday in Europe in the 16th and 17th centuries and has been an embarrassment to modern scientists ever since.

There was no place in the annals of empirical science, beginning mainly in the 18th century, for the occult practices of obsessed dreamers who sought most famously and impossibly to transform base metals into pure gold. So alchemy fell into disrepute.

But in the revival of scholarship on the field, historians are finding reasons to give at least some alchemists their due. Even though they were secretive and self-deluded and their practices closer to magic than modern scientific methods, historians say, alchemists contributed to the emergence of modern chemistry as a science and an agent of commerce.

"Experimentalism was one of alchemy's hallmarks," said Lawrence M. Principe, a historian of science at Johns Hopkins University and a trained chemist. "You have to get your hands dirty, and in this way alchemists forged some early ideas about matter."

Bent over boiling crucibles in their shadowy laboratories, squeezing bellows before transformative flames and poring over obscure formulas, some alchemists stumbled on techniques and reactions of great value to later chemists. It was experimentation by trial and error, historians say, but it led to new chemicals and healing elixirs and laid the foundations of procedures like separating and refining, distilling and fermenting.

"What do chemists do? They like to make stuff," Dr. Principe said. "Most chemists are interested not so much in theory as in making substances with particular properties. The emphasis on products was the same with some alchemists in the 17th century."

Pamela H. Smith, a history professor at Columbia, said alchemy "was the matter theory of its day" and was "incredibly multilayered and therefore a powerful way of viewing nature."

Yet on the whole, historians say, the widespread practice of alchemy impeded the rise of modern chemistry. While physics and astronomy marched slowly but inexorably from Galileo to Kepler to Newton and the Scientific Revolution, chemistry slumbered under alchemy's influence through what historians call its "postponed scientific revolution."

The new research and revised interpretations concerning the role of alchemy in the history of chemistry as well as pharmacology and medicine were discussed at a three-day conference late last month at the Chemical Heritage Foundation in Philadelphia. The meeting, attended by more than 80 scientists and historians, was organized by Dr. Principe, who said, "Only in the last 15 or 20 years have we learned how crucial alchemy was to the emergence of modern science."

No one at the meeting tried to turn lead into gold. But the historians conjured up quite a lode of pyrite, fool's gold, in the colorful characters they had found buried in previously neglected archives.

A few practicing alchemists, it seems, may have been certifiably mad — probably, like mad hatters, from sniffing the mercury they worked with.

One notable alchemist of the 16th century, a Swiss named Paracelsus, was not mad, but cantankerous and iconoclastic. "He was equal parts metallurgist, pharmacist, physician and crackpot," Dr. Principe said.

Historians have found that Paracelsus made some advances in the detection of disorders by analyzing urine and claimed marvelous cures through alchemy.

In his chemical cosmology, he saw the world as a great distillation vessel and its changes as parallel to the operations carried out in a laboratory. But he recorded his material and spiritual ideas in the deliberately opaque writing typical of many alchemists, who expressed themselves in codes, symbols and emblems to conceal their findings from the uninitiated.

From his study, Dane Thor Daniel of Wright State University in Dayton, Ohio, concluded that Paracelsus's unwavering objective was to find a Christian alternative to pagan natural philosophy — science.

Other alchemists were outright charlatans or fools, ridiculed in contemporary art and literature. On display in a gallery at the conference hall were several 17th-century paintings by Flemish and Dutch artists, who depicted alchemists toiling in the disorder of dark workshops and the poverty of futile quests. The paintings were said to be popular among Dutch burghers as a caution to anyone contemplating a life in alchemy instead of steady trade.

But many an alchemist drew support from royal courts where visions of newfound wealth and power danced in crowned heads. It was not always a happy alliance.

In 1601, Hans Heinrich Nüschler signed a contract with his patron, Duke Friedrich of Württemberg in Stuttgart, to demonstrate his process for extracting a substantial amount of gold from a sample of silver. The duke, keen on mining technology, promised a generous reward. Nüschler agreed to conduct the experiments at his own expense.

After several months of failure and mounting debt, the desperate alchemist resorted to fraud. He asked his brother to help by surreptitiously adding gold to the alchemical sample. His ploy exposed, Nüschler was tried, convicted and hanged.

"Only a handful of alchemists actually ended their careers on the gallows," said Tara E. Nummedal, a historian at Brown. "But this underscored that alchemy was very serious business in the Holy Roman Empire."

In her report, Dr. Nummedal concluded that the relationships of patrons and alchemists showed that "alchemy was a direct engagement with the political, economic, religious and intellectual realities of the early modern world."

At the turn of the 17th century, King Henry IV of France surrounded himself with alchemists who sought to resurrect plants from their ashes and experimented with ways to extend the monarch's life. Even the diplomats had orders to seek out the cryptic methods of alchemists in other countries.

An alchemist in the court of a German prince scored a profitable success quite by accident. Looking for materials for creating precious metals, Johann Friedrich Böttger analyzed a "white earth" that duplicated the ingredients for imported Chinese porcelain. The discovery was the beginning of the Dresden china industry.

Even geniuses of the first order, like Isaac Newton, found alchemy irresistible. It was an accepted method of seeking knowledge — or confirmation of received truth — in early modern history.

Newton, whose laws of gravity and optics ushered in modern physics, also delved into alchemy with relentless energy. His notebooks contain thousands of pages on alchemic thoughts and experiments over 30 years.

William R. Newman, a professor of the history and philosophy of science at Indiana University, said many manuscripts had not received the scrutiny they deserved. He reported on a text in the Smithsonian Institution that he called "an overlooked gem."

In these notebook entries, Newton cited the ideas of German alchemists for imitating the processes by which metals were generated in nature, deep inside the earth. These involved the familiar alchemical theory of metallic generation through interactions of sulfur and mercury.

But Newton, expanding on the theory, wrote: "These two spirits above all wander over the earth and bestow life on animals and vegetables. And they makes stones, salts and so forth."

As Dr. Newman noted, "Thus we have passed from a theory of mere metallic generation to one that is intended to explain the totality of life on earth, as well as the production of all mineral materials, not just metallic ones."

In this sense, Dr. Newman continued, Newton's repeated experiments for the rest of his life were aimed at fulfilling the words of the Emerald Tablet of Hermes, considered the founding text of alchemy in ancient Egypt. Newton expected to achieve what the tablet said was the una res, "the one thing" by which "the world was created" and with which one could "perform miracles."

So it seems that Newton was no ordinary alchemist interested in making gold. He apparently aspired to a theory of alchemy more comprehensive than even his laws of gravity. But it could be said, in a paraphrase of Newton's famous expression of modesty, that the giants on whose shoulders he stood in this endeavor did not measure up to his antecedents in physics and astronomy.

Newton's alchemical bent was not out of character, Dr. Smith of Columbia said. "He was drawn to the occult," she said. "Gravity for him was an occult force, and so was alchemy as an explanation of how things transform into other things."

The British chemist Robert Boyle, a Newton contemporary, also had a foot on each side of the alchemy-modern science divide. He dabbled for years in an alchemical obsession, the search for the philosopher's stone — the long-sought agent for transmuting lead to gold and unlocking other material and spiritual secrets. The stone was the unified theory of everything in that time.

Boyle wrote enviously in 1680 that "there exists conceal'd in the world" a group of chemists "of a much higher order able to transmute baser Metalls into perfect ones."

At the same time, Boyle hurled harsh criticism at alchemists, particularly Paracelsians and the obscurity of their language and concepts. His purpose, he wrote, was to draw "the Chymists Doctrine out of their Dark and Smoakie Laboratories into open light" and to engage in "better Experiments and Arguments."

Citing Boyle's "swinging critique" and even earlier attacks on alchemical practices, Stephen Clucas, a University of London historian, raised questions that he said require deeper research by historians: Why did a "scientific revolution" in experimental chemistry not occur earlier in the 17th century? Why was a clear separation of alchemy and exact chemistry delayed until the 18th century?

Bruce T. Moran, a historian at the University of Nevada at Reno and the University College London, said it was not all that unreasonable at the time to be attracted to alchemy. "For a variety of practical and intellectual reasons," Professor Moran said, "the idea of transforming one thing into another was to be expected."

In everyday life, grapes were turned to wine and wheat to bread. A sour green apple grew into a sweet red one. It was in the nature of things to change, even metals. Miners and refiners already knew that lead ore almost always contains some silver, and silver ore almost always contains some gold. This implied that the metals changed one into the other over time.

In the booklet "Transmutations: Alchemy in Art," written with Lloyd DeWitt, an art historian, Dr. Principe noted that in 1600, chemists knew of just seven metals — gold, silver, iron, copper, tin, lead and mercury. (Since then scientists have discovered another 60.) The original seven known metals had properties in common. They were shiny and, except for the liquid mercury, could be hammered, shaped and cast.

"The commonality of properties implied to early thinkers a commonality of composition," Dr. Principe wrote., "And thus it was theorized that all the metals were composed of the same essential ingredients in different proportions and degrees of purity."

"Even if in the modern view alchemy is all nonsense or very spiritual," Dr. Moran said, "many people drawn to it for whatever reasons were actually creating very useful, practical chemistry and bringing to it an artisan know-how."

The conference on the history of alchemy opened with a program of chamber music called "The Philosophers' Tone." The scholars delighted in Handel's transmutation of Ben Jonson's "The Alchemist" into pure gold. Over coffee between sessions, they pondered new directions of research and topics for dissertations. They said, for example, that more attention should be paid to alchemy's role in the history of medicine.

They also remarked, somewhat conspiratorially, over parallels between the misguided certainties and self-delusion of alchemy and today's political and religious attacks on modern science. Of Boyle's efforts to replicate experiments from alchemical writings, Joseph E. Early, a retired Georgetown University professor who studies the philosophy of chemistry, said, "He couldn't do it any more than we could find the weapons of mass destruction in Iraq."

Then the scholars departed Philadelphia, leaving the city's lead-to-gold ratio unchanged.
***************
Their Motorcycles Are in the Mail By MATTHEW HEALEY, NY Times

EVEN as a youngster, Penny Nickerson loved motorcycles. Growing up in a family that considered motorbikes unladylike, though, she had no choice but to pursue her passion on the sly.

"I cheated on the side — I rode with my boyfriend," Ms. Nickerson said. "They never did find out about my first motorcycle."

Now the United States Postal Service may be displaying a similar rebellious streak: tomorrow at the huge Sturgis motorcycle rally in the Black Hills of South Dakota, the Postal Service will issue a set of four stamps that depict classic American bikes. An event once tinged with something of an outlaw reputation, Sturgis has become an annual pilgrimage for well-heeled touring riders and sport bike enthusiasts.

When the post office approved motorcycles in 2003 as a subject for future stamps, it asked the Smithsonian Institution for help selecting models that would display what Mark Saunders, a post office spokesman, called "the evolution" of American style and construction. An example of one bike selected for the stamps, a 1918 Cleveland, is owned by Ms. Nickerson, president of the Big Sandbar chapter of the Antique Motorcycle Club of America, on Long Island.

Ms. Nickerson not only agreed to let the Postal Service use her bike as a model for the stamp's artwork, she also contacted club members who owned other motorcycles that had been chosen for the project — a sensitive matter because the selections had not been made public.

Photographs of the bikes were sent to an artist, Steve Buchanan of Winsted, Conn., whose previous stamp designs included insects, reptiles and carnivorous plants. Mr. Buchanan worked with the owners, the Postal Service and vintage-motorcycle experts to create the portrayals on the stamps.

Some details of the stamps differ slightly from the actual bikes they depict. For example, the 1965 Harley-Davidson Electra Glide, one of the most recognizable American motorcycles, is based on a bike owned by George Tsunis, a real estate developer and member of the motorcycle club who lives in Port Jefferson, N.Y. The most apparent difference between his bike and the one depicted on the stamp is its color — Mr. Tsunis's is black and white, but the Postal Service wanted a more colorful stamp, so it was changed to blue and white.

Both color schemes are historically accurate. Mr. Tsunis explained that such authenticity is something restorers of classic vehicles strive for. At collectors' meets, bikes are judged by their adherence to factory specifications, with points awarded for originality — even mechanical details like bolts, wiring and engine parts. The fewer modifications from original factory condition, the better, Mr. Tsunis said.

Another stamp in the series shows a "chopper" — a customized Harley with its handlebars, exhaust pipes and front suspension radically extended, a distinctively American style that was especially popular in the 1960's and 70's. The image was created by the artist after consulting with chopper builders — and Mr. Tsunis is now building a real version to match the stamp.

While Harley-Davidson is certainly the best known of American motorcycle manufacturers, it was not the only one; in the early decades of the 20th century, there were some 150 makes.

"The Indian was chief," said Larry Spielfogel, the owner of the 1940 Indian Four depicted on another of the new stamps. Mr. Spielfogel lives in Manhattan but keeps his collection of 63 motorcycles in Brooklyn. Mr. Spielfogel grew up in Port Washington, N.Y. and went to the Main Street School, half a block from a well-known dealership, Ghost Motorcycles. "When I went to school, I heard the motorcycles running," he said.

His father bought him his first bike, a Ducati, in 1964, which he would ride around the local sand pits. In those days, many who wanted to buy a new Harley would trade in an older motorcycle of another make. "I couldn't afford new bikes," he said. "Ghost literally had a mountain of 'em for $10, $15 each. At that time the Indians were junk."

Mr. Spielfogel calls Indians "the Duesenbergs of motorcycles." His 1940 Indian Four, named for its four-cylinder engine, is a relatively rare model; he said only 375 were made in 1940. Many were used by cities for police duty, which wore them out quickly.

Mr. Spielfogel found his Indian while driving on Sunrise Highway near Baldwin, N.Y., about 15 years ago. At a stop for gas, Mr. Spielfogel asked the attendant if he knew of any old motorcycles for sale in the area and was directed to the home of an older resident, who led him to an enormous pile of leaves in the backyard. Moving some of the leaves aside revealed a blue tarp.

"And under there is this motorcycle, all rusty," Mr. Spielfogel recounted recently.

The owner, who wanted to pass the motorcycle along to someone who shared his love of classic bikes, sold it to Mr. Spielfogel for $250.

It took three and a half years to restore, a process that involved a considerable amount of research, fabrication of many parts that were no longer available, and complete stripping and repainting of the bodywork. Mr. Spielfogel says the motorcycle is now worth close to $100,000.

Because of its age and rarity, Ms. Nickerson's bike arouses the greatest admiration among connoisseurs of antique motorcycles. Her Cleveland, which at first glance looks like little more than an old bicycle with a tiny motor attached to it, is the culmination of more than 10 years of research and restoration, all of which she did herself.

Nicknamed Olive, the bike was one Ms. Nickerson fell in love with when she was a teenager living in Maryland. But the family that owned it was reluctant to sell; it took years before she was able to load it into her pickup and bring it home.

Part of Ms. Nickerson's research involved trips to the Library of Congress to browse through old newspapers and magazines, looking for advertisements featuring the Cleveland. She said that many Clevelands and other motorcycles of that vintage were used by the Army in World War I; the military paint scheme of olive drab became the standard for civilian bikes, too.

Ms. Nickerson stopped off on her way to Sturgis last week at the Cleveland Auto and Aviation Museum for a homecoming visit with one of Olive's siblings there, before leading a procession to the building where Olive was made nearly 90 years ago.

Ms. Nickerson, who has by now acquired a 1914 Douglas, a 1925 Ner-A-Car, a number of postwar motorcycles and two grandchildren, marveled that thanks in part to the new stamp issue, her mother, now 80, seems to finally approve of her daughter's lifelong love affair with the motorcycle.
***************
Chasing the Perfect Taco Up the California Coast By CINDY PRICE, NY Times

I'VE never met a taco I didn't like. Weaned on Taco Bell and my Lebanese mother's Old El Paso tacos, I'm not terrifically choosy. High-end, low-end, commercial, authentic — even a bad taco is better than no taco.

But things change. Deep, obsessive love begets connoisseurship, and a more refined understanding is sought. The plan? A trip along Highway 1, between Los Angeles and San Francisco — among the most beautiful stretches of road in the country, and possibly the hottest taco crawl outside of Mexico. My boyfriend, Taylor Umlauf, will take the wheel and help sample the goods — generous spirit that he is — with hours between to soak in the scenery. The hum and buzz of 380 miles of winding open road await — heady visions of rustic farm towns unfolding into sun-bleached fishing villages, the sun, the salt, the fresh California air. This will be our storied and scenic backdrop. But our raison d'être? Five days, 28 taquerias, 49 tacos.

Eager to hit the road, we decide on a whirlwind tour of sprawling Los Angeles.

In the city's central section, Pico-Union is a largely Hispanic neighborhood that tourists rarely brake for, but it is home to the taco trifecta — King Taco, El Taurino and El Parián.

King Taco owns El Taurino, and both have a terrific atmosphere — bustling assembly-line kitchens, lively patrons, Latin-themed jukeboxes. Each produces tasty blueprints for the authentic Mexican taco: saucer-size soft corn tortillas about four inches wide, topped with steaming meats that hum with cilantro, onion and a shot of hot sauce.

But it is the loner, El Parián, that sways the heart. It is a favorite of the taco-blogging sensation, the great Bandini (www.tacohunt.blogspot.com), who has warned me that it always looks closed.

Parking in back, we slip into a surprisingly roomy restaurant with sit-down service. In the open kitchen, enormous pots bubble with birria (stewed goat), while customers toil quietly over chips and salsa. My carne asada taco arrives, the thick, juicy strips of steak bursting with flavor and laced with ripe tomato. Flanking the plate are the requisite slices of radish and wedge of lemon.

Across town, we cruise into a busy commercial strip of East Los Angeles. Those who have never sampled a fish taco would be wise to cut their teeth at the tropical urban oasis Tacos Baja Ensenada. Filled with plump pieces of fried halibut and stacked high with cabbage and an otherworldly cream sauce, it is the kind of taco you don't look up from.

Day fades to night through Venice and Santa Monica, and in the morning, we burst onto the open road. This stretch of Highway 1, just before Santa Barbara, where the road hugs the Pacific so tightly you can see the spray coming off the rocks, makes you want to laugh and crank up the music. In the summer, the wildflowers spring up, paving the way to San Francisco. You know it's been said a million times, but this really is the great American road trip.

Do rich people eat tacos? I had heard that wealthy Santa Barbara was a hotbed of authentic taco activity, but I was hard-pressed to believe it. A cruise down quaint, tree-peppered North Milpas Street, however, confirms it. The street is lined with taquerias, including the one that started the craze — La Super Rica Taqueria.

Known to many as "the Julia Child joint" — she was a loyal customer until she died two years ago — La Super Rica is bright and airy, and the tortillas are handmade on the spot. On the cashier's recommendation, I pair a taco de bistec (charbroiled steak) with a queso de cazuela (a heavenly cheese baked in tomato sauce).

Just as I'm sitting down with the owner, Isidoro González, a white-bearded passer-by leans in. "It's not just a taqueria, it's the best restaurant in town," he says. Heart be still, it's David Crosby. A fellow taco-hound! "You don't have to continue any further," he says, eyes twinkling. "This is it — this is the place."

Starry-eyed, we proceed. Nearby, just off charming State Street, where white stucco boutiques sit neatly under manicured palm trees, is a no-frills storefront called Lilly's Taqueria. The menu, scrolled hurriedly across a white eraser board, reads like Hannibal Lecter's grocery list — cheek, lip, tongue, eye. I opt for the lengua (tongue), and dig into the tiny pocket.

EMBOLDENED, I ask the owner, José Sepulveda, about the ojo taco (cow eye). "It sounds kind of unusual," he says with a laugh. "They think they're going to serve the eye right there. We chop everything, and it's cooked and steamed."

Right. It does kind of look like browned Steak-Ums. But I also spy some gelatinous, clear bits. "Oh, that," he says, catching my hesitancy. "That's nothing. Just different parts of the, uh, muscle."

Oh, boy. Like the cornea? I think, plunging in. The flavor is rich, straightforward — a bit greasy, but doable. "Tacos de ojo" is also slang in Mexico for "eye candy," as in "that Salma Hayek is un taco de ojo." Possibly excited by the connotation, my vegetarian boyfriend leans in swiftly for a bite, then stares sheepishly at the plate before dipping in for round two.

Back on the road — the whistle of the wind, the rush of passing trucks, the smell of salt air. Passing a herd of grazing cows, Taylor grips the wheel, muttering: "I can't even look them in the eye."

San Luis Obispo is a lot like Santa Barbara, without the fancy. It's just as cute, but the streets, lined with Mission-style buildings, are less crowded, and the shopping is feasible. On a sidewalk, four Mexican construction workers sit eating lunch. On a whim, I run through my list. They nod approvingly, but when Chapala, a little-known restaurant in nearby Morro Bay, is mentioned, the big guy on the end lights up like a firecracker: "Yes, yes! That's the one!"

Morro Bay is a fishing village about 10 miles north, with a service street that runs along roaring Highway 1. Tucked discreetly into a gas-station minimart, Chapala is easy to miss. Last November, after seeing long lines form for his homemade tacos, its owner, Antonio Dominguez, turned Chapala into a full-service restaurant, with a mariachi band that plays Friday nights. To mark the changeover, a temporary plastic sign flags in the wind.

Inside, the restaurant is awash in color — a vibrant, charismatic place with big wooden chairs brought in from Mexico. Festive music competes with the clank of the kitchen as the host grabs a couple of menus. The tacos are the best yet. The al pastor (marinated pork) is kicked up with a zigzag of cream; the shrimp taco is sautéed in a homemade achiote sauce.

Our next stop also turns out superb tacos, but with a beachside surfer appeal. At Ruddell's Smokehouse, a bubble-gum-colored outpost on Cayucos Beach, the owner, Jim Ruddell, owns up to his "gringo tacos" with a laugh, but his house-smoked meats and seafood are no joke. We feast on cumin-dotted pork loin and sweet, smoky oyster tacos, to the thrum of the crashing waves.

Fat and happy, we set our sights on the rocky landscape of Big Sur. The commercial world slips away as we climb the coastline, the gray-brown Santa Lucia Mountains rising suddenly over the swirling blue Pacific. Before us lies a stretch renowned for its vast, awesome splendor, a 90-mile picture postcard in the making — but alas, a taco wasteland.

As the dark cliffs of Big Sur give way to the bright green heartland, Mexican farmers toil in broad hats, backs bent in the hot sun. This is Watsonville, an agricultural town, filled with taquerias catering to the ever-increasing Hispanic population.

Fiesta Tepa-Sahuayo looks like a classic California hole-in-the-mall, but the festive interior brims with homeland trinkets. The tacos hardly disappoint, but my guess is that the real gems are the hard-to-find specialties, like shrimps in rose petal sauce.

Santa Cruz, to the north, is a flip-flop, sand-in-the-shorts kind of place — a laid-back beach town where the college kids reign supreme along thumping Pacific Avenue. Its Taqueria Vallarta turns out to be a major operation catering to daytime shoppers and late-night partiers, and my defenses kick up. Teenagers don't have the most discriminating tastes for food.

Young America, I stand corrected. The carnitas (shredded pork) tacos are delicious, and grabbing them to go, we pick up a six-pack and head up to the Skyview drive-in movie theater. It's a classic drive-in, screening Hollywood blockbusters and entertaining a laissez-faire policy of B.Y.O.T.

Halfway between Santa Cruz and San Francisco, we turn off into the rolling green hills of Pescadero, a tiny little blip of a town with a handful of general stores, a single bar and one gas station. I have been tipped off that there is a taqueria holed up somewhere in town, and that the ingredients are straight off the farm. I ask around. "There is no sign in the window," a local offers, "but there is a taqueria in the gas station."

Inside the gas station, it's lunchtime and bustling at Taqueria y Mercado de Amigos. Mexican workers squeeze into booths, sipping hibiscus sodas and chatting over the sizzle of the grill and the rhythmic cha-ching of the register. Two cooks work quickly — grilling the shrimp just till the edges blacken, searing the al pastor and drizzling it with hot sauce.

Outside, the quiet of Pescadero is breathtaking. We head up Stage Road to the old cemetery and take the dirt road to the top of the hill. Sitting on the trunk of the car, tacos warming our laps, we find the most beautiful spot yet — the Kelly green pastures rolling and folding straight into the Western sky, the sun beaming down on all that open land. And just when it couldn't get any better, we realize something else — we're holding two of the best tacos this side of Mexico.

On the last day, we reach San Francisco and its Mission District. For sheer taco volume, it is equal to any neighborhood in the States. The streets are lined with murals and filled with the sounds of friends heading for happy hour, cars honking as they pass. The taco to beat here is at La Taqueria, where awards line the walls. But I've heard word that two other restaurants, Taqueria San José and El Taco Loco, were gaining. Clearly, I will need to sample one from each.

Having barebacked it sans gringo toppings all the way from Los Angeles, I decide to indulge my American peccadilloes and load them up with guacamole, sour cream and cheese. In the Mission, this is called the "super taco."

Three carnitas are placed neatly shell to shell. At first blush, San José's, filled to the breaking point with rice and beans, looks doomed. La Taqueria's is clearly the looker — fresh ingredients folded gingerly into a wax paper pocket. But scraping aside the mound of rice on the San José taco, I am blown away. The pork is charred perfectly — crispy on the edges, with a center so sweet it brings a tear to the ojo.

Nearby, the legendary El Tonayense taco trucks (named for the owners' hometown, Tonaya, in the Mexican state of Jalisco) are hopping. Hitting the truck at Harrison and 22nd Streets, I sample an ace tripitas (pig intestines).

It's fitting that our last stop finds us at La Palma Mexicatessen, a tiny grocery store lined with the Mexican spices we've sampled along the way. In the back, kitchen workers shout orders and hand-roll tortillas to order. The crowd is lively — and why not? It's a beautiful afternoon, and the streets of this gorgeous city are lined with tacos. Determined to cap the crawl on the perfect note, I ask another customer what he likes on the menu. He smiles broadly.

"Everything."

The Taco Trail

Here are some of the taco places Cindy Price liked best on her trip from Los Angeles to San Francisco.

EL PARIáN 1528 West Pico Boulevard, Los Angeles; (213) 386-7361.

TACOS BAJA ENSENADA 5385 Whittier Boulevard, Los Angeles; (323) 887-1980.

LA SUPER RICA TAQUERIA 622 North Milpas Street, Santa Barbara; (805) 963-4940.

LILLY'S TAQUERIA 310 Chapala Street, Santa Barbara; (805) 966-9180.

CHAPALA RESTAURANT 2816 Main Street, Morro Bay; (805) 772-4492.

RUDDELL'S SMOKEHOUSE 101 D Street, Cayucos; (805) 995-5028.

TAQUERIA VALLARTA 1101 Pacific Avenue, Santa Cruz; (831) 471-2655.

TAQUERIA Y MERCADO DE AMIGOS 1999 Pescadero Creek Road, Pescadero; (650) 879-0232.

LA TAQUERIA 2889 Mission Street, San Francisco; (415) 285-7117.

TAQUERIA SAN JOSé 2830 Mission Street, San Francisco; (415) 282-0203.

EL TONAYENSE TACO TRUCK Harrison Street & 22nd Street, San Francisco.

LA PALMA MEXICATESSEN 2884 24th Street, San Francisco; (415) 647-1500.
*************