Names make news. Last week these names made this news:

In his syndicated newspaper column Spires of the Spirit, Dr. Frederick Brown Harris, chaplain of the U.S. Senate, un-petaled himself about flowers and funerals. " 'Please Omit Flowers,' " he wrote, "is a request often issued when arrangements are announced for what is usually called a funeral service . . . Whence comes this incongruous suggestion? Omit flowers--in the Valley of Shadow, when every yearning impulse is struggling vainly to express feelings that are too deep for words! . . . In 'Say it with Flowers' there stretch enchanting vistas of sacramental beauty like the glory of a garden or the shimmer of moonlight on a silvery sea . . ." Last week Reverend Harris' picture and words were splashed all over U.S. newspapers in full-page ads bringing readers "An Important Message ... in the Public Interest." Joyous sponsors of the ads: "The 11,000 members of the Florists' Telegraph Delivery Association."

Owlish Pollster Elmo Roper was elected board chairman of the Ford Foundation's Fund for the Republic, replacing ex-Automaker Paul G. Hoffman.

The world's top-earning, high-fashion model, Manhattan's svelte Dovima (a blend of her given names, Dorothy Virginia Margaret), 28, announced that she will soon up her posing rate from a classy $60 an hour to a classier $75. Reason: just like a baseball player, Dovima, a onetime $30-a-week candy counter girl, really wants her golden years to pay off. Lean, long Dovima sighed a prediction: "Photographers still like us as long, lean and thin as ever for fashion. But I think they are looking for a more natural, happy look instead of the gaunt, hard look that prevailed for so long."

A bespectacled Dalai Lama, 21, nominal ruler of Red-ruled Tibet, was permitted to venture outside the Bamboo Curtain for the first time since the Chinese Communists forced Marxian enlightenment upon his Himalayan country five years ago. In journeying from his capital of Lhasa to New Delhi, where he was warmly greeted by India's Prime Minister Nehru, the "living Buddha" traveled on foot, pony, jeep and, on the final lap, by plane. A half hour later, Tibet's No. 2 puppet, the Panchen Lama, a benighted Red stooge, arrived on a second plane.

Sweeping into Paris from London, symmetrically stacked (35-23-35) Marian McKnight, 19, Miss America of 1957, was hounded by newshounds. After the publicity-shy creature of publicity coyly evaded them at the posh Hotel Meurice, reporters picked up her trail again, cornered her at the entrance to the Folies-Bergere. Their brief interview proved unilateral--all questions and no answers. "Miss Amerique?" politely inquired a France Soirman. She responded, reported he, "with the sad countenance of a doe at bay." Soon, stated France Soir sadly, the door of the Folies-Bergere "swallowed Miss America with her camouflage of sables and her 99 centimeters* around the breast."

After serving as host at a heaping Thanksgiving dinner for elderly folks, Boston's unpompous Archbishop Richard J. Cushing shifted into high, merrily danced an Irish jig with two robustious ewes of his diocesan flock.

The burly Soviet Ambassador to the Court of St. James's, Jacob Malik, popped up at a London reception with his right hand in a bandage, accepted scattered condolences but offered no explanations. The Soviet Embassy later unhelpfully allowed: "Maybe it was a skin irritation."

The palace crisis that has openly rocked The Netherlands and not too privately estranged Queen Juliana and her consort, Prince Bernhard, moved closer to resolution. Juliana accepted with overflowing gratitude "for services rendered" the resignations of her private secretary, Baron van Heeckeren van Molecaten, and his buddy, the Queen's chamberlain, Johann van Maasdick. Significance of the quittings: the baron's family first introduced the Queen to Faith Healer Greet Hofmans (TIME, June 25), whose metaphysical grip on Juliana led to the crisis.

Sending a Library of Congress audience into a gale of scholarly snickers, aging (79) Biographer Archibald Henderson, a perennial examiner of Playwright George Bernard Shaw, trotted out a brand-new after-Shavian notion. It seems, related Henderson, that Shaw once got a letter that got the better of him. It was addressed to George Bernard Shawm. In a beard-tossing fury, Shaw roared to his wife that his correspondent could not even spell the name of the world's greatest man. Moreover, fumed G.B.S., there was no such word as "shawm." Shaw's wife, one of the world's most martyred women, quietly disagreed, led Shaw to a dictionary and pointed to "shawm ... an old-fashioned wind instrument long since passed out of common use."

*A gallant Gallic overestimate.

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