His 86th birthday found Author W. Somerset Maugham in Bangkok and in the middle of his leisurely "farewell tour" of the Far East. To gratify a U.S. newsman's request, the Old Party issued a handwritten statement addressed to America. It went, in part: "Thank you for all the kindness that I have received at your hands since I first came to America 50 years ago . . . I have an idea that in two or three hundred years English will be the universal language, spoken all over the world. Of course, it won't be the English we speak now; it will probably be even more strange than the language of Chaucer is to us now . . . I like to think it is just possible then, in the far distant future, that some old scholar, rummaging about old papers in the Library of Congress, will come across a passage which stated that a long-forgotten English author had . . . in 1960 expressed his earnest hope that the ties between his own country and the United States would become ever and ever closer."

Leaving Sant Ignazio Church in downtown Rome, popular, jovial Pope John XXIII, 78, waved off his chauffeur, strolled some 300 yds. to the Capranica Seminary, where he was to speak to some young priests. It was his longest walk outside the Vatican since his elevation to the Papacy. Feeling much like a young priest himself, His Holiness observed: "Our legs can still bear us, and this is the best way to move. But on foot, in an automobile or in the air, the important thing is to go forward--wherever the Lord wants us."

In the study of his home in Berkeley, Calif., snow-topped Fleet Admiral Chester W. Nimitz, soon to be 75, leafed through some historic papers dating from the days when he commanded the U.S. Pacific Fleet in World War II. But he made it clear that he was just browsing and not afflicted by any passion to pen his memoirs, as so many of his comrades-in-arms have done. Such books, said he, brim with "many critical remarks and self-praise at the expense of others. Any memoirs I wrote could not add historically to what has been written."

More willing to go along with a cultural gag as he mellows, India's Prime Minister Jawaharlal Nehru, 70, allowed himself to be turbaned and accoutered with a ceremonial sword and shield in order to get into the spirit of a war dance performed by Bombay visitors. Peace Lover Nehru seemed to be mildly amused by the belligerent ritual, part of a celebration that drew dancing troupes from all over India for observance of Republic Day.

Between the years when Sir Isaac Pitman and John R. Gregg devised their competing shorthand systems (as any stenographer knows, Gregg's is now predominant in the U.S.), a man named Andrew Graham developed a Pitmanish shorthand scheme that resembled, as much as any script, Arabic. By the time he was 17, Woodrow Wilson had all but mastered the Graham system, in 1874 dashed off a note in Graham to Graham. For the rest of his life, Wilson kept improving his Graham to a degree where present historians almost wished for a shorthand Rosetta stone that would provide a key for translating Wilson's ultra-Graham into good Wilsonian English. Last week in Washington, anachronistic Graham Expert Clifford Gehman, 84, had all but cracked the Wilsonian cipher after more than a year's effort. As proof of his success, Gehman displayed a cogent translation of Wilson's acceptance speech for the 1912 presidential nomination. Said Gehman wryly: "Mr. Wilson learned his Graham thoroughly--too thoroughly, I would say. He projected its theory beyond Graham's intentions, to about the same point I did."

Taking the speaker's podium at a meeting of the U.S.S.R.'s Composers Union, famed Soviet Composer Dmitry Kabalevsky (TIME, Nov. 23) advised his musical comrades to redirect their suites to the sunny side of the street. "Our songs suffer from a tone of despondent melancholy," declared he. "Under the guise of lyrics appear the cries of the weak man complaining of his own private life." After the meeting, one of Kabalevsky's colleagues, Composer Aram (Sabre Dance) Khachaturian, whose music is anything but self-piteous, winged to the U.S., looked like any tired businessman when he landed in New York City on his way to conduct some concerts in Havana.

"The day this idea first hit me," said Steve ("the thinking man's comic") Allen, "I got that certain instinctive chill. The hair on the back of my neck almost stood up. The idea was that good." Allen's brainstorm: a 19-minute "Meeting of the Minds" inserted in his hour-long TV variety show, featuring Allen and actors playing Aristotle, Dostoevsky, Montaigne, Hegel, Freud and Clarence Darrow, the lot of them hashing over the wisdom of the ages. But NBC, unable to see in such a cerebral panel the laugh riot customarily expected of Comic Allen, summarily vetoed Thinker Allen and his sham philosophers. It was, allowed the network, perhaps a fine idea for some other spot, time and moderator. Whimpered Steve Allen: "I feel like Edison might have felt if they turned down the electric light while they were sitting in the darkness."

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