By HP-Time.com, Oh! Carmen!!

"I should sit in my corner and not say anything. I'm not convinced any more that I know the score." The voice was still harsh and raspy, but Eric Hoffer's mood was unusually mild as he announced that he was giving up his weekly newspaper column, "Reflections," which runs in 400 papers, earning him about $5,000 a week. "I've got no solutions," the longshoreman-philosopher said. "This country needs solutions. When I write, I'm a passionate person, but I can't do it in a column. I slash too much." And Hoffer's replacement? Aaron Wildavsky, Dean of the graduate school of public affairs at the University of California at Berkeley, a nonactivist Humphrey Democrat who is to the left of Hoffer on race questions but right in step with Hoffer's views on student radicals: he's agin 'em.

It was a case of the medium getting the message when the FCC received a 900-signature petition from indignant Nassau Bay Texans demanding toll-free service to nearby Houston. Heading the list of signatures was that of Astronaut Rusty Schweickart, followed by those of nine other angered astronauts, members of the Committee on Sane Telephone Service (COSTS). "We find it intolerable," says Mrs. Schweickart, "that in this age of instant communication with men on the moon, we of the space community should be denied basic communications services."

Alfred Lord Tennyson foresaw it all: "The old order changeth, yielding place to new ..." It took time, but as Guyana became a republic, the 73-year-old statue of Tennyson's patron, Queen Victoria, was hoisted indecorously from its place in front of the Supreme Court building in Georgetown. The old lady did not look amused.

Maverick Episcopalian James Pike died near the Dead Sea six months ago, but his widow, Diane, affirms that the bishop is communicating regularly from the Beyond through her dreams. Says she: "I feel I have been given a number of messages from him about the meaning of his experience in the wilderness, his death, my continuing existence after he died, and the nature of our relationship in this new dimension."

A screaming, jostling crowd of 200 rushed them at the airport. When it was all over, the bride had lost the heel of a shoe and her nylons were in shreds. Pursued by paparazzi throughout their Roman honeymoon, South Africa's Dr. Christian Barnard and his Barbara took it all in good heart. After all, "those fellows have a job to do too," said the doctor. He may have second thoughts. From Rome their honeymoon odyssey took them to the U.S., where they caught Liza Minnelli's act in New York, viewed the space center at Huntsville, Ala., and attended the Heart Ball in Palm Beach. Result: more batteries of cameras. Upcoming on their trip: Norway, Lebanon and Switzerland.

Paris' Librairie Hachette decided to record a few choice passages from Charles de Gaulle's war memoirs. But who in all Gaul could possibly impersonate le Grand Charles! The choice: Paul-Emile Deiber, an admired Comedie Francaise actor. His past credits were impeccable--he has played both Zeus and Jesus Christ.

It was billed as a state visit to Kenya, but just try keeping the old hunter away from his guns. During the first break in the official proceedings, President Tito of Yugoslavia rushed pell-mell into the wilderness to take a few crack shots at East African wildlife. At the end of his safari, Tito felled a three-ton male rhino, a 21-ton buffalo and a "huge" lion.

After 37 years of litigation, West Germany's Supreme Court upheld a 1967 decision rejecting the claim of Anna Anderson Manahan that she is in fact the Grand Duchess Anastasia, youngest daughter and only surviving child of murdered Czar Nicholas II. Anna, who married former History Lecturer John Manahan in late 1968, refuses to accept the ruling, which also affects her bid for the rumored Romanov fortune reputedly banked by Nicholas in Europe. Said she: "We go on."

The Soviet Union's best-known defector, Svetlana Alliluyeva, confessed that last spring she received some "semiofficial" advice from the U.S.S.R. via a visiting Russian musician. She says she was asked to "keep quiet" and write no more. Further, Stalin's daughter --who intends to apply for U.S. citizenship--was also advised not to marry in America. "I told him that I cannot promise," she replied. Not that she has anyone special in mind--but then "how do I know?"

Opera in the buff? Why not? asks comely Diva Anna Moffo, who appears in the nude in the movie Una Storia a"A more. "I would strip in grand opera as completely as I do in motion pictures," she maintains. "By dropping clothes I think I drop not merely the so-called moral inhibitions but also a few others." Next, Oh! Carmen!'!

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