Last summer in London, Ballet Dancer Serge Lifar of the Ballet Russe de Monte Carlo was severely criticized for taking curtain calls while the audience called for the ballerina. Ever since, Lifar has been grumpy, dissatisfied. Last week in Manhattan he challenged Ballet Director Leonide Massine to a duel in Central Park. Massine told him, "Take an aspirin." In a huff Lifar took instead the S. S. Champlain for Europe.

Appointed "social ambassadress-at-large" for San Francisco's 1939 Golden Gate International Exposition was Manhattan cafe society's clown, Elsa Maxwell. Irked, the N. Y. Daily News's World's Fair-conscious "Nancy Randolph" (real name: Frances Kilkenny) wrote: ". . . To-day this column intends to whack Grover Whalen hard for letting the rival San Francisco Exposition grab that peerless partygiver and fun-maker, Elsa Maxwell. Of course, Grover Whalen has Mrs. Astor . . . but she doesn't like publicity."

The International Master Ladies' Hairdressers Association and the Coiffure Guild of New York, supporters of the upswing hair style, attacked Greta Garbo's pageboy bob as a cultural lag, called it "wholly unsuited for wear by her or by the women of this country."

Father Edward J. Flanagan, who sold the cinema rights both to his name and to the name of his orphanage, Boys Town, Neb., to help raise funds, wryly revealed that since Boys Town appeared (TIME, Sept. 12), contributions have totaled $5,000 less than last year and are much slower in coming in. His explanation: The cinema makes out Boys Town to be a firmly established institution, gives the impression that Father Flanagan is the sort of financial wizard who can make shekels out of a shoestring.

Walter Edmund O'Hara, independent candidate for Governor of Rhode Island, asked the Board of Tax Appeals to allow him income-tax deductions of $373,112. Reason: He had wagered $4,084,797 at his own race track* in 1935 and 1936, failed to recover all he bet, considered the losses as incurred in the conduct of his business.

Colorado's boyish Governor Teller Ammons bet Texas' boyish Governor James V. (for nothing) Allred that the University of Colorado would whip Texas' Rice Institute in a football game last January. The stakes: Pike's Peak v. Big Bend State Park on the Rio Grande. Rice won. So last week the two Governors motored to the top of Pike's Peak, which Governor Ammons thereupon handed over to Governor Allred. Governor Allred raised the Texas flag.

*Narragansett Park, from whose management he was ousted early this year by his opponent, Governor Robert E. Quinn.

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