"I hit him five or six times in the stomach. Then I hit him in the head, and when he came off the wall I hit him again. He was out before he hit the ground." Mike Hammer? Not quite. That was Manager Billy Martin talking about a fraternal misunderstanding among his Minnesota Twins, baseball's bad boys who have recently been trying to reform (TIME, Aug. 15). Martin, no stranger to donnybrooks during his playing days as a New York Yankee, explained it this way: the boys were sitting around a bar in Detroit hoisting a convivial glass when Dave Boswell, a talented but emotionally erratic pitcher, learned that a coach had reported him for cheating on an exercise drill. Boswell stormed out threatening to get "that squealer." Whereupon the team peacemaker, Outfielder Bob Allison, went outside to calm the raging Boswell. Martin emerged a few moments later and found that Boswell had flattened Allison and kicked him. Then the unfortunate pitcher came at Martin. "I did open my mouth a little loud to my manager," said Boswell after doctors reportedly took 20 stitches in his face.

She will be back in front of the cameras after 26 years, and the part is made to order. As Agent Letisha Van Allen, Mae West sets up shop on a huge bed to interview handsome young men--prospective victims for voracious, transsexual Myra Breckinridge. There was no press conference fanfare over 20th Century's latest casting coup ("Mae likes the press, all right," explained a studio flack, "but individually, one by one"); the word was simply passed that Miss West would share top billing with Raquel Welch (Myra) and get a minimum of $350,000 for her role. Still a perfectionist at 76, Mae claims that she will write all her own dialogue.

It stood to reason that a 195-lb. amateur wrestler would have little chance against a 280-lb. bruiser with twelve years in the pro wrestling game. But that was not how the script read when Dr. Sam Sheppard made his debut against Wild Bill Scholl in a charity match in Waverly, Ohio. Seven minutes into the match Dr. Sam coolly jammed two fingers into Wild Bill's mouth and expertly pressed the mandibular nerve, which lies in the tender area under the tongue. Scholl instantly went limp with agony. Fall and match to Sheppard. "Only new thing I've seen in wrestling in 15 years," said Sam's jubilant manager. Groaned Scholl: "It's not only horribly painful--it's unfair. Your mouth and jaw are paralyzed so you can't bite his fingers off."

At one point, an outraged swordfish attacked the underwater craft; another time, a monstrous 30-foot jellyfish with four-inch-thick tentacles loomed alongside. Those were only two of the incidents that famed Swiss Explorer Jacques Piccard and his crew of scientists had to report when their 50-foot submarine Ben Franklin surfaced off Nova Scotia after a 31-day, 1,650-mile drift up the Atlantic coast in the Gulf Stream. Piccard and his five companions spoke of massive undersea waves caused by the swirling of the Gulf Stream's powerful current around uncharted "hills" on the ocean floor. Their 140-ton craft was helplessly tossed about in the rush of water and actually shoved 28 miles west--out of the stream. They were nearly as surprised by what seemed to be huge coral formations at an unprecedented depth of 1,700 feet--indicating that the coastline around Charleston, S.C., once lay 70 miles farther out in the Atlantic.

The theme at the Second International Conference of Social Psychiatry in London was "The Sick Society," and double Nobel Prizewinner (Chemistry and Peace) Linus Pauling offered a novel cure for mankind's various ills. The world would be a better place, he said, if among other things, people could just get enough vitamin C. An optimal intake of the vitamin could mean a 10% improvement in physical and mental health. "What would be the consequences for the world," Pauling asked, "if the national leaders and the people as a whole were to think just 10% more clearly?"

"Since my English is not that good, I wasn't sure if I'd be playing a hippie or a Hopi. But I see it doesn't make any difference." Decked out as a Hopi Indian in headband, feathers and bear-claw necklace, Jean-Paul Belmondo probably created more of a spectacle in Tucson than he would have in Greenwich Village. In the film, Again, a Love Story, with Oscar-winning Director Claude Lelouch (A Man and a Woman), the Hopi bit is just a brief diversion in the adventures of Belmondo and Annie Girardot, who meet and mate as two French tourists motoring across America. "I chose Girardot and Belmondo," said Lelouch, "because they are not really made for each other. If there is love between these two people, it is because they are in a foreign country. In France, nothing would have happened."

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