Justice is sometimes served in mysterious ways. U.S. Supreme Court Justice Harry Blackmun told a commencement day audience at Hamline University last week that when he took his place on that exalted bench, he was amazed to find that each Justice had a box of cough drops in a drawer in front of him. "I don't know why," said Blackmun, "because we don't say much." In Blackmun's box was a single cough drop. "It tasted like it had been there since 1902. Then I didn't know what to do with the empty box. I glanced around and saw another Justice throw his empty box on the floor. I thought it was strange, but it was picked up immediately and the Justice was brought a fresh, full box. I tried the same thing, and it worked."

Dogs barked, cats hissed, turtles raced and gerbils skittered all over Ethel Kennedy's Hickory Hill. The 13th annual pet show for the benefit of Northwest Settlement House (admission $3.50) was making the welkin ring with the help of highly amplified announcements by Humorist Art Buchwald, in full ringmaster's regalia. Seven of Ethel's eleven offspring were on hand, and so was Uncle Ted--Ted Kennedy, the painter, that is. Next day, his painting Red Shack brought the high bid of $3,000 at an art auction in Boston for the benefit of the Kennedy Library Fund (seascapes by his sisters, Patricia Lawford and Jean Smith, fetched only $1,500 and $900 respectively). The purchaser was Miami Millionaire Ollie Cohen. Said Ted: "I'm sure he bought the artist and not the name."

Looking more flora than fauna herself, Mrs. David Bruce, wife of the U.S. representative at the Paris peace talks with North Viet Nam, popped across the Channel to London's Chelsea Flower Show to accept the new Evangeline Bruce Rose, named in her honor. Appropriately, for the wife of a diplomat, the Evangeline Bruce is a delicate compromise of pink and cream.

"When I got to Paris, I discovered all the people with money were in Cannes, so here I am," said Black Panther Eldridge Cleaver's wife Kathleen, when she turned up at the Cannes Film Festival with a bodyguard of women in Afros and men in cowboy clothes. "The pigs do not know I am here," she told a press conference held in a bar, adding that she had emerged from the Cleavers' sanctuary in Algeria "to raise money for the establishment of a Revolutionary Peoples Communication Network" designed to "lead to the overthrow of white capitalism." But the film folk had no money for Kathleen, and not much time either. Greek Author Vassilis Vassilikos, who wrote the novel from which the movie Z was made, began to heckle her about what he claimed was the Panthers' support of "fascism in Greece," and the bodyguard moved in. Bottles were hurled. Screams. Kathleen and entourage departed by a back door just ahead of the police.

It must have seemed to the promoters like a surefire moneymaker--a tour of Europe by Heavyweight Champ Joe Frazier and his rock group, to cash in on the tens of thousands of Continentals who had roused themselves in the wee hours barely three months ago to catch his televised fight with Muhammad Ali. But Joe's music gig has bombed all over. Only 250 tickets were sold for Cologne's 8,000-seat Sporthalle, a mere 138 for Berlin and 300 for Vienna. Free tickets had to be distributed in Hamburg, and the shows were canceled in Essen and Dortmund. One promoter blamed "His Majesty" Frazier. He broke appointments, turned down interviews, shunned the uses of publicity. The champ, apparently, could not care less. Why should he? He gets a guaranteed minimum of $4,100 a performance--whether anyone shows up or not.

Trying to duplicate the fictional feat of Jules Verne's Phileas Fogg, U.S. Author S.J. Perelman set off from London's Reform Club to make it round the world in 80 days, stepped through the club's door right on schedule--only to be handed a notice that his dues were overdue. "Doing this 100 years later--with war, incest and general nakedness so prevalent--is a helluva lot more difficult than Verne's description of it," complained Perelman. There were other differences. Fogg brought back a girl; Perelman left with a secretary, came back with a myna bird. "I jettisoned that bird in Hong Kong," he said, "and picked up this one, whose dialogue I can understand."

Chicago Mayor Richard Daley last week joined the ranks of such other political two-wheelers as New York's Mayor John V. Lindsay and Georgia's ex-Governor Lester G. Maddox. Opening a new "Bicycle Route System," Daley pedaled along gallantly behind a more experienced cyclist from the League of American Wheelmen and vowed that in the future he was going to bike every day to the city hall. "This is a great thing," said the mayor. "It will relieve our traffic tremendously."

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