MODERN LIVING

LIFESTYLES Missal for Mammals

We are as gods and might as well get good at it.

That peremptory statement is the introduction to one of the year's most intriguing books, a $4 quarto-sized paperback that, mainly by word of mouth, has become an underground bestseller.

Gods do not make bricks, or build sun domes, or scramble for sassafras in the shrubbery of Central Park. But for people who do, or want to, the Whole Earth Catalog is an almost inexhaustible compendium. It is a sort of Sears, Roebuck-Consumer Report for the minorities of the cybernetic age--from activists who want to improve the environment to abdicants who simply want to write bad poetry in the woods.

FASHION Problems in Pants

Sure, deck your lower limbs in pants; Yours are the limbs, my sweeting. You look divine as you advance--Have you seen yourself retreating?

Ogden Nash wrote those lines in the 1930s, when people still looked up every time an airplane flew over, and a woman who wore pants was either an actress or an athlete. He could hardly have foreseen the day when, at high noon, two out of every five women passing the entrance of Henri Bendel's in Manhattan would be dressed in trousers. The fact that women's pants are a fact of life (45 million pairs will be sold in the U.S. this year) is a source of solid comfort to fabric manufacturers. But it is also a source of problems for the women who wear them. As any man knows, pants get caught in bicycle chains. They bag at the knees, wrinkle in the rain and flap in the wind. Their cuffs collect water, dirt and lint. Their zippers fail. Pants also excite dogs. This file is automatically generated by a robot program, so viewer discretion is required.