DATE: Saturday, March 8, 1997               TAG: 9703080223

SECTION: LOCAL                   PAGE: B1   EDITION: FINAL 

TYPE: Column 

SOURCE: Guy Friddell

                                            LENGTH:   53 lines

A FLOATING PHOTOGRAPH IS ``APPROPRIATE''

Thoughts while floating. . .

Colleague Millie Johnson passed along a comment from one of the many readers, Jo Howren of Virginia Beach, evaluating The Pilot's new design.

Of my photograph that heads this column, Howren remarked, ``I didn't like his head floating around at first, but you get used to it.''

Now that's encouraging, I thought.

And then, on reflection, she added, ``It seems appropriate for him.''

That's the nicest thing that's been said about my head in ages.

I phoned to see if she minded my using the critique. It was so apt.

She agreed and added: ``But I wasn't trying to say you were an airhead.''

Yet another epithet!

Hadn't even thought of that one.

But we were laughing, and it moved me to tack ``floating'' at the start of this catch-all column of ends and odds.

To which Sarah Tomlin of Chesapeake relays a survey she took while watching on TV two pool players competing in a tournament in New Orleans.

A former English teacher, Tomlin reports that during an hour's play the two made 22 errors, not on the green felt, but in their grammar.

Still, she was pleased, as am I, by one player's description of a third, exceedingly thin contender:

``He's so skinny he could take a shower in a gun barrel!''

Meanwhile, a postcard appeared from Sheila Hayes of Virginia Beach dismissing my idea that only one cat bears the name ``Licorice.''

Her grandson, Taylor Broughton, prizes a toy cat named Licorice.

Sheila and her husband, Robert, both from Massachusetts, met in California when they were in the Navy. They married in Arizona and, over the years, their children were born in California, Rhode Island, Hawaii and Scotland.

Military families compliment us mightily when they settle here.

How does it stack up against those other exotica? I asked.

``I love it here,'' she said.

She had a cat named Marmalade, now has one called Sooty.

In a postscript to last week's letter of words to ban, Amelia Hitchings writes for a friend whose pet hate is to hear a lady say she ``plucked'' her eyebrows.

One plucks a chicken and ``arches'' her eyebrows, her friend insists.

``Thought you'd like this one,'' she concludes.

I'll cherish the distinction.

Rolling a shopping cart by the dairy section of a Norfolk grocery, I heard two clerks, energetic young women, chatting as they shelved cartons of milk.

``What you have to know first about shelving milk,'' the veteran advised, ``is that you have to be very careful not to stick your finger in the milk - OH, CRAPOLA!''

I kept floating, laughing.

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