Diary

Harry Rossoll, 89, who as a U.S. Forest Service illustrator created the Smokey Bear fire prevention messages that became one of the most successful public relations campaigns, died Thursday of an intestinal aneurysm in Atlanta. He provided the rough draft for Smokey Bear in 1944 as the character to promote forest fire prevention after rejecting figures including a forest ranger and a beaver.Michael Angelo Avallone, 74, a mystery writer who wrote the Ed Noon series and whose original novels were based on the television series "The Man from U.N.C.

SKOPJE, MACEDONIA -- School let out early in Pristina two days before the NATO bombings began. The teachers said goodbye. Some were crying. "See you all soon," Adelina Imeri told her instructors and classmates at the Hassan Pristina high school in Kosovo's provincial capital. "Yes, see you soon," most replied.No one dared suggest that the life they knew was drawing to a close. They didn't want to say it because maybe it would come true, Adelina recalled. But superstition couldn't freeze events.

Retired Brig. Gen. Austin Shofner,83, who managed to keep a diary hidden while in a Japanese prison camp during World War II, died Monday in Shelbyville, Tenn.General Shofner and nine other Marines took advantage of work details outside the camp walls to escape through the Philippine jungles.His diary is preserved in the Tennessee State Library and Archives. His listing in the Tennessee Encyclopedia of History and Culture calls the diary a "valuable historical record of the war in the Philippines."

When T. asked me how I would like to spend my last day on earth, I told him by playing Hookie from work making marinara sauce together making love while it was cooking, drinking red wine, eating bread and watching all the movies we have talked about watching together. -- from Anne Marie Fahey's diary, Feb. 22, 1995Anne Marie Fahey's last day turned out much differently from the dreamy scenario she anticipated in her diary.In fact, the only part that came to pass was that she and "T" indeed were together when her last day ended.

ROCK HILL, S.C. - In September 1861, a few months after the birth of his daughter, David Jackson Logan left his family and mercantile business to enlist in the Confederate cause.Three years later, Logan was dead. He was shot in the head by a Union Army sniper near Petersburg, Va. His slave, Jim, took his body back home to York, S.C.Logan's life as a soldier is captured in his diary, more than 50 letters to his wife, Sallie, and more than two dozen dispatches to the Yorkville Enquirer.The diary, letters and articles were transcribed by York County assistant curator Sam Thomas and published in a recent book, "A Rising Star of Promise."

FOR ONE WEEK I felt important. For one week my taste in TV mattered. For one week, my family was a Nielsen family, one of a selected number of households in the nation whose viewing habits were being recorded.But then this past Thursday night, the pinnacle of TV-mood measurement, the night of the last "Seinfeld" show, I was out of the picture. My time in the Nielsen limelight ended on Wednesday night. I felt like Cinderella. Once I had been the center of attention. Then, at the stroke of midnight, I was thrown into obscurity.

"These Is My Words: The Diary of Agnes Prine 1881-1901," by Nancy E. Turner. HarperCollins. $23."These Is My Words: The Diary of Sarah Agnes Prine 1881-1901" reads at times like many diaries of the period with a young woman experiencing hardships of daily life in the West. The novel touches on historical events, but is not dependent upon them. However, there are references to Arizona towns and places that make this of special interest to readers of the region.Pub Date: 3/22/98

LONDON -- Pick a royal, any royal, and Sir Roy Strong is bound to have an opinion.The former head of Britain's National Portrait Gallery and the Victoria & Albert Museum has published his diaries, in effect an insider's guide to London from 1967 to 1987.From receptions at Buckingham Palace to battles in museum boardrooms, Strong is a witty, often wicked tour guide, a man about town in his trademark fedora and velvet frock coat.Here's Strong on Princess Margaret: "tiresome, spoilt, idle and irritating."

Sometime in my adolescence came "Kind Hearts and Coronets." I have no idea how many times I have seen that movie, only that it has been too long since the last time. For all of its delights, I remember it mostly because I had never seen, or I believe heard of, Alec Guinness before and I knew suddenly that there was magic and genius in the man. This player - quite beyond that one part, or rather that large number of parts, he played - made the world a significantly more livable place.Sir Alec Guinness has kept a diary for decades, but one not meant to be preserved, limited to minor "daily jottings."

Carroll Circuit Judge Luke K. Burns Jr. is expected to announce his verdict Friday in the trial of a Taneytown woman accused of smothering her infant daughter and hiding the body in woods near Prettyboy Reservoir last summer.After six days of testimony, Burns heard closing arguments yesterday in the trial of Lisa E. Ruby, 20, who is charged with first-degree murder, battery, child abuse and reckless endangerment.Prosecutors argued Ruby was so frustrated over tending her 4-month-old daughter, Tabitha L. Meekins, that she placed a rag in the baby's mouth and covered the nasal air passage with her hand to kill her on Aug. 6, 1996.

Hey, have you heard about this seventh-grade kid who keeps a diary? Actually, he's not a real kid, because, like, what real seventh-grader would wanna write every day? Well, unless you're text messaging, but that's not like writing. Text messaging is cool. Anyway, the kid is a boy named Greg Heffley. He's not that cool. In fact, he's kinda wimpy. He's got a big head and a stick for a body; he looks like a Blow Pop. Plus, he wears a stupid backpack the size of a microwave. He's got a mom who's a total wimp.

Forty years ago, George Romero and a bunch of his buds threw together Night of the Living Dead, a piece of happily primitive filmmaking that scared the pants off the midnight horror crowd and inspired a whole generation of zombie films doubling as cultural commentary. With Diary of the Dead, Romero goes back to the beginning, only this time the amateurish look is calculated and the resulting film far less effective - if only because a handful of filmmakers have beaten him to the punch.

NEW YORK -- The diary is a 70-sheet spiral notebook with candy wrappers and a used pair of chopsticks taped inside. A picture of Donna Summer is glued to its cover next to a scratch-and-sniff pizza sticker that - after 27 years - still smells like pepperoni. Its cursive-scrawled pages hold Becky Ciletti's most intimate pubescent thoughts and secrets. The 39-year-old freelance magazine writer came to this bar on a rainy April night to read the mostly embarrassing excerpts - food-fighting, French-kissing, babe-loving and all - to nearly 100 strangers.

DIARY-OF-A-GINGER-TOM-CAT .BLOGSPOT.COM What's the point? -- Ferdinand the ginger cat has a blog. He says he "sits on many fences and has many stories to tell." Ferdinand, affectionately known as Ferdi, has proclaimed himself the most handsome ginger cat in the world and wants to share his diary with the world. If you've ever wanted an inkling of what's going on in the mind of your four-legged, light-footed, suave, feline friends, you may just find the answer here. Ferdi gives a detailed account of everything from his inner thoughts to his relationship with his human housemates.

On this Veterans Day, it is fitting to recall the words of Reamer E. "Buzz" Sewell, a World War II Army Air Forces veteran and prisoner of war, who kept a detailed diary of what daily life was like during his nearly seven months' confinement in Stalag VIIA in Moosburg, Germany. Sewell, a retired Eastern Airlines ticket agent who worked for 24 years at what is now Baltimore-Washington International Thurgood Marshall Airport, died last month. He was 85. While researching his obituary, Sewell's family graciously offered to lend me the diary he had kept at great peril during his imprisonment.

What's the point? -- Visit this site to be taken on an adventure with Dean Brooks. The adventure log is his weekly diary of feelings, opinions and the things that really bake his noodle. Overall, the blog is a chance to escape to a world so bizarre that your really bad day becomes a great day. What to look for --Look for The School Predator, a story by Brooks that is posted by chapter, so it keeps you wondering what happens next. There are also articles, reviews, commentaries and kids' lit, all by Brooks.

Screening `Freedom Dance' See Freedom Dance, an animat ed documentary with live inter views with Edward Hilbert, whose sketchbook diary entries during the 1956 Hungarian Revolution and Soviet occupa tion is the basis for the film, and is narrated by Mariska Hargitay, at the Weinberg Jewish Com munity Center, 5700 Park Heights Ave., $4 for members, $5 for nonmembers. 7 p.m. 410-542-4900 ext. 239 or jcc.org.

Reamer E. "Buzz" Sewell, a retired airlines ticket agent and Air Force navigator and bombardier who kept a secret diary documenting his experiences as a World War II prisoner of war, died of heart failure Friday at the Veterans Affairs Medical Center in Baltimore. The longtime Severna Park resident was 85. Mr. Sewell enlisted in the Army Air Corps a month after the attack on Pearl Harbor. After completing training and attaining the rank of lieutenant, he joined the 387th Bombardment Group in England in 1944.

A Woman in Berlin: Eight Weeks in the Conquered City Anonymous Picador / 288 pages / $14 As Berlin fell to the Soviet army at the end of World War II, a young journalist kept a diary of life in her apartment complex. The anonymous diarist relates the brutality inflicted on the conquered, in particular her own rapes and subjugation, but what also emerges is her fierce intelligence, wit and emotional resilience. In the annals of wartime diaries, here is an unforgettable and valuable addition.

GOLDEN, Colo. -- Sheriff's officials released yesterday the last batch of documents from their investigation of the 1999 massacre at Columbine High School, a trove that included one killer's essays about guns in high schools and a diary kept by his father that dismisses complaints against his son from another classmate. With 25,000 pages of Columbine-related documents already in the public domain, yesterday's 946-page coda offered little new information. But it did provide additional details about Eric Harris' and Dylan Klebold's plotting.