Falk

It has been five seasons since the Dallas Mavericks had a winning record, yet No. 2 pick Jason Kidd has gotten their fans excited. In Detroit, there's a feeling the Pistons could begin a turnaround with the addition of No. 3 pick Grant Hill. Though no one expects miracles in Minnesota, the Timberwolves have improved with the signing of No. 4 pick Donyell Marshall.And somewhere in the Washington Bullets' offices, there's a No. 5 jersey with the name "Howard" stitched on the back. But itdoesn't look like Juwan Howard, the No. 5 pick of the draft, will be in uniform any time soon.

FMC Corp. workers voted yesterday to end an 11-day walkout and accept a three-year contract, without resolving differences concerning overtime that force some to work 75 hours a week.The Chicago-based chemical company and the United Steelworkers of America Local 12517 agreed to form a joint committee to solve their overtime differences by Sept. 1."People were out on the street," said Bob Falk, the local's president. "We could have gotten bogged down for weeks on this."Falk added that some workers used the strike to grab a precious commodity: a few days off with their families.

WASHINGTON - Every parent is familiar with "motherese," the slow, high-pitched, singsong tone that mothers all over the world use to talk to their babies. You might suppose that this manner of speaking is just a simplified, degenerate form of grown-up language. To the contrary, some scientists think motherese might lie at the root of human language - long ago when our primitive ancestors came down from trees and started to walk on two legs. Dean Falk, the head of the anthropology department at Florida State University in Tallahassee, calls it the "putting the baby down hypothesis."

Oh, there are Jews in Cumberland?" Whether the question is applied to Cumberland or another small town, it often arises among those who primarily associate Maryland's Jewish community with Baltimore. "There's that element of surprise; you just don't expect it," says Karen Falk, curator of We Call This Place Home: Jewish Life in Maryland's Small Towns, an exhibition that opens today at the Jewish Museum of Maryland. For the past two and a half years, Falk has traveled the state, from the Eastern Shore to Brunswick, from Lonaconing to Havre de Grace, in search of Jewish communities or, in many cases, the vestiges of such communities.

When the Washington Bullets roll out the basketballs tomorrow at Shepherd College in West Virginia for the official start of training camp, they'll do it with a new coach, a new point guard and a new attitude.But barring a last-minute deal, their newest potential star, Juwan Howard, will be nowhere to be found.Chances are that Howard, the fifth pick of the draft out of $H Michigan, will be in Chicago working out with his personal trainer preparing for an NBA career that may face a long delay because his agent, David Falk, and the Bullets have cut off contract negotiations.

Ever dream of commuting to work by air, hovering above traffic in a personal aircraft a la Inspector Gadget? Dream no more. For $1.5 million, you have the Springtail Exoskeleton Flying Vehicle from the California-based Trek Aerospace. With a 12-gallon tank, it can travel for more than two hours and for a distance of 184 miles. It moves at a top speed of 113 mph and hovers somewhere near 11,400 feet. It takes off vertically and can land on flat rooftops, parking areas and other small spaces.

Image dispute may keep Jordan out of OlympicsA dispute over the right to images of NBA players in Olympic merchandising may jeopardize the participation of Michael Jordan, Patrick Ewing and John Stockton in the Olympic Games in Barcelona, Spain.David Falk, agent for the three NBA stars, has balked at allowing his clients' likenesses to be used, an outgrowth of a dispute involving Nike, which has exclusive apparel contracts with many NBA players."USA Basketball has had a serious problem with Falk and his clients," said Russ Granik, deputy commissioner of the NBA and vice president of USA Basketball.

Peter Falk had a fine career on the stage and in feature films. His crazed comic performance in "The In-Laws" alone would guarantee a major appreciation from film critics and scholars. But it is his network television work in the 1970s as a modest, sly, stub-of-a-cigar-smoking detective in a well-worn wreck of a trench coat for which he will be fondly remembered and celebrated for years to come. Falk, who died at his Beverly Hills home Thursday at age 83, gave life to a fictional detective named Lt. Columbo who was and is one of the only American crime solving characters who can rival the best in British detective fiction.

Peter Falk is listed as one of the co-stars of Next, the ESP/time travel flick starring Nicolas Cage as a guy who can see two minutes into his own future. But really, the filmmakers shouldn't have bothered. Sure, Falk, 79, shows up for one scene, playing formula role No. 27b in the Hollywood handbook: the irascible old codger to Cage's brash, adventurous hotshot. But Falk barely registers (he's onscreen only a couple minutes), and the part is absolutely inconsequential. Chances are Falk's part was bigger in the original script but was trimmed for reasons we may never know.

Peter Falk's voice grinds out of a telephone and is at once familiar and astonishing. It growls, it scrapes, it buckles, it quivers. It sounds like tectonic plates shifting far under the surface of the earth. You look about to see if the horizon is shaking.The horizon is fine. Just old Peter Falk on the horn, Columbo himself, advancing the cause of his new film "Roommates," in which, under several pounds of latex, he plays the fiery Rocky Holeczek, a retired Pittsburgh baker who raises his grandson from a 10-year-old child until he's a 40-year-old man."