Garry Trudeau

BOB ROBERTS(LIVE, rated R, 1992)"Bob Roberts" may have been the most accomplished and certainly the most clever and refreshing film of 1992. It's even more impressive when one considers that it was written and directed by an actor, first-time director Tim Robbins. He also wrote the bitingly satirical conservative ballads with his brother, David Robbins. Oh yes, and did we mention that Mr. Robbins is also the star of the film?Mr. Robbins plays Roberts, a walking contradiction who is right at home in the world of politics.

CHAUTAUQUA, N.Y. - I suppose a week's worth of lectures on writing might be considered a busman's holiday for someone like me, but when the lecturers are Billy Collins, E.L. Doctorow, Joyce Carol Oates, Amy Tan and Garry Trudeau, it's a bus you want to be on. To hear these masters in the "institutional sublimity" of Chautauqua is to be at least twice blessed. For me it was thrice. I hear all these stars and I begin, as I do every summer, thinking about how to start doing the things that really matter.

NEW YORK -- If you think that race relations in the United States have steadily, almost miraculously, improved over the past 35 years -- which I do -- this might be a good week to stay away from newspapers and television news.Names make news, and we are about to be bombarded by some of the biggest of them, beginning with President Clinton and Steven Spielberg, moving on to ''Doonesbury,'' and dropping down to Tawana Brawley and Latrell Sprewell.Race extravaganzaThe president's well-meaning race extravaganza began Wednesday with a town hall meeting in Akron, Ohio, and continued yesterday with the first public hearings of his Advisory Board on Race, chaired by the Duke University historian John Hope Franklin.

It has been quite a while since I've seen the prez in person.CThe first time was in 1978, when I was still in college and working at a business journal in Washington.It was impress-the-intern time, so I was sent to the White House for a presidential briefing.The commander-in-chief then was Jimmy Carter and the White House was gripped by the Iran hostage crisis.I, of course, was gripped by other things.While the other journalists delivered their carefully crafted questions, I was on sensory overload trying to blend in with the wallpaper.

NoiseBuster makes for a quieter placeIt's a beautiful evening, so you and your spouse go out to the porch to enjoy the breezes and some conversation. No sooner do you sit down than a neighbor fires up the Lawnmower from Hell.Noise Cancellation Technologies, a Stamford, Conn.-based company dedicated to making the world a quieter place, is marketing a new product that is touted as a solution to such auditory assaults.The NoiseBuster, which was developed at Noise Cancellation's research and development lab in Linthicum, is being billed as the first consumer audio headset that employs "anti-noise" technology to mute obnoxious sounds while allowing the user to hear speech, music or warning signals.

Garretson Beekman Trudeau, who calls himself Garry and signs his work "G.B. Trudeau," graduate of St. Paul's School and Yale and descendant of the man for whom New York City's Beekman Place was named, has just produced his sixty-first outraging book: "Flashbacks: Twenty-Five Years of Doonesbury -What a Long Strange Strip It's Been" (Andrews and McMeel. 332 pages. $18.95).I like the book, intemperately. In his quarter-century peregrination of the superhighway of American life, Mr. Trudeau leaves no turn unstoned.

Washington -- It's bad enough that Vice President Dan Quayle has been slandered by a comic strip.What is incomprehensible is that the press has compounded the slander by treating it as news.The result, on the eve of Campaign '92, is an intriguing glimpse of today's media culture, in which the same standards used in the production of Geraldo Rivera's news-porn can be found in your daily paper.The fact that the press is being played like a violin by rumor-mongers undercuts its efforts to play character cop and advertising fact-checker in political campaigns; moreover, it undercuts the vital bond of trust between purveyor and consumer that is at the core of the news business' existence.

WHEN THE GOING GETS WEIRD: THE TWISTED LIFE AN TIMES OF HUNTER S. THOMPSON. By Peter Whitmer. Hyperion. 335 pages. $21.95.DO WE really need another "very unauthorized biography" of outlaw journalist Hunter S. Thompson? There's been a spate of them recently -- this is the second in 1993, the other being Paul Perry's "Fear and Loathing" -- and the question is, why? Are the authors chronicling an era using one of its pivotal stars?Or defining a writer's influence on the journalism of the last three decades?

Man killed in accident on I-695 near Catonsville A Ellicott City man died yesterday after his car collided with a tractor-trailer, forcing authorities to temporarily close the outer loop of the Baltimore Beltway, state police said. Shortly before 2 a.m., a 38-year-old man was driving a 1995 Ford Probe southbound on Interstate 695 near Frederick Road in the Catonsville area when he veered off the roadway and struck a light pole, said 1st Sgt. Russell Newell, aMaryland State Police spokesman.

Washington -- The educated classes lament the alleged balkanization of campus life. Segregation has returned, it is alleged, only this time the segregationists are not bull-faced Southern governors or pot-bellied sheriffs wielding billy clubs and cattle prods.No, this time the segregationists are various minorities and women who insist, in the modern etiquette of ''empowerment,'' on walling themselves into enclaves of race, ethnicity and gender, including separate and unequal dormitories, fraternities, sororities, cafeteria tables, student centers, studies programs, enrichment programs and graduation exercises.