Taboo

This guy who works at TSI Harley-Davidson in Ellington, Conn., has not cried since three years ago in May, when his dog, Rusty, died."I'm a rock," the guy says, and he means it.Does his wife, to whom he has been married half his life, ever ask him to express his feelings?"

He was cool. He was smart. He was dirty. And he was relentlessly funny. Speaking of dead people - the very words the man used in a recent routine on death - George Carlin died Sunday in California. That doesn't sound right or is the least bit funny, but if anyone could riff on death, it was Carlin. No subject was taboo - particularly taboo subjects, such as religion, drugs, sex and death, and sometimes in that order. His trail-brazing social commentary spanned more than four decades, forced a Supreme Court decision on broadcast indecency, and influenced top-shelf comedians such as Chris Rock, Jerry Seinfeld and Jon Stewart.

Stephen King offers bubble gum to a visitor, who declines. "But it's strawberry," he wheedles. "Maybe later," she relents. "Great," says King with a whoop. "My mother told me any girl who chews will smoke. If she smokes she'll drink. If she drinks she'll do everything bad." Most authors don't start interviews by quoting their mothers and blowing bubbles. But King, the irrepressible horror cult hero, is the planet's richest, most famous and most prolific scary writer. And he can do just about any darned adolescent thing he wants.

CHICAGO - Tickling rats to make them chirp with joy may seem frivolous as a scientific pursuit, yet understanding laughter in animals may lead to revolutionary treatments for emotional illness, researchers suggest. Joy and laughter, they say, are proving not to be uniquely human traits. Roughhousing chimpanzees emit characteristic pants of excitement, their version of "ha-ha-ha" limited only by their anatomy and lack of breath control, researchers contend. Dogs have their specific sound that spurs other dogs to play, and recordings of the sound can drastically reduce stress levels in shelters and kennels, according to the scientist who discovered it. Even laboratory rats have been shown to chirp delightedly above the range of human hearing when wrestling with each other or being tickled by a keeper - the same vocalizations they make before receiving morphine or having sex. Studying such sounds of joy may help us understand the evolution of human emotions and the brain chemistry underlying such emotional problems as autism and attention-deficit/hyperactivity disorders, said Jaak Panksepp, a pioneering neuroscientist who discovered rat laughter.

Q: Time was when corporations gave their employees advice about how to dress. Maybe they didn't go as far as IBM or call it a dress code, but it was much more than a subtle bit of direction. If you did not come around, they soon found a way to get rid of you. From what I see around the office, they don't do that any more. Why not?A: It has never been taboo -- legally or otherwise -- to give such "shape up or ship out" advice. Neither is it the most comfortable part of a manager's role. Not wishing to play "mother," managers usually leave daily dress decisions to the employee's discretion.

AMERICAN men are renowned the world over for their frank speech. In my recent travels around the country, I discovered, however, there is one word that causes them to stutter and stumble and reveal their cultural misperceptions."

Parenting, apparently, does not have to mean buying a minivan and moving to the 'burbs. Moms can be trendy. They can have nipple rings, tattoos and keep up with their favorite punk garage bands. Or at least that's what writer Ariel Gore says. Gore, who edits the popular 'zine Hip Mama, will be at Atomic Books on Saturday to read from her new anthology of Hip Mama articles and discuss alternative parenting. "It's not the whole my-way-is-best idea of parenting," Gore explained. The 'zine is a "place where people can tell the truth about their experiences parenting."

The first thing Frances Morton Froelicher tells you is what she doesn't want to talk about.Yes, yes, yes, there's this reception tonight to honor her 80th birthday and the 50th anniversary of her founding the Citizens Planning and Housing Association. Yes, she's proud of her work going back to the 1930s, when she was a freshly graduated social worker tromping through East Baltimore's alley slums.But enough about that."I don't know what you want to talk about," she tells a visitor, "but I'll tell you what I want to talk about, which is my prescription for the future."

My doctor looked at me, shook his head and declared that there was absolutely nothing wrong with my thyroid gland. Why I had gained an embarrassing 16 pounds in three months was as much a mystery to him as it was to me.But he said he had a solution. I braced myself for that awful word I had heard many times before in the past decade. It's the worst four-letter word in the English language for someone who loves the taste and texture of good food and writes about it for a living -- D-I-E-T.

Chicago. -- The president has offended some in his own party with his plan for attacking the deficit. When he discusses Medicare cuts, he blunts the attacks Democrats have been mounting on the cold-heartedness of Republican spending proposals.For a president to offend his own camp is not necessarily a bad thing. It is often the only way to move out beyond narrow positions. Nixon offended hard-core followers when he opened diplomatic relations with China, but that laid the basis for all his later claims to diplomatic skills and statesmanship.