Toilet Paper

FEELING HOUSEBOUND? Wishing for an inexpensive day out with the kids? Winterfest at Manchester Elementary School might be the answer.From 10 a.m. to 2 p.m. Saturday, the school cafeteria and gymnasium will become a carnival grounds complete with games, door prizes and all of your children's favorite foodstuffs. Parking will be available at the school or Fire Department carnival grounds.This is Manchester Elementary School's first winter carnival. The PTA chose a winter event in hopes of attracting parent volunteers who have been too busy with spring sports to help during a May festival.

Last week I promised that in today's column I would announce which commercial, according to my survey, you readers hate the most. So if you have an ounce of sense or good taste, you'll stop reading this column right now.Really, I mean it this is your last chance you're making a huge mistakeOK, you pathetic fools: The most hated commercial of all time, according to the survey, was the one for Charmin featuring "Mr. Whipple" and various idiot housewives who...

No autographs from O'sAn open letter to Orioles owner Peter Angelos:I had a very negative experience at the Aug. 23 game between the Orioles and the California Angels. I attended the game with my wife, my 5-year-old son and one of my son's friends. This was my son's first game at Camden Yards and his only thought for the last few weeks has been getting an autograph from one of the Orioles.I called the Orioles' offices the week before the game and was told that the players usually sign autographs between 6: 05 and 6: 45. I left work so that we would arrive at the ballpark no later than 5: 30. At 6: 05 we entered and obtained a place along the rail beside the first base dugout.

CALL IT the winter of '94 flashback syndrome. Even on an Indian summer day in October, you hear that the venerable Hagers-Town Town and Country Almanack is predicting above-average snow in Maryland this coming winter and you've all but got your car pointed in the direction of the grocery store for milk and toilet paper rations.The logical side of your brain tries to remind you that long-range weather forecasting is a fragile art. In fact, over the last five years, the almanac has been wrong as often as right.

NEW ORLEANS -- There it was, by God, the thought that everything was wrong.It was wrong, it was broken, it was way past being fixed.It could have, at one time, but I'd let it go. I'd created it, innocently enough, it is true, but I had let it go on and on and now it was too late.It was too late for it, for me, for everyone involved. It was just damn plain late.I looked at the bedside clock, a loud, luminous, gassy assertion of numbers. One-thirty a.m. It would get later still.I knew that between the first time I looked at it and the second time the numbers will have grown brighter, louder, more awake, and it would be later still.

You hold in your hands a valuable commodity -- and that's not pulp fiction.Because of a worldwide surge in the demand for wood pulp, the price for paper products of almost all kinds -- including the newsprint on which this newspaper is printed -- is soaring.Executives of companies that use or sell paper say they've never seen anything like it.The price increases have been so steep, National Public Radio reported last weekend, that thieves in New York have taken to swiping bundles of used paper before the city's recycling trucks can pick them up.The effects are being felt in a multitude of ways -- some visible to consumers, some hidden but all very real.

Q: My daughter is now 4, and since she was 18 months old she has had pain in her vagina. Her doctor said it is probably yeast infections.Could it be anything else? What can be done to help reduce the pain and the recurrence?A: Your question presents a puzzle difficult to put together without more information. We can only work with the clues provided by your description and your doctor's reaction.We're not certain your daughter is having vaginal pain, especially beginning at 18 months. We believe the answer lies in thinking about what can cause irritation to the vagina or vulva.

I've buried lots of things in our yard. Leaves. Vegetable scraps. Goldfish. The time capsule that my daughter made in grade school (alas, we forgot to mark the spot).Once, in 1968, I buried a phonograph record: "Honey," by Bobby Goldsboro. It was an awful song that the whole world was humming. In a fit of pique, I bought the record, threw "Honey" down a hole beneath a maple tree and covered it with dirt. I felt a lot better after that, and the maple didn't seem to mind. See the tree, how big it's grown?

The 1,250 students at South Carroll High School were evacuated for 55 minutes yesterday after someone ignited a roll of toilet paper in a second-floor bathroom.The resulting fire inexplicably sent smoke throughout the F and G sections of the school, in the 1300 block of W. Old Liberty Road, about 1:40 p.m., but fire officials said it appeared that there was no other damage.Dr. Robert Bowden, an assistant principal, said he was told of smoke in a hallway at the western end of the school and sounded the alarm to evacuate the students, staff and teachers, and alert the fire department.

On Thursday night I entered the food store and got out, I think, sometime Friday morning. The weather forecasters were calling for snow. My refrigerator and my pantry were completely empty (as these things go) with barely enough essentials to get us through next August if, God forbid, the ice didn't melt by then.This is our universal mind-set every time a new Age of Shovelry arrives. Fear of starvation becomes a byproduct of each passing cloud. We head for the food stores and line up like Russians waiting for something to make into borscht.