Wagon Train

The TV Repairman:Regarding college hoops this weekend and all of next weekTurn on the telly. If teams aren't racing up and down the floor, driving, dunking and dishing off no matter what the hour, call the repairman. Your set is not working. ESPN alone is sending along 33 games, 23 of them conference championship games. Best of these figures to be the Mid-Continent showdown from Green Bay next Tuesday.* Bulletin (three bells)! Channel 2 finally is recognizing the NBA this weekend, accepting the NBC feed of the Trail Blazers-Celtics game Sunday at 12:30.

BECAUSE both of them were childish, neither President Clinton nor the angry fellow who shouted a question at him in Florida the other day deserves any help.But in the spirit of charity we will answer the question, however rudely it was put.In case you missed it, the question was: "Can you name one country which has taxed and spent itself into prosperity?"Sure. The United States of America. Also Germany, Britain, France and Japan. No country ever attained prosperity without public investment, or spending as it is sometimes known, paid for by taxes.

The County Commissioners made official yesterday what they have been talking about for weeks -- a 27-cent increase in the property tax rate.They voted 2-1 yesterday to raise taxes and adopt a $162 million operating budget and $45 million capital budget for the fiscal year that begins July 1.Commissioners W. Benjamin Brown and Donald I. Dell approved the budgets and the tax increase. Commissioner Richard T. Yates voted against them.The capital and operating budgets they approved yesterday emphasize education, public works, economic development and preservation of agricultural land.

Gov. Parris N. Glendening yesterday stood firm in his opposition to slot machines to help Maryland racing, even as the industry's advocates sounded alarms about Tuesday's approval of slots-style gambling at a track on the state's western border.The approval of video-lottery devices at the horse track in Charles Town, W.Va., which is near the Maryland border 25 miles west of Frederick, will not change the governor's position, said Judi Scioli, Glendening's press secretary."No bill that authorizes slot machines or casinos will pass my desk," the governor said in a terse statement released by Scioli.

"UNFORGIVEN," for which Clint Eastwood is apparently destined to be honored in the Academy Awards excesses next week, is the coldest movie I've seen since "Eskimo."The next coldest was "Pale Rider," a 1985 Eastwood oater about an avenging gunman raised from the grave by a little girl's prayers, unless I misunderstood the symbolism.The dominant color in both Eastwood movies was ice blue. While the sun occasionally came out in both, it was the gray, dead sun of a North Atlantic January.A friend in the movie business says maybe both shows were filmed way up in Canada, which might account for the frigid colors.

Where did the time go?It seems like just yesterday that we began 1993. Now it's coming swiftly to an end.Upon reflection, I'd have to say it's been a pretty good year.I stuck with one of my New Year's resolutions. It was to begin my writing again. I guess there's always next year to begin that diet.This has been an eventful and fascinating year for me. Since May, I've interviewed local celebrities I previously did not know existed.Like Kitty Devilbiss-Marble, the director of the Taneytown Senior Citizens' Center, who is a basket weaver in her spare time.

The TV Repairman:John Madden calls it "taking the temperature," thinking ahead weeks to the NFL's second season, the stretch run of the regular season, the playoffs and Super Bowl. And, quite frankly, to him it appears as if the answer to this "whodunit" will be determined in advance of the final chapter once again.Madden will be on hand for the biggie Sunday, Cowboys at 49ers at 4 p.m. on Fox, and it's difficult to tell if he's "up" for the game, or slightly "down" about where the season goes from here.

'Star Trek' . . . is an astonishing tale unsurpassed in the history of entertainment," William Shatner says tonight at the end of "Star Trek: A Captain's Log."If you accept the statement without question, then this is definitely the retrospective for you.If, however, you're the kind of person who says, "Hmmm, what about, say, Shakespeare?" you are probably going to have lots of trouble with the overstatement and some of the claims of cultural significance made during the hour."Star Trek: A Captain's Log," which airs at 9 tonight on WBAL (Channel 11)

There was sort of a ringer in the Oldies But Goodies class at the Mount Airy Saddle Pals Open Horse Show Sunday."Now I'm embarrassed," said the class winner, Nancy Gray of Frederick. "I usually show at quarter horse shows and I just rode my friend's horse in this class for the fun of it."Gray has a great deal of experience showing her quarter horses in Western Pleasure and Horsemanship classes at major shows in the region. But this was her first time aboard Judy Carroll's Doc's Schatz, a 14.2-hand former stallion.

MOJAVE NATIONAL PRESERVE, Calif. -- Most people know this place from the air-conditioned comfort of their car as they speed along Interstates 15 or 40.It can appear a godforsaken wasteland of blowing dust and bleached bones. But it is not. And that is one point upon which all sides of the California Desert Protection Act debate agree."They try to say that we don't want to protect the desert," says Sandy McIntosh, a desert act opponent who lives 70 miles northwest of Needles inside the new Mojave National Preserve.