Warts

Q. My father drinks one or two glasses of red wine daily. He insists it is his "medicine," keeping his heart and brain healthy. It has become a family joke, especially because he insists that it has to be good wine. We asked him where he got this idea, and he cited your newspaper column. Is Dad's "medicine" really as good for him as he says, or is this just an excuse? A. Scientific studies document the value of moderate wine consumption in reducing the risk of Alzheimer's and heart disease.

Q. I heard that cinnamon helps with blood sugar control in diabetes. Is this true, and if so, how much does it take? A. We have heard from a number of people that one teaspoon of cinnamon on oatmeal or in other food can help lower blood sugar. Preliminary test-tube research suggests that this spice enhances cellular response to insulin and facilitates the passage of glucose into cells. Diabetics must inform their doctors if they add cinnamon to the diet and also monitor blood sugar levels carefully.

TOKYO -- With the exception, perhaps, of Russia, each nation came away from the meeting of the financial leaders of the Group of 7 industrialized countries yesterday with something it wanted. For the Japanese hosts, there was a statement, albeit a muddled one, of collective concern over the potential negative effect of an excessively strong yen on the global economy. The Europeans managed to keep their currency, the euro, out of the final communique despite concerns among policy-makers outside Europe that its low value is being used to avoid taking steps for painful economic restructuring.

AS LONG AS NOTHING HAPPENS, NOTHING WILL. By Zhang Jie. Translated by Gladys Yang, Deborah J. Leonard and Zhang Andong. Grove Weidenfeld. 196 pages. $18.95. CHINA achieved material gains in the 1980s. But it also became a society adrift. In unchaining itself from the rigid doctrines of Chairman Mao Zedong, it seemed also to break loose from all its moral and philosophical anchors. Chinese no longer believed in their old revolutionary myths, but found no new ones to replace them.That disillusion, which underlay the 1989 protest movement centered on Beijing's Tiananmen Square, also lies at the center of Zhang Jie's "As Long as Nothing Happens, Nothing Will."

TORONTO -- There's a connection between Cate Blanchett's performance as the elfish Lady Galadriel in The Lord of the Rings trilogy and her turn as crusading and martyred Irish journalist Veronica Guerin in the film of the same name. It's not obvious, Blanchett says, but it's there. "You have a responsibility to a real person," Blanchett says. "And I wanted to get as close to the real Veronica Guerin as I could. "But it's no more daunting than playing Galadriel, let's be honest. Fifty years of Tolkien's readers own her. And they're not taking that work that I do there lightly, either.

THE LATEST figures regarding American college an university students majoring in history are nothing to write home about. In recent years history has been given the academic cold shoulder. Bachelor's degrees awarded in history fell from 43,386 in 1970 to 16,048 in 1985, master's degrees from 5,049 to 1,921, doctorates from 1,091 to 543.The most recent data covering the 1988-89 academic year show that undergraduate and master's degrees have increased modestly, but doctorates are at their lowest point in recent history, leaving the American Historical Association not only puzzled but concerned.

For as long as they can remember, the people of the high Andean river valleys of Peru have endured recurring waves of a deadly and disfiguring disease called bartonellosis. It is always present in their villages. But every four to six years, they suffer a "bad year" - a mysterious surge in the number of cases and severity of the illness. Victims develop a fever and flu-like symptoms, followed by anemia that kills 40 percent to 60 percent of its victims if untreated. Months later, those who survive develop a terrible rash they call verruga - bleeding warts, all over the body, that last two to five months.

JFK: RECKLESS YOUTH. By Nigel Hamilton. Random House. 898 pages. $30.NIGEL Hamilton strikes two major chords in "JFK: RecklesYouth," the first of three projected volumes on the life of John Fitzgerald Kennedy. Once struck, they echo throughout this insightful biography that covers Kennedy's "rogue years," 1917 to 1946.It's obvious, first, that Mr. Hamilton, a British scholar whose literary reputation rests on a three-volume study of Field Marshal Bernard Montgomery, has a great deal of admiration and affection for Jack Kennedy.

A woman from Baltimore called The Sun sports department with a cure for Mike Mussina's wart."He should spit on it," she said.Careful there. Spitting is still a sore subject in some corners of the Orioles clubhouse."

A day after making a trip to Philadelphia to have a wart removed from the middle finger on his pitching hand, Brian Matusz felt good enough to throw a bullpen session Saturday and remains on track to start Tuesday. It was originally believed that Matusz would miss at least one start after having the laser procedure. "It felt fine," Matusz said. "We weren't sure going into the laser process if it was going to be irritated the next couple days or not. It feels fine. It doesn't feel irritated at all. It feels normal.