Water Buffalo

SYDNEY, Australia - What began as a gentle childlike dream little more than two weeks ago ended in a wild party yesterday celebrating all things Australian and bracketing what have been hailed as the greatest Olympic Games of the modern era. From its fantastic start Sept. 15, when Olympic Stadium was transformed into a spectacular world of flying fish and spinning pinwheels, to the unofficial anthems "Waltzing Matilda" and "Land Down Under" that closed the Games, Sydney did its best to show the world Australia.

A hotel delivery in China; A memorable placeOur plane shuddered and yawed, heightening our apprehension and uncertainty. Outside the window, rich fields of rice and red sorghum sprawled to the horizon. Water buffalo roamed about. The Yangtze River flowed just beyond our view. Beautiful! But our purpose for being in China was not simply the landscape.We landed in Changsha. The airport terminal was an aluminum shed with sparse seating and one undersized luggage rack - paltry for a city of 6 million people.

A group of Oakland Mills Middle School pupils is doing its part to end world hunger by hitting the books. Through the Read to Feed program, they are soliciting pledges for reading a certain number of books. The money is used to purchase animals such as heifers, goats, chickens and water buffalo for poor families around the world. Read to Feed is sponsored by Heifer International, a nonprofit organization based in Little Rock, Ark., that aims to help poor families with long-term solutions to their problems.

An invitation to the first lady's 50th birthday party would have any woman frantically wondering what to wear. The dilemma deepens when the guest also has to transport the present of honor -- a long-haired, four-legged bleating critter -- to the White House."

THERE WERE OODLES of "American Girls" at Carrolltowne Elementary School on Friday. Sherlock Holmes, Pippi Longstocking, Pocahontas and Indiana Jones dropped in, too.The Cat in the Hat, with his distinctive striped hat, could be found in several classrooms. For the third consecutive year, students at Carrolltowne held a "Book Buddy Day.""We decided it would be a wonderful way of celebrating Maryland Reading Month," said Susan Abramson, the school's language arts specialist. "It's all about good literature.

LEIDEN, Netherlands - To fade a pair of blue jeans used to take years of wear and tear or a washing machine full of pumice stones. Now, an enzyme found near a pink flamingo's mud nest in Kenya can do the job in minutes. Scientist Brian Jones made the discovery next to one of the thousands of raised mounds dotting a salt lake near the Rift Valley. The six-hour drive from Nairobi to a camp among water buffalo and crocodiles is one of many he's made in the search for new products for his employer, Genencor International Inc. of Palo Alto, Calif.

Less than a month after the antiques world reeled at the high prices paid for French porcelains at the sale of the collection of the late Elizabeth Parke Firestone, more plebeian 18th century English pottery brought astonishing high prices as well. There is no recession in the market for antique pottery and porcelain.A Sevres porcelain billiard score marker sold for a whopping $99,000 at the Firestone sale on March 22 at Christie's in New York. The 16 1/4 -inch plaque decorated in a trompe l'oeil technique to simulate a marble bracket had a royal provenance: the billiard room at Versailles.

Oh, those whacky French! Quelle goofs! Only they could come up with a story in which a 32-year-old man seduces and enjoys delirious sexual congress with a 16-year-old girl and end it with the man . . . as the victim!But that's "The Lover," from Marguerite Duras' unfilmable novel as filmed by the master of the unfilmable, Jean-Jacques Annaud ("Quest for Fire," "The Bear") in the unfilmable country of Vietnam, where, happily for the production company, it's still 1929.Duras' novel was essentially the dense and presumably mythologized memoir of her own longed-for and liberating defloration; it was a worldwide best seller back in the early '80s.

Along with goggles and gas masks, U.S. soldiers in Iraq are carrying another item into battle - mini bottles of Tabasco sauce, packed in their food rations. The fiery pepper sauce, produced since 1868 by the McIlhenny Co. on Avery Island in Louisiana, has spiced up military meals for more than a century. "One of my distant cousins sent a case of Tabasco to Ulysses S. Grant when he was president," says Paul McIlhenny, company president. That still counts, because Grant was a Civil War general, he says.

For many centuries, the names of Anthony and Cleopatra have provided food for thought. Those with an historical bent can chew over what role the Egyptian queen played in Rome's decline. The literary may savor retellings of their doomed romance by Shakespeare, Dryden and Shaw. And, for those with campier tastes, there are Liz and Dick, and their magnificent mess of a movie that nearly bankrupted 20th Century Fox in 1963. Whatever your appetite, however, Anthony and Cleopatra probably haven't conjured images of cheese.