Herb Caen

HERB CAEN 

TUE 

Man Playing Typewriter 

RIGHT, and typewriter wins... Meanwhile, advertising slogans get increasingly and annoyingly succinct: From "Got Milk?" to "I Can Banking" to, observes Max Mudlheimer, "People Do Gasoline and Oil." Beats crack, I guess... Beat- nik, the word I coined 36 years ago-but-what- have-I-done-lately, is moribund if not dead, but "bitnik" lives! Jim Schroeder flashes that it's on the infobahn, and defined thus by hot Wired magazine: "One who uses a coin-operated termi- nal installed in a coffee house to log into cyber- space." I tink I like "beatnik" betta... On Sun- day, when we turned our clocks back, we were told that we'd get back the hour we lost last April, so how come I am still tired? Another cosmic lie... Troy Garrison, tiring of malaprops (check), suggests a new game: non sequiturs. His initial offering is the first sentence of a chapter in "The Lives of Danielle Steel": "Two years to the day after Japan surrendered, bringing an end to World War II, Danielle Fernande Domi- nique Schuelein-Steel was born in New York City." The non sequitur game is declared over. Nobody's going to top that.