As the birthday boy appeared on the crowded veranda of his house in San Juan, Puerto Rico, a 38-man choir burst into Ralph Vaughan Williams' Let Us Now Praise Famous Men. Famous Man Pablo Casals, cellist, composer, humanitarian, was celebrating his 95th birthday, surrounded by hordes of friends and mountains of letters, cables and presents from all over the world. The festivities have been going on for several weeks, and are scheduled to last for at least another fortnight; Nonagenarian Casals, with his 35-year-old wife Martita, has been enjoying every minute of them. He was depressed, however, by atrocity photographs from Bengal and observed: "Savages! We are all savages. To obtain peace at the rate we are going will take another 300 years. But we must start now."

Will people be shocked in the year 2014 by the cliche-crammed love letters from a U.S. President to a married woman? Not until then will the public get a peek at the more than 250 letters that Warren Gamaliel Harding wrote between 1909 and 1920 to Mrs. Carrie Phillips, wife of a department store owner in Marion, Ohio. Harding Biographer Francis Russell discovered the correspondence in 1963, but Harding's heirs sued to block publication, and now it has been agreed to immure the letters in the Library of Congress for the next 42 years. By that time their impact may be mild indeed. "Compared to what is available today in any drugstore bookrack," says

Russell, "Harding's eroticism is naive and even pathetic as the quality of his mind peeps through the boudoir phrases. The letters, if they can be considered shocking--as some of them can --are more so because they were written by a President of the United States than through the tumescence of their content."

Attorney General John Mitchell has demonstrated that Martha isn't the only stand-up comedian in the family. Called upon to pinch-hit for his sick wife as commentator at a Martha Mitchell Fashion Fiesta in Tempe, Ariz., John wowed the audience of 1,200 with some gags right out of the old Keith-Albee circuit. When a woman sponsor of the show asked him at the microphone. "May I call you John?", he cracked back. "Yes, if I may call you later." Giving the models an appreciative eye: "I don't know about the clothes but the rest of the merchandise is great." Told by a woman that she had just talked to the ailing Mrs. Mitchell on the phone, John was right there with the comeback. "Who doesn't?" he asked.

In 36 years of married life, Israel's Moshe Dayan has accumulated a notable collection of honors: war hero, general, Minister of Defense. Moshe and Ruth Dayan also have three children and five grandchildren, but otherwise their marriage has been far from blessed. Now it has ended with a rabbinical divorce. "All Israelis are friends, so Moshe and I will remain friends," said Ruth. Some newspapers speculated that another friend, handsome Divorcee Rachel Korem, might soon be the new Mrs. Dayan.

Fugitive Timothy Leary, 51--onetime Harvard psychologist, onetime drug-culture guru, onetime convict in San Luis Obispo, Calif., and onetime member of Black Panther Leader Eldridge Cleaver's expatriate flock in Algiers--may have found a resting place at last. Swiss authorities have rejected U.S. demands that Leary be extradited to serve out the rest of his ten-year California sentence for possession of marijuana. The Swiss felt, as one official put it, that ten years was much too stiff a penalty for "finding two marijuana butts in the ashtray of a car that did not even belong to Leary." -

It sounded almost like a dream ten years ago, when a syndicate headed by Karim, the young Aga Khan, announced the development of Sardinia's Costa Smeralda as a multimillion-dollar superresort. Hotels have since been abuilding, tourists arriving, yachts dropping anchor. But then it began to look like a dream again. Said Karim: "We have not found the expected support in Sardinia." Moved by the jet set's response, Karim promptly reversed himself. Once more the dream seems real.

The man who gave Russian workers the speedup back in 1935 has resurfaced. Alexei Stakhanov became Stalin's original "shock worker" by producing 102 tons of coal in a six-hour shift--eleven times the norm. Soviet officials then used the high output of dedicated "Stakhanovites" as a pretext to raise production quotas for everyone. Now 66, Stakhanov told Pravda that there was too much emphasis on production statistics, "machines, automation, percentages and tons." When it came time to praise the workers, he said, he had seen party officials giving out awards while sneaking glances at their wristwatches. "Praise should not be routine," declared Comrade Stakhanov. "It should come from the bottom of the heart."

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