Along with the freaky spring weather, who should be rolling through the Southland but redheaded Stripper Tempest Storm, 45, the last of the big-time burlesque queens. This time around she appeared with a rock group called the James Gang and had a string of brand-new bookings: the college circuit. Tempest likes it fine. "College guys always used to pile into B-houses on Friday and Saturday nights, but now to have 3,000 or 4,000 jumping up and yelling right on the campus--wow!" Do the students ask her questions? "The girls do. Mostly they want to know where I buy my lingerie." Was she thinking about retiring? "I could teach. Girls still need to know poise, finesse and femininity."

It was one down and perhaps one up for Muhammad Ali. On the way to a possible match with new Heavyweight Champion George Foreman, Ali lost a twelve-round decision in San Diego to an unknown ex-Marine named Ken Norton. The unexpected loss probably scotched Ali's chances of sharing a record $6 million-to-$10 million purse with Foreman. As consolation, the ex-champ may get a crack at another title--professor of poetry at Oxford. "This is not simply a joke," said Dr. Duncan Macleod, a fellow of St. Catherine's College, who wants to nominate Ali for the chair. "It may be time for ephemeral poets such as Ali to be recognized." The fighter's top-rated opponent in the coming vote by 30,000 Oxonians is British Poet Stephen Spender, heavily backed by W.H. Auden. So far, no one was placing odds.

Singer Alice Cooper is the head ghoul of Grand Guignol rock. Painter Salvador Dali is the grand Dada of shock work art. What could be more fitting than that Salvador should paint Alice? Or that Alice should pose wearing a million dollars' worth of borrowed jewels and surrounded by a coffee eclair, ants and a soft watch? But it wasn't just a painting. Unveiled in Manhattan last week was a chronological hologram--a three-dimensional photograph inside a continuously turning cylinder. Dali chose Cooper for this novel portrait, he said, because Alice is "the best exponent of total confusion I know."

Back in Viet Nam to cover the aftermath of the war for The New Yorker, Author Frances FitzGerald paid a visit to Quang Ngai, a coastal lowlands province particularly vulnerable to Viet Cong incursions. While there, FitzGerald, the author of Fire in the Lake, a bestselling book about American involvement in Southeast Asia, and Daniel Southerland of the Christian Science Monitor were picked up by the Viet Cong, questioned and then released two days later. "Actually we asked them more questions than they asked us," said Southerland. They were the first Western reporters to be captured since the January cease-fire took effect.

A good many Christian eyebrows were raised when Billy Graham, in the course of a press conference while visiting South Africa, proposed that rapists be castrated (TIME, April 2). A group of black ministers from the Twin Cities even threatened to boycott the evangelist's July crusade in their area. Returning home, Graham acknowledged that his statement was "an offhand, hasty, spontaneous remark" that he had immediately regretted. But Graham could not help preaching a little. "It is interesting that the thought of castration stirs a far more violent reaction than the idea of rape itself," he noted. "Perhaps this is part of our permissive society's sickness."

"An egregious insult to all our returning prisoners," said Secretary of Defense Elliot L. Richardson. "The rottenest, most miserable performance by any one individual in the history of our country," declaimed Congressman Robert H. Steele of Connecticut. The cause of their indignation was Actress-Activist Jane Fonda; in a television interview, she asserted that the returning P.O.W.s who said they had been tortured were "liars and hypocrites." Later Fonda backed down, but not out, of the controversy. "It would be foolish for anyone to say there was no torture," she admitted. "But it is a lie to say that torture was the policy of the North Vietnamese." She did not say that her expertise was based on one short visit to North Viet Nam, where she talked to eight P.O.W.s but saw no camps.

Over the years, Tough-Guy Actor Edward G. Robinson put together one of the finest private art collections in the world: his "children," as he called his impressionist and postimpressionist paintings. Indeed, the works that he left when he died two months ago were his "second family." The first had gone in 1957 when he was forced by a divorce settlement to sell 58 paintings and one bronze, which Greek Shipping Magnate Stavros Niarchos bought for $3,250,000. Struggling with bad health, Robinson, 63, returned to film work, bought back 14 masterworks from Niarchos and rebuilt his collection. Appraised at $5,125,000, Robinson's second collection of 88 paintings was snapped up by Manhattan's Knoedler Gallery, whose head is Dr. Armand Hammer, chairman of the Occidental Petroleum Corp.

Ada Beatrice Queen Victoria Louisa Virginia Smith, nicknamed "Bricktop" because of her red hair, has come a long way from West Virginia. She gained fame and fortune at her nightclubs in Paris, Rome and Mexico City, entrancing countless fans with her whispered songs, cigar and feather boa. She taught the Duke of Windsor to black-bottom; Cole Porter wrote Miss Otis Regrets for her. In Manhattan last week a gaggle of old friends, including ex-Folies-Bergere Star Josephine Baker and Singer Mabel Mercer, showed up as Bricktop opened her own room--"Bricktop's"--at Huntington Hartford's Show Magazine Club. Why did she go back to work at 78? "It's nice to be mingling around," said Bricktop. "Not working nights began to wear on me."

For Britons, it was bad enough that London Bridge was dismantled and moved to Lake Havasu City, Ariz. Now the century-old Albert Bridge, with its Maypole-like piers, is being threatened --by automobiles. Closed a year ago to have its underpinnings shored up, the bridge should be opened just for pedestrians and small shops, its friends say. Heading the campaign to ban cars is the Duchess of St. Albans, who invited Poet Robert Graves over from Majorca to give her a hand. "He is one of the last Victorians," she said. Graves, 77, helped the Duchess and Poet Laureate Sir John Betjeman collect 1,000 signatures on a petition and dutifully blew up a balloon for photographers.

He was just "an eagle beating his wings against the cage," argued the eloquent defense attorney for Psychedelic Guru Timothy Leary, who had taken it on the lam from a California prison where he was serving a one-to ten-year sentence for possession of marijuana. Leary had escaped in what his lawyer described as a state of involuntary LSD flashback intoxication. The San Luis Obispo jurors were not impressed. It took them only 90 minutes to turn Leary from an eagle to a common jailbird again. He now faces a possible six months to five years for the escape that could be tacked on to his original marijuana conviction.

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