Deadly Game

When two old girlfriends meet again by chance on the streets of postwar London, it marks a new beginning in their relationship and perhaps the beginning of the end for their husbands in "Dead Gorgeous," the summer season premiere of PBS' "Mystery!" franchise (9 p.m. Sunday on KCET).

"Turn left, turn right, go back!" her friends urge as she leads her avatar, a pet dog, into a lethal trap and the sound of an explosion rings out from the computer. In the virtual game world, players can always hit restart, but 11-year-old Chamroeun Chanpisey gets the point. "The game is different from real life," she said. "People have only one life. " The video game, called Undercover UXO, shorthand for unexploded ordnance, is a new tool aimed at educating young Cambodians about the dangers of land mines and other explosives across the war-pocked Southeast Asian country.

Of all the one-liners for which Bill Shankly, the messiah of Liverpool soccer, was renowned, perhaps the best remembered is his version of an old sports witticism: "Football isn't a matter of life and death. It's more important than that." Shankly died in 1981, after building the Liverpool Football Club from a minor league also-ran into a powerhouse of the British and European game. But his name is now back on thousands of Liverpool lips as residents of this grief-stricken and much-maligned city are forced for the second time in less than four years to wonder if the gods are somehow testing them against their late hero's yardstick.

American Assassin A Novel Vince Flynn Atria, $27.99 A tale from CIA superagent Mitch Rapp's earliest days ? his athletic background and covert training prepare him to take aim after a terrorist act devastates his family. Broken A Novel Karin Fossum Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, $25 A crime novelist is haunted by one of her characters, a neurotic loner who pleads for fair treatment and gets entangled with a damaged young woman.

On the night of Feb. 20, 1939, three Soviet secret policemen knocked on a door at the Hotel Moskva in the Russian capital, asked to see the (fake) passport of its occupant, gave him a few minutes to gather some belongings and whisked him away to the notorious Lubyanka prison. Charged with espionage, he was questioned for almost a year before being sentenced to eight years in Norilsk, a mining center hundreds of miles above the Arctic Circle and one of the bleakest islands in the Gulag Archipelago.

Poor American traveling salesman Howard Trapp. First a storm strands him in a mysterious house in the Swiss Alps, then his host cajoles him into putting his life on the line in "The Deadly Game." James Yaffe's play, adapted from a novel by Friedrich Durrenmatt, is hardly "Death of a Salesman" in quality. This production by the North Coast Repertory Theatre is a moralistic mystery. It doesn't make you think so much as it makes you think twice about booking a trip to Switzerland.

His black tombstone is covered with Match Box cars, toy soldiers and a tiny football left by visitors to the grave. The inscription reads in gold letters: "Clovis' Child. Our little boy forever." A year after 6 1/2-year-old Matthew Joseph Roberts disappeared, no one in this eastern New Mexico town of 30,000 has forgotten him or the impact of his death. On May 8, 1990, Matthew went running after his mother, who had just left for the grocery store. The boy did not return. Officers were dispatched.

Kissinger claims that the news media's reportage of the Vietnam war failed to distinguish between "what was inherent in modern weaponry and what represented deliberate cruelty." Surely he knows that such fine distinctions cannot be made in the heat of battle. The pictures I remember of American soldiers torturing captured Viet Cong and of children with burning napalm on their backs were typical of actions by both sides in the conflict. They were all part of a game--a deadly game that cannot be refined.

Regarding the column "A Deadly Game in the Fast Lane," by Robert A. Jones (Part A, Dec. 11): It is most likely true that the freeways just north of the Mexican border slaughter more humans each year than any equivalent stretch of interstate in the nation. But Jones is so thoroughly confused as to what laws are made for that he makes several incomprehensible suggestions. He suggests that we build freeway overpasses or reduce the number of lanes on the freeways. To propose a "safe" crossing for illegals is like opening the bank vaults and inviting the crooks to rob the bank.

"The Deadly Game," at the Costa Mesa Civic Playhouse, is a talky courtroom drama with a twist: It doesn't take place in a courtroom at all, but in the private home of retired judge Emile Carpeau.

On the night of Feb. 20, 1939, three Soviet secret policemen knocked on a door at the Hotel Moskva in the Russian capital, asked to see the (fake) passport of its occupant, gave him a few minutes to gather some belongings and whisked him away to the notorious Lubyanka prison. Charged with espionage, he was questioned for almost a year before being sentenced to eight years in Norilsk, a mining center hundreds of miles above the Arctic Circle and one of the bleakest islands in the Gulag Archipelago.

When Cody Alexander Morris returned from the war last fall, he carried home a burden -- a diagnosis of post-traumatic stress disorder -- and a new way of playing with guns. The gun game was called "Do You Trust Me?" Morris, 19, learned it from his Kentucky National Guard buddies in Iraq. He taught the game to his roommates: best friend and fellow guardsman Casey Lee Hall, 18, and a 16-year-old cousin, Cory Adams.

Investors can be so frighteningly on the money in predicting things like elections that, in theory, setting up a commodity-style market in which participants helped generals anticipate terrorist attacks, coups and turmoil might have harnessed the force of greed for the U.S. good. But a Bush administration plan to do so, one that officials pledged Tuesday to "terminate," was unbelievably stupid.

When two old girlfriends meet again by chance on the streets of postwar London, it marks a new beginning in their relationship and perhaps the beginning of the end for their husbands in "Dead Gorgeous," the summer season premiere of PBS' "Mystery!" franchise (9 p.m. Sunday on KCET).

It is widely reported that when the war on Iraq is launched, the United States will bomb into smithereens every one of Saddam Hussein's beautiful, extravagant palaces, with the aim of killing Iraq's leader no matter where he may be hiding. These are the supposedly humane tactics of a civilized nation anxious to conduct a short war that will bring about a swift "regime change." But what if the military planners have misjudged the opposition?

Pakistan's foolish action in setting off nuclear explosions Thursday to match India's tests two weeks ago makes the world, not just South Asia, a more dangerous place. The collapse of the Soviet Union nearly a decade ago reduced the chances of nuclear war. But now India and Pakistan have increased the threat and provided a dangerous example for other countries, such as Iran and North Korea, thought to be aiming for nuclear capability.

More than 200 mourners, including friends and relatives wearing T-shirts adorned with his name, said goodby Saturday to Gabriel Soto, the 13-year-old victim of a shooting that occurred during a one-sided version of Russian roulette. After a Mass at Our Lady of Perpetual Hope Catholic Church, the boy's body was buried on a windy, steep hillside at Eternal Valley Memorial Park in Newhall, where the crying of his family and the strains of traditional mourning songs were almost drowned out by noise from the Antelope Valley Freeway.

American Assassin A Novel Vince Flynn Atria, $27.99 A tale from CIA superagent Mitch Rapp's earliest days ? his athletic background and covert training prepare him to take aim after a terrorist act devastates his family. Broken A Novel Karin Fossum Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, $25 A crime novelist is haunted by one of her characters, a neurotic loner who pleads for fair treatment and gets entangled with a damaged young woman.

Poor American traveling salesman Howard Trapp. First a storm strands him in a mysterious house in the Swiss Alps, then his host cajoles him into putting his life on the line in "The Deadly Game." James Yaffe's play, adapted from a novel by Friedrich Durrenmatt, is hardly "Death of a Salesman" in quality. This production by the North Coast Repertory Theatre is a moralistic mystery. It doesn't make you think so much as it makes you think twice about booking a trip to Switzerland.