Kurt Loder

Reluctant Time cover boy Eddie Vedder mumbles incoherently from behind a line of empties. "Pint-sized paparaz-a-phobe" Shannen Doherty proclaims--Nixon-like--"I am not a bitch." The "lead breast" of global phenomenon "Baywatch," Pamela Anderson, extols the wonders of Zen in a meditation-provoking one-piece. Sen. Ernest F. Hollings (D-S.C.) assails "what is it, Buffcoat and Beaver, or Beaver and something else." Ike Turner swears he only punched her once. Must have been the year in something.

This year in rock, by most media accounts, pretty much consisted of Kurt Cobain going to his grave, Elvis Presley rolling over in his grave, Trent Reznor wishing he were dead and the kicking of a dead horse at Woodstock II. MTV focuses on Cobain, Reznor and Woodstock (stock having been the operative word there) in the 1994 edition of "The Year in Rock," eulogizing the late Nirvana leader at greatest length but stopping just short of wistfully proclaiming the day the music died.

ENTERTAINMENT Contract Smashing?: Virgin Records has sued one of its top acts, the Smashing Pumpkins, for breach of contract, claiming in an L.A. Superior Court lawsuit that the band told Virgin officials in January that it would not make any more albums for the company, even though four more are due under a seven-album contract. However, under a state law, such contracts expire in seven years; the band signed with Virgin in 1991 and hopes to now work out a better deal.

electronically scrambling, for example, the marijuana emblems that show up with smoke-alarming regularity on major gangsta rappers' caps and shirts in videos these days, as if they had endorsement contracts. So it's just a bit of a surprise that "Straight Dope: An MTV News Special Report"--an hour special hosted and written by Kurt Loder--finally comes down implicitly but palpably on the pro-pot, or at least pro-legalization, side.

Savvy record publicists learned early in the compact-disc craze that the best way to get critics' attention was to send out a CD copy of a new album rather than the conventional vinyl one. At a time when critics still had few of the discs, writers were so caught up with the excellent CD sound quality that they tended to listen to almost anything that came their way in the format.

"We're going to do what we can with the material that we now do," an anxious British singer says on a home demo tape that he made in 1969 to showcase his new songs for record executives. "Some of it has been considered 'single' material, but we'll leave that up to you to sort out. . . . Anyway, the first one is called 'Space Oddity.'

Since most music videos only cover three or four major deadly sins, max, at any one time, MTV has finally decided to cover them all at once with the definitive special "Seven Deadly Sins: An MTV News Special Report" (airing tonight at 10). The hour is a lively mixture of film and pop celebrities and everyday folks musing about how these time-tested traps of humanity impact their lives.

And you say television is predictable? Who would have guessed a few years ago that one of TV's rages of the '90s would be two homely, repulsive, eternally flatulent, irredeemably moronic teenagers who can barely read, have reached the apex of their lives working in a greasy burger joint and spend most of their time rapt before a set watching rock videos and fantasizing about "scoring"? As in having rip-roaring sex 'round the clock.

It's beginning to look a lot like Christmas this weekend, as the networks start ushering in the holidays with Yuletide specials, movies and the Hollywood Christmas Parade. But first there is Thanksgiving today, with the usual parades and football games. CBS' "The All-American Thanksgiving Parade," at 8 a.m. on Channel 2, covers the festivities in New York, Detroit, Hawaii and, for the first time, Nashville. NBC's "Macy's Thanksgiving Day Parade," kicking off at 9 a.m.