Timothy Leary

G Gordon Liddy's resume is both ominous and quirky--government super-spook with an unusual tolerance to pain (open flames no problem), Watergate burglary "mastermind," convicted felon (nine times over), high-paid lecturer, TV actor, would-be talk-show host, macho right-wing stalwart. Then there's this little thing he has been doing with counterculture drug evangelist Dr. Timothy Leary off and on through the '80s.

Timothy Leary is prepping for the afterlife. Naturally, it's an alternative afterlife. Diagnosed a year ago with untreatable prostate cancer, Leary isn't interested in anything as mute as a gravestone or as passive as a memory--though he did consult the cryonics crowd about freezing his lysergic acid-soaked brain (the technology isn't ready yet).

Three robbers who burst into a Pico Rivera home Christmas night fatally shot a 17-year-old boy after ransacking his house and stealing money and jewelry, Los Angeles County sheriff's deputies said Friday. Abraham Cisneros and his mother answered the robbers' knocks about 9:15 p.m. Thursday and had guns shoved in their faces, Deputy Michael Irving said. The robbers ordered the two to lie on the living room floor while they scoured the house for jewelry and money, he said.

Timothy Leary, the 1960s drug guru, gave inmates at a Massachusetts prison doses of hallucinogenic drugs in tests to see if it would stop criminal tendencies, the Boston Globe said Saturday. The Globe reported that Leary, who was overseeing the 1961 tests as a faculty member at Harvard University, was fired by state officials after the hallucinogenic tests had been under way for some time because he was seen as inciting inmates to rebellion.

The daughter of 1960s LSD guru Timothy Leary was again ruled incompetent to stand trial for attempted murder in the 1988 shooting of her sleeping boyfriend. Superior Court Judge Terry Smerling said Tuesday that Susan Martino, 42, was unable to understand the charges against her and committed her to a state psychiatric hospital until she could be found fit. In 1989, a judge found Martino unable to stand trial on the charges. She could be held for up to 14 years if she does not recover.

In 1966, John Griggs robbed a man of LSD at gunpoint, according to a former friend's testimony before a grand jury. The act dramatically changed Griggs' life. A week later, Glen Lynd testified in 1973 before the Orange County Grand Jury, Griggs experimented with the LSD, "threw away his gun and was running around hollering, 'This is it.' That's how it all began." Lynd in 1973 was describing the origins of the Laguna Beach-based Brotherhood of Eternal Love, which by then was alleged to be an international drug ring.

I wonder what prompted The Times to devote 81 column inches, not including three photos, to Timothy Leary. According to writer Dick Roraback, Leary's current claim to fame is that he is a celebrity, a "party animal" without whom no glitzy Hollywood premiere is complete. Despite references to Leary's to-say-the-least checkered past, the general tone of the article is strangely adulatory. Roraback appears to accept without reservation Leary's new persona as "the Billy Rose of philosophy," whatever in the world that means.

The Patience Stone Atiq Rahimi Translated from the French by Polly McLean Other Press: 160 pp., $16.95 Books have many incarnations. Some come back as plays or movies. If they have questionable karma, they come back as paperback remainders or Saturday morning cartoon shows. "The Patience Stone" would make a fabulous one-woman play. It is set in a bedroom in Afghanistan, where a woman has watched over her husband for 16 days. He is comatose, with a bullet in his neck.