As rector of Edinburgh University, Author-Iconoclast Malcolm Muggeridge, 64, is supposed to act as intermediary between students and administration. Last week, in his annual address from the pulpit of St. Giles's Cathedral, the High Kirk of Edinburgh, the Mugger reaffirmed his sympathies with the rebellious ways of youth, "up to and including blowing up this magnificent edifice." The point at which he lost touch, however, was the demand that birth-control pills be handed out at the university's medical dispensary. That sort of request, said Muggeridge, "raised in me not so much disapproval as contempt," and he resigned his post forthwith. "How sad, how macabre and funny it is," said Muggeridge, "that all they put forward should be a demand for pot and pills, the resort of any old slobbering debauchee anywhere."

A crisis loomed as workmen at New Hampshire's Loon Mountain ski area found what they thought was steam escaping from the side of the mountain. They reported the phenomenon to the resort's general manager, Sherman Adams, 69, onetime assistant to President Dwight Eisenhower and an old hand at dealing with volcanic pressures. Adams investigated and found a hibernating bear in a cave. "I'll flush him out in the spring," said Sherm.

Evgeny Evtushenlco, 34, is dropping salt in the samovar again with yet another batch of soul-scraping poems published in the Russian journal Znamya. The poems derive from his six-week tour of the U.S. in 1966, and one in particular--Monologue of a Blue Fox on an Alaskan Animal Farm--seems an especially bold statement of the rebel's own schizoid loyalties. The fox shrills for freedom from its cage, where it is held because of the value of its fur. Then it discovers that the door to its pen has been left open, only to make a further horrible discovery:

He who is conceived in a cage yearns

for the cage.

With horror I understood that I love That cage where they hide me behind a fence,

And that animal farm, my native land.

New York City's Madison Square Garden has seen them all in its day, from roller-derby promoters to evangelists to the top-hatted cuties of the horse-show set. Now comes India's Maharishi Mahesh Yogi, sixtyish, guru to the Beatles and other show-biz folk.

The Yogi--who bills himself as "His Holiness"--opened his New York pitch with a press conference, at which devotional attention was paid to the $3 price of admission to the Garden. What if a spiritual devotee has no scratch? "I'm quite sure," meditated the Yogi, "that in New York, $3 will not be beyond the reach of any man."

"You can really sense their friendliness even if you don't understand the language," gurgled Sylvia Hitchcock, 21, the reigning Miss Universe and a girl well adapted to overcoming language barriers everywhere. After flying into Japan to hustle graciously for Royal Crown Cola, the company that sponsors her, Sylvia donned a long silk kimono and obi for a round of tradition al tea drinking. Her first pass showed a clear Western influence as she knocked back the whole cup in one gulp, but she was soon taking it down in the prescribed three sips. "It's fabulous," said Sylvia of the green Japanese brew. "It looked like pea soup but tasted like--well, like exotic bouillon."

Thirty years have passed since Trumpeter Harry James peeked out between the curtains at the overflow audience in Carnegie Hall and whispered: "I feel like a whore in church." That was the night that Benny Goodman's big band first brought jazz to the concert hall, and in memory of the occasion Benny got the old group together last week for an evening of dinner-and-jam at his Manhattan apartment. Some of the boys --James, Pianist Teddy Wilson, Trombonist Red Ballard--were tied up elsewhere, but 14 of the original 26 made it, including Drummer Gene Krupa, Vibraphonist Lionel Hampton, Pianist Jess Stacy and Singer Martha Tilton. Goodman, now 58, fed them all a buffet supper, and then they sat down to blow Avalon, Sweet Lorraine, Stompin' at the Savoy. As they used to say back then--swingin'.

Rest assured, said the London insurance broker, "any ordinary boy of this age would have great difficulty in getting insurance coverage for a car like this." As it was, the underwriters were only too honored to cover Prince Charles, 19, all proper and legal-like as the owner of his first car, a six-cylinder, 127-m.p.h. MGC-GT. The car cost $3,120--out of the Prince's own pocket--and boasts such embellishments as an electrically controlled aerial and a leather-covered steering wheel. It has a bull horn that has already caused mumbles in the Noise Abatement Society. Charles will keep the car at Sandringham House for use on weekends and vacations from Cambridge, 50 miles away. The university, less impressed than insurance men by royal prerogative, will not let him keep a car on campus until he is 22.

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