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Show I'Tis the season for giving -and that includes Washington! Dear Santa, I want a baby party and a watch, and an old fashioned stove and a double doll carriage, car-riage, and a new shoulder purse, and a eas ybake oven and that's all. Love, Diana Lee Marsigli Dear Santa Thank you for the things you gave me last year. This year I would like a flashlight gun, the game Sorry, a Army outfit, out-fit, and a surprise. Love, Richard Murdock I have to u?e much imiginna-tion imiginna-tion to realize what channel was watched. It's all kind of humorous, if you don't think 'about our national na-tional debt some $335 billion and if you forget about the fact that we went an additional $25 billion into debt this past year. If you think that all the money for "unusual projects" is awarded to "kooky" places outside the good ol' mountain This is the season for giving giving thanks at Thanksgiving Thanksgiv-ing time, giving presents at Christmas time a season when we believe it is better to give than to receive. And that includes Washington. The nation's capital, however, has that "giving feeling" 365 days a year. I'm talking about money grants shelled out for projects. While I'm sure most will agree that there is a definite def-inite need for financial aid from federal to state and local lo-cal levels, it occurs to me that this "government giving" gets carried away a little more than it should. Take, for instance, the college col-lege in California producing a comic book costing $8,789. No kidding! The National Foundation Foun-dation on the Arts and Sciences Scien-ces awarded the grant and dead serious in what they are doing and there is a. certain amount of merit in all these projects. Although no one has ever totaled these grants under a heading of "weird" "unbelievable," "unbeliev-able," or "ridiculous," here are a few I've picked up and pass along for your education. Some $14,000 was shelled out of "foggy bottom" for the specification spec-ification in Cave Beetles; a grant of $C,000 went for a compilation of writings on the fur trade between the United States and Canada between 1770 and 1820; $115,000 to Le-Roi Le-Roi Jones and the Black Arts Theatre for productions such as the one titled, "The Toilet,"; and half a million dollars were found "not doing anything" in the Agency for International Development, so when some chap from Lebanon asked for the grant, AID dished it out for a school which didn't even exist! How's that for economy ? Vietnam has taken its share of U.S. money. About $400,000 bought 1,000 TV sets for South Vietnam villages. The only problem was that many of these villages weren't equipped with electricity and many of the TV sets weren't equipped with batteries. If that wasn't enough, the TV sets were equipped with two .channels to view real democracy, so the people wouldn't have to watch only one channel. They set up one channel for American propaganda propa-ganda broadcasts. The other channel could receive old cowboy cow-boy movies, "I Love Lucy," "Gunsmoke," etc. You don't west, just let me relate a few instances. A University of Arizona professor pro-fessor was conducting what he thought was a very interesting experiment, but he needed the money. The federal coffers "coughed up" $5,192 to help him out. What was he doing? He wanted to know why some girl lizards can do without boy-lizards. boy-lizards. Really! He had found that several distinct species found in Arizona consists of nothing no-thing but females. He wanted to research the love life of whiptail lizards. Our own state of Utah "benefitted" "ben-efitted" from some of the grant aid. Utah State University of Logan was awarded $10,000 to research a project called by grant officials, "The Social Studies of Squirrels." And I hope there aren't too many students at the University Univer-sity of Utah smiling over the Utah State grant, because the "U" will take a back seat to no one when it comes to getting grants for "special projects." The most famous, I think, was a $10,000 grant awarded to that Salt Lake City institution of higher learning for the study of . . . the sex life of mice! by Representative Laurence J. Burton niiruy aeienaea tneir acuon. They said the researching of comic strips was in the public interest. They said comics were a source of information about historical progress and that the study was important to the survival and well-being of the nation since comics affect the public's thinking! The ladies reading this report re-port may find the next bit of information most interesting, but I think it might be lost on male readers. A $159,000 grant went to the University of Florida Flor-ida to teach mothers how to play with their babies. A $33,101 grant was awarded to the Israel Institute of Applied Ap-plied Science for "a test aspects as-pects of the role of a husband and wife's relationship. And it also said, "The test should be sensitive." And what's the latest you know about I n d o-Australian Ants? Some folks know a lot or should know a lot, anyway. A $70,000 grant was awarded to classify and find out the population biology of these ants. It doesn't stop here. It gets mere riduculous even though I am sure the researchers are |