A letter sent to Maria Dillon, a hostess at an Italian restaurant in Chicago, by Frank D. Zaffere III, a Chicago lawyer:

Dear Maria:

This notice—given on the two-month anniversary of the date when you broke your promise to marry me, and six days prior to the date we were to be married—is provided to you in accordance with the provisions of the Illinois Breach of Promise Act. As required by that section, please be advised as follows:

1. I asked for your hand in marriage, and you agreed to marry me, on November 2, 1991. I proposed to you, and you accepted my proposal, at the Pump Room in Chicago. At the time of our engagement, I placed upon your finger, and you accepted, a 1.06-carat diamond engagement ring.,

   

2. The date for our marriage ceremony, set by you, was August 9, 1992.

3. As a result of your breach of your promise to marry me, I have suffered significant actual damages, in excess of $40,000, relating to monies expended and financial accommodations made by me for your care, welfare, and happiness, in each case in reliance upon your promise of marriage. My expenditures and financial accommodations for you included, without limitation: (a) your living allowance; (b) medical and dental treatment; (c) vacations; (d) entertainment; (e) clothing; and (f) jewelry.

4. I am still willing to marry you on the following conditions: (1) we proceed with our marriage within forty-five days of the date of this letter; (2) you confirm to me in a solemn oath (which will be private between us) that you have been since August 3, 1991, and will forever be, faithful to me; (3) you promise in a solemn oath (which will be private between us) that you will never lie to me again about anything; (4) you agree in a solemn oath (which will be private between us) that you will use your best efforts to resolve and reconcile all differences between you and my daughter, Althea (subject, of course, to her willingness to engage in a meaningful dialogue with you).

Please feel free to call me if you have any questions or would like to discuss any of the matters addressed herein.

Sincerely,
Frank D. Zaffere III

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At a class at Harvard Divinity School, students were asked to talk about what they thought was central to Christianity. After listening to the discussion for several minutes, one student thought that something important was being ignored, so he volunteered "Jesus." He was immediately derided by the others for being "Christocentric."

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From a March 1992 discussion between radio talk-show host Chris Clark and a caller named Gregory, on KGO's Chris Clark Show, in San Francisco:

Gregory:

I have a friend who recently had breast reconstruction after having undergone a mastectomy for breast cancer. She was upset because, for the time being, she was not allowed to get the silicone implant and had to stick with the saline. As it turns out, she is very pleased with the saline. But this gives rise to an interesting point. Another friend pointed out that in politically conservative, repressive times big breasts on women become very popular and in liberal, freewheeling times small breasts become popular.

Chris Clark:

What are we entering into now?

Gregory:

Well, clearly we are in a repressive age.

Clark:

So there are going to be larger breasts.

Gregory:

Yes, based on my friend's theory. For example, the Fifties were a very repressive age, and we had Marilyn Monroe, Jayne Mansfield. The Twenties were a very wild age, and small breasts were popular. You see, his theory is that in a repressive age people feel the need for nurturing. That's why big breasts become popular.

Clark:

Yes.

Gregory:

Now, my theory is that my friend is confusing cause and effect. Rather than political thought determining breast size, it's the other way around.

Clark:

You mean breast size determines political thought?

Gregory:

Yeah. Big breasts are popular, people look around, they say, "Oh, there's lots of big breasts, they're very big, they're scary, somebody might get their eye put out. I'm going to vote for Buchanan."

Clark:

Yes.

Gregory:

It's not that "political times are repressive, ergo we like big breasts" but that there are a lot of big breasts around, ergo we get scared and we get conservative. And, conversely, like in the Sixties you had people like Penelope Tree and Twiggy, and people looked around and said, "Oh, there's lots of small breasts around, it's okay, it's safe. I'm going to join a commune and take drugs."

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A federal judge in Washington, D.C., dismissed a lawsuit filed by a sex offender serving time in D.C.'s Lorton Reformatory. Michael A. Johnson had filed the lawsuit for $12,500 because the prison store had charged him $6.00 for a $5.80 book of twenty 29-cent stamps.

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Excerpted from various educational materials distributed to children in the New York City public school system:

The Teenager's Bill of Rights:
I Have the Right to Decide Whether to Have Sex and Who to Have it With.
I Have the Right to Use Protection When I Have Sex.
I Have the Right to Buy and Use Condoms.

Condoms can be sexy! They come in different colors, sizes, flavors, and styles to be more fun for you and your partner. You can put them on together. Shop around till you find the type you like best. Be creative and safe... Guys can get used to the feel of condoms while masturbating.

SUCKING: A lot of guys still enjoy sucking and getting sucked. The biggest risk from sucking is getting cum in the mouth. The only way to be totally safe is to lick only the shaft or to use a condom.

TOYS (dildos, butt plugs, etc.) are fun. Don't share toys. Clean them with lots of soap and water after each use.

WATER SPORTS and scat are fine. Don't let anyone's p**s or s**t get inside your body.

When School District 24, in Middle Village, Queens, rejected the "Rainbow Curriculum," which contained similar materials, School Chancellor Joseph Fernandez unilaterally suspended the board and appointed three school bureaucrats as trustees to run the district and immediately implement the curriculum. Their job titles were: "Chief Executive for Monitoring and School Improvement," "Executive Director of the Division of Instruction and Professional Development," and "Deputy Executive Director of the Division of Funded Programs." Each made more than $100,000 a year.

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Promotional material for Karen Sanchez-Eppler's Touching Liberty: Abolition, Feminism, and the Politics of the Body, published by the University of California Press:

In this striking study of the pre-Civil War literary imagination, Karen Sanchez-Eppler charts how bodily difference came to be recognized as a central problem for both political and literary expression. Her readings of sentimental antislavery fiction, slave narratives, and the lyric poetry of Walt Whitman and Emily Dickinson demonstrate how these texts participated in producing a new model of personhood, one in which the racially distinct and physically constrained slave body converged with the sexually distinct and domestically circumscribed female body.

Moving from the public domain of abolitionist politics to the privacy of lyric poetry, Sanchez-Eppler argues that attention to the physical body blurs the boundaries between public and private. Drawing analogies between black and female bodies, feminist-abolitionists use the public sphere of antislavery politics to write about sexual desires and anxieties they cannot voice directly.

Sanchez-Eppler warns against exaggerating the positive links between literature and politics, however....

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According to a report in the Washington Times, a District of Columbia police station chains its typewriters to desks to keep them from being stolen by officers and other police department personnel.

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Discussion on the "support groups" conference on the Prodigy network, for Prodigy users with obsessive-compulsive disorder, or OCD:

To: All
From: Diane
Did anyone out there have problems with OCD while they were voting? I had a horrible time in the voting booth, obsessing over punching out the wrong name or voting the wrong way on a referendum. There was one measure that I felt very strongly about. I stared at that measure for what seemed like minutes before I punched the ballot. Then I punched it thirty-one times (I do everything in odd numbers). When I took the ballot out of the machine, I panicked, thinking I had punched the wrong thing, but I managed to drop it in the box and get in my car. As soon as I got in my car I panicked again and wondered how I could retrieve my ballot and check to see that I had punched the right place. Knowing that retrieving the ballot was impossible, I was able to go to work, but I continued to worry about it all day. Did anybody out there have similar problems on election day?

To: Diane
From: Barbara
When I walked away after voting, I did momentarily think that maybe I had pulled the wrong levers, but then I was able to reassure myself that it was fine. I know what you mean about staring. I do that, too. This weekend I seem a bit better. I'm on Zoloft, 150 mg/day, and I think maybe it's starting to have an effect.

To: Diane
From: Cindy
I had almost the same problem voting as you did. Except I almost didn't vote at all because I was convinced that I would punch the wrong holes in my ballot. I finally went in, got my ballot, and started punching holes, dozens of times! I obsessed for a short time after. Thank God it is over!

[Ed.: Such confused voters were to receive much wider attention eight years later.]

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Residents of Heber City, Utah, were disappointed to discover that the recyclable items they had been so carefully separating for the past year and hauling to the Wasatch County Recycle Center were, in fact, winding up in a nearby landfill instead. County officials say the deception was necessary to ensure that enough people would participate in an actual recycling program to make it worthwhile. "We had to make sure that we weren't throwing away public money on a project that wouldn't accomplish anything," says Kent Berg, public works director for Wasatch County. "If the community wasn't willing to put out the effort, we wouldn't provide the program." Despite the results of the county's experiment being, in Berg's words, "not that great," the recycling center will remain open. "Even though we didn't get the participation we were looking for," he says, "we think it's important to continue with the program," this time for real.

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Ohio State University's American Indian Council was asked to remove a visual display from the ceiling of its cubicle in OSU's Frank W. Hale Jr. Black Cultural Center. The flag of the American Indian Movement, an American flag with the image of a Native American superimposed over it, offended members of Afrikans Committed to Improving Our Nation, who said that the American flag was an affront to their culture. OSU Vice Provost for the Office of Minority Affairs David Williams, who is African-American himself, remarked, "It's not the flag; it's what the flag symbolizes. There is racism, discrimination and poverty that goes on in this country. If that is what the flag represents, then I have a problem with that." Williams said that nothing but artwork should be displayed in the Hale Center, because "that's what the center is for."

Williams went on to defend a new policy to regulate visual displays in the facility, for which he would not disclose details, on the grounds that the center in fact was not multicultural. "I never said it was a multicultural center. What I said was, it is a black culture center, but we embrace the cultures of other people." Williams said the university could have made one multicultural center from the very beginning, but it was too late to change it now. "People need to realize that at some point in time, the university made the decision to make a black cultural center for whatever reason. It is somewhat unfair to say 'OK, now it is a multi-cultural center.' "

The flag was later discovered to be missing from the center, and leaders of the American Indian Council filed a report with OSU Police. "I'm concerned just as well if something is taken from the center," said Larry Williamson, assistant director of the Hale Center. Williamson promised to assist the council in finding the flag and the person or persons who took it.

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The female pop trio Wilson Phillips has released a protest song called "Goodbye Carmen," which tells "how sad it is when your servants are deported."

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The Department of Education printed 50,000 copies of a booklet called "Preparing Your Child for College," which includes tips such as these:

"A person who attends college generally earns more than a person who does not... With a college education, your child can earn higher pay." "To prepare for college, there is no substitute for your child getting a solid academic education. This means your child should take challenging courses in academic subjects and maintain good grades in high school."

Another section says "your child needs a quiet and comfortable place to study." To make one you can:

1. "Help him or her find a quiet place with some privacy."
2. "Set up a desk or large table with good light and place reference books such as a dictionary on the desk or nearby."
3. "Make sure your child studies there on a regular basis."

The booklets cost 50 cents each to produce and do "not qualify as a waste of government money," according to Maureen McLaughlin, acting assistant secretary for post-secondary education. The advice, she says, especially helps parents who lack college education.

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Since 1987, four New York City corrections officers have been arrested for smuggling guns to prisoners. Rather than use the guns against other prisoners or as a means to escape, prisoners would use them to create self-inflicted wounds in order to bring lawsuits against the city, alleging that it failed to protect them from injury.

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Washington governor Mike Lowry changed the job title of "chief of staff" to "staff director" after being told that a member of the Swinomish tribe objected to the use of the word "chief." The word "chief" derives from the Latin and Old French words meaning "head."

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Men's movement pioneer Aaron Kipnis, who bills himself as a "gender reconciliation facilitator," suggests that one reason many men feel alienated, disconnected, and unable to approach relationships in a "fecund, life-affirming" manner, is that they try to relate to nature by communing only with Mother Earth, without realizing that there's a Father Earth, too. "Our work ahead," Kipnis writes, is to reclaim the "archetypal energy" of the Green Man—one of the "ancient masculine gods of the earth." One way to connect to the spirit of the Green Man, according to Kipnis, is to tie yourself to the top of a tree. "Feel the strength and ancient, deeply rooted power of the Green Man who dances, sways, and shudders with the wind." But Kipnis adds, "Of course, this is dangerous. So don't go up without proper training, safety equipment, and a buddy to secure you."

[Ed.: Kipnis's editor, Christopher Harding, reminds us that the Green Man "persists in our popular culture" as "the Green Giant of frozen pea fame."]

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The Agency for International Development spent $12 million educating Tunisian students in the United States, so that they would return to their homeland and put their newfound knowledge to work. More than seventy earned doctorate degrees at taxpayer expense, but the students decided to stay instead.

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Spike Lee told magazines and newspapers that if they wanted to interview him regarding his film Malcolm X they would have to send a black journalist. He did this to highlight that many major magazines and newspapers don't have black staff members. But Lee turned down a request for an interview by the only black writing film criticism for a national publication. David Ehrenstein interviewed Lee twice for the now-defunct Los Angeles Herald-Examiner, but now he can't get to the director. Ehrenstein suggests that maybe it's because he now works for The Advocate, a gay and lesbian journal.

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A German couple who had taken a Caribbean cruise were awarded one third of their fare by a German judge because the ship was also inhabited by some 500 yodelers from the Swiss Union of Friends of Folk Music, who amused themselves on the cruise with performances by the Lisbeth Sidler-Fritz Arnet Yodeling Duet and the Village Sparrows of Oberaegeri.

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In 1990, the Skagway River overflowed its banks, and the city of Skagway in southeastern Alaska barely escaped flooding. Before the flood season in 1991, city residents decided they were not going to be caught with their guard down again and took steps to protect themselves.

When Mayor Stan Selmer called the Army Corps of Engineers and the Federal Emergency Management Agency to ask for help, he was told he would have to wait until the city actually got flooded before the federal agencies could intervene. "Well, we weren't going to just sit there and let the river flood us," says Selmer. The city decided to bulldoze a channel through a dry riverbed that would divert floodwaters into a nearby inlet. Selmer notified the Environmental Protection Agency, the corps and the Alaska departments of Environmental Conservation, Fish and Game and Natural Resources, telling them what the city was up to. He got no notice to cease and desist from any of the agencies.

However, in December, Selmer received a letter from EPA Field Operations Chief C.D. Robinson saying that the city had violated the Clean Water Act. According to the Skagway News, Robinson wrote that the city was mistaken in trying to protect itself without the participation of the Corps of Engineers and that even in an emergency the city should make reasonable efforts "to receive comment from interested federal, state and local agencies."

"If I had time to do all that," says Selmer, "we'd all be underwater before anybody figured out we were in an emergency situation." Ironically, he notes, it is partly the EPA's fault that Skagway is in danger of flooding: In 1986 the EPA ordered a contractor to remove dikes that protected his property. In 1990, the river overflowed in the same spot where the dikes had been. Selmer is refusing to undo any of the work and plans to try to get the EPA to let him do more work to protect the city. "The amazing thing," he says, "is that the clean water the EPA is trying to protect is the same water that would wind up drowning the people in our community."

†

Francis Scott Key High School in Union Bridge, Maryland, had its first female student try out for the football team. The school's lawyers had advised that it had to accept her under Title IX, which forbids sex discrimination in educational institutions that receive federal funding. Tawana Hammond, a 17-year-old who had never played organized ball, was tackled in her first scrimmage and suffered injuries that required the removal of her spleen and half her pancreas. She was placed on life support for four months. Hammond has now sued the school for $1.5 million, alleging that the school did not properly inform her of the risks of playing football.

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Three New Jersey townships—Upper Pittsgrove, Alloway and Quinton—have contracted to have elevator inspectors, but there are no elevators in any of the three municipalities. The New Jersey Department of Community Affairs ordered all of the state's 567 towns to provide an elevator inspection service, even for municipalities without elevators. "Otherwise," a spokesman said, "the Uniform Construction Code would no longer be uniform."

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The Journal of the American Medical Association, November 18, 1992:

In response to a growing number of members concerned about environmental issues, we are offering all of our members a chance to write a new kind of prescription for JAMA and a healthier planet.

You now have the opportunity to waive your membership subscription to JAMA for the sake of the environment. By reading a colleague's copy of JAMA, you can help reduce the amount of paper waste going into landfills—perhaps the most serious environmental issue facing our planet today.

We recognize that this option may not be for everyone; only members who have ready access to another copy of JAMA may want to exercise it. You should still read JAMA every week for up-to-date medical information you can use every day.

To write your own prescription for a healthier planet and voluntarily waive your JAMA subscription, detach and mail this postage-paid card today. The money allocated from your dues will be diverted to other important AMA programs such as the National Coalition of Physicians Against Family Violence and Health Youth 2000, to name two.

†

In a move that infuriated several dozen car owners, New York City bureaucrats issued summonses, with fines of up to $1,000, to people whose cars had been vandalized and destroyed during a riot. The owners were informed that they were in violation of a law that prohibits "abandoning" their vehicles on city streets.

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There's more than one way to win at the sweepstakes. Carolyn Parks of Belleville, Illinois, filed a $15,000 lawsuit for respiratory distress, a skin rash and a swollen tongue she says was caused by an allergic reaction after she licked a sweepstakes prize stamp.

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After Richard Jacobson of Oconomowoc, Wisconsin, placed a "for rent" ad in his local paper that listed a cottage "ideal for couple," he got into a legal battle that lasted nearly two years, after which the courts finally ruled in his favor. The nonprofit Metropolitan Milwaukee Fair Housing Council, which monitors housing advertisements in Southeast Wisconsin, filed a complaint that accused Jacobson of "a preference or limitation based on marital status in violation of the Wisconsin Open Housing Law." William Tisdale, a spokesman for the council, says, "An individual deserves the same protection as does someone who is black or gay, and we felt that 'ideal for couple' was just as discriminatory as 'ideal for white' or 'ideal for Catholic.' " Jacobson was slapped with a $500 fine by the state Equal Rights Division, ordered to take a $50 class on writing classified ads, and ordered to reimburse the Fair Housing Council $1,481 for legal fees.

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Shawn Brown, a University of Michigan sophomore, made the mistake of using the wrong hypothetical scenario to illustrate a point about the difficulties of getting reliable polling data: "Let's say Dave Stud is entertaining three beautiful ladies in his penthouse when the phone rings. A pollster on the other end wants to know if we should eliminate the capital gains tax. Now Dave is a knowledgeable businessperson who cares a lot about this issue. But since Dave is 'tied up' at the moment, he tells the pollster to 'bother' someone else."

His instructor, teacher's assistant Debbie Meizlish, replied in her written comments: "This is ludicrous & inappropriate & OFFENSIVE... It completely violates the standard of non-sexist writing... Professor Rosenstone has encouraged me to interpret this comment as an example of sexual harassment and to take the appropriate formal steps. I have chosen not to do so in this instance. However, any future comments, in a paper, in a class or in any dealings [with me] will be interpreted as sexual harassment and formal steps will be taken... You are forewarned!"

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Playwright Robin Baitz, recipient of a $15,000 grant from the National Endowment for the Arts, made two donations of $7,500 to two institutions that were denied NEA grants because they exhibited sexually explicit material. In a letter to the NEA, Baitz said that his transfer saves him from being "complicit" in the "cultural sacking of this country" by conservatives. The fact that Baitz had received a grant now mortified him because it meant he was insufficiently offensive to the "psychosexual hysterics" and "cultural carpetbaggers" rampant in America.

An NEA spokesperson responded to Baitz's contribution, "We are delighted anytime someone in the private sector wants to support the arts."

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A Newsweek editorial denounced a song called "Boom Bye Bye," in which 19-year-old rap artist Buju Benton proposes shooting homosexuals. Previously, the editorial board defended similar rap songs celebrating cop-killing and other socially dubious behavior, under the theory that these songs help alert white people to their responsibility for the social conditions that foster black rage.

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A onetime U.S. Treasury Department employee showed up in a dress for a job interview with his former employer, and made it clear that if hired, he intended to wear women's clothes to the office regularly. The Treasury Department declined to reemploy him. Charging that he had been discriminated against under the Rehabilitation Act of 1973, the man filed suit in federal court, which eventually ruled that the man was not handicapped under the meaning of the law, but still ruled in his favor because the Treasury Department had thought he was handicapped, and had thus discriminated.

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UC-Berkeley Professor June Jordan in the San Francisco Bay Guardian, November 18, 1992:

A few days after the election, my friend Sue was reading a Curious George book to her Emma, her daughter who is almost 2. Near the end of the book, a little boy's balloon gets caught in a tree. "Who do you think can get the balloon down for that little boy?" Sue asked Emma.

"Bill Clinton," Emma answered. Expectations are getting higher all the time.

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Spike Lee, interviewed by Rolling Stone, November 12, 1992:

A lot of people will have to do a lot of explaining on AIDS one day. All of a sudden a disease appears out of nowhere that nobody has a cure for, and it's specifically targeted at gays and minorities. The mystery disease—yeah, about as mysterious as genocide.

I'm concerned that AIDS is a government-engineered disease. They got one thing wrong, they never realized it couldn't just be contained to the groups it was intended to wipe out.

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The University of California, Berkeley, has suspended junior Andrew Martinez for attending class nude. It seems that nudity is not illegal in Alameda County, where the university is located, so local officials couldn't stop Martinez. And nudity doesn't violate university regulations, so what did Martinez do wrong? He ran afoul of the university's anti-sexual harassment policy. Martinez was later expelled, and he now plans to sue the university to force a reversal of its decision. He is also writing a book on his mission in life, militant nudity, and has already received a movie offer.

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The principal of the local school in Colorado City, Arizona, ordered 14-year-old James Bateman home with instructions to change his clothes after the boy wore a T-shirt with a picture of Batman's foe The Penguin. The principal said that the shirt was a sign of devil worship.

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A contractor who was required to hire union painters to paint a highway bridge across a river discovered that rules also required that a small boat patrol beneath the bridge to rescue any painter who fell, although the usual method of dealing with this hazard is to rig a net below the bridge. Union rules dictated that the boat be manned by a union painter. Since the boat had an outboard motor, however, and since rules did not permit a painter to operate an engine, a unionized operating engineer had to be added. The employer, who was obligated to pay skilled wage rates every day to both workers, complained that he was not even offered any of the fish the two "workers" were catching.

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On December 28, 1992, swarms of religious cultists ran through stalled traffic on major roads in Manila and slashed tires on scores of vehicles, paralyzing traffic in the Philippine capital, and causing frightened drivers to flee and abandon their vehicles. The activist sect, calling itself the Reserved Manpower of the Good Wisdom for All Nations, was convinced that flattening tires was the key to salvation and progress in the country. Cultists distributed handbills informing the public that the tire tactic was "God's way of stopping bad deeds." The handbills promised a new era of equality and social justice, including a daily wage of $30 for everyone in the Philippines, where annual per capita income is about $750. "This is God's order to let out air," said Honora Dimagila, 44, one of those arrested. "Air is from God. This is the solution to the crisis in our country."

[Ed.: Where it reads 'religious cultists,' substitute the word 'legislators.']

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Junior high school student Christine Fisher's "What Christmas Means to Me and Why" was selected for publication in the school newspaper, but the principal refused to run it unless the sentence "It is also the day that Christians celebrate Christ's birth" was changed to "[Christmas] is also a day that people celebrate love."

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Syndicated columnist Carl Rowan, praising Bill Clinton's diverse cabinet choices on "Inside Washington" in December, opined that Lyndon B. Johnson might not have escalated the Vietnam War had there been fewer white males in his Cabinet. Rowan recalled that when he became director of the U.S. Information Agency in 1963 and was invited to sit in on a Cabinet meeting, he saw nothing but "all male, white faces. And I have to ask myself today, if there had been some diversity in that Cabinet, maybe Lyndon Johnson wouldn't have gone with all those macho soliloquies and gotten himself destroyed in the Vietnam War."

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In a meeting of the Massachusetts Bar Association Bench-Bar Press committee that Dianne Wilkerson attended before taking office as Democratic state senator, Wilkerson blasted the American media and education system, saying that they are conspiring to keep important cultural achievements of minorities under wraps. Her example: the heretofore ignored fact that the mother of President Dwight D. Eisenhower was black.

"She had darker skin than I do," Wilkerson, who is black, was quoted by the Massachusetts Lawyer's Weekly as telling the group. She also said that she should have been tipped off by Ike's short hair and "yellowish skin," but she became convinced after seeing a 1968 edition of either Time or Life, which she claims was recalled from the newsstands, that showed Eisenhower's mother clearly was black. Officials at Time and Life aren't aware of any such occasion.

Archivist Dwight Strandberg from the Eisenhower presidential library in Abelene, Kansas, says that Wilkerson has her facts wrong. "As far as the records show, Ida Eisenhower was of Germanic descent, with a little Swiss thrown in." Strandberg also pointed out the source of the rumor: a group of segregationists attempting to inflict political damage on Eisenhower during the 1957 Little Rock school desegregation case.

Even in the face of the library's evidence, Wilkerson insists that her view is correct. "You don't think there is any such thing as black Germans?" she asked.

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An item from the Federal Register:

[A-570-822]
Postponement of Preliminary Determination: Certain Helical Spring Lock Washers From the People's Republic of China
AGENCY: Import Administration, International Trade Administration, Department of Commerce.
EFFECTIVE DATE: February 1, 1993.
FOR FURTHER ADMINISTRATION CONTACT:
William H. Crow II, Office of Antidumping Investigations, Import Administration, International Trade Administration, U.S. Department of Commerce, 14th Street and Constitution Avenue NW, Washington, DC 20230; telephone (202) 482-0116.

Postponement

Pursuant to section 733(c)(1)(B) of the Tariff Act of 1930, as amended (the Act), and 19 CFR 353.15(b), we determine that this investigation is "extraordinarily complicated," because of the complexity of the issues surrounding respondent selection, market-oriented industry status, the possible use of separate rates for unique exporters, and the difficulties in obtaining publicly available published information for the purpose of establishing the foreign market values of the subject merchandise.

We are also required by the Act to affirmatively determine whether parties are cooperating. Regarding this issue, we have received questionnaire responses from Hangzhou Spring Washer Factory (Hangzhou), a major producer of the subject merchandise, and from the Embassy of the People's Republic of China, representing all producers/exporters other than Hangzhou.

For the reasons cited above, we determine that this investigation is extraordinarily complicated in accordance with section 733(c)(1)(B)(i)(II) of the Act, that additional time is necessary to make this preliminary determination and that, for the purposes of extending the preliminary determination, responding parties have cooperated. The statutory deadline for issuing the preliminary determination is no later than April 26, 1993.

This notice is published pursuant to section 733(c)(2) of the Act and 19 CFR 353.15(d).
Dated: January 26, 1993.
Joseph Spetrini,
Acting Assistant Secretary for Import Administration.
[FR Doc. 93-2294 Filed 1-29-93; 8:45 am]
BILLING CODE 3510-DS-M

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