Iowa Dogs Gave Them No Relief

--”The trip was everything we had hoped for and more,” said Peter Haven after he and Aaron Persky completed a 50-day, 3,269-mile bicycle trip across the country to raise money for African famine relief. “Well done and glad to see you’re in one piece,” Richard Schubert, president of the American Red Cross, said in greeting the weary but smiling pair outside the volunteer organization’s national headquarters in Washington. Persky, 23, of San Francisco, and Haven, 20, of Temecula, Calif., averaged about 65 miles a day in raising $5,000 in pledges for the national Red Cross plus an unknown number of other contributions to aid starving Africans made to Red Cross chapters along the way. The pair began the trip in Palo Alto, Calif. “We got an up-close look at the country and its generous people,” many of whom gave them food or took them into homes to spend the night, Haven said. They also met a lot of dogs. “The toughest dogs were the ones in Iowa--some of them chased us for more than 100 yards,” Persky said.

--New York Gov. Mario M. Cuomo has signed what is apparently the biggest single bill ever passed by the New York Legislature. Measures filed in the Legislature normally run about three pages. But the bill Cuomo signed Monday, revising New York City’s administrative code, is 3,088 pages long and weighs 32 pounds. The revised code took 10 years to prepare. Among other things, it deletes many out-of-date laws, including one that made it illegal for women to show their navels in public.

--Rep. Thomas E. Petri (R-Wis.) has complained in a newsletter to his constituents about the difficulty of containing congressional spending. “There’s $1.4 million (allocated) for garage attendants,” he said. “No, they don’t park the cars. No, they don’t guard the garage doors--we have a Capitol police force equal to that of the city of Indianapolis to do that. The attendants . . . well . . . attend.

--Utah Sen. Jake Garn, a payload specialist on the space shuttle Discovery in April, has received the stars of a brigadier general in the Utah Air National Guard. “I don’t know when I’ve felt so honored,” the Republican lawmaker said.

--Kathy Lindgren was chosen grand champion in the Illinois State Fair’s husband-calling contest in Springfield. The attention-getting shout that won Lindgren her second title goes like this: “Kennneee, Kennneee. The sows are in heat. I can’t get the boars out of the mudhole. C’mon in, Kennneee.”