All Pumped Up, They Can’t Weight to Get a Pushover

--Who were those muscled men? Two women whose camping trailer overturned on a Pennsylvania highway were startled when four men jumped out of a West Virginia State Police cruiser and righted it. They were, in fact, troopers who had just taken top honors in a weightlifting competition at the National Troopers Conference in northern Pennsylvania. “Here we were, driving down the road, really feeling our oats,” Trooper M.D. Pritchard said. “We had won all those awards; then we see this accident. We hop out of our car with our weightlifting outfits on and there’s a camping trailer to push over.” The 15-foot camper had broken loose from a pickup truck and was lying in the middle of the road. A crowd gathered as Pritchard, Gary Bain, P. E. Cross and G. A. Armentrout went to work. “We lifted and at first nothing happened,” Pritchard said. “But we couldn’t quit. We didn’t dare with all those people looking down on us. So we grunted and groaned and tried again.” Successful at last, the troopers drove off, with one of the women “still standing there with this puzzled look on her face,” Pritchard said. They never asked the women’s names. The troopers won first and third places in the bench press and second and third in the dead lift at the conference.

--The Miss Thailand World ’86 beauty pageant turned ugly when unhappy runners-up stole the winner’s tiara and crowned their own queen. Saeng-ravi Asavarak’s smile never faltered as the angry also-rans tried to rip off her victory sash before a stunned audience of 2,000 at a luxury hotel in Bangkok. They snatched her tiara and placed it on sobbing first runner-up Duangduan Jithaisong. Saeng-ravi, 22, denied charges by other competitors that she had had a nose job, refused to use the sponsor’s cosmetics and wore false eyelashes.

--After you’ve offered his and her bomb shelters, miniature submarines and Chinese junks as Christmas gifts, what do you do for an encore? Neiman-Marcus, the Dallas specialty store, has commissioned “a complete new breed of American domestic feline,” the California Spangled, developed by Los Angeles breeder Paul Casey. The spotted cat, billed as “a leopard for your living room,” is bred from Siamese, Angora, Abyssinian, Egyptian and Malayan varieties. It is not a recognized breed, but store spokeswoman Carolyn Cobb said its absence of registration is a token of its exclusivity.