* Surfin’ Santa: “Christmas in Malibu,” a...
* Surfin’ Santa: “Christmas in Malibu,” a recording about a forlorn, board-less surfer who gets an unexpected visit from a surfing Santa Claus, is the rage along celebrity-laden Malibu shores. “Beaches are bare, Ain’t no one there,” begins the Beach Boys-flavored rendition of the Christmas Day visit of surfing St. Nick, who proclaims with a hearty ho-ho-ho, “Surf’s up, Dudes!” Songwriter Joe Klein shipped 7,000 cassette tapes of the song to radio stations and record stores. The response was phenomenal, said Klein, who quickly produced a video when MTV, the cable music channel, inquired.
* Wait a second: If you wake up feeling awful on Jan. 1, 1990, there’s an explanation. It’s Global Time Lag, meaning that 1989 was a second longer than it should be. In fact, a slowing of the Earth’s rotation has forced timekeepers to introduce an international “leap second” to keep the world’s atomic clocks in line with the day’s actual duration, said John Pilkington of London’s Royal Greenwich Observatory. This year, there will be 31,536,001 seconds, instead 31,536,000, he said, adding, “Long term, the Earth is slowing down.”
* Royal lament: Prince Charles on Tuesday lamented the “calamitous decline” in literacy in Britain and the degeneration of English into a “dismal wasteland of banality, cliche and casual obscenity.” Last June, the heir to the British throne complained the language was taught “so bloody badly” that he had to correct all letters written by his staff. “We have seen the abandonment of . . . rules of grammar and the parts of speech as boring and irrelevant,” he said. “Looking at the way English is used in our popular newspapers, our radio and television programs, even in our schools and our theaters,” people needn’t wonder why “our language has become so impoverished, so sloppy and so limited.”
* Gorby the Hunk?: An Israeli newspaper reports that Mikhail Gorbachev may portray himself in an Israeli-Soviet film, “Direct Flight,” based on the true story of a Soviet plane hijacked to Israel last December. The film’s script writer, who also serves in the Soviet parliament, told Gorbachev he was looking for a double to portray him in the film. The Soviet leader answered: “Why look for a double? If I am free, I will play myself.”