Scouting Out: All over China, the search...

Scouting Out: All over China, the search goes on. Teams of “living Buddhas” are following Tibetan traditions in the hunt for a child embodying the spirit of the late Panchen Lama, who died in January, 1989. The new Panchen Lama, who ranks second only to the exiled Dalai Lama in the hierarchy of Tibetan Buddhism, is believed by Buddhists to be an incarnation of Amitabha, a deity who takes human form.

Home Run: Connie Scramlin was a Detroit Tigers fan to the end. The very end. When her funeral is held Friday, she will be wearing a $200 Tigers uniform in a casket draped with yellow tiger lilies and trimmed in the team’s colors of midnight blue and orange. “Take Me Out to the Ball Game” will be played. Scramlin died Sunday at 58 in Flint, Mich. Said funeral home spokesman Tom Martin: “It’s like celebrating a pennant series rather than her death.”

New Dean: Robert Blocker is the new dean of UCLA’s School of the Arts, announced UCLA Chancellor Charles E. Young. Blocker, 44, dean of the University of North Texas College of Music, takes over the school July 1. He said he wants to make the UCLA arts program “correspond to professional fields as closely as possible while maintaining . . . scholarly interests.”

Bug Off: The U.S. military’s latest war is against bugs. The uniforms of more than 500,000 soldiers returning from the Persian Gulf War have been given a scrubbing, as have hundreds of thousands of pieces of military hardware, to ward off disease and insects, said Robert Nave, an agricultural adviser to the U.S. military in Saudi Arabia. And the Saudis are not insulted: “Their soil is sacred to them. We told them we weren’t going to take any with us. They were pleased by that,” Nave said.