* Homecoming: Feminist Gloria Steinem is not...

* Homecoming: Feminist Gloria Steinem is not what you would call domestic. “I had lived in the apartment (in a Manhattan brownstone) for at least four or five years before I found out the oven didn’t work,” Steinem, 57, told Vanity Fair magazine. But she’s purchased a second apartment in the building and joined it to the first creating a real bedroom. “I don’t know why it took me so long to realize you need to have a home,” she said.

* Grubby Diplomacy: On trash pickup day in Fredericksburg, Va., the curious may be startled to see residents disposing of trash bags marked “U.S.A. Dept. of State Diplomatic Pouch.” To save money, the city buys 4-foot black trash bags from a company that sometimes recycles odd lots from other customers. Dennis Murphy, a U.S. Customs spokesman, has no truck for the issue because diplomatic items shipped past him must be closed with diplomatic seals: “We wouldn’t be fooled. Or at least I hope we wouldn’t be fooled.”

* Swing of the Image Pendulum: He was death-obsessed and despairing. At least that’s the image of Edgar Allan Poe. But the author was really the Stephen King of his day, says Poe expert Jeff Jerome, whose New Year’s resolution is to knock down the stereotype. Poe was not a “drunken, dope-addicted, crazed maniac,” argues Jerome. “He was a dashing man--a poet, with an air of refinement.”

* What’s Love Got to Do With It?: Robert Indiana, who created a LOVE logo for postage stamps, has been slapped with a suit in Rockland, Me., by a man who claims that the artist hired him to perform sexual acts. Jason Marriner, 23, is asking for damages for alleged distress. Indiana’s LOVE device with the LO on top of the VE --the O tilted--made him famous. Indiana’s attorney called the charges “utter balderdash.”