Doug Clark

1. Bill Clinton impersonator Damian Mason performs his show for engineers at a Garco Building Systems meeting. Photo by Liz Kishimoto/The Spokesman-Review 2. Bill Clinton impersonator Damian Mason checks the progress of his silver hair-color spray while he gets ready for a performance at the convention. Photo by Liz Kishimoto/The Spokesman-Review

'I'm beginning to sense an image of your card," said the gray-haired magician, who peered deeply into my eyes. A knowing smile stole over his face. He leaned back in his chair and hooked his thumbs into a vest imprinted with colorful top hats and that most mystical incantation: abracadabra. "The two of spades," he announced in a theatrical tone.

Wild sex, improper telephone calls, unsavory characters ... I finally must comment on the sleaze-ridden administration that has embarrassed itself. No, not the Clinton White House. I'm as bored as everyone by the president's chronic zipper mismanagement and assorted peccadillos.

In the end, it makes little difference that Joey Hamlin was convicted of manslaughter in the second degree rather than the first-degree charge prosecutors hoped for. Either way Travis "T.J." Frazier is just as dead as he was on Feb. 21, 1996, when 16-year-old Hamlin pointed what he thought was an unloaded handgun at his friend's head and stupidly squeezed the trigger.

The last time I locked eyes with Gary Hathaway, he was trying to pick a fight with me in a grade school art class. Gary was a small but tough kid who used his fists to act out against an abusive and transient home life. Now, 30-some years later, Gary and I stood staring at each other again. This time we shook hands.

First came firestorm. Then came ice storm. Now comes ... Better to let Kathy Nichols explain the unnatural disaster that turned the back yard of her lovely South Hill home into a bigger mess than the Clinton administration. "It's a poop pot," says Kathy, her voice taking on a low tone of disgust. "It's horrible."

Mark Fuhrman co-hosts radio talk show. File/The Spokesman-Review

A fire is flickering. The flowers are fresh. "Freesias," exclaims my delighted wife, Sherry. "My favorite." She bends to sniff the fragrant, funnel-shaped petals artfully arranged with lilies and eucalyptus in a dark vase. The striking floral display perches on a piece of sheer glass supported from a beige wall by two ornate sconces. Sherry beckons me for a whiff. Sorry, I tell her. Can't make it. Too busy parking my wide load in one of two leather chairs that are soft as snowdrifts and face the fire at just the perfect warming distance.

1. Marching on Martin Luther King Jr. Day. Hundreds of supporters follow Heather Bayless as she leads the Unity March down Spokane Falls Boulevard on Monday. Photo by Craig Buck/The Spokesman-Review 2. Pastor Ezra Kinlow, right, and Ali Turner, center, join the crowd in prayer Monday at the Masonic Temple on Riverside. Photo by Craig Buck/The Spokesman-Review

Scorched UFO buffs call him a real Man in Black. To spaced-out believers, Richard Weaver is a gatekeeper for the U.S. government's conspiracy to hush up the fact that a saucer full of cosmic commuters once took a tumble out among the New Mexico tumbleweeds. But the 50-year-old Spokane native says he got cheated if his critics are correct.

Lewis and Clark High School circa 1958. File 2. Lewis and Clark students head out to lunch in this photo taken last spring. File photo

Sometimes the sights and sounds of downtown Spokane are so weird they should be set to a soundtrack. And what more fitting song to celebrate our urban hub than "Downtown," Petula Clark's hit song from the '60s?

There's nothing like church for divine perspiration, and Pines Baptist Church in the Spokane Valley runneth over. Sweat pours off "Giant" James Henderson as the 6-foot-6, 400-pound slab of humanity explodes an elbow through 10 layers of cinder block as if they were communion wafers. Sweat drips off Siolo Tauafea as the Samoan Superman hurls his bulked-up body into a 9-foot-thick ice glacier. The crunching impact creates enough ice chips to make a margarita the size of Comstock Pool.

Has mad-cow disease found a home on the ranges of Spokane? Can we carnivores no longer wolf down a Whopper or binge on Big Macs without worry of turning our brains into Swiss cheese? That's the message vegetarian scaremongers are putting forth to drum up interest in their upcoming meeting.

What really happened to 15-year-old T.J. Frazier? Detectives think they finally have figured out the Spokane Valley boy's death. Joseph L. Hamlin, 16, is charged with first-degree manslaughter. His teenage buddy, Sam Krueger, will swear that the bullet Hamlin pumped into T.J.'s brain on Feb. 21, 1996, was an accident - pure and simple.

Spokane firefighter Mike Sparkes is the cover model and creative spark behind the firefighters' calendar.

Budnick recipient Randy Thomas says he went along with a plot to kill by smearing bacon on a tethered victim only because he feared for his own safety. File/The Spokesman-Review

There were candles in the wind. There were mourners, nearly 60 of them, huddled Sunday night near the Spokane County Courthouse steps. There were damp eyes and angry calls for justice. As the crowd stood in silence, a stocky man read a poem about innocent lives snuffed out by a sadistic killer.

Judging from my column photo, you can probably envision my joy when news broke that baldies like me can finally buy a pill to regrow hair. It's called Propecia. The Food and Drug Administration approved the drug as the first pill to fight male pattern baldness. That this announcement arrived over the radio a few days before Christmas only added to my gibbering rapture.

Every Christmas for the last 60 years, someone in Pat Scollard's family inevitably dredges up the story of her brightest moment of fame. The tale is usually followed by a brief discourse on how the nincompoops down at the newspaper bollixed up Pat's one shot at being Spokane's Christmas Baby of 1937. Some nameless reporter confused Pat with her cousin, who was born 12 hours later.

When to turn pro is a momentous decision all great amateur athletes eventually must make. As the last second on the Rose Bowl clock trickles away on New Year's Day, attention will focus on Washington State's darling, junior quarterback Ryan Leaf. Will he stay a Coug or play for pay? If Leaf has the good sense God gave Spokane's Arne Belsby, he will raise his eyes to the heavens and holler the Jerry McGuire war cry.

1. The Hoskin family in 1910, from left, Reggie, Elfrieda, Frieda, James, Ruth and Marion. Family photo 2. Reggie Hoskin "cheated the Titanic," according to a British newspaper headline. Photo by Doug Clark/The Spokesman-Review

More than 70 percent of the 800 students at Spokane's Shaw Middle School receive free or reduced-price lunches. Just another 25 low-income students would qualify the North Side school for a special type of federal aid. Yet this so-called needy student body has proven once again that it knows as much about the spirit of giving as any charity-minded group in town. Shaw's second annual penny drive ended last week with a balance of $1,625.53, beating last year's fund-raiser by more than $200.

Their hearts are as pure as a Rocky Mountain shower. Their motives are clean as the crisp runoff from a glacial thaw. It's the judgment of these two women that's all wet. Lucy Gurnea and Judy Laddon dropped by the other day, seeking my help in promoting a "feel-good" program that supposedly will make Spokane more environmentally aware.