THE LEFT LANE
Teens to kick ash

Advertiser Staff and News Services

REAL: the Hawai'i Youth Movement Against Tobacco Use intends to do some serious ash-kicking Friday.

That's no typo. About 750 teens ages 13 to 18 are expected to turn out for the Kick Ash Bash at the World Cafe, 6 to 9:30 p.m. The event will feature music, dancing and, of course, plenty of anti-tobacco sentiment.

REAL, patterned after Mainland groups such as Truth and Target Market, is a teen-led program paid for by the state Department of Health and the Hawai'i Community Foundation with tobacco settlement money.

Tickets for the Kick Ash Bash are $3 in advance or $6 at the door from World Café and all Ticket Plus locations. For details, call REAL Headquarters at 441-8195.

CBS has kept a promise to promote Letterman more.

CBS says it's delivering on the promises it made to keep David Letterman with the network, heavily promoting his "Late Show."

Letterman's representatives made specific programming demands, including scheduling the new "CSI: Miami" as a lead-in to the evening news — and CBS did so, CBS president Leslie Moonves said.

CBS also agreed to use the resources of parent company Viacom Inc. to heavily promote the "Late Show" on MTV and other properties. And the network clearly is trying, Moonves said, repeating a joke comedian Jon Stewart made about how often Letterman was hyped during the network's broadcast of the NCAA basketball championships: "There was so much promotion I thought Letterman was playing Duke in the semifinals," Stewart cracked.

Toughing it out

Divorce doesn't necessarily make adults happy. But toughing it out in an unhappy marriage until it turns around just might, a new study says.

The research identified happy and unhappy spouses, culled from a national database. Of the unhappy partners who divorced, about half were happy five years later. But unhappy spouses who stuck it out often did better.

About two-thirds were happy five years later.

Findings were presented at a Virginia "Smart Marriage" conference sponsored by the Coalition for Marriage, Families and Couples Education.

Baby walkers may keep curious children — and their parents — happy, but that peace and quiet comes at a price. Because babies don't have to carry their own weight, their muscles are prevented from developing normally, and the nervous system is deprived of sensory information required to learn how to walk.

In a study of 190 healthy babies, researchers at University College in Dublin, Ireland, discovered that those who used walkers were slower to crawl, stand and walk than children who didn't. They calculated that each 24 hours of walker use postponed the moment that a child could walk unaided by 3.3 days and stand unaided by 3.7 days.