March 27, 1994

MAKING IT WORK 3 Call her Mugga, waiting for her seven minutes of TV fame on "Def Comedy Jam," a testing ground for black comics. NEW YORKERS & CO. 4 How does an Amish farmer make it in the big city? Simplicity, perseverance and a series of compromises.

RONALD WEITZ spends his days in Brooklyn, overseeing a squad of city social workers who try to find help for cocaine-addicted babies. But every few weeks he takes up a well-worn paperback, tones up his self-taught brogue and joins two dozen other New Yorkers to plumb the richly double-entendre'd depths of "Finnegans Wake." They read, reread and try to filter meaning from a few pages at a time. Three years beyond "Riverrun," they are still only 447 pages deep.

Damon Stoudamire stands all of 5 feet 11 inches and probably felt as small as a Lilliputian after making only 2 of 12 shots against Louisville on Thursday night. So this morning, more than four hours before Stoudamire and the rest of the Arizona Wildcats would take on Missouri in the West Regional final of the National Collegiate Athletic Association basketball tournament, he showed up at the Sports Arena, stood outside the 3-point line and shot as many jumpers as he could during the alloted 45-minute shoot-around.

China's frenetic economic boom and natural forces are shrinking the country's farmland at an alarming rate, scientists and Government officials say. As a result, Chinese and Western scientists are raising new questions about the country's ability to feed itself in the future. In China's central and eastern provinces, the country's breadbasket for three millenniums, farmers are abandoning the land to chase prosperity in big cities and towns. There, tens of thousands of new factories have opened under the economic reforms of Deng Xiaoping, China's paramount leader.

Two adjoining three-story brick houses on 65th Street just off Fifth Avenue have been bought by the record producer David Geffen, who is expected to demolish them and build one house on the site. They total 34 feet, far wider than the average brownstone. The prices were $1.7 million for No. 7 1/2 and $2.25 million for No. 9. Clark Halstead, managing partner of the real estate company that bears his name, said that even if Mr. Geffen spent $5 million more to raze them and build a grander place, "he'd still be doing fine."