February 8, 1996

THE thermometer read 15 degrees last Sunday afternoon, but that was not the reason my fingers had turned blue. The culprit was an old Kerman carpet, supposedly worth $28,000, being sold at an auction of Oriental rugs and textiles held at the fashionable Mark Hotel on the Upper East Side. Two spit-moistened fingertips and one surreptitious rub later, I had navy blue stains that vanished only after steady scrubbing. The spit test for ferreting out what is known to the trade as "liquid restoration" -- recoloring with paint, dye or even Magic Marker -- was a trade secret divulged by Rosalind Candlin Benedict, a rug consultant, appraiser and editor of "Rug News," a trade publication. She was my guide during portions of a months-long odyssey through the highways and byways of carpet buying in New York City.

TIME was when every living supertwin -- that means every triplet, quadruplet, quintuplet and sextuplet in the world -- could count on a birthday card from Miss Helen Kirk. In 1939, when Miss Helen, as the Galveston, Tex., dowager always calls herself, was a young medical assistant to a doctor who delivered a set of quadruplets, she began recording multiple births and writing to the parents as a hobby.

Caesars Atlantic City Hotel Casino dismissed a security guard who found a customer's bank card and used it to withdraw $100 from an automatic teller machine. But that was not enough, state regulators said yesterday, fining the casino $5,000 for not properly reporting the episode, the A.P. said. SUSAN JO KELLER

A Boeing 757 carrying 189 people, mostly tourists on their way home to Berlin and Frankfurt from the Dominican Republic, crashed into the Atlantic late Tuesday about 13 miles offshore. At least 105 bodies were recovered, American officials said, but The Associated Press quoted a Dominican civil defense official, Domingo Antonio Vargas, as saying as many as 126 bodies had been found by late yesterday. Debris was spread in an area two miles long and 150 yards wide, the United States Coast Guard said, suggesting that the jet broke up before it hit the water.

From practically anywhere in this city, you can see the mansion on the hilltop, with its 100-foot flagpole stabbing the sky. Up there, anyone can tell you, lives Jack Simplot, the billionaire who has dominated the local economy for seven decades and is responsible for the jobs of more than 14,000 people in this part of America. He has also been embroiled in one of the oddest melodramas in the computer industry: the recent ouster, and reinstatement eight days later, of the chairman and chief executive of the chip maker Micron Technology Inc.