-== WAIT UNTIL...DUCK ==-

Quentin Tarantino learned an important lesson last week: Don't drink and talk race. The feisty director got into a discussion with an African-American acquaintance, Barron Claiborne, about whether there are "black features." At one point Tarantino put two fingers in his nostrils to refer to the shape of some black people's noses. Later, after more drinking, Claiborne "comes and stands over me, which is something you don't do to another man," the director told Howard Stern. "He starts it all up again." Tarantino told the guy to get out of his face. "And then our friend says the magic words: 'Make me.' At that point I just stood up and popped him." Somehow, the man's girlfriend also sustained a blow. But what really irked the apparently quite irkable director was that the New York Post labeled him a racist because of the incident. "What I put into my life and work," he said, "with that one sentence they p_____ all over it."