A second drawback of monitoring devices is that they give both adults and children a false sense of security. Monitoring systems may inform parents where their children are, but they do not show whom they are with. One of the great benefits of actually spending time with your kids is that you can see whether Heath and Madison are consorting with miscreants, street urchins, hooligans, guttersnipes, ne'er-do-wells, mysterious carnies or that broad general class subsumed under the rubric "bad actors."

For these devices to be effective, society would need to force sinister citizens to carry similar devices that would set off an alarm whenever they came into contact with authentically virtuous middle-class children. Alas, that would probably not sit well with the American Civil Liberties Union.

Where does one get such penguin attire? Appeals are made to the knitting public to place their time, skill, and leftover yarn into the service of animals in need. A New Year's Day 2000 spill of 260 gallons of fuel oil off the southern tip of Australia prompted an appeal that resulted in piles of sweaters ("jumpers," in Australia) being sent to aid the damaged little birds, many crafted by the capable hands of American knitters.

To be better prepared for the next such environmental crisis, in 2001, the Tasmanian Conservation Trust and State Library ran the knit-for-a-penguin campaign. They hoped to build a stockpile of 100 sweaters. They got more than they bargained for…

HIDDEN VALLEY, CA-- A radical Balsamic fundamentalist group detonated an estimated 800 pounds of TNT at the Hidden Valley Ranch compound Monday, killing 11 and injuring dozens more. "Let no salad again be foully tainted by the corrupt regime of Hidden Valley," said Martin Pulaski, leader of the Nation Of Balsam, in a statement claiming responsibility for the deadly attack. "We shall not rest until every salad's flavor is enhanced by a light and tangy vinaigrette, not buried in a shameful avalanche of buttermilk."

Yesterday, students woke up and saw something definitely unnatural atop the dome. Although it was instantly recognizable as part of MIT's long tradition of pranks, or "hacks", it took an anonymous mass e-mail for many students to get the joke.

William Shatner will host an American version of "The Iron Chef" - the most bizarre cooking show in the world - next fall on UPN.

The show, a one-time special airing the Friday before Labor Day, will likely become a regular series, UPN chief Dean Valentine said yesterday…

What Types of Information Do I Collect?

In the course of knowing you, I may gather personal data about you from any or all of the following sources:

Answers to Direct Questions
I will often elicit information with interrogatory statements, such as "Who's your least favorite person in the office?" or "It's Dennis, isn't it?" In some circumstances, it may be necessary for me to repeat such queries until you answer them out of sheer annoyance.

Oscar winners live nearly four years longer than their colleagues, according to a study that credits the "You like me! You really like me!" effect of an Academy Award on an actor's self-esteem.

"Once you get the Oscar, it gives you an inner sense of peace and accomplishment that can last for your entire life, and that alters the way your body copes with stress on a day-to-day basis," said Dr. Donald A. Redelmeier, a professor of medicine at the University of Toronto, Ontario, and co-author of the study.

"[…] His vision of a confusing, yet somehow bourgeois and bureaucratic universe satirized everything from poets and politics to the genre itself, but Adams never saw himself as a science fiction writer - just a humorist who somehow found in scifi his most effective platform. […]"

COLLEGE STATION, TX--Agricultural scientists around the world are hailing what is being called "the biggest breakthrough in biotechnology since the breakthrough it fixes."

On Monday, Texas A&M chemists unveiled Zovirex-10, a revolutionary new fungicide capable of halting the spread of a fungus unexpectedly spawned by a July 2000 breakthrough, an advanced soy hybrid that grows 10 times better in soil over-saturated with chemical herbicides.

The fungus, which, if left unchecked, would likely have destroyed 98 percent of Earth's soy crop and wrought untold environmental havoc, made the latest scientific advance possible.

"It's an extraordinary development," said Dr. Nathan Oberst, project coordinator and the man responsible for both breakthroughs. "At the time, we thought the soy hybrid was a fantastic thing. When the resultant fungus started wiping out other soybean plants at an alarming rate, we thought we might have blundered, but now it's clear that this potential global disaster was just the precondition we needed for a major leap forward."

[Woody] Guthrie had many visitors from the music world, but he did not hesitate to anoint this cherubic kid in his corduroy cap and dusty jeans. "That boy's got a voice," Guthrie said. "Maybe he won't make it with his writing, but he can sing it."

Tocatta and Fugue in Me, A-Minor. As a teenager, Sarah Vowell was not casual about music lessons, music became her life. She was in Marching Band, Jazz Band, Band One, Symphony Band, Pep Band and the Bozeman Recorder Ensemble. Here Sarah recalls all the things she learned in music class that had nothing to with music. Music from elementary school students from the San Francisco Unified School District.

I thought that the one big hurdle for comics was getting out of the embarrassing arena of the comic-book shop--which is really just one step away from a pornographic bookstore to a lot of people. But I didn't realize that all the junk that companies like DC and Marvel have been selling under the rubric of "graphic novels" has created a new shelf in bookstores, and that's where our stuff ends up: torn and soiled, next to Batman: Firestorm At Midnight. Recently, I was in Barnes & Noble here in Chicago, and found a copy of my book in the role-playing-games section. I had to choke back a sob. It's a reminder of how little respect this sort of endeavor garners.

To set this up just a bit more for onlookers, before asking a question, let me explain that your book is the account of three month-long episodes of attempting to live entirely on earnings from $7- or $8-per-hour jobs. You show up in low-wage cities and try to get on your feet, like someone "graduating" from welfare to work. One of many intriguing aspects is the juggling of three challenges: landing a job (not that hard, in the "tight" economy of the late nineties); doing the job (sometimes quite hard, as you make vivid); and finding a place to live (nearly impossible, for reasons we will get to). The account is realistic and sobering. But the tone is far from grim, as a few samples might show…

Not to complain or anything, but the whole thing did serve as an exercise in vanity-abatement and self-esteem reduction, in case I needed that. I got reamed out by supervisors. I had food thrown at me by nursing-home residents. I screwed up monumentally from time to time, smashing a darling objet in a mini-mansion we were cleaning and flaming out catastrophically as a waitress in a well-known low-priced breakfast-and-burgers chain. And the odd thing is how much I cared. I would wake up in the middle of the night, chagrined by my latest error, promising to do better the next day. Maybe I don't have a very strong personality structure. Or maybe when you work as a waitress or cleaner or nursing-home aide eight to nine hours a day that is, for the time being, what you are.

WASHINGTON, DC--The lowest common denominator (LCD), the leading cultural indicator for American mass-market tastes, continued its precipitous drop last week, fueling worries about the future of the U.S. marketplace for ideas and stoking fears of a long-term cultural recession.

The ill health of the LCD, in steady decline since the advent of television, has been cause for concern among the intelligentsia for decades. But double-digit drops in the LCD since October 2000 have alarmed even the most pandering members of the entertainment industry.

"Quite simply, the collective intelligence level is dropping so rapidly that it's becoming increasingly difficult for producers to insult the intelligence of the American public," said News Corp president and COO Peter Chernin. "Without a way to set a floor for the lowest common denominator, even the stupidest material we can develop is not stupid enough for audiences to enjoy."