The Freemasons, who for centuries zealously guarded the secrecy of their rites and greetings, are hoping to dismantle their mysterious image and revive interest in their declining society by opening a museum along the Boston Common.

As part of a multimillion-dollar renovation of its Grand Lodge, the Masons will put windows in the windowless facade, add a doorway along Tremont Street, and put on display a vast collection of Masonic memorabilia.

Before I Sue You, Mister Cheap… One of the most successful Cheapass Card Games to date, Before I Kill You, Mister Bond…, will be going out of print on August 31, 2001. This is part of an arrangement we have reached with Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer, owners of James Bond 007. MGM feels this game capitalizes too much on its trademarked character, and frankly we're in no financial position to argue with them.

In Thursday's issue of the journal Nature, paleontologists estimate that the giant apatosaurus, formally known as brontosaurus, put on more than 30 pounds a day at the height of its adolescent growth spurt.

Argentinasaurus, perhaps the heaviest dinosaur that ever lived, would have gained more than 100 pounds a day during its most rapid period of growth.

Using a high-end software package that lists for $28,000, assistant professor David Schmidt demonstrated that the shower pushes the air into a large vortex with a low pressure center that literally sucks the curtain in.

''It is something akin to a hurricane on its side,'' Schmidt said. ''I hadn't anticipated this vortex.''

Solving the shower problem, which required 50 hours of computer time and 1.5 trillion calculations, took Schmidt into territory that makes even the world's finest mathematicians uneasy. The whirls of air and water are governed by the Navier-Stokes equations, which were discovered in the 19th century but remain deeply mysterious. The equations explain how fluids react to pressure and movement, but they can be very difficult to apply to real problems, making precise solutions impossible in all but the simplest of cases.

Here we come
Out of history
Familiar names like Noah
And Adam and Eve

[refrain]
Hey! Hey! We're not monkeys!
Never drank primordial soup!
We're the folks God created
Not an evolutional fluke!

Libra: (Sept. 23--Oct. 23)
The unstoppable machinery of fate has set in motion irreversible events which shall inexorably lead to your acquisition of an unwanted nickname.

Scorpio: (Oct. 24--Nov. 21)
You will die of dehydration and malnutrition next week, shortly after hitting the snooze button for the 234,734th time.

Pisces: (Feb. 19--March 20)
It turns out that a journey through the nine circles of hell is a good concept for an epic poem, but not for a restaurant.

July 13, 2001 | WASHINGTON -- In the second White House health scare in little more than a week, doctors Wednesday night implanted a sophisticated pacemaker in President Bush's brain. The device, known as an implantable cranial defibrillator, or ICD, continuously monitors and records the president's brain waves. When Mr. Bush's brain activity becomes dangerously slow for a chief executive, the device delivers a mild electric shock, jolting the president back to a relatively active mental state.

"I feel good," the president told reporters several hours after the operation. Bush then twitched noticeably. "I mean, I feel well," he said.

As a cultural critic, Queenan has taken potshots at nearly every trend that has come down the pike. What his criticism sometimes lacks in substance, he makes up for with smartass bile. And when it comes to tearing apart celebrities, he is merciless. […]

One Op-Ed piece found Queenan wishing that the movie "Mr. Holland's Opus" had ended the same way as "Braveheart," with Richard Dreyfuss getting his entrails ripped out while a cast of thousands cheered.

The film "Blame It on Rio," Queenan wrote, "contains rabies jokes and Valerie Harper."

STRASBOURG, France - More than 100 garden gnomes and other statues have been found assembled on a roundabout in eastern France, a police spokesman said.

Some were set up to spell out "Free the Gnomes," leading police to believe that the prank culprits are members of a group known as the Garden Gnome Liberation Front.

My first night with Anastasia was the kind of magical, passionate ride that left me with my pants on the back of the kitchen chair, my underwear on the chandelier, my socks in the toilet, my hair on the door handle, half of my artificial leg somewhere in the pantry, my kidney in a Coleman ice chest on its way to the Moroccan black market, and my car in a Tijuana auto repair shop with new, red, diamond-tuck interior. -- Matthew Swanlund

It was the classic conundrum - marry Dirk, who truly loved her, or spend the summer in Iceland shoeing horses and teaching geodetic science to indigent zucchini farmers - but in the end she knew she could only follow her heart, which was what brought her to the airport, passport in hand. -- Melissa Affolter

The Miss Port Henry Diner is one of the few remaining Diners in the United States, Mint-Condition, Turn Key, Fully Equipped, Seats 28 in the Dining Room, 20 in the Historic Railroad Car, 12 additional seating areas,  state of the art equipment, excellent gross sales, ample parking, located in the Village of Port Henry in the Town of Moriah, prime location, only minutes to state boat launch and Marina on Lake Champlain.

Last week I got a call from Qwest, asking for "Mr. Licklees," which was perhaps the most unnerving mispronunciation I'd heard since a telemarketer called me Leekless. That is not a name. That is an adult continence product. I asked him to spell the name, and he stammered out a dense mash of misplaced letters, as if my name had been horribly injured in an accident and sewn back together by an illiterate. And how are you pronouncing that? I asked.

Licklees? he said

You have the wrong number, I said.

OK, he said, his voice heavy with defeat. Sorry.

Anyway! Kaboom I remember as well. It had a clown on the box, which was a strike against it right there, and smiley-face cereal pieces. I don't want a bowl of severed heads looking up at me in the morning. I don't care if they're happy about it. That almost makes it worse. The marshmallows tasted like something you'd find among the cedar shavings of a rabbit who ate nothing but styrofoam. And the purple pieces turned the milk the color of an old bruise.

Moon Pies, incidentally, are still available. Let them melt a little, then roll them around in some Kaboom and fry 'em up in some Tang. That's good eatin'.

A British retiree has decided to sail round the world permanently on a luxury cruise ship because it costs no more than staying in an old people's home, a newspaper reported on Sunday […]

And while her fellow pensioners while away their hours in a retirement home in Britain's damp climate, she travels the high seas, stopping at sunny destinations, playing bridge and dancing with handsome stewards […]