Critically low on small denominations, the Treasury Department put out an urgent call for ones and fives Monday.

"If we don't get some soon, we're going to run out," Deputy Treasury Secretary Kenneth Dam said. "And right now, we have no one we can send to the Bureau of Engraving and Printing to grab more. [Executive Secretary] Jeffrey [Kupfer] is in Federal Trade Commission meetings all day, and [Under Secretary] Peter [Fisher] is too new to handle cash."

Though Dam said he suspects there may be a fully stocked tray of cash in the department's safe, the only one who knows the combination is Secretary Paul O'Neill, who is at an economic summit in Stockholm until Saturday.

At the time, it sounded like something you could do yourself using no more than a Casio keyboard with preprogrammed drum patterns. Today, it is no less than the sound that defined an era.

The benefit of distance and time, of course, is perspective, and that goes for musical tastes and values as much as anything else. And so it is that the quintessential '80s song emerges, and it came not from a prolific or popular artist such as Duran Duran, Madonna, or Prince but from a British duo whose name few people remember: Soft Cell.

The song: ''Tainted Love.''

Ah, yes, you can hear it now. The cheesy drum machine. The touch-tone bass line. The bonk-bonk at the start of each measure. And, then, Marc Almond's torch-singer vocals […]

Being unemployed has brought Todd Rosenberg fun, some fame and a very small fortune - which is why he is in trouble with the New York State Department of Labor.

Rosenberg, 32, is the creator of "Laid Off: A Day in the Life," an animated cartoon about a guy who spends all day watching TV in a blue bathrobe and eating potato chips. […]

The other problem, however, is that unemployed people are supposed to be actively looking for work, not spending all of their time answering e-mail, drawing cartoons and getting interviewed on television about being unemployed. So there is a good chance, Rosenberg said, that he will be asked to repay the last seven weeks of his unemployment benefits - close to $3,000.

He doesn't have the money; the tip jar has been paying his rent. "I really am unemployed," he said. "I really am broke."

Jackie Chan suffered a minor injury while performing a stunt during the shooting of a movie outside Bangkok.

The 47-year-old actor, who performs his own stunts, suffered a facial injury Monday and was sent to a hospital where he was kept for four hours, Robert Lee, Chan's Thai coordinator, told The Associated Press. Chan was back on the set Tuesday, he said.

Scenes for the movie "Highbinders" are being shot in a sports stadium at Muang Thong Thani outside Bangkok where a set has been built to resemble a European castle.

verbicide \VER-buh-syde\ (noun)
     *1 : deliberate distortion of the sense of a word (as in punning)
      2 : one who distorts the sense of a word

"Homicide and verbicide -- that is, violent treatment of a word with fatal results to its legitimate meaning, which is its life -- are alike forbidden." (Oliver Wendell Holmes, The Autocrat of the Breakfast-Table, 1858)

If you think "verbicide" sounds like a silly way of saying "the killing of a verb," you're not entirely wrong. "Verbicide" was formed by combining the Latin word for "word" itself, which is "verbum," with the English suffix "-cide," meaning "killer" or "killing." "Verbicide" describes the metaphorical "killing" of a word by the distortion or destruction of its meaning (and these murderous tendencies are not limited to verbs -- one can commit verbicide upon any part of speech). It can be applied to wordplay or punning, or to language distortions that are intentionally deceptive or euphemistic. It has also developed a second sense referring to the person who creates such distortions.

*Indicates the sense illustrated in the example sentence.

Aries: (March 21-April 19)
Your heart will be shattered by a beautiful scientist who removes it from your body, dips it in liquid nitrogen, and drops it to the ground.

Gemini: (May 21-June 21)
It turns out that sneaking in and having sex on your boss' desk isn't as sexy as it sounded, especially with him taking phone calls the whole time.

Pisces: (Feb. 19-March 20)
The world may end "not with a bang but a whimper," but the end of your world will have plenty of both.

Part of a $70 million PR campaign, the GE ad depicts a beautiful bend on Massachusetts' Housatonic River, which had been polluted by decades of PCB discharges and other hazardous chemicals from the company's plant in nearby Pittsfield.

"We work hard on this lazy river," a deep-voiced actor says as the camera lingers on the Housatonic, which GE was ordered to clean at a cost of $250 million by the EPA. "In the past three months alone, GE has removed more than 5,200 cubic yards of river sediments and 3,200 cubic yards of bank soil, making the Housatonic River a safe and beautiful place for everyone."

BIRMINGHAM, England -- Staff at a marine centre have turned to the "Walrus of Love" to try to get their shy sharks in the mood for mating.

The love ballards of soul legend Barry White -- known as the Walrus of Love by his fans -- are being pumped in to tanks containing dogfish, starry smooth hounds and tope at The National Sea Life Centre, Birmingham, central England.

[…] Karen Hewlett, an aquarist at the centre, told CNN: "Nothing has happened yet but we hope that if anyone can persuade them it will be Barry White.

"We'll know if it does the trick by their behaviour, because in the early stages of shark courtship, the male chases the female at high speed and attempts to bite her back and dorsal fin, which actually isn't very romantic."

Down the aisle to Woman World, where you have the brick-thick bridal bibles, the hectoring journals of the flat-tummy demographic, the exhausted mom domestic companions (When will you have sex again? We ask six psychics), and the little-miss-harlot magazines like Cosmo which promise that they can teach you how to make men want you. PUT OUT - THEN DON'T! might as well be the sum total of the advice, if they were serious, but no: it's all tricks and technique and emotional legerdemain. FIVE WORDS THAT WILL TOTALLY FUSE THE TWO OF YOU is my favorite Cosmo headline - I've been wondering about that for a while:

1. I will order pizza afterwards
2. When you're done that's fine
3. I have a beer distributorship

Tristan Gale, 22, and Chris Soule, 29, of the U.S. Olympic team, are sliders. Their sport is skeleton, a solo event, which requires them to whip down an ice track of deep curves and straightaways, face down, headfirst, on a torso-sized sled (the name comes from the look of the first sleds, made in the 19th century, a metal framework that vaguely resembled a skeleton). During practice runs at the track in Park City, Utah, Soule, who stands 6 feet and weighs 167 pounds, has reached speeds approaching 85 miles an hour. "I'm in control of the sled just about the whole way down the track," he says, "unless I hit a wall or lose my focus. I'm in control every 100th of a second. You have to be very precise and be on top of your game when it comes to keeping that speed going down the hill." Gale, who, at 5 feet 2 inches, 108 pounds, is significantly lighter than Soule, pokes along at a mere 80 miles an hour. "I have total control of where I am," she says; "I can't come to a stop at any point until I come to the finish line, but I can choose to be anywhere I want on the track."

Ivan Massow has defended his comments about the British art scene following his resignation as chairman of the Institute of Contemporary Art.

Mr Massow caused a storm in the art world after writing an article in the New Statesmen [sic] which said much conceptual art was "pretentious, self-indulgent, craftless tat".

"Oh cry me a river."

Aries: (March 21-April 19)
Though you are unable to cultivate a reputation as a great lover of women, your reputation as an above-average lover of pancakes remains secure.

Gemini: (May 21-June 21)
In time, Death comes to all men, but the way he keeps stopping by to have a beer and moan about the Steelers' AFC Championship loss is a little pathetic.

Virgo: (Aug. 23-Sept. 22)
You'll save more than $40,000 by freezing your corpse in a bathtub full of ice instead of springing for the cryogenics.

"As class sizes continue to grow and test scores continue to decline, our public schools are in a state of crisis," Bush said at a White House press conference. "There is no more time for deliberation. It is time to act. Our children need these adhesive gold stars."

Bush went on to describe the "alarming state" of many of the nation's public schools, citing underpaid teachers, buildings badly in need of repair, and woefully outdated textbooks.

"If a child is going to learn under these conditions, he or she is going to need lots of encouragement," Bush said. "These gold stars will serve as reinforcement for our best students while motivating underachievers to do better. You have no idea what a difference it makes to a young child's self-esteem to see a big, shiny star at the top of his or her spelling test. I know it made a big difference to me as a child."

A new phenomenon is emerging on the Internet and like all geekish fads it involves terms seldom, if ever, heard elsewhere, such as "cuneiform meatspace" and "carburettor logotype."

The game is called "Googlewhacking" and is the invention of some search-obsessed fans of Google.com, the search engine that has an index of over three billion Web pages.

The object of Googlewhacking is simple enough. A participant types two words into the Google search line with the hopes of pulling off a single search result.

If you see "Results 1-1 of 1" appear under a Google search -- congratulations! You're a winner (and you clearly don't have enough work to do).

Googlewhacking is more difficult than it looks. Google's massive database updates constantly, thus making the solitary search result more and more elusive. […]

Various Web sites, including Unblinking.com, explain Googlewhacking in detail, replete with rules for the uninitiated, trivia and examples from the Googlewhack lexicon such as "octopi jujitsu."

As this site has appeared on www.slashdot.org and is experiencing slightly increased traffic I would like to add a few extra comments...

1. Guinness was used as it is an internationally recognised beer. I would have used a good, well known American beer but that is like finding the pot of gold at the end of a rainbow.

2. I do not recommend using this technology for cooling overclocked AMD processors. Saying this has absolutely nothing to do with the fact that I work for another processor maker who I probably shouldn't mention but who want me to say you should all buy P4s.

3. Yes, I am the same guy who did the Star Wars Asciimation (www.asciimation.co.nz) thing a few years back and this is what I've been doing instead.

4. Sorry Mum.

If you didn't know Alan Moore had been dubbed "the Orson Welles of comics", you could easily mistake him for the village eccentric. A mysterious, imposing character who rarely leaves his home town, he is a practising magician with an all-black dress code, a wizard-like mane and rings on every finger. He looks like a cross between Hagrid and Danny from Withnail And I, and possesses an apparently bottomless knowledge of things arcane and alternative, which he spins out for hours, usually with an extinguished spliff in one hand.

For comic fans, he's the undisputed high priest of the medium, whose every word is seized upon like a message from the ether, but who never replies to their mail. His sci-fi detective masterpiece Watchmen made him the comic industry's de facto leader back in 1986, but Moore's response to the attention was to effectively disappear into the shadows for the next 10 years. The rest of the world has remained oblivious to him as a consequence, although he has exerted a continual, unseen influence on popular culture without ever being sucked into it. This week things could change, with the release of the first movie adaptation of one of his works: the Hughes brothers' Jack the Ripper thriller From Hell.

Sean Connery is in discussions with 20th Century Fox to possibly star in The League of Extraordinary Gentlemen film, possibly as Alan Quartermain.

The script for the film is by James Robinson (writer of STARMAN comic). The first draft was reportedly scrapped and a second was submitted. [The Hollywood Reporter, Coming Attractions, Jan. 25, 2002]