[…] Although on previous journeys Palin has circumnavigated ("Around the World in 80 Days") and bisected ("Pole to Pole") the globe, ventured round the Pacific Rim ("Full Circle"), and retraced the multi-continental whereabouts of his favorite writer ("Hemingway Adventure"), "Michael Palin's Travels: Sahara" is in some ways his most ambitious effort yet. (The series airs on Bravo through June 1 -- check local listings -- and will soon be available on DVD. The accompanying book was published last month by St. Martin's Press.) After all, this is the most unforgiving natural environment on earth, and the journey comes at a time when Westerners (especially Britons and Americans) are not very popular in the Islamic world. And yet Palin still has time to cheerfully barter for yellow slippers in Morocco, watch a sheep sacrifice in Mali, play a marbles-like game using camel droppings in Mauritania, survey ancient Roman ruins in Libya, and trek for weeks without even a road to follow. […]

Fruit from the new Meat Trees, developed by British scientists using gene-splicing technology, closely resembles ordinary grapefruit. But when you peel the large fruit open, inside is fresh beef.

"Our trees may sound like something out of a science fiction movie, but it's really a simple, down-to-earth idea whose time has come," declares Dr. Vincent Tartley, director of agricultural bioengineering research for the UltraModAgri Group, which created the amazing trees.

"Vegetarians have been complaining for years that despite their moral convictions against consuming meat, they still crave the flavor of a good steak once in a while. Now they can have their cake and eat it too." […]

The coffee flows like a river. A mound of potatoes sizzles on the grill. Chuck Berry blares through the speakers.

"What'll it be, hon?" a smiling waitress asks, greeting a stranger off the street like an old friend.

A slice of life, circa 1950? Try noon last Friday at the Four Sisters Owl Diner.

Steeped in nostalgia and mystique, diners can no longer be found on every street corner, but those that have survived still attract a steady following. […]

Years ago I caught the end of a sci-fi horror movie on TV, and I was riveted - it seemed as if the producers had hired every single actor in Hollywood and paid them fifty bucks to play dead. I'd never seen so many dead people. They were heaped in the subway, piled on the street, strewn in the churches. Big thick heaps of pockmarked, sallow-faced, zombified dead people. A cast of thousands! I never quite figured out what the movie was about, only that the final apocalyptic scene was like nothing I'd seen. And it had spaceships, too. I'd never caught the entire movie, so when I saw it at the video store this weekend I thought hey, this should be good!

Then the credits start to roll, and you see the words "Based on the books 'The Space Vampires'" and you think perhaps I have overmisunderestimated this one. The movie was "Lifeforce," and I have a crick in my neck from ducking the chunks it blew. Everybody in the movie was miscast, except for the woman who spent the entire film walking around naked, and for Patrick Stewart. You can't miscast him, because he always plays Patrick Stewart. […]

I have no idea what is a flower and what isn't. I mean, I can tell what's obviously a flower, but the plants that produce a flower later always confuse me. They all look like weeds. Some of the weeds have caught on to this, and present a small blossom right away - don't kill me, I'm pretty! Here! Pluck me! It's on the house! So I stuck to uprooting filthy dandelions. Their leaves are ugly. Their purply stems offend. Their deep rubbery roots reveal their true characters. I roamed the yard, implement in hand, stabbing the earth and ripping out the interlopers. I heaped the dead like vanquished Orcs, and if I'd had the time I would have impaled the dandelion heads on sticks to warn off their kin.

A speeding, unlicensed Florida trucker with a long driving record slammed his overloaded banana truck into the shiny walls of the newly christened Liberty Tunnel yesterday, causing a 9-mile logjam and giving the Big Dig's centerpiece its first black eye, authorities said.

On the night of May 15-16, millions of eyes will be drawn skyward, where there will hang a mottled, coppery globe -- our Moon -- completely immersed in the long, tapering cone of shadow cast into space by Earth.

If the weather is clear, skywatchers across most of the Americas, Europe and Africa will have a view of one of nature's most beautiful spectacles: A total eclipse of the Moon.

Unlike a total eclipse of the Sun, which often requires an avid viewer to make a long journey in order to stand under the path of totality, lunar eclipses can more frequently be observed from one's own backyard. The passage of the Moon through the Earth's shadow is similarly visible from all places within the hemisphere where the Moon is above the horizon.

The total phase of the upcoming event will be visible across much of North America, all of South America, as well as central and western Europe and most of Africa (except the extreme eastern part). This makes for a potential viewing audience of nearly 2 billion people. […]

Tue May 13, 2003 09:15 AM ET

LONDON (Reuters) - An angry domesticated badger savaged five people, leaving one man so seriously injured he needed skin grafts, and chased away pursuing police officers during a 48-hour rampage through a quiet English town. One-year-old Boris launched what experts described as unprecedented attacks after finding himself hungry, alone and frightened after being stolen or released from a wildlife visitor center where he had been hand-reared and hand-fed. "I have been involved with badgers for 24 years and I have never heard of anything like this, nor has anyone I have spoken to," Mike Weaver, chairman of the Worcestershire Badger Society told Reuters on Tuesday. Weaver was brought in by police to catch Boris, who had bitten the five victims' arms and legs after getting loose near Evesham, Worcestershire, in central England. The officers themselves had been chased onto the bonnet of their car as they tried to round up Boris, who was later put down. Weaver said badgers were notoriously powerful animals and the incident showed the folly of trying to turn wild animals into pets.

I found them while helping my parents clean out their basement a few years ago. They were neatly arranged in their own plastic file box. Plenty of the dishes seemed normal enough, but as I flipped through them, some of the recipes began to alarm me. And then I found the card for the "Rosy Perfection Salad."

I fell over. Like I Iaughed so hard I started coughing and I fell back on the floor and I waved the card at my mom, who just rolled her eyes. "Can I please have these? Please?" I begged. "What do you want them for?" she asked. "To cook?" "No," I said. She let me have them. I think they might have been my grandma's, but she never copped to actually buying them. Nobody else did, either.

These cards mystify me. None of them have calorie or nutrition information of any kind, and in some instances it's hard to tell what's dietetic about the recipes at all, except that they're unspeakably grim. And yet also, completely insane. […]

NEW YORK-Seeking to broaden the customer base of the popular drug, Pfizer announced the launch of a $40 million "Zoloft For Everything" advertising campaign Monday.

"Zoloft is most commonly prescribed for the treatment of depression and anxiety disorders, but it would be ridiculous to limit such a multi-functional drug to these few uses," Pfizer spokesman Jon Pugh said. "We feel doctors need to stop asking their patients if anything is wrong and start asking if anything could be more right." […]