Went to see the gypsy,
Stayin' in a big hotel.
He smiled when he saw me coming,
And he said, "Well, well, well."
His room was dark and crowded,
Lights were low and dim. 
"How are you?" he said to me,
I said it back to him.

I went down to the lobby
To make a small call out.
A pretty dancing girl was there,
And she began to shout,
"Go on back to see the gypsy.
He can move you from the rear,
Drive you from your fear,
Bring you through the mirror.
He did it in Las Vegas,
And he can do it here."

Outside the lights were shining
On the river of tears,
I watched them from the distance
With music in my ears.

I went back to see the gypsy,
It was nearly early dawn.
The gypsy's door was open wide
But the gypsy was gone,
And that pretty dancing girl,
She could not be found.
So I watched that sun come rising
From that little Minnesota town.

Posted by Shad Muegge at August 22, 2002 11:55 PM

CHRISTIAN: I—I don’t even know if I am a true Bohemian revolutionary.

BOHEMIANS: What!

TOULOUSE: Do you believe in beauty?

CHRISTIAN: Yes.

ARGENTINEAN: Freedom?

CHRISTIAN: Yes, of course.

SATIE: Truth?

CHRISTIAN: Yes.

THE DOCTOR: Love?

CHRISTIAN: Love? Love. Above all things I believe in love. Love is like oxygen. Love is a many-splendoured thing, love lifts us up where we belong. All you need is love!

[The BOHEMIANS are impressed.]

Posted by Shad Muegge at August 22, 2002 04:32 PM

I'm slowly building up a structured, visual record of everything in my house. You're welcome to browse around while I'm working - check out the kitchen cabinets, dig through my collections, or head on down to the basement and see what you can find.

Posted by GeeTee at August 22, 2002 03:33 PM

"The vast potential of broadband has so far benefited nobody as clearly as it's benefited downloaders of pornography and pirates of digital content," Chernin told an audience of about 200.

Posted by GeeTee at August 22, 2002 03:14 PM

How completely does Gelernter see a city like New York being mirrored? He imagines a three-dimensional image scanner where, by chance, "a butterfly wanders into the in-box and (a few wingbeats later) flutters out--and in that brief interval the system has transcribed the creature's appearance and analyzed its way of moving, and the real butterfly leaves a shadow-butterfly behind. Some time soon afterward you'll be examining some tedious electronic document and a cyber-butterfly will appear at the bottom left corner of your screen (maybe a Hamearis lucina) and pause there, briefly hiding the text (and showing its neatly folded rusty-chocolate wings like Victorian paisley, with orange eyespots)--and moments later will have crossed the screen and be gone."

Posted by GeeTee at August 22, 2002 03:11 PM

How we went about testing these questions and what we found may astound you. Our planned two-week investigation into the psychology of prison life had to be ended prematurely after only six days because of what the situation was doing to the college students who participated. In only a few days, our guards became sadistic and our prisoners became depressed and showed signs of extreme stress. Please join me on a slide tour of describing this experiment and uncovering what it tells us about the nature of Human Nature.

Posted by GeeTee at August 22, 2002 02:04 PM

"Sex trade workers must be compensated for displacement they experience at your hands in the same manner you would compensate a business if you were to use their locale during operating hours," the letter said. "The same must hold true for homeless people you push from beneath a bridge or doorway and drug users you move from a park."

Posted by GeeTee at August 22, 2002 01:19 PM

How could economics not be behavioral? If it isn't behavioral, what the hell is it? And I think it's fairly clear that all reality has to respect all other reality. If you come to inconsistencies, they have to be resolved, and so if there's anything valid in psychology, economics has to recognize it, and vice versa.

Posted by GeeTee at August 22, 2002 01:16 PM

Until now, the entertainment industry has relied on civil lawsuits aimed at corporations, not individuals, to limit widespread copyright infringement on peer-to-peer networks. Now, however, the RIAA is revising its strategy and appears ready to sue individuals swapping songs over the Internet. At issue in the RIAA's request is an obscure part of the Digital Millennium Copyright Act (DMCA) that permits a copyright owner to send a subpoena ordering a "service provider" to turn over information about a subscriber. It is not necessary to file a lawsuit to take advantage of the DMCA's expedited subpoena process.

Posted by GeeTee at August 22, 2002 01:00 PM

Malcolm said the Internet has become "the world's largest copy machine" and that criminal prosecutions of copyright offenders are now necessary to preserve the viability of America's content industries. "There does have to be some kind of a public message that stealing is stealing is stealing," said Malcolm, who oversees the arm of the Justice Department that prosecutes copyright and computer crime cases.

Posted by GeeTee at August 22, 2002 12:58 PM

Under a policy implemented in October, line workers at the Jim Beam Brands Co. plant may use the restroom only during lunch and two other scheduled daily breaks, one before lunch and one after. They also are allowed one unscheduled toilet break per day, and can be disciplined for taking more, starting with a warning and escalating to dismissal after six incidents.

Posted by GeeTee at August 22, 2002 12:41 PM

A company based in the Chicago suburb of Elk Grove Village has accepted its first deposit for manufactured diamonds made from carbon captured during the cremation process so that loved ones -- family members or even pets -- could be mounted into a ring, pendant or other jewelry.

Posted by GeeTee at August 22, 2002 12:36 PM

You've found the living, breathing embodiment of Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes' conception of The Marketplace of Ideas.... Bumperactive.com, the world's finest (and, well, only) Bumper Sticker Cooperative.

Posted by GeeTee at August 22, 2002 11:36 AM

Record labels are reluctant to discuss spoofing, but their trade group, the Recording Industry Association of America, has called it a legitimate way to combat piracy. And at least one company acknowledges that it has been hired to distribute spoofs, although it would not say by whom.

Posted by GeeTee at August 22, 2002 11:23 AM

Less than a week after seizing the Ottawa school board because trustees broke provincial law by running a deficit, Education Minister Elizabeth Witmer sounded more conciliatory yesterday in her dealings with two other boards in which officials have violated balanced-budget legislation.

Posted by GeeTee at August 22, 2002 11:18 AM

If treatments and detection methods bear fruit in future tests, the discovery offers a potential way to battle a feared bioterrorism agent. Similar viruses could have broader uses, perhaps disabling infections such as strep or staph germs.

Posted by GeeTee at August 22, 2002 10:14 AM

I vowed to find a good board-certified plastic surgeon and get on with it. I figured finding a doctor sensitive to hippie chicks would be a snap. If there are 9 million aging hippie chicks in America, we must have influence in the plastic surgery market, dramatically changing the aesthetic toward a more organic, natural outcome. 

Posted by GeeTee at August 22, 2002 10:08 AM

An alternative to waiving disclosure altogether would be to require SMS ads to include the sponsor Web site name or URL, Cornfield said. Such a requirement would allow campaigns protect the integrity of their messages by discouraging "spoofed" SMS messages from rival candidates or parties, he said.

Posted by GeeTee at August 22, 2002 08:16 AM

"We knew that just a few amps blows a household fuse. So we scaled it all up to fry these copper jets," said John Brown, the physicist at the Defense Science and Technology Laboratory who heads up British electric armor research.

Posted by GeeTee at August 22, 2002 08:06 AM