Group websurfing: “Need to get out more but can’t bear to leave your

computer screen? Jack Schofield explains how to

socialise in cyberspace.” Guardian

Group websurfing: “Need to get out more but can’t bear to leave your

computer screen? Jack Schofield explains how to

socialise in cyberspace.” Guardian

Group websurfing: “Need to get out more but can’t bear to leave your

computer screen? Jack Schofield explains how to

socialise in cyberspace.” Guardian

Privacy News: Tailgating the Motorist: Big Brother? Drivers’ locations and driving habits may soon be monitored in a variety of ways, including using your electronic toll “passport”, onboard navigation systems, cellphones and a “sniffer” that records what radio station you’re listening to. International Herald Tribune

Talk to the Palm. A $179 attachment is an MP3 player, a digital voice recorder and a backup device rolled into one. Out of deference to music industry copy protection rules, users will not be able to beam songs to other Palms via the infrared link. Wired

To IgNobel-ly Go… This years IgNobel Prizes are out, for just plain silly things in the name of science. Beyond 2000

Mir attacked by cosmic mushrooms

The Boston Globe is reporting Mir’s trouble with rampant fungus which is eating plastics and other “spare parts” aboard the aging space vehicle.

Simple Simon.

If nothing else, the criticism of John

Simon has kept alive a sense of history. No one writing

today has done more to uphold the aesthetic standards of the

Third Reich. As film critic for the National Review and

theater critic for New York magazine, Simon’s specialty is

making punching bags out of people whose looks he finds

repellent, especially those who don’t conform to traditional

modes of beauty. (Barbra Streisand has been a favorite

target over the years: Early in her career, he said she looked

like “a tremulous young borzoi.”) If a performer isn’t

Simon’s idea of pinup material, the merits of his or her work

are beside the point. It was one of his remarks that once

earned him a plate of hot goulash in the face courtesy of

actress Sylvia Miles. His prejudices often make him sloppy

with the facts. In his review of Raúl Ruiz’s film of Proust’s

“Time Regained,” he identified Ruiz as “like Proust, a

homosexual.” As Film Comment pointed out, that should

come as some shock to Mrs. Ruiz.

Charles Taylor tries to go off on critic John Simon the way Simon goes off on everybody else. The occasion was Simon’s comments to director Atom Egoyan, taking questions from the press after the New York Film Festival opening of his film of Beckett’s Krapp’s Last Tape, one of the first two movies in a project seeking to film all of Beckett’s plays. Salon

Split Personality. Thoughtful review of Girl, Interrupted — the book and the film — by esteemed psychiatrist Alan Stone. Access a list of his other psychologically-informed film reviews from this page. Boston Review

It was a tricky moment the night Lilith Lacroix tried to join the New Zealand Symphony Orchestra on stage. Sydney Morning Herald

Message in a bottle travels halfway round the world Ananova

Exorcism goes to show how little we know. A Chicago priest reflects on the fact that his archdiocese now has a full-time exorcist. Chicago Sun-Times

“I hate this hand”. “The man who was given the world’s first hand transplant wants it removed by surgeons because he hates the sight of it. Clint Hallam, who two years ago underwent the operation carried out by a British surgeon, claims the hand no longer works and that he is being made ill by anti-rejection drugs. Mr. Hallam, 53, has gone to Lyon, where he received the hand, to convince the French member of the transplant team to amputate it. ‘I can no longer do anything with it. It just hangs uselessly by my side. It looks hideous because it is withered and I don’t see any point in keeping it any longer.’ ” The Independent

Group websurfing: “Need to get out more but can’t bear to leave your

computer screen? Jack Schofield explains how to

socialise in cyberspace.” Guardian