Toymakers Play the Game, Create a Craze - "The life cycle of a toy craze goes something like this: clever development and marketing to hook the kids; stampeding of the stores; frenzied and heavily publicized searches for the sold-out commodity; hand-wringing from self-styled children's advocates; and inevitably, the waning of the item's popularity until many, many years later, when it becomes a symbol of times gone by..."

 Still ch-changing... - ACCORDING to David Bowie’s business manager, the pale, skinny Englishman who first strutted on to the world stage in the early 1970s, resplendent in platform heels, feather boa and futuristic make-up, now “lies in bed awake every night imagining what tomorrow might bring. If there is anything new, interesting or daring out there he wants to be the first to try it.” Most of the hoary rockers of Mr Bowie’s generation have long since gone into retirement, burned out from all the sex and drugs of the good old days. Others have merely been milking their fans’ nostalgia with tedious “greatest hits” albums or arthritic concert appearances...

 UK Games Ratings Not Kids' Play - Policing computer-game players in England is a classic example of an aged organization tackling new-age technologies and social mores. And at this week's "The Rating Game: Doing It For Themselves" conference held at the British Academy of Film and Television Arts, there was a symbolic throwing up of the hands in futility...

 Wildly original ‘Now and Again’ strange, endearing - "SURELY, “NOW AND AGAIN” (which will be confused with the ABC hour “Once and Again”) is no ordinary CBS Friday night series. It is so wildly original it defies conventional categorization. From start to finish, the hour keeps viewers entertainingly off-balance. It shifts tones constantly — a sci-fi thriller one minute, a black comedy the next..."

 CNN Airs, Then Edits Videotape - CNN aired a video Tuesday of a captured Russian soldier being shot in the head, then edited the report in subsequent viewings to stop the action before the trigger was pulled. The graphic video, apparently taken by fighters in the breakaway republic of Chechnya three years ago, was contained in a report about how the footage is being used to muster Russian political support for the conflict...

 China Cracks Down on Computer Game - "Chinese authorities have punished retailers selling computer games showing Taiwan's military defeating an invasion by mainland Chinese forces, the newspaper People's Liberation Army Daily reported. The CD-ROM computer games, with titles like ``Crush the Chinese Invasion'' and ``Defend Taiwan's territorial seas,'' were being sold openly in an electronics market in the city of Chengdu, in western China's Sichuan province, the report said..."

 Pope, Bono team up to fight poverty - An enthusiastic Pope John Paul II joined forces Thursday with music stars Bono, Quincy Jones, David Bowie and Bob Geldof in the Jubilee 2000 campaign to provide debt relief for the world’s poorest countries...

 Playing With The Big Kids - Unreal goes beyond fun... - "TRAIL-BLAZING 3-D action games are putting more than high-tech virtual weapons in the hands of consumers. The CD-ROM for the search-and-destroy game Unreal also includes creative software, which computer-savvy users have been adapting for architectural and educational projects. When the nonentertainment software developers at Digitalo Studios in Fort Lauderdale got a copy of Unreal last year, for instance, the game-loving staff immediately installed it on the office computer network..."

 Study: Cable News Stresses Content - Hold the blood and guts. A new generation of local news programs on cable TV is trying to compete with bigger broadcasters by emphasizing substance over sizzle, a study concludes. Some of the best news channels, like Las Vegas One and New York One, pack more information into their newscasts than broadcast network affiliates, said a report by Rocky Mountain Media Watch. The media watchdog group has criticized local broadcast newscasts throughout the 1990s for heavily emphasizing crime news and entertainment...

 Einstein Had Retarded Child - A new book claims that Albert Einstein's illegitimate daughter was born severely retarded, possibly with Down syndrome, and died at 21 months after a bout with Scarlet fever. When the first volume of Einstein's collected papers was released in 1987, it showed that he had had an affair while at university with a fellow student named Mileva Maric, who later became pregnant and gave birth to a child at her parent's home in rural Serbia...

 Rooney Explains Column - Relax, all you starlets of television news. Andy Rooney says he wasn't talking about you. The ``60 Minutes'' curmudgeon set tongues wagging with a newspaper column that suggested that the most beautiful woman in TV news ``looks as if she had been in a minor automobile accident'' because of plastic surgery...

 Pretty pretty bang bang - Is Quake 3 too beautiful to live up to its promise as the "ultimate death-match game"? Sometime before Christmas, Id Software chief John Carmack will sign off on the company's long-awaited Quake 3 Arena, unleashing a game of unparalleled beauty and unapologetic violence...

 Actor Seeks Parkinson's Funding - Actor Michael J. Fox told a Senate hearing Tuesday that he had hidden his Parkinson's disease for eight years ``through increasing amounts of medication, through surgery, and by employing the hundreds of little tricks and techniques a person with Parkinson's learns to mask his or her condition...''

 DOWNLOADING IS SLOW GOING FOR BOWIE CD - David Bowie's new album, "Hours," is living up to its name, taking diehard fans plenty of hours to download. The British rock legend, with his label Virgin Records, a division of EMI Music, took the future into his own hands Tuesday, becoming the first major recording artist to launch an entire album for downloading from the web...

 Maps of Places That Don't Exist - Anyone who wants to pinpoint where James Bond met that blonde with the bottle of champagne on her curvy hip need only consult ``Language of the Land,'' an unusual book published by the Library of Congress offering maps of imaginary places. Another map shows just where Tom Sawyer whitewashed his famous fence. Still another points out the spot at which Paul Bunyan's ox Babe, trying to catch a field mouse, dug the Mammoth Cave. L. Frank Baum's ``Wonderful World of Oz'' is charted...

 Actor George C. Scott Dead at 71 - George C. Scott, the forbidding-looking, gravel-voiced actor who turned in an Oscar-winning performance as the profane and patriotic Gen. George S. Patton then declined the honor, has died at 71. Scott died Wednesday of a ruptured abdominal aortic aneurysm at his home 40 miles northwest of Los Angeles...

 Painter Velazquez Defied Tax Man - Diego de Velazquez not only had the talent to be royal court painter in 17th-century Spain, but the nerve to defy his boss and buck a sales tax on artists. Art historians poring over dusty, brittle Culture Ministry files said Thursday they had dug up a statement signed by Velazquez in 1627 in which the Spanish master backed colleagues resisting the 1 percent levy...

 Old Brands, New Media - The head of MTV's Net unit has a theory: It ain't the Web site with the best tech that wins, it's the Web site that can build the biggest brand the fastest. Yeah, sounds familiar. But given that MTV's parent company, Viacom, is about to join CBS to become the world's biggest promotional machine, Nicholas Butterworth has a good feeling that his sites are gonna win...

 Movie Planned for Web Distribution - An Internet company offering music and movie downloads says it will offer one of the first movies specifically produced for initial release on the World Wide Web. ``The Quantum Project'' will be produced by Metafilmics, the production company that made ``What Dreams May Come,'' the Robin Williams feature that won an Academy Award for best visual effects. Some short subject movies have had their premieres on the Internet, but analysts said they believed ``Quantum Project'' would be the first longer film to debut online...

 Fragadelic Females Duke It Out - For women like Aracelis Batista and Frances Roberts, there's nothing like a manicure and a facial to help you unwind after mercilessly reducing your opponent to a quivering pile of gore. Good thing, too. Because that's just what's in store for these finalists of the Female Frag Fest '99 -- an all-estrogen tournament of the ultra-violent shoot-em-up game Quake II - which comes to crescendo in the Cyberathlete Professional League's massive "Ground Zero" event...

 Digital Filmmakers Do San Fran - Not too long ago, camcorder-toting amateur filmmakers only daydreamed of being in the movie business. These days it seems like most of them actually are. Judging by the volume of entries to Resfest, the annual digital film festival that begins Thursday in San Francisco, experimental filmmaking is flourishing, largely a result of the more sophisticated recording and editing tools available to the general public. Resfest received more than 650 entries for this year's festival, nearly double the 350 that came in a year ago...

 Is That a Rocket in Your Pocket? - Cancel the kegger. There's an increasingly popular substitute for geeks who want to get down. Its called a LAN party: a roomful of hard-core computer gamers dueling over a local area network, without the server crashes, lag, and mysterious time-outs that often accompany Internet gaming action. Network performance isn't the only motive for gathering. There are also more, um, primal reasons...

 Critic Dissects TV Ads With Flair - "Talk about a pitch man. John Forde can seduce you into paying attention to television commercials and then, get this, thinking about them.  That's because Forde, a charmingly loose cannon who has fixed his aim on the American way of selling, knows how to entertain as he encourages us to avoid being patsies with credit cards. ``Mental Engineering'' is his vehicle, a new half-hour series that is making its way to an increasing number of PBS stations. The premise is simple: Forde and his guests, including professors, comics and writers, view and critique TV ads..."

 Art as Human Sashimi - "The talk of Ars Electronica was the Plastinator and fluorescent-dog man, two artists who showed how thought-provoking the festival's new emphasis on life sciences could be. "It's not a small feat to take a 20-year tradition and re-orient it," said Eduardo Kac (pronounced "Katz"), the Brazilian-born artist who years ago stuck an animal-ID microchip in his ankle, and has an art project in the works to genetically engineer a dog with a fluorescent-green coat..."

 Costner Said Threw Pitches in Film - The winces that Kevin Costner makes on the pitching mound in his new movie ``For Love of the Game'' aren't an act. ``Kevin threw every strike, threw every curve ball,'' said University of Texas baseball coach Augie Garrido, who served as a technical consultant on the film. ``There's one scene where you'll see about two or three pitches. There must be 140 more that he threw that day on the cutting room floor...''

 Spielberg May Take Kubrick Project - Steven Spielberg may be lined up to direct what would have been Stanley Kubrick's next film project, a newspaper reported. Kubrick, who died in March just days after completing ``Eyes Wide Shut,'' had planned to make a futuristic film called ``AI,'' about a young ``robot'' boy adopted by a childless woman, The Sunday Times said. Warner Bros., the studio with which Kubrick worked for many years, and the director's family appear enthusiastic about Speilberg possibly seeing the project through, the newspaper said...

 Bill Gates Conspiracies - Do you know that Bill Gates' real name is William Henry Gates III?  Nowadays, he is known as Bill Gates (III) where III means the order of   third. So what's so eerie about this name? OK, if you take all the letters in Bill Gates III and then convert it into ASCII code (American Standard Code for Information Interchange) and then add up all the numbers... You will get 666, which is the number of the beast...

 Philly is Back for Moviemakers Philly

 Teen Reporters Connect on Web - "Code-happy students who know HTML and PERL are custom-writing programs for producing online school newspapers. As the students learn journalism, they're teaching their teachers about technology. "We were trying to think of a way to improve the process and make the online edition available as quickly as possible," said Tim Cassedy-Blum, the managing editor of the Black and White, the newspaper at Walt Whitman High School in Bethesda, Maryland. Cassedy-Blum was one of the three students who wrote the program for the online paper..."

 Black Rock: Same As It Ever Was - This year's Black Rock City looked more like Calcutta than Hooverville with a record number of people attending the end-of-summer bacchanalia. More than 17,000 celebrants had made their way to Burning Man by Friday, according to the Black Rock Ministry of Statistics. The number grew to 20,000 -- some news outlets estimated 24,000...

 Mayor's Veto Saves Brothel Nevada - Only one brothel remains where there used to be a row three blocks long here, and a bitterly divided City Council voted to shut that one, too. Then the mayor stepped up and rescued the Stardust Ranch.  Mayor Robert Miller vetoed a 3-2 City Council vote to ban prostitution. He said he thought brothels provided a place for safe sex...

 Oh, Those Wacky Tele...bubbys? - "Tinky Winky worships the devil. At least the purple Teletubby does in "Telebubby Fun Land," a parody Web site that features animations of the popular children's television characters drinking vodka, smoking, and sodomizing sheep. But no one is laughing in the BBC Worldwide offices, where they formally asked Telebubby creator Tom Fulp to take down his site..."

 UK Hitch-hiker's guide to the Internet - It's a jungle out there. Barring reference to an overgrown mass of wild vegetation, the phrase in question has never been more suitably applied than with reference to the Internet...

 Library of Congress Maps Literature - "Anyone who wants to pinpoint where James Bond met that blonde with the bottle of champagne on her curvy hip need only consult ``Language of the Land,'' an unusual book published by the Library of Congress offering maps of imaginary places. Another map shows just where Tom Sawyer whitewashed his famous fence. Still another points out the spot at which Paul Bunyan's ox Babe, trying to catch a field mouse, dug the Mammoth Cave. L. Frank Baum's ``Wonderful World of Oz'' is charted..."

 Bright Kids with Bright Ideas - Believe it or not, the largest multilingual, educational Web site in the world was built by kids. ThinkQuest is an international Web design contest on subjects spanning from the antiwar movement of the 1960s to the art of Japan. Entries from the past three years are catalogued on the site. "It's proven that kids have so much to offer to education," said Allan Weis, the president and CEO of Advanced Network & Services, the company that founded ThinkQuest...

 Ban Sought on Animal Death Videos! - "Lawmakers and animal rights activists are calling for a ban on the production of ``crush videos,'' films for viewers who get sexually aroused by watching women smashing rats and other small animals..."

 'Blair Witch' film 'found' in Amazon - Apparently, those who discovered the lost "Blair Witch" film footage have been holding out on us. Internet users can view what's being promoted as "newly discovered" footage belonging to the makers of hugely profitable Artisan release "The Blair Witch Project." It's all part of two movie-marketing schemes involving Amazon.com, the largest retailer on the Web. At amazon.com/blairwitch, Web surfers can view via software provided free by RealPlayer several minutes of footage not used in the film or in the upcoming video, which is scheduled for release in about seven weeks. The "Blair Witch" project marks the first time Amazon.com will stream video at its online video store.

 Newspaper Group To Train Journalists - In the newsrooms of the Thomson newspaper group, a new type of reporter is hitting the beat.  The company has been advertising in its own newspapers for local writers, no experience preferred. The would-be reporters will instead get 12 weeks of training at a school created and run by Thomson...

 Digital TV turns off British consumers - British broadcasters have poured hundreds of millions of pounds into marketing campaigns promising to transform our television experiences with digital technology. So why are consumers shutting their eyes and digital TV bosses quitting the industry?

 Sharon Stone Plays Auctioneer - Actress Sharon Stone took on the role of celebrity auctioneer and helped raise a record amount for an abused women's shelter.  Stone was one of the auctioneer's who helped sell dozens of pieces of donated art to raise money for Abuse Counseling and Treatment Inc...

 Memorial fund for Shatner's wife - LOS ANGELES (AP) - A memorial fund for actor William Shatner's wife will help a nonprofit home for women recovering from alcoholism and drug abuse. Shatner, best known as Capt. James Kirk in TV's "Star Trek," found his wife Nerine in the swimming pool of his Studio City home earlier this month. Police termed her death an accidental drowning. Autopsy results were pending, with toxicological tests due in about a month. "I want to make her tragic death meaningful," Shatner said in a statement. "She brought youth, inspiration and passion to everything. She wanted to work with women whose disease was something she fought herself for many years." Donations to the Nerine Shatner Memorial Fund will help the nonprofit Friendly House. Mrs. Shatner, 40, died on Aug. 9.

 Prosecutor To Exhume Sheppard's Body - The Cuyahoga County prosecutor has ordered the exhumation of the wife of Dr. Sam Sheppard, whose murder conviction and later acquittal helped inspire the TV series and movie ``The Fugitive.''  Prosecutor William Mason told The Plain Dealer newspaper that he wants to exhume the body of Marilyn Sheppard to do his own analysis for the upcoming trial in a wrongful imprisonment lawsuit filed by Sheppard's son, Sam Reese Sheppard...

 'Sixth Sense' Tops Box Office Again - "The Sixth Sense'' spooked $24.1 million out of moviegoers at the weekend box office, becoming the first film since the ``Phantom Menace'' to hold the No. 1 spot for three consecutive weeks, according to industry estimates.  The supernatural thriller starring Bruce Willis as a therapist treating a boy who sees dead people has grossed $107.7 million in three weeks.  Different movies had debuted in first place for nine straight weekends since ``Star Wars: Episode I The Phantom Menace'' fell to second place in June...