Gone is the bespectacled, plaid-shirted, pizza-stained wretch who guzzles soda while fumbling through cyberspace. Astrakhan wears leather, dyes his hair blonde and dons strawberry-tinted sunglasses.

"Human rights are no reason to interfere in the internal affairs of a state," Russian Foreign Minister Igor Ivanov protested last week, offering the same argument that Russia and Yugoslav President Slobodan Milosevic made during last spring's NATO air war against the Serbian attempt at "ethnic cleansing" in Kosovo.

Those financial analysts who wonder what will happen to News Corp when Murdoch falls off his perch should stop worrying: he intends to live for ever.

When I was in college, I briefly dated a young man who made me promise not to tell his father that I was half-Japanese.

"I don't want to do any goddamn sightseeing unless they insist," he says. "I don't want to go to the Forbidden City. I don't want to go to the Great Wall. I want to be very cold turkey."

Many of the self-proclaimed anarchists in black carried cameras along with their crowbars, hammers and spray paint. Smashing a plate-glass window was extra fun, apparently, with time to pose afterward.

At a recent news conference, he proclaimed that he doesn't think he is descended from a baboon, which prompted the Tulsa World to bluntly call Keating an "ass" on its opinion page.

Re: Jar Jar Binks: Meesa love him! To his critics, I have this to say: "How wude!" I thought this space J.J. was "Dyno-mite!" I was so amused by his pratfalls, I wish they had digitally inserted him into "Eyes Wide Shut" while they were at it!

Artist Hirst has since become quite well-known for, among other things, neatly slicing up animal carcasses and displaying them in tanks of formaldehyde.