The match's leaden pace (one move every twenty-four hours) ensured participation was limited to shut-ins who could devote the entire summer to the enterprise.

"wrong" buttons According to Reuters, a junior trader at an undisclosed German-based financial institution cost his company $17 million when he "pressed the wrong buttons on his computer" during a training exercise. The move apparently broadcast news that his firm was looking to sell $19 billion worth of German bond futures contracts. Presumably, the employee failed the training exercise, entitled "How Not to Press the Wrong Buttons on Your Computer."

robotic canines Last summer, Sony revealed plans to release a robot dog, available to the public over the net for the attractive price of $2,500. The dog, named Aibo (Japanese for "pal"), is neither fury nor realistic but can sit, beg, wag its tail and respond to electronic commands emitted by remote control. Sony hopes Aibo will allow it to capture the untapped segment of the pet-owner market that finds real dogs too "warm, friendly and lovable."

Santa Claus Children's hearts were warmed the world over last Christmas Eve when, for t he first time ever, Santa's journey was monitored via the web. The idea came courtesy of Norad, the very same North America Aerospace Defense Command that normally spends its time scanning the skies for missiles. Turns out that once a year since the fifties, Norad has used its extensive network of surveillance satellites to follow Santa's trek. This year, however, new technology allowed Norad to display the Red-Suited One's progress on its own sites. Reports that one insider whispered, "It gives us our first real hope of finally blowing that fat bastard out of the sky," are patently false.

synonyms for homosexual In January, Merriam-Webster was forced to temporarily take its online thesaurus offline after receiving complaints that some of the preffered synonyms for the word "homosexual" included fag, faggot, fruit, homo, invert and queer. Also listed were the related words fairy, nance, pansy, queen and swish, as well as the more arcane but presumably no less offensive "uranist" and "uranian", the latter defined in Merriam-Webster's dictionary as "of or relating to the planet Uranus." We leave you to puzzle out the implications.