The women's epée was probably the weakest event at the Remenyik Open. For all of my pool bouts, I was able to get touches just by waiting for my opponents to get their arm out of position or make other obvious errors. My first two direct elimination's were like that.

My third direct elimination looked like it was going to be like that. I was ahead 10-4, and I was feeling very confident, but very confused. I had no idea what I was doing against her, but I knew it was working. I tried to figure out what I was doing, but started losing points. She caught up. I scrambled futilely to suddenly start using strategy for the first time all day. I somehow managed to get two more points, and she somehow managed to tie me. With one minute left she started moving at hyperspeed and got two more points. With six seconds remaining, I should have flèched at her for the point, but I didn't feel confident enough in my flèche.

I made top 8 (ranking 6th out of 36 women). Every year for the Remenyik Open, the Northwestern coach orders a batch of 8 daggers and swords as trophies, so I got a cool dagger handmade in Toledo, Spain.

The middle-class America of my youth was another country. We are now living in a new Gilded Age, as extravagant as the original...

Yet glimpses of the lifestyles of the rich and tasteless don't necessarily add up in people's minds to a clear picture of the tectonic shifts that have taken place in the distribution of income and wealth in this country. My sense is that few people are aware of just how much the gap between the very rich and the rest has widened over a relatively short period of time. In fact, even bringing up the subject exposes you to charges of ''class warfare,'' the ''politics of envy'' and so on. And very few people indeed are willing to talk about the profound effects -- economic, social and political -- of that widening gap. Yet you can't understand what's happening in America today without understanding the extent, causes and consequences of the vast increase in inequality that has taken place over the last three decades, and in particular the astonishing concentration of income and wealth in just a few hands.

...Reading all these euphemisms, I was reminded of Monty Python's parrot: he's pushing up the daisies, his metabolic processes are history, he's joined the choir invisible. That is, he's dead. And the Bush administration lies a lot.

Paul Krugman joined The New York Times in 1999 as a columnist on the Op-Ed Page and continues as Professor of Economics and International Affairs at Princeton University. Krugman received his B.A. from Yale University in 1974 and his Ph.D. from MIT in 1977. He has taught at Yale, MIT and Stanford. At MIT he became the Ford International Professor of Economics.

Item 1: On Oct. 1, 2002, The Tech (America's foremost college newspaper) reported on page 1 that the Defense Department unattributably engaged in what is reasonably characterized by the victim as "character assassination" with respect to Scott Ritter, former chief weapons inspector for the U.N. Special Commission in Iraq by claiming Ritter had relinquished his U.S. citizenship and was now a Russian citizen. One wonders why The Tech was able to beat The New York Times (and every other journalist in the world) and why no one else reported the matter.

Item 2: On Oct. 4, 2002, The Tech reported on its front page that the MIT Administration missed a great opportunity to highlight the overwhelming superiority of its faculty by asking the school bookstore to remove from a prominent location T-shirts clearly praising the faculty by observing that the Institute Has The Finest Professors through use of the acronym "IHTFP." Given the number of Nobel laureates on the faculty one would think the Administration would be a little prouder of that fact.

Doctor Bob had slept with one of his patients and had felt guilty all day long. No matter how much he tried to forget about it, he couldn't. The guilt and sense of betrayal was overwhelming.

Every once in a while he'd hear that soothing voice within himself, trying to reassure him: "Bob, don't worry about it. You aren't the first doctor to sleep with one of their patients and you won't be the last. And you're single. Let it go...."

But invariably the other voice would bring him back to reality: "Bob, you're a vet."

Filmmaker Godfrey Reggio is no great fan of technology.

Maybe you can help.

If you are a Time Traveler from Dimension D1263GT10, year 2008 or Dimension D2044GT5, year 2432 AND/OR in possession of the Dimensional Warp Generator #52 4350a wrist watch, the Carbon Copy Replica model #52 4350 2 or similar technology I need a RELIABLE SOURCE! I will also need a carbon based time transducing capacitor or temporal displacement unit. ... I prefer someone with access to teleportation.

2002-10-03 The 2002 Ig Nobel Prize Winners

All the new winners, like all their predecessors, have done things that first make people LAUGH, then make them THINK. Here are the 2002 Ig Nobellians:

BIOLOGY
"Courtship Behaviour of Ostriches Towards Humans Under Farming Conditions in Britain."

PHYSICS
for demonstrating that beer froth obeys the mathematical Law of Exponential Decay.

INTERDISCIPLINARY RESEARCH
...for performing a comprehensive survey of human belly button lint -- who gets it, when, what color, and how much.

CHEMISTRY
for gathering many elements of the periodic table, and assembling them into the form of a four-legged periodic table table.

MATHEMATICS
"Estimation of the Total Surface Area in Indian Elephants."

LITERATURE
The Effects of Pre-Existing Inappropriate Highlighting on Reading Comprehension."

PEACE
for promoting peace and harmony between the species by inventing Bow-Lingual, a computer-based automatic dog-to-human language translation device.

HYGIENE
for inventing a washing machine for cats and dogs.

ECONOMICS
The executives, corporate directors, and auditors of Enron, Tyco, WorldCom... [you get the idea] for adapting the mathematical concept of imaginary numbers for use in the business world.

MEDICINE
"Scrotal Asymmetry in Man and in Ancient Sculpture."