The Shoveller: We're not your classic heros. We're the other guys.
The Shoveller: God's given me a gift. I shovel well. I shovel very well.
The Shoveller: We struck down evil with the mighty sword of teamwork and the hammer of not bickering.

The Sphinx: He who questions training only trains himself at asking questions.

The Shoveller: Yeah, I've heard of this guy. He's a big crime-fighter down east.
Mr. Furious: What's his power?
The Blue Raja: Well, he's terribly mysterious.
Mr. Furious: That's his power, he's mysterious?
The Blue Raja: He's TERRIBLY mysterious, actually.

Isamu Kaneko, a 33-year-old assistant professor at the prestigious University of Tokyo, was arrested on suspicion of developing and offering free downloads through his file-sharing software called Winny.

There is a subculture of librarians that could make a significant impact on the profession. They are women and men, youthful and experienced alike, who all share one thing: a passion for solving problems by creating software.

They are hacker librarians.

The Journal of Social Structure is designed to facilitate timely dissemination of state-of-the-art results in the interdisciplinary research area of social structure -- on the patterning of social linkages among actors.

In the last half-millennium, great revolutions have swept the Western world. Each has brought profound change. And each is too little studied or appreciated today.

To leaf through this sweeping, densely detailed but lightly written survey of the last 500 years is to ride a whirlwind of world-changing events.

A book of enormous riches, it's sprinkled with provocations.

Only after a lifetime of separate studies covering a broad territory could a writer create with such ease the synthesis displayed in this magnificent volume.

In a society in which subtlety is prized above all, face-to-face confrontation is avoided, insults can be leveled with verbal nuances and hidden meanings are found everywhere, there is one place where the Japanese go to bare their souls and engage in verbal combat: Channel 2.

News media follow it; big companies meticulously monitor it; the police react to it. Language is raw, and comments are blunt, often cruel and hurled with studied cynicism.

Channel 2 is run by a single person and its contents are shaped entirely by the individual users who post comments.

"Channel 2 has become a brand name in this society and has an influence that cannot be measured by numbers."

Founder Hiroyuki Nishimura, 27, said he was bored with his Web site and did not believe it was worth enough to attract buyers.

Officials have found a catalog of "sadistic, blatant and wanton criminal abuses" at the hands of American captors. This horrible scandal represents the most serious crisis for the coalition since the war on terrorism began.

As America finds itself ever more deeply embroiled in Central Asia and Iraq, it need only look at the experience of its coalition partner, Britain, in Afghanistan to learn about the hubris and transience of empire.

"I have seen this country, sacred to the harmony of hallowed solitude, desecrated by the rude intrusion of senseless stranger boors, vile in habits, infamous in vulgar tastes."