General Memetics Corporation, baby. Don't you know it.

Word-of-mouth marketing has become a new trend in efforts to reach young consumers. Thousands of unpaid volunteers create a "buzz" about certain products, which they get for free. Corporations trying to use word-of-mouth marketing pay six figures to companies that provide these "buzz agents."

Word-of-Mouth Marketing Creates a Buzz

Check it.

Herb Alpert and Sergio Mendes, long associated with the carefree pop music of the 1960s, are back in record stores after long absences.

Alpert broke into pop consciousness with his band the Tijuana Brass, whose song "Lollipops and Roses," from the1965 album Whipped Cream and Other Delights, found its way into millions of American homes.

Forty years after helping add exotica to the American music scene, Alpert has collaborated with heavyweights of electronic music for a disc of remixed versions of his songs. The new album is called Rewhipped.

Sergio Mendes, Alpert's Brazilian protege, is following a similar path with will.i.am, of the pop-rap group the Black Eyed Peas. The pair have updated hits by Mendes' group Brazil 66 for the CD Timeless.

In addition to will.i.am, Mendes worked with Stevie Wonder, India.Arie and Jill Scott, among others. The songs range from old classics like "Mas Que Nada" to the new "Please Baby Don't," written and sung by John Legend.

Electronic Exotica: Alpert and Mendes, Remixed

(This article is a preview of this weekend's Times magazine.)

Lee can sound almost evangelical when he talks about the liberating power of technology. The Internet, he says, will level the playing field for China's enormous rural underclass; once the country's small villages are connected, he says, students thousands of miles from Shanghai or Beijing will be able to access online course materials from M.I.T. or Harvard and fully educate themselves. Lee has been with Google since only last summer, but he wears the company's earnest, utopian ethos on his sleeve: when he was hired away from Microsoft, he published a gushingly emotional open letter on his personal Web site, praising Google's mission to bring information to the masses. He concluded with an exuberant equation that translates as "youth + freedom + equality + bottom-up innovation user focus + don't be evil = The Miracle of Google."

I haven't read this yet.

Google in China: The Big Disconnect

President Bush's new chief of staff said it was time to "refresh and reenergize the team" and told senior White House aides who might be thinking about quitting this year to go ahead and leave now.

Joshua B. Bolten laid down his directive at his first meeting with top presidential aides. Bolten replaced Andrew H. Card Jr., Bush's staff chief for the first five years of his presidency.

NYT coverage is New Chief of Staff Sends Message: The White House Exits Are Open.

"It's a smart, savvy move," said Kenneth M. Duberstein, a Republican lobbyist. "It's the symbolism and it's the message and it's the reality: they're serious about a revitalized, re-energized team."

Bush's Chief of Staff Invites Aides to Leave

Comedy Central TV came to Orange County, but the joke was on those attending a panel discussion they thought was being filmed for a serious documentary.

Some locals are furious about the ruse, worried that they might end up looking foolish on national television.

Panelists Duped by Fake News Show Are Not Amused

Eberhardt Rechtin, who played a key role in the development of space technology during the Cold War, died Friday at Torrance Memorial Hospital after lengthy battles with several illnesses. He was 80.

Rechtin, of Rolling Hills Estates, was chief executive of El Segundo-based Aerospace Corp. for 10 years, chief engineer of Hewlett-Packard Corp. and director of the Pentagon's Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency, among other positions that placed him at the forefront of U.S. national security. He later joined the faculty at USC, creating the school's first program in aerospace architecture.

Eberhardt Rechtin, 80; Helped Develop US Space Technology

"I was both enthusiastic and doubtful," he says. "The old school part of me was brainwashed into thinking that writing on the Internet was a form of slumming or self-cheapening, kind of like publishing your own book at Kinko's." On the other hand, the editor assigned to the project was Meghan O'Rourke, formerly a fiction editor at the New Yorker and hardly an illiterate Web nerd.

The result is "The Unbinding," a serialized Web novel and a rumination on technology today, its first segment posted at Slate.com in March with postings continuing twice weekly through June. Kirn depicts technology as a looming Orwellian force, spying on the citizenry, turning our insides outward; yet Big Brother is not an ominous other but we, the people: We've internalized the totalitarian apparatus, and thus technology becomes at once our attempt at salvation, connection, love, meaning, and the vehicle of our own oppression. The loss of privacy makes for comedy, at first, and then for a sense of foreboding as trampled boundaries refuse to reappear.

In short: Everybody's spying on everybody (including themselves).

Weaving a tangled web

Los Angeles prosecutors filed embezzlement, grand theft, drunk driving and weapons charges Monday against a former European video game executive, whose involvement in the crash of a rare Ferrari Enzo in Malibu two months ago has mushroomed into a case filled with international intrigue.

WaPo coverage is The High-Octane Story of the Felon and the Ferrari.

A Pileup of Charges in the Case of the Totaled Ferrari

Much of their analysis strikes us as solid -- but the rebellion is problematic nonetheless. It threatens the essential democratic principle of military subordination to civilian control -- the more so because a couple of the officers claim they are speaking for some still on active duty.

If they are successful in forcing Mr. Rumsfeld's resignation, they will set an ugly precedent. Will future defense secretaries have to worry about potential rebellions by their brass, and will they start to choose commanders according to calculations of political loyalty?

At the same time, David Broder says:

Seeing these senior officers take this public stand is unprecedented; even in Vietnam, with all the misgivings among the fighting men, we saw no such open defiance.

Rumsfeld and President Bush insist that the manpower and strategy have been exactly what the commanders in the field thought best, but now general after general is speaking out to challenge that claim. The situation cries out for serious congressional oversight and examination; hearings are needed as soon as Congress returns. These charges have to be answered convincingly -- or Rumsfeld has to go.

The Generals' Revolt

For five years, the most wildly popular talent contest on American television has been dominated -- thoroughly, totally and completely -- by kids from Southern Hicksville, USA. Seven of the eight top-two finishers in the first four years were from states that once formed the Confederacy, and five of the seven remaining finalists this season are, too.

... And yet, "Idol" does terribly in Knoxville, Houston and Nashville, the official home of country music.

Who Put The Y'all In 'Idol'?