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When I'm not driving a race car, I'm driving another kind of race car. My "sand" race car.

I've been playing around with off-road vehicles2 ever since I was a kid. Mo-torcycles, dune buggies3, ATVs4, pickup trucks5—they've all been part of our family since I was 7 or 8 years old. I'm still very much involved in it, and, during the off-season6, my hobby is a sandcar—an off-road vehicle designed to play on sand dunes.

My pride and joy is a rear7-engine sandcar that weighs about 1, 600 pounds, is about 37 feet long and is capable of about 750 horsepower. It has a turbocharged8 V-6 Lexus9 en-gine, big brakes10, 19-inches of travel and triple-bypass shocks11. It's got all the latest equipment.

Sandcars are made for tricks12. They're equipped with turning brakes, so when you're doing a wheelie, you can apply the brake to one wheel and turn the car in circles13. They look somewhat like the off-road14 cars you see in Ba-ja races, but they're lighter and not quite strong. A sandcar needs to be light. Sand and weight don't mix. It's always good to stay on top of the sand.

Everything on a top-of-the-line sandcar is really extravagant and high-technol¬ogy15. That's the only way you can make that kind of horsepower. Some of the cars have as much as 800 horsepower. Back in the day, the old Volkswa¬gen16 and Corvair dune buggies had about 80 horsepower. They've come a long way since the 1960s and 70s.

In the winter, we go to Glamis Dunes, an area just east of Brawley in south-eastern California, not far from my parents home in San Diego17. My family and I will take off on a Thursday and stay through the weekend. We'll empty out the toybox and play with sandcars and ATVs. We'll barbecue'8 and just re-lax. It's a family outing for us.

Not long ago, I took my Red Bull Cheever Racing teammate, Ed Carpenter, out to the big dunes for his first ride in a sandcar. He was hanging on to his seat a little bit because he didn't know what to expect19. That's what it's like the first time you go out there, but after you get used to it, riding the dunes is a lot less scary and a lot more fun.

A lot of my friends have boats, but, since I race in the summer, I don't get much use from a boat. In the winter, though, I can spend time with my family, my brother and my parents by doing something we all enjoy. It's a hobby and an escape and relaxation all at the same time.

Some people go jogging, some people go fishing, some people go golfing. I can't explain it, but I just like to play in the sand.

There was a certain man of Zorah, of the tribe of the Danites, whose name was Manoah. His wife was barren, having borne no children. 3And the angel of the LORD appeared to the woman and said to her, "Although you are barren, having borne no children, you shall conceive and bear a son. Now be careful not to drink wine or strong drink, or to eat anything unclean®, sfor you shall conceive and bear a son. No razor is to come on his head, for the boy shall be a nazirite to God from birth. It is he who shall begin to deliver Israel from the hand of the Philistines. " Then the woman came and told her husband, "A man of God came to me, and his appearance was like that of an angel of God, most awe-inspiring; I did not ask him where he came from, and he did not tell me his name; ?but he said to me, 'You shall conceive and bear a son. So then drink no wine or strong drink, and eat nothing unclean, for the boy shall be a nazirite to God from birth to the day of his death. '"

Then Manoah entreated the LORD, and said, UO, LORD, I pray, let the man of God whom you sent come to us again and teach us what we are to do concerning the boy who will be born. " 9God listened to Manoah, and the angel of God came again to the woman as she sat in the field; but her husband Manoah was not with her. So the woman ran quickly and told her husband, "The man who came to me the other day has appeared to me. " Manoah got up and followed his wife, and came to the man and said to him, "Are you the man who spoke to this woman?" And he said, "I am. " Then Manoah said, "Now when your words come true, what is to be the boy's rule of life; what is he to do?" 13The angel of the LORD said to Manoah, "Let the woman give heed to all that I said to her. l4She may not eat of anything that comes from the vine. She is not to drink wine or strong drink, or eat any unclean thing. She is to observe everything that I commanded her. "

Stores and shops are choked with food. Rationing is virtually suspended, and overseas suppliers have been asked to hold back deliveries Yet, instead of joy, there is widespread un-easiness and confusion. Why so food prices keep on rising when there seems to be so much more food about? Is the abundance only temporary, or has it come to stay? Does it mean that we need to think less now about producing more food at home? No one knows what to expect.

The recent growth of export surpluses on the world food market has certainly been unexpectedly great, partly because a strange sequence of two successful grain harvests in North America is now being followed by a third. Most of Britain's overseas suppliers of meat, too, are offering more of this and home production has also risen.

But the effect of-all this on the food situation in this country has been made worse by a simultaneous rise in food prices, due chiefly to the gradual cutting down of government support for food. The sRops are overstocked with food not only because there is more food available, but also because people, frightened by high prices, are buying less of it.

Moreover, the rise in domestic prices has come at a time when world prices have begun to fall, with the result that imported food, with the exception of grain, is often cheaper than the home - produced variety. And now grain prices, too, are falling. Consumers are beginning to ask why they should not be enabled to benefit from this trend.

The significance of these developments is not lost on farmers. The older generation have seen it all happen before. Despite the present price and market guarantees, farmers fear they are about to be squeezed between cheap food imports and a shrinking home market. Present production is running at 51 percent above pre - war levels, and the government has called for an expansion to 60 per cent by 1956; but repeated. Ministerial advice is carrying little weight and the expansion program is not working very well.

Margaret Mead, the anthropologist who won fame describing primitive peoples to more culturally evolved people, sought to explain the young and old to each other in a recent lecture at New York City's American Museum of Natural History. She was sympathetic to the young even those who are making life difficult for the old.

"The young people who are rebelling all around the world, rebelling against whatever forms the governmental and educational systems take,are like the first generation born in a new country,"Miss Mead said, "They are at home here. Their eyes

have always seen satellites in the sky. They have never known a world in which war did not mean annihilation. The young be-lieve that contraception is possible and necessary, and that our capacity to feed the world will not last. "

"They realize,"she declared,"that if the pollution of air and land and water is allowed to go on, this planet will be uninhabitable. They know that,as members of one species living on one planet,all distinctions based on race must vanish. They realize that some form of world organization is necessary. Young people are unable to see the killing of an enemy as different from the murder of one's own children,and they cannot reconcile the efforts to save our own children by every means with our willingness to pour napalm on other people's children. "

"All of us who grew up before the war, "she said,"are im-migrants in time, immigrants from an earlier world living in an age essentially different from anything we knew before. We still hold the seats of power and command the resources and the skills which have been used in the past to keep order and organize large societies. We control the educational systems, the apprenticeship systems,the career ladders up which the young are required to climb,step by step. "

Miss Mead saw "a crisis of faith and hope, a crisis in which most parents are too uncertain to assert old dogmatisms — as they look at the children who they never were — and mast children are unable to learn at all from the parents and elders they will never be." She added that this breach between the young and their parents also existed between youth and their teachers: "There are no bearable responses in the out-of-date, dog-eared textbooks, or the brightly colored, superficially livened-up textbooks that they are asked to study. "

The BBC English Dictionary contains background information on 1 000 people and places prominent in the news since 1988; the Oxford Advanced Learner's Dictionary; Encyclopedic Edition is the OALD plus encyclopedic entries; the Longman Dictionary of English Language and Culture is the LDOCE plus cultural information.

The key fact is that all three dictionaries can be seen to have a distinctly "cultural" as well as language learning content. That being said, the way in which they approach the cultural element is not identical, making direct comparisons between the three difficult.

While there is some common ground between the encyclopedic cultural entries for the Ox ford and Longman dictionaries, there is a clear difference. Oxford lays claim to being encyclo pedic on content whereas Longman distinctly concentrates on the language and culture of the English-speaking world. The Oxford dictionary can therefore stand more vigorous scrutiny, for cultural bias than the Longman publication because the latter does not hesitate about viewinj the rest of the world from the cultural perspectives of the English-speaking world. The culture objectives of the BBC dictionary are in turn more distinct still. Based on an analysis of over 7C million words recorded from the BBC World Service and National Public Radio of Washington over a period of four years, their 1, 000 brief encyclopedic entries are based on people and places that have featured in the news recently. The intended user they have in mind is a regular listener to the World Service who will have a reasonable standard of English and a developed skill in listening comprehension.

In reality, though, the BBC dictionary will be purchased by a far wider range of language learners, as will the other two dictionaries. We will be faced with a situation where many of the users of these dictionaries will at the very least have distinct socio-cultural perspectives and may have world views which are totally opposed and even hostile to those of the West. Advanced learners from this kind of background will not only evaluate a dictionary on how user-friendly it is but will also have definite views about the scope and appropriateness of the various socio-cultural entries.

All high school graduates ought to go, says conventional wisdom and statistical evidence, because college will help them earn more money, become "better" people, and learn to be more responsible citizens than those who don' t go.

But college has never been able to work its magic for everyone. And now that close to half our high school graduates are attending, those who don' t fit the pattern are becoming more numerous, and more obvious. College graduates are selling shoes and driving taxis; college students interfere with each other' s experiments and write false letters of recommendation in the intense competition or admission to graduate school. Others find no stimulation in their studies, and drop out—often encouraged by college administrators.

Some observers say the fault is with the young people themselves—they are spoiled and they are expecting too much. But that' s a condemnation of the students as a whole, and doesn' t explain all campus unhappiness. Others blame the state of the world, and they are partly right. We' ve been told that young people have to go to college because our economy can' t absorb an army of untrained eighteen-year-olds. But disappointed graduates are learning that it can no longer absorb an army of trained twenty-two-year-olds, either.

Some adventuresome educators and campus watchers have openly begun to suggest that college may not be the best, the proper, the only place for every young person after the completion of high school. We may have been looking at all those surveys and statistics upside down, it seems, and through the rosy glow of our own remembered college experiences. Perhaps college doesn' t make people intelligent, ambitious, happy, liberal, or quick to learn things—maybe it' s just the other way around, and intelligent, ambitious, happy, liberal, quick-learning people are merely the ones who have been attracted to college in the first place. And perhaps all those successful college graduates would have been successful whether they had gone to college or not. This is heresy to those of us who have been brought up to believe that if a little schooling is good, more has to be much better. But contrary evidence is beginning to mount up.

William Shakespeare is widely regarded as the greatest English language playwright. He was a literary genius whose works are still read and performed all over the world. Shakespeare, the man, is something of an enigma, though, as very little is known about him. We do know that a William Shakespeare was baptized1 on April 26, 1564, the third of eight children of John and Mary Shakespeare. He lived in the town of Stratford-upon-Avon in England and when he was eighteen, he married a twenty-six-year-old woman named Anne Hathaway. They had three children, including one set of twins. For much of his life, he was employed as an actor in London, and he died in 1616, at the age of fifty-two.

Beyond those basic facts, little else is known about the life of Shakespeare. Even his birthday, April 23, is speculative and is based on the assumption that baptisms at that time took place three days after a baby's birth. In total, 154 sonnets2 and 37 plays, which are grouped into comedies, tragedies, and histories, are attributed to William Shakespeare. However, not one original manuscript has survived; the plays and poems we know today come from a collection known as the First Folio, published in 1623 after Shakespeare's death. The only portrait of him accepted as authentic appears on the title page of the First Folio.

This lack of historical data has caused some literary experts to question whether William Shakespeare really wrote the works attributed to him. Skeptics cite a number of arguments to support their belief that Shakespeare, the playwright, was really someone else. First, fourteen plays have scenes that take place in Italy and demonstrate a detailed knowledge of Italian society and politics. However, there is no record of Shakespeare's ever traveling to Italy. Skeptics also argue that the level of vocabulary and language used in Shakespeare's works reflects the writings of a highly educated person with a good understanding of law, politics, and history. Yet there is no record of Shakespeare's ever attending a university.

If William Shakespeare did not write the great plays and sonnets, then who did? The two most plausible candidates are Edward de Vere, the 17th Earl of Oxford, a contemporary poet and friend of Queen Elizabeth I, and Christopher Marlowe, also born in 1564, a Cambridge graduate, playwright, and—allegedly—Elizabethan3 spy.

Advocates for de Vere argue that his aristocratic background and travels throughout Italy in 1575 make him a likely candidate. However, de Vere died in 1604, and many of the greatest Shakespearean plays, including King Lear and The Tempest, appeared after this date. Also, there is no convincing explanation as to why de Vere might prefer to write using William Shakespeare as his nom de plume*

Around the world people play numerous different ball games. It is not certain how a lot of these games were created, but we do know the history of two of them.

Basketball started in the United States, but was created by a Canadian, James Naismith, in 1891. While teaching RE.1 at Springfield College2 in Massachusetts,3 Naismith got the idea for the game. During the winter, students could rarely exercise outdoors. Seeing this, Naismith got two large baskets and hung them on opposite walls of the school gym, about three meters above the floor. He divided students into two teams. The object of the game was to throw a ball into the basket. Players soon got tired of taking the ball out of the baskets, so Naismith cut holes in the bottoms of them. Many people liked the game and, in 1936, basketball became an Olympic sport.

In 1895, William G. Morgan, a teacher at the YMCA4 in Massachusetts, created a new game for his students. Morgan began with a tennis net. He raised the top of the net two meters above the floor. Players hit a large ball over the net using their hands and wrists. Like tennis, players had to hit the ball so it landed on the other side of the net inside the court lines,5 and not drop it. In 1896, the first game of volleyball was played at Springfield College. This game also became very well-liked and by 1905, it was being played in Canada, Asia, and Cuba. In 1964, volleyball also became an Olympic sport.

When the temperature jumps, we sweat to cool down. When our blood pressure falls, our hearts pound to compensate. As it turns out, though, our natural state is not a steady one. Researchers are finding that everything from blood pressure to brain function varies rhythmically with the cycles of the sun, the moon and seasons. And their insights are yielding new strategies for keeping away such common killers as heart disease and cancer. Only one doctor in 20 has a good knowledge of the growing field of "chronotherapeutics", the strategic use of time (chronos) in medicine. But according to a new American Medical Association poll, three out of four are eager to change that. "The field is exploding," says Michael Smolensky. Doctors used to look at us like, "What spaceship did you guys get off?" Now they're thirst-y to know more.

In medical school, most doctors learn that people with chronic conditions should take their medicine at steady rates. "It's a terrible way to treat disease," says Dr. Richard Martin. For example, asthmatics are most likely to suffer during the night. Yet most patients strive to keep a constant level of medicine in their blood day and night, whether by breathing in on an inhaler four times a day or taking a pill each morning and evening. In recent studies, researchers have found that a large mid-afternoon dose of a bronchodilator (j^^H1 J^^^J) can be as sage as several small doses, and better for preventing nighttime attacks.

If the night belongs to asthma, the dawn belongs to high blood pressure and heart disease. Heart attacks are twice as common at 9 a. m. as at 11 p. m.. Part of the reason is that our blood pressure falls predictably at night, then peaks as we start to work for the day. "Doctors know that," says Dr. Henry Black of Chicago's medical center, "but until now, we haven't been able to do anything about it. " Most blood-pressure drugs provide 18 to 20 hours of relief. But because they're taken in the morning, they're least effective when most needed. "You take your pill at 7 and it's working by 9," says Dr. William White of the University of Connecticut Health Center. "But by that time you're gone through the worst four hours of the day with no protection. " Bedtime dosing would prevent that lapse, but it would also push blood pressure to dangerously low levels during the night.

The government's new cyber-security officials yesterday asked telecommunications companies for help in building a government computer network that would have "no risk of outside penetration"—a task some computer security consultants say is nearly impossible.

Plans for the private network, called Govnet, hinge on whether a reliable network infrastructure can be built at an affordable price, officials said. Computer system consultants said they could not estimate how much the network would cost because of the government's enormous size and security needs. Richard Clarke, who was appointed special adviser to the president for cyberspace security this week, said he believes a more reliable system can be built. Ninety percent of available fiber-optic space is unused and fairly inexpensive to obtain, he said.

Govnet is part of a plan Clarke announced earlier this week "to secure our cyberspace from a range of possible threats, from hackers to criminals to terrorist groups, to foreign nations, which might use cyber-war against us in the future". Govnet would be completely independent from the Internet to help keep out hackers and viruses, according to the government's plan. The request from the General Services Administration asks that telecommunications companies submit proposals about how the network could be built, how much it would cost, and how long it would take to construct.

This year, the current network has been breached by hackers, computer worms and viruses. The system was also roughed up by the "Code Red" computer worm and an attack program called "I Love You". The viruses affected thousands of government computers. Last year a report by the General Accounting Office, an internal government watchdog, found weaknesses in the computer network that could allow terrorists or hackers to "severely damage or disrupt national defense or vital public operations or steal sensitive data". Clarke said the government's current-virtual private network is vulnerable to viruses and denial of service attacks that Govnet would make more difficult to execute.

An internal network, such as the Govnet proposal, is worth investigating but will probably fall to sophisticated hackers, said Amit Yoran, chief executive of the security-services company Riptech Inc. and a former information-security program director at the Defense Department. "It is probably more feasible to implement and strongly enforce global security postures and practices rather than go out and purchase new assets," Yoran said. "Once someone is able to get in, they will find a weak link. When you have a network the size of the government's there will be weak links. Someone will get in. "