LATEST ADDITIONS

Just prior to the morning hour at which most liquor stores open, Don Byron and I are sitting outdoors at a sidewalk cafe on a steamy Park Avenue South (Technology Gulch)when a scene breaks out on the sidewalk.

Byron (head turns and he murmurs): "Oh my god."

A stringy&#150haired, smelly, obviously intoxicated woman staggers after a younger, taller man who's also worse for wear, and hollers in a drunken growl: "I got my own phone now. Yes it is. It works you used it."

Byron (laughing): "It's the metropolitan wino scene. You know what I mean? You know the scene in Firenze, now here it is in New York. It has all the elements: the dirty clothes, the ruddy skin, the formaldehyde lips."

Feel confused by the pace of scientific progress? Ah grasshopper, that is but the first step on the path to enlightenment.

Yup, but this five book list of technological books that matter from the <I>WSJ</I> is a corker. The only book on it that I've read in Dava Sobel's superb <I>Longitude</I>, but if the others match it for page-turning readability, I'll hoover 'em all up.

It <I>is</I> theoretically possible, but they'd have to destroy the original. You go first.

As my buddy Jeff and I were walking around the neighborhood recently, I was struck by how many drop-dead gorgeous high-school age girls there were. Feeling sort of dumb for asking, I said, "Is it my imagination or have girls gotten prettier since we were in high school?"

The linguistic distribution of the generic names for soft drinks.

But the Ace Craft Gen H-4 personal helicopter is pretty darn cool. If you have a Y chromosome, I bet you want one, too.