Nearly 150 people had gathered outside the cemetery of Westminster Presbyterian Church, but the man known as the "Poe toaster" was, as usual, able to avoid being spotted by the crowd, said Jeff Jerome, curator of the Poe House and Museum. The tribute takes place every Jan. 19 - the anniversary of Poe's birth. The visitor did not leave a note, Jerome said, electing not to respond to questions raised in the past year about the history and authenticity of the tribute.

*****

Jerome invites a handful of Poe enthusiasts to join him inside the church every year but withholds details of the tribute in an effort to help the toaster maintain his anonymity. He said the visitor no longer wears the wide-brimmed hat and scarf he donned in the past. In 1993, the visitor left a note reading, "The torch will be passed." A later note said the man, who apparently died in 1998, had handed the tradition on to his two sons.

This year's visitor was the same man who has come to the grave site many times in the past, Jerome said. "We recognize him from his build, the way he walks," he said. "It would be very easy for us, visually, to see if this were a different person."

In a complaint filed yesterday in U.S. District Court in Los Angeles, Hilton alleges that Hallmark has, among other transgressions, misappropriated her image and invaded her privacy with the card, a copy of which you'll find below. According to the lawsuit, the greeting card, which purports to show Hilton's "first day as a waitress," was first distributed earlier this year and remains on sale. Hilton is seeking at least $500,000 in actual damages and a permanent injunction barring Hallmark from further exploitation of her name and likeness.

Editor's Note: The clues in this puzzle are a little more playful and involve more wordplay than in a typical crossword. You have been warned. -- WILL SHORTZ

We can certainly see this product gaining favor in hospitals and offices run by germophobes, and the like. It's antimicrobial paper, and it's being brought to market by a company called Domtar.

A special silver compound coats the paper, preventing it from growing bacteria, fungus, mold, mildew, and even odors. Moreover, it keeps the dreaded staphylococcus aureus away, that diabolical MRSA that we've heard about so much lately.

You don't need any special equipment to store or use this paper, which can sit on the shelf without festering for much, much longer than normal paper. It's white, of course, and has a high amount of brightness, which should give you a good feeling about using it for presentations as well.

In the Medieval period, artists and scribes often used a metal stylus in order to draw on a specially prepared paper surface. Generally known as Metalpoint, or Silverpoint when the stylus was made of silver, artists such as Leonardo da Vinci, Dürer and Rembrandt all used this technique. http://www.silverpointweb.com/index.html gives a lot of information about how it works.

The pens we sell are a modern version (and do not use silver). The solid metal 'nib' consists of a metal alloy, that leaves a mark on most types of paper. If you use the sort of paper typically used in printers and photocopiers, the pen leaves a mark that looks as if it was made by a pencil. However the line will not smudge, and cannot be rubbed out.

Since there is no ink, there is nothing to dry out, so the pen will work just as well in 25 years time as it does today. And of course it never needs sharpening!

Usage: 'Google' as noun referring to, well, us.

Example: "I just love Google, they're soooo cute and cuddly and adorable and awesome!"

Our lawyers say: Good. Very, very good. There's no question here that you're referring to Google Inc. as a company. Use it widely, and hey, tell a friend.

Usage: 'Google' as verb referring to searching for information on, um, Google.

Example: "I googled him on the well-known website Google.com and he seems pretty interesting."

Our lawyers say: Well, we're happy at least that it's clear you mean searching on Google.com. As our friends at Merriam-Webster note, to "Google" means "to use the Google search engine to find information about (as a person) on the World Wide Web."

Usage: 'Google' as verb referring to searching for information via any conduit other than Google.

Example: "I googled him on Yahoo and he seems pretty interesting."

Our lawyers say: Bad. Very, very bad. You can only "Google" on the Google search engine. If you absolutely must use one of our competitors, please feel free to "search" on Yahoo or any other search engine.

The 2005 online auction raised $150,000 for the nonprofit organization devoted to protecting freedom of information, expression and petition.

It also thrilled nearly two dozen fans who paid to see their names in print, according to David Greene, executive director.

Linda-gail Case, 52, a self-proclaimed "tried and true" Nora Roberts fan, spent $6,800 last year to see her name in Roberts' latest novel, Angels Fall.

For Case, it's been "a hoot" reading about Linda-gail, a waitress who has a crush on the town's bad boy.

Case said that seeing her unusual name in print is distracting, and she often needs to reread chapters.

The device, called AMOEBA (Advanced Multiple Organized Experimental Basin), consists of 50 water wave generators encircling a cylindrical tank 1.6 meters in diameter and 30 cm deep (about the size of a backyard kiddie pool). The wave generators move up and down in controlled motions to simultaneously produce a number of cylindrical waves that act as pixels. The pixels, which measure 10 cm in diameter and 4 cm in height, are combined to form lines and shapes. AMOEBA is capable of spelling out the entire roman alphabet, as well as some simple kanji characters. Each letter or picture remains on the water surface only for a moment, but they can be produced in succession on the surface every 3 seconds.

Researchers at Akishima Laboratories have developed similar devices in the past that used waves to draw pictures on the surface of water, but those devices had trouble producing letters with straight lines (such as the letter K). Additionally, it took the previous devices up to 15 minutes of data input time to produce each letter.

The newly developed technology uses improved calculation methods for controlling the wave generators, relying on formulas known as Bessel functions. In addition to being able to draw letters consisting of straight lines, the input time has been drastically reduced to between 15 and 30 seconds for each letter.

For each word, we performed a Yahoo image search and retrieved 50 image results. (If fewer than 50 images were found, we deemed the word too obscure and discarded it.) Then for each image we averaged the values of the pixels in the middle and then averaged those 50 results. We brightened the colors slightly for display.

Wikipedia is the online encyclopedia that "anyone can edit." Unless you want to edit the entries on Albert Einstein, human rights in China or Christina Aguilera. Wikipedia's come-one, come-all invitation to write and edit articles, and the surprisingly successful results, have captured the public imagination. But it is not the experiment in freewheeling collective creativity it might seem to be, because maintaining so much openness inevitably involves some tradeoffs.

At its core, Wikipedia is not just a reference work but also an online community that has built itself a bureaucracy of sorts — one that, in response to well-publicized problems with some entries, has recently grown more elaborate. It has a clear power structure that gives volunteer administrators the authority to exercise editorial control, delete unsuitable articles and protect those that are vulnerable to vandalism.

Those measures can put some entries outside of the "anyone can edit" realm. The list changes rapidly, but as of yesterday, the entries for Einstein and Ms. Aguilera were among 82 that administrators had "protected" from all editing, mostly because of repeated vandalism or disputes over what should be said. Another 179 entries — including those for George W. Bush, Islam and Adolf Hitler — were "semi-protected," open to editing only by people who had been registered at the site for at least four days. (See a List of Protected Entries)

While these measures may appear to undermine the site's democratic principles, Jimmy Wales, Wikipedia's founder, notes that protection is usually temporary and affects a tiny fraction of the 1.2 million entries on the English-language site. "Protection is a tool for quality control, but it hardly defines Wikipedia," Mr. Wales said. "What does define Wikipedia is the volunteer community and the open participation."

The Derveni papyrus, a fourth-century B.C. religious discourse, was charred in an ancient funeral pyre, making portions of the text unreadable. Now experts from Brigham Young University in Provo, Utah, are using high-tech methods to expose the blackened script, which could help complete existing partial translations of the document.

An international team funded by the National Geographic Society recently used similar techniques to authenticate the lost Gospel of Judas. (National Geographic News is part of the National Geographic Society.) Specifically, a technique known as multispectral imaging may be able to reveal as much as 10 or 20 percent of the scorched sections of the Derveni scroll, researchers said last week.

NASA developed multispectral imaging so that telescopes could see through space dust and gases to peer further into the cosmos. The method involves taking multiple images of the same subject using different light wavelengths. Brigham Young scientists are using the technique to filter out various unwanted light frequencies and find the wavelength that makes black text visible against the darkened background. Archaeologist Polyxeni Veleni is director of Greece's Archaeological Museum of Thessaloniki, where the manuscript is currently housed. "We were now able to read even the most carbonized sections, as there were pieces that were completely blackened and nobody could make out whether there were letters on them," he told the Associated Press.

Google Inc. co-founder Sergey Brin acknowledged Tuesday the dominant Internet company has compromised its principles by accommodating Chinese censorship demands. He said Google is wrestling to make the deal work before deciding whether to reverse course.

Meeting with reporters near Capitol Hill, Brin said Google had agreed to the censorship demands only after Chinese authorities blocked its service in that country. Google's rivals accommodated the same demands — which Brin described as "a set of rules that we weren't comfortable with" — without international criticism, he said. "We felt that perhaps we could compromise our principles but provide ultimately more information for the Chinese and be a more effective service and perhaps make more of a difference," Brin said.

*****

Brin visited Washington to ask U.S. senators to approve a plan that would prevent telephone and cable companies from collecting premium fees from companies such as Google, Microsoft and Yahoo! for faster delivery of their services. Brin, dressed casually in jeans, sneakers and a black sport jacket, said he wasn't sure whether he changed any lawmakers' minds. Google's China-approved Web service omits politically sensitive information that might be retrieved during Internet searches, such as details about the 1989 suppression of political unrest in Tiananmen Square. Its agreement with China has provoked considerable criticism from human rights groups. "Perhaps now the principled approach makes more sense," Brin said.

The Bookman is a bookshelf in the shape of a man and is a highly decorative piece of furniture as well as a sculpture.

Designed by East Anglian artist Kazmierz Szmauz who also designed the CDMan, the DVDMan and Videoman. However, as booksellers we regard Bookman as his highest achievement. The Bookman holds about 100 books and looks most splendid when they are leatherbound books which we can also supply.

He measures 70 inches high by 45 inches wide and is made from Mahogany, although other woods can be used. Shelves are best adapted to books beneath 8 inches in height.

Some 6,500 languages spoken in the world today. And, according to the 2000 census, you can hear at least 92 of them on the streets of New York. You can probably hear more; the census lumps some of them together simply as "other."

But by the end of the century, linguists predict, half of the world's languages will be dead, victims of globalization. English is the major culprit, slowly extinguishing the other tongues that lie in its path. Esther Allen, a professor of modern languages at Seton Hall University, calls English "the most invasive linguistic species in the world." Spanish and Hindi are also spreading, subsuming the dialects of South American Indians, and of the Indian subcontinent.

*****

English may be eating up other languages, but paradoxically translation into English is vital for their survival, Mr. Rushdie said. "People are not going to learn Serbian," he said. "If Serbian writers are going to survive in the world, they will have to be translated into English."

*****

"Some languages are dying and some are appearing," she said. "That is a much deeper and more interesting dynamic." Maybe, Ms. Ugresic said, the new language of globalization will be "Smurfentaal," a kind of slang with bits of Dutch and other languages, among them Moroccan, Turkish, Serbo-Croatian and Spanish, spoken by young people on the streets of Amsterdam. "Every honest linguist will tell you the preservation of language is a lost battle," Ms. Ugresic said, "because you can't deal with language dogmatically. Language is a living thing. "So let it go."

1. Rolling Stone - Jan. 22, 1981 - John Lennon and Yoko Ono lying in bed
2. Vanity Fair - Aug. 1991 - Nude pregnant Demi Moore
3. Esquire - April 1968 - "The Passion of Muhammad Ali": Ali with arrows in his body
4. The New Yorker - March 29, 1976 - Drawing of New York from Hudson River and rest of the country to Pacific Ocean
5. Esquire - May 1969 - Andy Warhol drowning in Campbell's soup can - "The decline and collapse of American avant-garde"
6. The New Yorker - Sept. 24, 2001 - 9/11 - Twin towers drawing in all black against a gray skyline
7. National Lampoon - January 1973 - "If you don't buy this magazine, we'll kill this dog" - Man pointing gun at terrified dog
8. Esquire - October 1966 - "Oh my God - we hit a little girl."
9. Harper's Bazaar - Sept. 1992 - Linda Evangelista holding up the letter "A" in magazine's title: "Enter the Era of Elegance"
10. National Geographic - June 1985 - Afghan girl - "Haunted eyes of an Afghan refugee’s fears"

Readers craving Homer, Baudelaire or Lewis Carroll in the middle of the night can get a quick fix at one of the French capital's five newly installed book vending machines.

"We have customers who know exactly what they want and come at all hours to get it," said Xavier Chambon, president of Maxi-Livres, a low-cost publisher and bookstore chain that debuted the vending machines in June. "It's as if our stores were open 24 hours a day."

Stocked with 25 of Maxi-Livres bestselling titles, the machines cover the gamut of literary genres and tastes. Classics such as "The Odyssey" by Homer and Carroll's "Alice in Wonderland" share the limited shelf space with practical must-haves such as "100 Delicious Couscous" and "Verb Conjugations."

"Our biggest vending machine sellers are 'The Wok Cookbook' and a French-English dictionary," said Chambon, who added that poet Charles Baudelaire's "Les Fleurs du Mal" - "The Flowers of Evil" - also is "very popular." Regardless of whether they fall into the category of high culture or low, all books cost a modest $2.45.

The 30ft (9m) sculpture, The Writer, will be on Parliament Hill for four months before returning to Italy.

The tribute to the loneliness of writing is meant to inspire visitors to the heath, which has associations with writers Keats and Coleridge.

Leslie Mare, from the Corporation of London which runs the heath, said: "People seem to love it or hate it".

"Heteroflexible" is someone who is usually -- but not always -- heterosexual.

"Supersize," the fast food menu word for big portions, can now be both an adjective and a verb, as in "supersize me."

And to "go commando" means "to wear no underpants."