Mathematicians John G. Kemeny and Thomas E. Kurtz had been trying to make computing more accessible to their undergraduate students. One problem was that available computing languages like Fortran and Algol were so complex that you really had to be a professional to use them.

So the two professors started writing easy-to-use programming languages in 1956. First came Dartmouth Simplified Code, or Darsimco. Next was the Dartmouth Oversimplified Programming Experiment, or Dope, which was too simple to be of much use. But Kemeny and Kurtz used what they learned to craft the Beginner's All-Purpose Symbolic Instruction Code, or Basic, starting in 1963.

The college's General Electric GE-225 mainframe started running a Basic compiler at 4 a.m. on May 1, 1964. The new language was simple enough to use, and powerful enough to make it desirable. Students weren't the only ones who liked Basic, Kurtz wrote: "It turned out that easy-to-learn-and-use was also a good idea for faculty members, staff members and everyone else."

And it's not just for mainframes. Paul Allen and Bill Gates adapted it for personal computers in 1975, and it's still widely used today to teach programming and as a, well, basic language. (Reacting to the proliferation of complex Basic variants, Kemeny and Kurtz formed a company in the 1980s to develop True BASIC, a lean version that meets ANSI and ISO standards.)

The other problem Kemeny and Kurtz attacked was batch-processing, which made for long waits between the successive runs of a debugging process. Building on work by Fernando Corbató, they completed the Dartmouth Time Sharing System, or DTSS, later in 1964. Like Basic, it revolutionized computing.

Ever the innovator, Kemeny served as president of Dartmouth, 1970-81, introducing coeducation to the school in 1972 after more than two centuries of all-male enrollment.

From bare-chested marvels to perpetual protesters with crazy signs, these colorful people are being turned into unlikely internet celebrities by a new breed of local websites that use social networks, citizen reporting, mapping mashups and a healthy dose of humor to chronicle their subjects' activities.

In Manhattan, the Find He-Man blog publishes readers' daily sightings of an outrageously muscular, consistently shirtless man who bears a distinct resemblance to the comic book hero.

"He's kind of a local celebrity," says Paul Briganti, a student at the School of Visual Arts who launched the blog with his comedy group, beast. "It started because I was at a bank talking to a friend about this guy and someone overheard me and knew who we were talking about. Then I started to realize that pretty much everyone knew who he was, so we decided to start this kind of fan community."

The sites track their respective urban eccentrics with a paparazzo-style intensity usually reserved for movie stars. It's a model similar to Gawker Stalker, a celebrity-mapping site that caused controversy when it launched in 2006. While Gawker Stalker uses a Google Maps mashup to track stars spotted on New York City streets in real time, tracking local color online is almost as old as the web itself. The Knowhere Guide, an alternative U.K. travel guide from the early 1990s, included user-contributed sightings of "local heroes" that frequently features street eccentrics.

The Find He-Man blog brings in an average of 10,000 to 15,000 visits a month and receives enough He-Man sightings to post frequent updates, which the editors plot on a Platial map mashup and embellish with a hefty dash of humor. A typical entry: "April 17 -- Jenn saw He-Man at a drum circle in Washington Square Park playing the bongos. The instant His hand made contact with the rawhide, a huge blast erupted that cleared out most of NYU's campus."

Lele McLeod says she modeled her Seattle Notables blog, which tracks local characters rather than Hollywood stars, on Gawker Stalker.

"We don't have many celebrities here," says McLeod, co-owner of Seattle's McLeod Residence art gallery.

Instead, Seattle Notables tracks local residents like Slats, aka "the Original Hipster," a quirky musician and nightclub aficionado noticeable for his Ramones-esque leather outfit and scraggly mop of brown hair hidden under a broad-brimmed black hat.

"You see him all over town, at every bar," says McLeod. "He's kind of like a Where's Waldo."

Readers submit sightings of Slats and other notables like Link the Zelda Hunter, a local resident with a fashion sense reminiscent of Nintendo's green-clad protagonist, and Juan the Frye Apartment Guy, who has spent the better part of the last two decades parked on a downtown street corner yelling that the Seattle Police, the local housing authority and Fidel Castro conspired to steal his apartment. The sightings are plotted on a Yahoo map mashup, and readers link to photos on Flickr.

Slats, who is also the subject of a Where's Slats? forum on the website of alternative weekly The Stranger, seems somewhat put off by the attention, but has developed a healthy, celebrity-style tolerance for his pesky fan base.

"It's kind of strange when I go in a bar and everyone's taking a picture of me, or I walk down the street and they're yelling my name," says Slats, whose real name is Chris. "I'm just living my life and all of a sudden it's like, 'Whoa, what's going on?'"

Unlike fame-seeking urban eccentrics such as New York's Naked Cowboy, the subjects of Seattle Notables seem confounded by, or oblivious to, their internet infamy.

"I don't think Juan the Frye Apartment Guy wants to be a celebrity in any way," says McLeod. "He just wants people to know the Seattle police stole his apartment, and he's kind of oblivious to all this attention."

Both Juan and Link have a presence on MySpace, which has become a popular gathering place for fans of other cities' urban eccentrics, such as Papa Smurf of Detroit and Robert "Pinky" Valentino of Santa Cruz, California.

Are we headed toward a Web 2.0-fueled world of microcelebrity where every semi-interesting human is worthy of fan clubs, rabid devotees and citizen paparazzi? To hear Slats explain his unlikely fame, he might as well already be Lindsay Lohan or Britney Spears.

"It's amazing how much time people spend on this," says Slats. "I thought it was gonna die down by now, but it hasn't stopped. I get kind of mad when people write things that aren't true, but, you know, people are gonna write whatever they want to write and you just gotta roll with it. I try not to take it too seriously."

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You don't need to be all doom and gloom about it.

Sure, the U.S. could be in a recession. Consumer confidence is declining. Food and gas are so expensive it's more cost-effective to stay home and diet.

But the advertising business (of all things!) is actually benefiting from the painful spectacle of the traditional media landscape fragmenting into shards. The internet is continuing to oust broadcast TV, print and radio from their once-secure position as the automatic repository for ad dollars, and the complex environment that’s been rattling the advertising and media industries could actually function as an economic buoy during these hard times.

Here's how it works. Advertisers and the companies that service them now need a multitude of ways to drill their messages into the public consciousness. That desperation plays right into the hands of the giant holding companies that now own everything from traditional ad agencies to media planning and buying businesses to PR firms to promotions specialists to digital advertising agencies with expertise in hot, new areas like search-engine optimization.

Clearly there's pain; but it's not being evenly distributed right now.

Just compare Google's results and those of The New York Times Co. Google recently reported a 42 percent jump in revenues in the first quarter of 2008 over the same period in 2007. Nearly half of the revenue came from the U.S. and the figures aren’t inflated by the acquisition of DoubleClick. Meanwhile, the Times saw revenue slip 4.9 percent and advertising revenues drop 9.2 percent.

Now looking ahead, Google and the rest of the digital-advertising world are expected to grow just a little slower this year than they would have otherwise. But for Google, a bodacious 42 percent rise in revenue appears lackluster compared with the 63 percent year-over-year pop it saw in 2006 and 2007.

A market-research company, eMarketer lowered its 2008 growth forecast for online ad spending from whopping 29 percent in October 2007 to measly 23 percent in March 2008. You get the gist.

Marketers are still spending online and will continue to, whether it's through paid search, banner ads, video, viral ads, email, or even coupons. Spending on online promotions, which includes tactics like contests, coupons and rebates, will triple over the next five years to $22.8 billion from $8 billion in 2007, reports a new study from research firm and consultancy Borrell Associates.

Online marketing and advertising also has a leg up in a stressed economic environment, because the return on investment is significantly easier to track and explain to the boss.

Meanwhile for the newspaper industry, the weakened economy and the rise of the internet is a perfect storm. A report from Deutsche Bank on Gannett said, "The ad trends remain weak, and there are no positive catalysts in sight."

U.S. newspaper circulation has been on a downward slide for the last 20 years and it drops more significantly in areas of higher broadband penetration, according to global ratings agency Fitch Ratings. Just Monday, a Reuters analysis of a new release from The Audit Bureau of Circulations shows that U.S. newspaper circulation fell 3.6 percent during the six months ending in March 2008 compared with the same period a year earlier.

Circling back to the ad industry: Those holding companies who have reported their first-quarter results all have shown good organic revenue growth in the United States, in part because of the diversity of their services, says Alexia Quadrani analyst at Bear Stearns.

Omnicom, the largest marketing-services holding company by annual revenue, just announced organic growth in the U.S. at 6.7 percent in 2007, just 1 percent lower than in 2006. Randall Weisenburger, Omnicom Group’s executive vice president and C.F.O., characterized Omnicom’s outlook for the year as "cautiously optimistic," in his February conference call announcing annual results to analysts. "We’ve been to this movie, and we’ll weather it very well, I think," he said.

Last Friday, WPP Group, Omnicom’s closest competitor, announced 5.1 percent like-for-like revenue growth for North America, as opposed to 3.9 percent in 2007. "North America remained relatively strong and better than last year, and global revenues were in line with budget," materials for its first-quarter trading update stated.

Most recently, holding company Publicis Groupe announced organic growth in North America to be 5.3 percent after registering just 3.1 percent last year.

Havas, another holding company, saw 6 percent organic growth in the U.S. compared with -0.8 percent in 2007 over 2006. "North America saw a significant increase in growth across all our businesses," the company announced.

Underlying the health of these companies is that the advertising market may be slow to grow, but it's not declining. And if there has been a flash freeze, it started closer to the beginning of 2007, says Jon Swallen, senior vice president of research at TNS Media Intelligence.

Both Nielsen Media Research and TNS have reported U.S. ad spending grew under 1 percent in 2007. Meanwhile, marketers are known to believe that cutting back advertising in a time of economic unrest only exacerbates their inability to sell product. When you throw in this year's Olympic Games and presidential election, the advertising market is likely to grow faster than it did in 2007.

In the media space, however, these special events are likely to benefit the few: NBC, which is airing the Olympics; specific local broadcast stations located in areas of the country where candidates need to fight for votes; and 24-hour news networks. Unlike advertising companies, who can easily diversify their services by acquisition to meet the newest demands of their clients, TV networks are still TV networks.

Hovering somewhere overhead, a tiny robot points its camera at the van and takes note of its color scheme and markings. An even bigger drone, thousands of feet above its hovering kin, maintains a God’s-eye vigil on the whole hunt.

Everything these robots see is radioed to monitors thousands of miles away -- and into the targeting systems of a B-52 bomber winging, silent and nearly invisible, several miles overhead.

This scenario, played out at a remote Nevada facility last week, was the first major test of the Army’s $160-billion, 20-year plan to build a high-tech family of networked robots and hybrid-electric armored vehicles. The “Future Combat Systems” program, co-managed by Boeing and consultants SAIC, aims to equip roughly a third of the Army with 14 new vehicle types that are connected constantly to a vast communications net.

The theory behind the FCS is that dispersed, intelligent robotic systems plugged into a universal communications network can help small numbers of U.S. troops riding in new vehicles to control huge swaths of terrain. Any ship, airplane or tank fitted with the FCS network devices will be able to see everything the others see.

The SkyNet-like network and dynamic coordination “is the most important thing,” Brigadier General James Terry says.

This is “a big deal for joint fires,” Army spokesman Paul Mehney told Wired.com.

“Joint fires” is mil-speak for getting all the military services to share info and coordinate their attacks. That kind of teamwork is a big factor in the U.S. military’s combat prowess. And if FCS works out as planned, the five U.S. military branches will team up better than ever.

Did the test work? Kinda.

The robots spotted the van; their targeting data bounced to a nearby unit of specially-equipped Humvees, then across the network to an Air Force intelligence cell in Langley, Virginia, then back to the B-52 -- all in just seconds. The bomber simulated dropping a guided bomb to “destroy” the van.

The Nevada test proved it was possible, according to Mehney.

But one critic says the test essentially was rigged -- that the conditions were too easy.

“There is ‘works’ and then there is ‘works,’” John Pike, an analyst with Globalsecurity,org, told Wired.com.

“A considerable fraction of the FCS network hardware does not currently exist,” Pike said. And the integration of that hardware that does exist has been touch-and-go.

In February, when testers “flipped the switch” for the first time on the network radios, there was a collective sigh of relief that the radios even worked -- this according to one FCS insider who spoke on background.

Last week’s desert test comes at a critical time for Future Combat Systems. Mounting criticism from the GAO plus the growing cost of fixing and upgrading the Army’s current war-weary vehicle fleet -- $120 billion over 10 years, according to the GAO -– has put the squeeze on the futuristic program. “It is not yet clear if or when the Army and [its contractors] can develop, build, and demonstrate the … network,” the Government Accountability Office reported in March.

One powerful congressman, nominally a supporter of FCS, has proposed injecting extra money into the program in order to rescue some of its technologies before canceling the rest.

Rep. John Murtha (D-PA), chair of the defense appropriations subcommittee, promised an extra $20 billion this year for FCS, provided the Army could use the money to wrap up the program quickly. “We need to accelerate FCS if we ever want to see anything accomplished,” Matt Mazonkey, a Murtha staffer, told Wired.com.

The Army is still preparing its response to Murtha’s query, Mehney said. Regardless, the service’s position on FCS has never wavered. The Army says that FCS is on-budget, on-schedule, and with continued funding will deliver on its promises to connect the ground service to itself and to all the other military branches.

And to ensure smooth progress despite a combined $900 million budget cut last year, the Army this month asked Congress to “re-appropriate” $250 million of other Army funds into FCS coffers.

With a news blackout in effect since Monday at the Everest base camp -- and no news media at camps farther up the mountain -- the situation is being chronicled only by a smattering of international climber/bloggers.

"We saw lots of military staff and one solider carrying a very sophisticated sniper type of gun," Jim Curtin wrote on his blog Monday.

Curtin has been blogging his ascent of Everest for several weeks but is now stuck at Camp 2, at 21,000 feet.

Over the last several days his blog has chronicled the frustrating wait as Nepalese soldiers block climbers from ascending the mountain.

Nepalese soldiers have closed the summit until the Chinese torch run is made, which is expected between May 1 and May 10, depending on the weather. Italian bloggers captured a picture of Nepalese soldiers on the 27th, seen above.

Soldiers have posted a hand-drawn sign, saying, "Dear Climbers. All of you are not allow to go forward from this point till 10 May 2008. Thank you for your cooperation," according to Curtin, who posted a picture). PeakFreaks also noted the existence of the sign.

"Should someone blow past the sign and start climbing the Lohtse face, the skilled sniper may come into play," Curtin wrote.

Mountain teams are supposed to be under a communications blackout, but a group called Climbers Without Borders have set up an anonymous information service that allows climbers to posts updates to MountEverest.net.

In addition, several climbers have their equipment stashed away, according to a climbing-equipment salesman who requested anonymity to protect clients in the field.

Nepalese soldiers arrived at the mountain on the 20th with the orders from Nepal's Home Ministry to stop pro-Tibet protests by "any means necessary" according to the Associated Press.

One young American climber, William Brant Holland, was found carrying a sign that read "Free Tibet, Fuck China" last Friday, and deported back to the United States. Despite the presence of soldiers, Holland said that he was not scared.

"The soldiers are just plainclothes. They're not carrying machine guns, maybe just have one side-arm," Holland told Wired.com by cellphone Tuesday. "They're not gonna shoot anybody."

A combination of small, high-tech gadgets powered by solar panels are enabling wired climbers to keep blogging and remain in touch with their loved ones.

Luis Benitez, a climber who has ascended Everest six times, said that all the technology necessary to run a blog could be stowed in a tiny bag.

"You need a satellite phone, a PDA, special compression software, one cable and a solar panel and that's it," Benitez said.

Benitez said that despite the blackout, he continues to receive phone calls from friends at Camp 1, where Nepalese authorities do not have a military presence.

"People are hiding sat phones in their socks," he said.

While the bloggers on the mountain have generally refrained from directly criticizing the Nepalese or Chinese governments, Benitez, who has previously run afoul of the Chinese government, was more open.

"The Chinese bribed the Nepalese to make the mountain a police state," Benitez said. "I've been a mountaineer my whole life and I've never seen anything like it."

That leaves you with three to five months to fill while waiting for the Golden Avenger to soar into your living room and leave scorch marks on the wall-to-wall. But is Iron Man really the best use of your iron dollar? Might there be other, equally ferrous, folks who meet or exceed the quality standards over at Stark Industries? I think we should investigate.

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Job: Professional wrestler
Powers: The Camel Clutch, the Iranian Drop, yelling at the camera
Challenge: Hell-in-a-Cell match
No contest here. Even if Iron Sheik fights dirty -- and he will -- folding chairs and trash cans aren't going to do anything against state-of-the-fictional-art powered armor. If the Sheik is lucky, Iron Man will pin him with one finger on each shoulder. If he's not, the second the ref's back is turned, out come the antitank missiles.
Winner: Iron Man.

Job: Giant robot and underappreciated animated film star
Powers: Flight, rockets, heavy-handed moralization
Challenge: Fight!
The Iron Giant is, in essence, a 30-foot-tall version of Iron Man with no human inside and defensive weaponry he can't control. I don't think many people have a chance against a bad-tempered, 20-ton version of themselves. Iron Man's only chance is to talk the robot down by appealing to his buried conscience. However, you can't make big, wet cartoon eyes from behind a mask, so it won't work. Iron Man is reduced to a red-and-gold pile of recyclables in about 15 seconds.
Winner: Iron Giant.

Job: Heavy-metal band
Powers: Screaming guitar solos, stage pyrotechnics, skeletal mascot
Challenge: Battle of the bands
Iron Man makes a surprisingly good showing here, recruiting fellow Avengers Thor, Hulk and Captain America on lead guitar, drums and bass respectively. Iron Man doubles as lead singer and the most badass amp you've ever heard. They have a respectable showing with covers of Metallica's "Enter Sandman" and Blue Oyster Cult's "Godzilla," but fall way behind in the second set when Hulk insists that they play "Brand New Key."
Winner: Iron Maiden.

Job: Celebrity chef
Powers: Fusion cuisine, excellent knife technique, 3.98-average review on Yelp
Challenge: Battle Conger Eel
Tony Stark has people for this sort of thing. Iron Man sits back and sips a Full Throttle through a straw while his "assistants" -- actually top Japanese chefs flown in at great expense -- do the cooking. However, in a managerial screw-up, Iron Man doesn't realize that you can't expect two top chefs to work in harmony. His team falls into fisticuffs while chef Masaharu Morimoto presents an exquisite eel-kidney sorbet over hand-shaped nori crackers.
Winner: Iron Chef Japanese.

Job: Anti-litter symbol, faux Cherokee
Powers: A single tear representing the pain and sorrow of indigenous peoples encountering '70s-era fast-food trash
Challenge: Impersonation
Tony Stark and Iron Eyes Cody are both men with a secret. Stark dresses up as a flying weapons platform, and Cody pretends to be a Native American to get acting roles. Who's better at putting up a front? Each is challenged to pose as a 14-year-old girl in a chat room to catch child molesters. Stark ends up trading stock tips instead, and Cody sheds a single tear every time anyone makes a LOLcat reference. However, the Recording Industry Association of America sues them both for illegal downloading.
Winner: Tie.

- - -

Born helpless, nude and unable to provide for himself, Lore Sjöberg eventually overcame these handicaps to become a magnate, a magnifico and a magnetar.

Some in the audience at the Royal Institution of Great Britain that Friday evening later told Thomson they thought he was "pulling their legs." The atom, after all, was known to be indivisible. That's what its name meant.

As director of Cavendish Laboratory at Cambridge University, Thomson was researching electrical currents inside cathode ray tubes. He observed that the rays are deflected by an electric field.

Researchers had been puzzled by cathode rays until Thomson theorized that the rays were in fact streams of small subatomic particles, the first known. He called them "corpuscles," the Latin for "small bodies."

Thomson figured his negatively charged corpuscles accounted for about one-thousandth of the mass of a hydrogen atom (1/1836 or 1/1837 is the accepted ratio today), matched by a positive charge elsewhere in the atom. Thomson was vague in 1897 but later theorized that the negative electrons swarmed around in a "sphere of uniform positive electrification." (Establishing the nuclear-orbital model of the atom would fall to Ernest Rutherford and Niels Bohr in later decades.)

In a commentary on the published version of Thomson's lecture, Irish physicist George F. FitzGerald suggested that the corpuscles were actually free electrons.

Other scientists had proposed that cathode rays were composed of particles and had attempted to establish their relative mass and charge. Thomson's great contribution was estimating that ratio and recognizing that the ratio was universal and didn't depend on the specific materials. That led him to postulate that the particles were one of the building blocks of the atom itself, even though he hadn't fully proved that at the time of his epochal lecture.

Thomson was awarded the 1906 Nobel Prize "in recognition of the great merits of his theoretical and experimental investigations on the conduction of electricity by gases." He was knighted in 1908.

His 1907 book was titled The Corpuscular Theory of Matter, and he continued to call his discovery "corpuscles" until 1913.

(Source: ChemTeam, others)

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Microsoft has been radio silent since Yahoo's doomsday clock struck midnight last weekend. No chariots-cum-pumpkins, no big bombs—just dead air.

Even employees say they're in the dark as to the company's next move. So as its stock slowly loses altitude, C.F.O. Chris Liddell offered the only clue available in an conference call with Microsoft employees late last week.

Liddell wouldn't make clear "the Yahoo situation." In the face of such uncertainty, the wheels of analysis spin furiously. One of the better insights came from Citigroup analyst Mark Mahaney, who handicapped the outcomes of the Microsoft-Yahoo war.

Mahaney reckons there's a 45 percent chance Yahoo sells out at a higher offer; a 40 percent chance Microsoft goes hostile; a 10 percent chance Microsoft walks away; and a 5 percent chance they both agree to the current price.

Taking each of those options in turn, it's possible to at least handicap some winners and losers as this particular battle in the war for the web plays out.

Scenario: The higher offer

What happens next: The classic prisoner's dilemma: If Yahoo said early on it would take a higher bid, Microsoft would have paid it. If Microsoft had upped the bid early on, Yahoo would have taken it. Yet neither did so, because of two decades of Silicon Valley history when Microsoft sucked the lifeblood of many start-ups.

Today's Microsoft may be less vampiric, but the memories linger. It's like other reparations: Silicon Valley demands it be compensated via a Yahoo premium, but Microsoft's current shareholders don't understand why they must pay from their pockets for others' past sins.

Winner: Steve ("Give It Up to Me!") Ballmer. Yahoo, across the board.

Loser: Microsoft shareholders.

Wild card: Microsoft deliberately offered mediocre earnings knowing its stock would drift down—and with it, its bid for Yahoo. (Microsoft initially offered half cash and half stock for Yahoo, worth $44.5 billion in February but worth only $40.9 billion today.) If Microsoft offers all cash, it effectively pays a 10 percent premium to the current value without raising its initial bid.

Scenario: The hostile takeover

What happens next: With Saturday's deadline past, Microsoft has to be talking with key Yahoo shareholders behind the scenes. Last week's threat by C.E.O. Steve Ballmer that Microsoft may simply walk away was a bluff intended to weaken their resolve.

One shareholder, Capital Group, doubled its stake in Yahoo in the first quarter. If Capital bought those new shares after Microsoft made its offer, it may be in its financial interest to talk with Microsoft.

The catch here is the poison pill Yahoo created seven years ago. Once an aggressor owns more than 15 percent of Yahoo, the board can "make it more difficult for a third party to acquire us (or a significant percentage of our outstanding capital stock) without first negotiating with our board of directors." That means the board can issue 10 million new shares overnight, and existing investors can also buy new shares.

So Microsoft's ultimate tactic is a proxy fight—it can push an alternate board; all of Yahoo's directors are up for reelection this year.

Yahoo deserves a board that can help it find a way out of its slump. Some current board members, hailing from Skyrider and Northwest Airlines, seem irrelevant. But those pitched by Microsoft, with experience at Grey Global Group and Adelphia, are arguably worse.

So while hostile in name, this effort will remain tame. Microsoft remains as incapable of a knockout punch as it has been all along. And that means a long and costly proxy battle, with at best a Pyrrhic victory for Microsoft. And the slump in Microsoft's and Yahoo's stocks will likely continue.

Winners: No one, really.

Losers: Everyone else.

Wild card: Big Yahoo investors like Capital Group decide they're tired, and take Microsoft's offer.

Scenario: Microsoft walks away

What happens next: Yahoo's stock drops back below $20, and Microsoft's rallies above $30.

Then Yahoo turns its spin machine away from Microsoft and toward future growth. Yahoo has launched a few initiatives—improving its algorithms, opening its search to developers—that could potentially have a real impact. Its stock, usually volatile, could rise above $31 if it does everything right.

Microsoft has its own options. It could buy the AOL business that Time Warner is eager to sell. It could buy or exchange stakes with News Corp., taking an interest in MySpace and Fox Interactive Media. It could buy Ask.com if Barry Diller finally spins it off, or a neglected online-ad player like ValueClick.

Winners: Microsoft shareholders.

Losers: Yahoo shareholders, at least for several months.

Wild card: Microsoft bolts just so Yahoo's stock can plunge, then it walks back in a few months with a lower offer. An intriguing bet, but if Yahoo does turn around this year, Microsoft would regret taking such a risk.

Scenario: Microsoft sticks to its half-stock, half-cash bid

What happens next: Assuming Microsoft doesn't pay all cash, this isn't likely unless Yahoo's stock falls further.

Winners: Microsoft workers hoping for the cash Microsoft would need to pay for Yahoo.

Losers: Anyone who bought Yahoo on Microsoft's initial offer.

Wildcard: Yahoo's prospects grow unexpectedly dimmer in the next few months.

By whatever name you choose -- and it went by all of them at one time or another -- for those of us who grew up watching these entertaining romps, this is the quintessential Godzilla movie.

It had everything you could ask for: wonderfully cheesy special effects (acute halitosis never looked so good), great dubbing (in the English-language release, the talking went on after the Japanese actors had stopped moving their lips), a couple of hot Japanese twins (albeit a pair of faeries scarcely a foot tall), wanton, widespread destruction (Nagoya, rather than Tokyo, took the hit this time), and a monster to root for (the big moth).

The Godzilla-Mothra imbroglio wasn't the first time these two had courted trouble.

Godzilla had already been around for a decade, rising from the sea in the 1954 film, Godzilla, to ravage the Japanese mainland following a hydrogen-bomb test gone awry. Godzilla evolved over the years, his dinosaur-like appearance always changing, although he never lost the atomic breath that, along with his sheer bulk, served as his main weapon of destruction.

As for Mothra, she (yes, Mothra was all woman) made her original cinematic bow in the 1961 flick bearing her name. Maybe because Mothra, a fictional lepidopteran, originated in a novel before coming to the screen, she was more nuanced than her troglodytic antagonist. Unlike Godzilla, Mothra possessed an intellect, which she put to use in a series of films.

The plots for what are loosely called "Godzilla movies" follow the same simple formula: The monster -- usually our man Godzilla -- is awakened from its slumber, either by man's folly (nuclear testing) or man's greed (there always seems to be an evil capitalist lurking in the weeds, eager to exploit a lost culture or a slumbering monster). Fully awake now, the monster wreaks vengeance on the hapless Japanese, whose soldiery, never fully recovered from Guadalcanal and Iwo Jima, lies prostrate before the rampaging beast.

The soldiers do know how to die dramatically, though, which makes for some entertaining cinematic moments.

In the end, the movie's alpha monster is finally overcome, either by a few plucky scientists who dream up some goofy formula that works, or by another hairy, scaly or wing-flapping opponent, who, for reasons never adequately explained, decides to temporarily ally itself with the perfidious two-legged mammals that stirred up this hornet's nest in the first place.

Simple and repetitive as the storylines may be, the '64 film began a complicated relationship between Godzilla and Mothra, who, over the course of several movies, died and were reborn, were alternately vanquished and victorious, and lined up both as friend and foe. Their relationship with humanity was equally complex: Mothra could be punishing but was ultimately benevolent, while Godzilla, usually the heavy, occasionally emerged as a kind of antihero, earning our sympathy in his role as avenging angel.

The Godzilla franchise was born in the Toho film studios in the 1950s but has been spun off so many times that it's impossible to chronicle the monster's lineage here. Suffice it to say, Godzilla has appeared on the screen -- both large and small -- in comic books, videogames, novels and in myriad other places as a pop culture icon.

OK, so maybe Mothra vs. Godzilla wasn't Kurosawa. But it was a fine way to kill a Saturday afternoon.

(Source: Various)