After drawing massive crowds with her high-voltage rock performances, Turner will now swing to a new tune: she will play a Hindu goddess in a spiritual Merchant-Ivory musical for which she will also sing classical numbers in Latin and Sanskrit.

This leads to a surprising facet of game psychology: Really hard-core gamers often look past the cultural "content" of a game. They're mostly worried about a more prosaic concern, which is whether the game is fun. The geopolitics of a game melt away as players, like philosophers musing on their favorite platonic solid, ponder gameplay in the abstract.

We're accustomed to thinking that a piece of entertainment is nothing but its cultural content. A movie or TV show is just what you see on the screen. But a game is also about play, and play is invisible. That's why outsiders are often puzzled by the success of games that would appear to be nothing but screamingly offensive content. They can't see the play. Sure, you've got raw guts flying around?but for the player, part of the joy is in messing with physics (even if that happens to be bullets and shoulder-launched grenades) or with strategy (even if that's figuring out how to starve a village).

Researchers used short pulses of laser light to produce images of electrons leaving atoms and recorded what happened to within 100 attoseconds.

To imagine how long this is, if 100 attoseconds is stretched so that it lasts one second, one second would last 300 million years on the same scale.

Jose Sandoval, making his first sworn statement since he was convicted of the Sept. 26, 2002, Norfolk bank shootings, is asked why he jumped the counter.

"Because somebody was talking s--," Sandoval replies.

Madison County Attorney Joe Smith asks who.

"A Smurf."

"A smirk?"

"A Smurf," Sandoval repeats, as in the blue TV cartoon character.

"I take it from your answer you don't want to answer that question," Smith says. "Or is it really your testimony that a blue Smurf was in the bank?"

"That's what I said."

The prosecutor tries once more: "Did you jump the counter because you wanted to make sure everybody was dead?"

"No, I jumped the counter because the Smurf was talking s--," Sandoval says.