Or should it be <I>Coq au Blam</I>? Some recipes make life a lot more interesting than others.

Not the usual "ain't they cute?" discussion, but a look into <I>Toxoplasma</I>, a parasite that has a strange behavioral action on rats&mdash;and perhaps on men and women as well.

Huge database of animated .GIFs that demonstrate mathematic concepts. Need to explain the Conchoid of Nicomedes? Poincar&#233; Hyperbolic Disks? Semicubical Parabola Involutes? Sweat no more&mdash;just point and click.

No, but it <I>behaves</I> like one, according to researchers who used an internet game called www.wheresgeorge.com to predict the geographical spread of epidemics. How's that work? Money, like viruses, is spread by people and, since people travel great distances these days, coming up with a way to chart how far and fast an epidemic can travel has been nigh on to impossible.

I thought I'd really begin where I always begin: with my band's first album. As I've said before, I know this thing better than I know most anything else. From the creation of a song like "50 Bullets" &#151; sitting on my bed and turning a simple four-note riff into a complicated and violent four-minute explosion &#151; to the recording process, marred by uncomfortable, late-night drives from Clifton to New Brunswick where <a href="http://www.versioncity.com/">Jeff Baker</a> fooled around with tape reels and watched lazily as we somehow came up with fourteen tracks that we could only almost perform &#151; drunk on Budweiser and stuffed on fried chicken and tired, so damn tired &#151; I know this thing. I know this amazing and ambitious and awful album better than I know most anything.