Wes Phillips

New positions for you and your faithful companion.

Yamaha Electronics Corporation has introduced four new A/V digital home-theater receivers equipped with XM Satellite Radio capability (XM-Ready). The $649.95 RX-V757, $549.95 RX-V657, $449.95 RX-V557, and $349.95 RX-V457 will allow users to plug an XM Connect-and-Play home antenna into the Yamaha XM-Ready A/V receiver and activate the XM service to receive 150-plus digital radio channels—no other accessories or installation are required. Using XM's industry-leading chipset technology, as well as a new proprietary chip and signaling protocol, the XM Connect-and-Play home antenna is capable of receiving XM's satellite and terrestrial signals, in addition to performing channel tuning, decoding, and audio transmission functions.

A new story by Roddy Doyle. 'Nuff said—except that the "f-bomb" is dropped in the second graf. Of course, I already said it's by Roddy Doyle.

"In [Daniel Kehlmann's] first novel translated into English, the 31-year-old literary wunderkind's breezy, sometimes charming and ultimately inconsequential work follows the actual lives, careers and eventual intersection of two of Germany's brightest scientists: explorer, geographer and naturalist Alexander Von Humboldt and the astronomer and aptly crowned 'prince of mathematicians' Carl Friedrich Gauss."