David,

How, pray tell, do you see references to Madonna in florid  middle-brow
prose as elitist?  Powers is a television journalist, not William
Buckley.

And since he's a television journalist, doesn't this explain his
inaccuracies?  For a journalist, he's stunningly accurate.  After all,
from this distance, what difference does a day make? Let's see, for the
error on page 278, an error of one day is approximately 0.002 percent of
the total elapsed time since then (for anyone checking my work, don't
forget to add a day for each leap year--I ignored the leap seconds that
we've experienced since the invention of the atomic clock--which was
wise considering I rounded up to the nearest 1/1000th of a per cent for
dramatic impact). I'd love to see any other TV journalist approach that
kind of accuracy.

GC