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