DATA DAY News of interest to RANSACK members. From fascinating tidbits about the television program The Avengers to interesting news in the worlds of science. The Avengers What's that funky music In The Girl From Auntie, when Steed and Georgie burst in on the Arkwright Knitting Circle, the music playing in the background is the Nitty Gritty Dirt Band song called "Tennessee Stud".� There is no knitting involved in the original song, but the music was obviously chosen with care - a song about a horse (Steed-stud-horse). Submitted by Pat the Librarian Laugh, clown, laugh In the Tara King episode Look, (Stop Me If You've Heard This One But) There Were These Two Fellas there is introduced a Clown Makeup Registry, with clown's makeups painted on blown-out eggshells. This is an actual practice, as described here. This practice is also mentioned in the Terry Pratchett Discworld novel, Men At Arms. Submitted by Barbara Peterson The World The Hoover Dam is ready for visitors from outer space In September, 2003 I attended The Twin Cities Book Festival in Minneapolis, Minnesota, USA, sponsored by The Rain Taxi Review of Books. Over 70 publishers were there (mostly book, but a few magazine). I was there as a myrmidon for a publisher friend, but between bouts at her table I was able to wander around, talk to publishers and collect literature. In one of my rounds I found for the first time a tabloid newspaper called The Bloomsbury Review. (It calls itself a �book magazine� and is published 6 times a year, reviews a LOT of books and interviews authors and publishers). In browsing through it, I came across an article called PERMANENCE, written by Gregory McNamee. I don�t know why I started to read it, but I did. It�s all about how to save computer files in a format that will never be antiquated, and specifically PDF (portable document format). But it doesn�t start out like that. Here�s the first two paragraphs that caught my attention: Among the buttresses and turbines of Hoover Dam, on the lower Colorado River where Arizona and Nevada meet, lies a marble-and-steel map of the stars. Designed by sculptor Oskar J. W. Hansen in a mix of Art Deco and Futurist styles, the map was meant to show future inhabitants of the Southwest, and the cosmos, that the dam�s builders knew their place in the universe, physically and chronologically. (The map shows the location of the dam relative to the United States, that of the United States to the Earth, and that of the Earth to the Solar System. It also pinpoints the date that the dam was commemorated, September 30, 1935. ) Hansen�s unstated assumption was thqat the gigantic structure would stand for countless generations - long enough, anyway, that visitors to it might no longer speak anything recognizably like English, but might nonetheless be able to read a celestial chart and figure out the story it told. Submitted by Barbara Peterson