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Napster -- friend or foe?
Fans have already embraced new music-distribution technologies. Musicians can fight them or join them.
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[03/30/00]

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[03/28/00]

Technology: View from the top
Cybersleuth
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[03/27/00]

21st Challenge
21st Challenge No. 32
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By Charlie Varon and Jim Rosenau
[03/25/00]

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By Mary Mackey

In the summer of 1993, I was on my way to Eastern Europe to research several of the archaeological sites that later appeared in my novel "The Fires of Spring." I was also on my way to lie face down in the mud clawing at the earth while guys in ski masks sprayed machine gun bullets over me; but as I rushed around collecting guide books and trying to learn how to say, "Where is the rest room?" in Bulgarian, I didn't have a clue what I was about to get into.

As usual, I logged into the Well a couple of weeks before the trip and went to the travel conference to see if anyone could offer me tips. "Don't take the bus between Varna and Istanbul," one person warned. "It takes 18 hours, everyone smokes and I ended up in the hospital with pneumonia." "Rent a car in Bulgaria, not Romania," suggested another. "It's a lot cheaper." But the best advice I got was a suggestion to contact an American living in Prague who went by the log-in ID of "antenna."

"Antenna" was a radio expert who had helped set up several independent stations in Eastern Europe after the Soviet Union went bust, and he knew the territory. The first thing he told me was not to fly on a Romanian plane. ("They have the best pilots in the world because they have the worst planes in the world. Rumor has it they cannibalize the crashed planes and refit the parts using hammers.") When I told him I planned to go to Moldova to see the remains of the great circular cities that had been built 5,000 years ago, there was a bit of cyber-silence followed by a laconic piece of e-mail:

"Do you realize they are having a civil war?"

This was news to me. There had been no travel advisory on the State Department Web page; no hints in any of the sites I'd researched that Moldova was in turmoil.

"How bad is it?" I asked. I don't recall his exact words, but I do recall that he said that death was a distinct possibility. When I got enough saliva back into my mouth to swallow, I started searching the Web, and sure enough, there in three or four lines in a back issue of the New York Times, I found a brief note indicating that Moldova was in a disturbing and completely unpredictable state of civil unrest.

I went to Romania and Bulgaria, but skipped Moldova. All things considered, I figure those 20 minutes I spent on the Well probably upped my life expectancy by several decades.

About the writer
Mary Mackey is the author of four collections of poetry and nine novels including "The Year the Horses Came," "The Horses at the Gate," and "The Fires of Spring." Her work has been translated into 11 foreign languages including Japanese and Finnish.

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