for 19 September 2000. Updated every WEEKDAY.

Tim Cavanaugh
Special Guest Editor

Terry Colon
Art Director

Heather Havrilesky
Senior Editor

Phillip Bailey
Production Editor

Joey Anuff
Publisher

Wow - Seems to me the Quest Archetype pre-dates even the Bad News Bears by a couple of thousand years, and even Walter Matthau wasn't THAT old. Judging by box office hauls, the more obvious the basic plot premise the better, since audiences shouldn't really be bothered to keep track - we're all familiar with the premise, it's the window dressing that counts. Have times really changed so much since Homer gave us the first miniseries, or since Krishna bestowed upon Lord Arjuna some really dope moves in the original Smackdown?

<Jeff.Johnson@branders.com>

Thanks for the tip, Jeff. I'll have to go down to the Goodwill and pick up a paperback of Man and His Symbols so I can look up this "Walter Matthau." Was he a character in that new Star Wars? I ask because I can tell you're a buff.

I enjoyed the self-consciously common man touch to your hip talk. Do you teach a course in Joseph Campbell at a community college? If you do, you must really get through to the students. Be careful passing out the free marijuana to the co-eds!

Counting the window dressing,

Slotcar Hatebath

The Colossus of Ceylon, Minnesota

Devastating! Beautiful and horrifyingly accurate! I am old enough to remember the first Eisenhower-Stevenson contest. In comparison to what's happened since then, their debates seem like those of Gladstone and Disraeli. In 1968, I refused to vote for Humphrey as a protest against the war and the treatment of demonstrators at the Democratic convention. But several years later, while I was living in Frankfurt I heard him interviewed on AFN and realized he was a real statesman by what had come to be the going standards of American politics. Mondale, of course, was