Live Veggies!

Journal Record, The (Oklahoma City), Feb 22, 2002

There are 1,054 people from 50 countries competing in the Internet pool for his current set of dates, which ends Sunday in Austin. He returns on April 5 in Stockholm for a five-week European swing.

The pool was started a year ago by 24-year-old Canadian graduate student and computer expert Arthur Louie, and has quickly grown. Participants pick a set of songs, which are given point values: low for the songs Dylan plays most frequently, high for the songs he plays rarely.

It's a game that could be created around very few artists. For one thing, not many perform as much as Dylan. For another, most acts are so tightly choreographed their set lists change very little, if at all, from city to city. Dylan usually plays around 20 songs a night. During a 35-date concert swing last fall, he played 92 different songs, Louie said. The pool has exhaustively catalogued his current tour: Blowin' in the Wind, Honest With Me and Summer Days were played on each of the first 14 dates. Twelve different songs were performed only once.

Dylanologists study his set lists posted every morning after concerts for tendencies. They've noticed he's begun most concerts lately with an acoustic cover tune, and has been performing a lot of songs from his Grammy-nominated album, Love and Theft. But his unpredictability is legendary.

Winners of the game can actually win prizes, though Dylan might not appreciate them. The grand prize for the current competition is a CD box set of bootlegged Dylan concerts.

Does Dylan himself know about the game? That's cause for speculation on the Dylan pool; his spokesman, Elliott Mintz, thinks not. Mintz wrote down the Web address when told about the game to check it out himself. "To my knowledge, he doesn't spend any time online," Mintz said. "He's not a big computer guy."

The way we were

NEW YORK (AP) -- Today is the 53rd day of 2002. There are 312 days left in the year. Here are some business and legal highlights from this date in history:

In 1819, Spain ceded Florida to the United States.

In 1865, Tennessee adopted a new constitution abolishing slavery.

In 1879, Frank Winfield Woolworth opened a five-cent store in Utica, N.Y.

In 1889, President Cleveland signed a bill to admit the Dakotas, Montana and Washington state to the Union.

In 1924, Calvin Coolidge delivered the first presidential radio broadcast from the White House.

In 1935, it became illegal for airplanes to fly over the White House.

In 1973, the United States and China agreed to establish liaison offices.

In 1980, the U.S. Olympic hockey team upset the Soviets at Lake Placid, N.Y., 4-to-3. (The U.S. team went on to win the gold medal.)

Sex and the grapefruit

LAKELAND, Fla. (AP) -- When the girls from Sex and the City sipped grapefruit martinis to toast Carrie's engagement, the Florida Department of Citrus saw a way out of a slump. "After that episode ran, we all screamed, `Did you see that?' They had been drinking cosmos on the show for so long," said Michelle Chandler, the department's deputy executive director of marketing. "This is a great opportunity to contemporize grapefruit juice."