Not In Our Name photo
Joan Baez performing in August 2005 at Cindy Sheehan's encampment in Crawford, Texas.

Joan Baez: "We probably won't overcome." That quote seems a newsier headline than the one topping Emma Brockes' interview in The Guardian (U.K.):

Q: Didn't hanging out with Dylan and the Beatles feel like intruding on a boys' club? A: Yeah. So I'd make tea. And dry Dylan's sweaty vests

This was why we needed Janis Joplin, but most of us lurched between old roles and no roles then. Equality for all was the dream of the '60s and its elusive legacy, triggered first by nonviolent Freedom Marches. Everybody had to figure out how to change.

The story is full of the past, in case you only know Baez as one of your parents' vinyl albums. Baez found fame early, and moved quickly to museum status when folk yielded to rock. She understands the heady days of the peace movement as a peak experience, like Hemingway's bullfighters, "living life all the way up."

Now, performing in theatre in Somerville, Mass., -- near Cambridge, where she sang as a teenager at Club 47, (photo)

"When did we get so old?" she cried, to huge cheers. She gave them everything in her repertoire: the Bob Dylan impression, the unaccompanied version of Amazing Grace, the anti-war songs. The only thing she wouldn't do was We Shall Overcome, too sacred to perform on a whim she tells me when I meet her later, besides which - and here she giggles - "we probably won't overcome. We're in such a pickle."

I don't know about that. On the Web, I see a lot of second chances.

New African stars? Ethiopian 'Idol' is a big hit on staid state TV, also from The Guardian, which seems to be having a lot of fun.

Sharing needn't be illegal: What's a Torrent? A primer on file-sharing 2006 at PC Magazine begins,

We've all heard bits and pieces about BitTorrent, here and there, true and untrue—it's used for trading illegal files; it's illegal; it's too obscure for anyone but teenagers; it's the easiest way to download large files. But we have heard about it, because although BitTorrent itself is legal, it's one of the fastest ways to trade all sorts of files, and therefore, it's often mentioned when illegal file-sharing comes up.

No more potholes: Flying car captured on Google Earth; Experimental Oz project packs grav-busting hyperdrive. Unmistakably, the floating object casts a shadow.