The Blair Witch Project

A COUPLE of years ago when I was sent ahead of the rest of the family to scout out a place for us to live in the States, I included the town of Adams, Massachusetts, as a possibility because it had a wonderful old-fashioned diner on Main Street.

FORTY YEARS ago we wrote "must" and "shall"; now we say "have got to" and "am going to".

Pepsi, perennial runner-up in the the wars of the cola world, pours more resources into the snack-food market, the boss takes a $1m- a- year paycut to work for just a dollar, and employees thank Pepsi it's Friday because then their weekend starts at lunchtime - all to fizz up the company's finances and push through a revolutionary new way of co- ordinated, worker-friendly retailing that's beginning to pay off

Two years after the massacre, I re-visited the square - and, beyond the ice cream vendors, it was obvious the party had rewritten history

FAST FOOD outlets in the UK are expanding at the rate of at least one a week for each of the major chains. As a survey revealed that Britons spend an average of pounds 7m a day on junk food - more than any other nation in Europe - the burger and pizza manufacturers revealed that they plan to continue their rapid expansion.

Unsung foreign legionnaires No 37

Stewart Lee, 30, grew up in Solihull and studied English at Oxford University, where he met Richard Herring. They formed a comedy act, first performing at the Edinburgh Fringe in 1987. His solo work includes stand-up comedy for Channel 5, and being script editor for Channel 4's `Harry Hill' show. He lives in Finsbury Park, north London,

THE AMERICAN soul diva Gwen Guthrie is best remembered for "Ain't Nothin' Goin' On But the Rent", one of the biggest dance anthems of the Eighties, which captured the public imagination with its catchphrase: "No romance without finance. You gotta have a J.O.B. if you wanna be with me." Over the course of a varied career, the disco star contributed to dozens of albums as a composer, lead and backing vocalist and was one of the first recording artists to raise money for the fight against Aids.

KEYS, WHICH symbolised the high-consumption and security-conscious century, will not make it far into the next. Nor will the typewriter, the fountain pen, light switches or the transistor. The garages of the 21st century will be full of record collections, tinned foods, Happy Meal toys, floppy disks, aprons, CD radios, useless kitchen appliances, Men Are From Mars, Women Are From Venus books, can openers and posters of Che Guevara.

IT WILL be an event which sums up the Chinese century. The stage is the Forbidden City's ancestral temple, where emperors worshipped their dynastic forebears until the last incumbent, Pu Yi, was ejected in 1924, and which the Communists re-opened as the Workers' Cultural Palace. The story is Turandot, Giacomo Puccini's lavish opera about the cruel but beautiful Chinese Emperor's daughter who had her suitors beheaded if they could not answer her riddles - just the sort of plot which the Chinese tend to dismiss as a Western slur on their great civilisation. And the director is Zhang Yimou, the renowned film-maker, some of whose films are still banned in China, and whose only previous experience of opera was the socialist epics permitted by Madame Mao during the Cultural Revolution. All in all, under the masterful baton of the conductor Zubin Mehta, the $15m (pounds 9m) open-air production is a most improbable operatic extravaganza.

While Wales and the south-west are cheaper than London, some towns can still be costly because of the holiday market. If you are on a budget, consider studying in a more remote area

Evil on the road: black man torn limb from limb by white racists who gave him a lift

If celebrity is a commodity, then Matthew Freud's PR empire has cornered the market.