Science friction. About a year ago, Jerry Falwell made his famous suggestion that liberal organizations like the ACLU were indirectly responsible for the September 11 attacks. A more recent theory suggests an even more surprising -- and more credible, but that's not saying much -- source: Isaac Asimov's Foundation trilogy. Either way, the twenty-first is proving to be a difficult century for many science fiction fans and, thanks to 9/11, for horror novelists too.

Hooray for Bollywood Indian films of recent years have exchanged music and romance for serious topics and violent plots that feature only the occasional song-and-dance number. But Indian youth are rising in protest. Bring back the good, clean fun, they say. Oh, and throw in some fast cars and (almost) foreign women. Time for a song! Here's the filmi classic "Mera Joota Hai Japani" (literally, "My Shoes are Japanese"). Okay, where were we? Movies. Crime. Well, we can all rest easier knowing that New York remains secure from potential assault by sightseeing South Indian film stars. Time for another song! Here's the Malayalam favorite "Gopangane". Roll credits. Aacha!

Missing persons. The standard day-tour of the island of Zanzibar, off the coast of Tanzania, includes visits to several sites related to the Arab slave trade. There's an Anglican church built on the site of the old slave market, and up the coast, a secret slave port that sprouted after the British ended the above-board export of captured Africans. What's less clear, after your day of touring and even after reading many a book of colonial and post-colonial history, is what happened to the slaves after they left East Africa. Slaves taken from West Africa -- those that survived -- became the ancestors of millions of black and multi-racial Americans, Caribbeans, and Brazilians alive today. But what of those taken to Arabia? They show up as plot devices in the Thousand and One Nights, but after that they seem to have been forgotten. You don't, after all, generally think of the Gulf States having significant black populations ... though there is a surprising amount of racial diversity among the members of Qatar's national basketball team.

Amazing art in four simple steps. How do you make a good (or bad) poem better? All it takes is a dictionary, an algorithm, a bit of patience ... and voila!, Wordsworth's "Daffodils" becomes the vastly improved "Imbeciles". For those who prefer statistics to formulas, there is the path of Komar and Melamid, artists who created a series of paintings based on market research. Residents of dozens of countries were asked about their artistic preferences; the data were used to produce each nation's Most Wanted and Least Wanted paintings. The artists have also made a music CD along the same lines. For a radio story on these projects, fast-forward to minute 10:30 of this program. And finally, for a recent look at how similar all this conceptual art is to pop culture reality, head here to meet the next (keep your fingers crossed) Britney Spears.