love

Your spouse has been working late in the office. You fear it might be the office cupboard.

Your spouse suddenly has a friend who needs a lot of comfort after a bereavement. You suspect the comfort might have slipped beyond the cuddle.

So, please, get yourself a GPS and track that spouse wherever he or she may roam.

This is not merely my suggestion for your peace of mind. It is that of a New Jersey court that decided that following your husband or wife is not an invasion of privacy. It's more of a loving gesture of concern. (… Read more

LAS VEGAS--"Love," Cirque du Soleil's successful celebration of The Beatles, is five years old this month.

Now that the show has reached this milestone, Cirque du Soleil is willing to unveil more of its secrets. Last week, Tom Wegis, technical director for "Love," served up an all-access, stat-soaked, guided tour of the show's backstage world now it's had five years to settle and grow into its surroundings. "Love" is the only Las Vegas Cirque du Soleil show performed in the round, and the three-level theater seats 2,013 visitors, all within 98 feet of the stage. The space has four control booths positioned in four separate corners (controlling lighting, projection, stage management, and automation, respectively). A total of 276 separate production cues flow back and forth between the booths as the show comes together.

Four automated tracks built into the stage carry artists and smaller stage pieces out into the show. The theater has 10 12,000-lumen projectors for each of two 2,000-square-foot panoramic screens wrapping around the space. Four 832-square-foot semi-transparent screens move in and out of the space, thanks to eight motors. They're illuminated by four 16,000-lumen projectors offering images of The Beatles and their music.

The most impressive machinery powering "Love" from behind the scenes resides under the stage. Nine stage lifts raise and lower artists and set elements in and out of the performance space. The largest motor-driven rack-and-pinion lift raises a center stage segment weighing about 22,000 pounds. Engineers dug 32 feet down into the desert ground to install it; it provides a force of 150 pounds per square foot and can raise the huge stage at a speed of a foot per second.

All Cirque productions stress that the safety of the artists and crew is the primary concern. To that end, the larger set elements are monitored by a specially designed encoder system that confirms that the moving piece is precisely where it needs to be when it needs to be there. If anything onstage strays by so much as millimeters, the movement cuts out and the show stops. … Read more

Lovers are jealous beings. They become very upset when the object of their affections is stolen by another.

I wasn't aware, however, that the same applied to married people.

A case currently playing in the theater of a London court is, however, enlightening me. For it is alleged that Ian Puddick, a plumber who seems to be a star of a TV show called "Bricking It," raised arms against his wife's alleged lover.

He allegedly raised them, then lowered them to his computer keyboard, whereupon he tweeted and created Web sites that railed against his rival.… Read more

I don't know about you, but I'm rather partial to a nice smell. Somehow, some people just offer a better odor than others, and one reacts to them more positively because of that.

I am heartened, therefore, to get a sniff of research performed at the Chinese Academy of Sciences.

According to National Geographic, the Academy was very interested to see just how animal-like we really are. The academy wondered whether we really are sophisticated in our choice of sex partners, or whether we are, indeed, just like the others on Orwell's farm.

Naturally, if they had … Read more

SAN FRANCISCO--If you're looking for powerful brands in the entertainment business, you'd be hard-pressed to find two with more influence than "Avatar" creator James Cameron and Cirque du Soleil.

So the marriage of the two, on a forthcoming movie project Cameron is executive-producing (and that's helmed by "Shrek" and "Chronicles of Narnia" director Andew Adamson) promises to offer fans a compelling mixture of the Cirque's unique hybrid of artistry, acrobatics, music, and showmanship and Cameron's mastery of the latest filmmaking technologies.

This partnership is just one of the latest … Read more

The U.S. government has Fort Knox, families have safety deposit boxes, and gym-goers have lockers--sacred places where valuable things are stored and protected. To extend the analogy, content companies like CBS have libraries; catalogues of hits old and new that represent the foundation of the entertainment business and the source of current and future income. We call ours the content vault. Check it out in the above video.

In any business, the key to long-term success is seeing beyond the flavor of the month to consistently create and sell a stellar product. At CBS, our biggest asset is and … Read more

Relationships are complex. And I'm not sure that Facebook, for all its cleverness, is ever the right environment for complexity.

Which is why some might feel a certain twitch of brotherhood with Richard Leon Barton Jr. According to the Grand Rapids Press, Barton Jr. got married last July. It was, by all accounts a happy event.

These days, people do feel a terrible urge to display a record of happy events on Facebook. And, well, these records might not make everyone else so happy. So it appears in this case. For pictures of Barton Jr.'s wedding reportedly materialized on the Facebook pages of some of his family members.

Regretfully, one family member reportedly saw these pictures. And she happened to be a woman in New England to whom he was still legally wed. She reportedly went to the police and told them she suspected something might be amiss when her husband had defriended on Facebook. (That is always a warning sign in any marriage, one imagines.)

Apparently, hell hath no fury like a woman bigamized. So you will be stunned into a permanently single life when I tell you that Barton Jr. has been charged with polygamy.

Michigan, unlike certain areas of Utah, tends to look down on polygamy. The maximum sentence is four years (and/or a $5,000 fine). In Barton's case, things are made even more complex by the fact that he reportedly has something of a criminal record already.

Police told the Grand Rapids Press that they were told the first wife (whom he had met online) had discussed divorcing Barton Jr., but that somehow this happy event had failed to occur.

Oh, what a complex web the Web can weave.

So please, should you be considering leaving your spouse over the next week or two, don't forget to go through with the proceedings before getting married again--and most certainly before defriending him or her on Facebook.… Read more

Hey, if you dump your boyfriend, you'll be happier. How do I know? Because you could be with me.

How do you know you could be with me? Because I'm in your waiting room. No, not in the waiting room at your dental surgery. I'm in your Facebook WaitingRoom.

You might have thought that the Breakup Notifier was enough to make love's course run smoother than your own sometimes coarse behavior has managed to effect. Breakup Notifier is a Facebook app (since blocked by Facebook) that notifies you the minute one of your many crushes became … Read more

Sometimes online love is even more blind than the real thing.

According to the Chicago Sun-Times, a 48-year-old man from Naperville, Ill., had been in an online relationship with a woman for two-and-a-half years.

You might wonder why they had not consummated their relationship, by, say, meeting. But some feel the virtual world is, for them, enough.

Regardless, last Wednesday the man reportedly called police because he believed his online love was in serious trouble--he was convinced she'd been kidnapped in London.

Clearly, this seemed like a serious matter. The man reportedly provided the police with a copy of … Read more