External Obliques
Lie on your back on the floor with your knees bent and your hands placed behind your head with your elbows pointed out to the side.

Cross your right leg over your left, then lift your left shoulder and turn in the direction of your knees (opposite shoulder to opposite knee). At the top of the movement, your elbow should be pointing directly at the ceiling. Do not pull the elbow forward in front of your face or across your body. Your hips and lower body should remain stationary on the floor — do not roll into the movement.

Return to start position.

Start with one set of 10 to 15 repetitions, then repeat on the opposite side.
Internal Obliques
Begin in the same start position as the previous exercise.

Cross your right leg over your left, then lift your right shoulder and curl your right elbow toward your right knee (same elbow to same knee). Be sure not to pull your head toward your knee. Lift and turn. Your elbow should be pointing up to the ceiling at the top of the movement. The lifting shoulder should be completely off the floor while the resting shoulder remains on the floor.

Return to start position.

Perform 10 to 15 repetitions, taking two seconds to raise the leg and four seconds to lower it.

Start with one set of 10 to 15 repetitions, then repeat on the opposite side.
Additional Points to Remember
Perform the exercise two to three times per week on nonconsecutive days.

Maintain normal breathing and stop if the exercise causes pain.
As with all exercises, this movement may not be appropriate for people with certain physical limitations. If you are unsure, check with your physician first

But ad buyers are painfully aware that banners are routinely ignored (on average) 99.3 percent of the time. They are uniformly despised by most industry creatives. And-with few exceptions (see “Banner Branding,” p82)-they have the emotional allure of truck stop neon.

“Eighty percent of what’s out there is what I call gratuitous digitization,” says Smith. “It’s a waste. Throw out all the gee-whiz stuff, and you know what? I’d rather have a color brochure.” At a much-publicized industry conference in August hosted by Procter & Gamble (see “FAST Start, Slow Going,” p86), aimed at spearheading new models for online advertising, Time’s president of new media, Linda McCutcheon, summed up the stunted evolution of the industry when she suggested that the standard Internet ad banner “had become the dancing Lucky Strike girl” of the industry.

Lacking sufficient processing speed and bandwidth to deliver many of the elements of emergent “rich” media-such as streaming video and sound-and lacking enough sophisticated measurement standards (how often users click on a banner ad is a woefully inadequate gauge of success) to assure ROI and drive capital investment in new advertising models, the Internet has so far left the branding equation out in the cold.

If powerful branding tools are to be discovered and, eventually, mined on the Net-they will have to meet a new set of standards. Old branding was apples (and Apple); new branding is oranges.

“Brand is a complex phenomenon,” McKenna explains. “We have to change our idea that brand is simply ‘awareness.’ Consumers are aware of many things that do nothing to change their behavior.” The challenge, he notes, is that the Internet is inherently not a passive experience-where traditional branding has been most successful. “All other media is one-way or broadcast. With the Internet, the power of choice is totally in the hands of the consumer, and for that reason, it is a revolution for marketing.”

The time has come, McKenna adds, to find a new branding equation that accommodates the shift to consumer power and choice. “For the past hundred years, producers have been assuming that a well-known name is a shortcut to information,” he says. “In a world were information is disposable and choice and price are higher values than brand, how we engage and retain our customers has to be reevaluated. Everything we have seen in terms of marketing using the Internet has been experimentation.”

Just a year ago, according to industry surveys, advertisers’ primary motivations in advertising on the Web were to generate traffic and get out product information. Today, the elusive concept of “brand-building” is now at the top of the list. But as everyone in the ad industry knows, there isn’t much yet to show.

“The industry has an ad model that’s still classic New York,” Smith says. “It’s a headline, a beautiful color picture, and a tag line. That’s their hammer and they hit everything with it. Well,” Smith says, shaking his head, “[online] consumers are getting totally bored with that.”

While it might well be blue-sky time for creatives like Smith who dream up ways of engaging online consumers, it’s getting closer to bottom-line time. The online ad business is currently worth between $500 million and $1 billion a year-less than a drop in the bucket against the $73 billion the top 10 advertisers spent in 1997, according to Competitive Media Reporting. “No one wants to be the one out there with arrows in our back,” he adds. “We gotta prove that some things are working.”

Then the equation is disrupted. When Inez learns Francesca’s real identity, she disappears from the chat rooms. Without her digital dominatrix, Elaine finds her brilliant career starting to founder, and she launches a search for Inez.

Though the novel is heavy with of-the-moment titillations, Martha Baer manages to transcend easy, hip allusions. She slyly embroiders the Dilbert-like details of office life: Her sketches of Poplar & Skeen’s banal titles, goals and enthusiasms are hilarious (at a half-day workshop, Elaine and her colleagues divide into teams named Group Wilson, Group Taft, Group Roosevelt).

Baer has written a tribute to the headiness of ambition, the mysterious tangle of love and work, sex and power. There are some big ideas embedded in the story — occasionally, too big. And sometimes she veers from her precise prose and becomes downright pretentious.

But though she initially seduces us with graphic sex talk, Baer knows how to hold us captive in a tale. She keeps us wanting more, asking for it, begging for the climax.

Larry started out on the show in the Newman mail room. He met Victoria in that mail room and their relationship has had a wide variety of ups and downs. Larry moved up in Newman Enterprises and became an integral part of that team.

He married Victoria but that first marriage was filled with problems and they divorced. He married Nina and took her son as his own. They were happy for a while but then along came Tricia. Nina and Larry divorced and Larry started his fateful road with Tricia.

He stuck by Tricia for a long time and through many of her crazy days. But eventually he saw her for what she really was and divorced her. Of course this pushed Tricia over the edge and closer to ending Larry’s life.

At the end of his time on the show Larry was happy again with Victoria. They had found their way back to one another and were about to married but it was not to be. Tricia had one last plot up her sleeve and this time Larry would not survive. It was the end of a love story and the end of a long time character.

Larry is gone from the show but he lives on in the memories and lives of the people he left behind. Victoria, Neil, the Newman’s and the fans. It will take some time for the show and the fans to get adjusted to not seeing him every day.

Young and Restless Online wants to wish Scott Reeves the best in whatever he pursues in the future. We enjoyed watching him on the show over the years and will enjoy watching to see what he does next.

Roger told me he was out of CART, period,” CART team owner Morris Nunn told a website on Sunday at California Speedway in Fontana.

Why? Because of tobacco sponsorship.

Combined with all the uncertainty about CART’s future created by the current 2003 engine fiascothis could be the start of teams defecting to the IRL.

After losing two major engine suppliers, in Honda and Mercedes Benz, the news that Toyota are committed to going IRL it doesn’t look good. Without engine specifications decided for the new 2003 CART powerplant Ford may not want to supply the whole field.

Some team owners may jump ship altogether while more will be looking to hedge their bets by having a presence in both series. One rumour has Penske running in both series, IRL with tobacco company backing and a CART team with Mobil colours. Mo Nunn is taking no chances; he had a two-car CART entry in 2001 and will be running one car in CART and one in the IRL next year.

I heard speculation at the recent NASCAR race at Rockingham that the days of Penske’s Mobil team there may be numbered. Certainly there have been some bizarre goings on there with the team providing driver Jeremy Mayfield with cars he considered so bad that he parted company with the team before the end of the season in disgust.

It seems CART itself is not sure of where it is heading and what it wants. At home in the US it is not doing well in the all important television ratings and at some of the tracks there are large numbers of empty seats clearly visible. It is doing very well in the international events in Mexico, Germany, England and Japan.

What about Australia? Well, the 2001 Honda Indy 300 drew a world record crowd for any CART race meeting. Even in the middle of such a successful meeting the uncertainty over where CART are going had the local V8 Supercar series exploring ways to take over the race meeting in future for a major endurance race instead of the Champ Cars. The new V8 Supercar race at Adelaide, using a street circuit based on the old F1 track, draws a very big crowd and costs a lot less to put on than Champ cars.

It would be a shame to lose the series as it provides close racing over a wide variety of circuit types. I love the road courses they go to, Portland, Road America, Laguna Seca with its famous Cork Screw and my absolute favourite, Mid Ohio.