JON L. HENDRICKS | THE TIMES Caution tape lines the outside of the twisted remains of a collapsed flyover bridge Monday that killed one construction worker Friday near Ill. 394 and Interstate 80 in Lansing.

This story ran on nwitimes.com on Saturday, August 20, 2005 12:54 AM CDT

Accident scene surreal, somber

BY DEBORAH LAVERTY
Times Staff Writer
LANSING | Just before 5 p.m., the unthinkable happened.

As workers were setting the last of six steel beams, measuring 9.5 feet by 300 feet, in place for the Ill. 394 flyover ramp connecting Interstate 80, the beams moved.

“All six of the beams shifted and fell off of a concrete pier. One of the beams is still connected,” Illinois Department of Transportation spokeswoman Diane O’Keefe said.

Ironworkers stood by somberly as police and emergency personnel worked to control traffic. They had little to say as the body of one of their own, Daniel Lopez, lay beneath literally tons of steel.

The collapsed steel resembled a larger-than-life accordion. An orange crane, used to set the beams, sat silent.

OSHA inspectors were on the scene before nightfall and were still searching for a cause late Friday.

“Our thoughts and prayers go out to the family,” O’Keefe said.

Because of the potential danger to workers and motorists near the highway, Lopez’s body would not be removed until it could be determined how best to move the lone still-standing beam.

“We want to get a structural engineer here so we can safely move the beams and remove the man’s body. I’m not sure of a time frame. We just want to make sure the beams won’t shift and won’t be of any danger to anyone else,” O’Keefe said.

Illinois State Trooper Leonard Stallworth said the Glenwood and Lansing Fire Departments were first called to the scene shortly before 5 p.m.

The Glenwood fire chief described the scene as chaos when rescue crews arrived.

Ironworker had little time to escape

BY MEMA AYI
mayi@nwitimes.com
219.933.3241
The flyover ramp on Ill. 394 came down in just seconds, shaking the ground and everything around it, according to a Schererville police officer riding through the construction zone at the time of the Friday night accident.

“It was moving around like an accordion,” said Officer Richard Jandura, who was on his way to a White Sox game with girlfriend Buffy Pajor.

Jandura, in the passenger seat, thought the iron girders were coming right at the car. Stuck in one lane through the construction zone, the falling bridge was about 100 feet to his right, he said.

“It was like something you see on TV. It was coming out of the sky,” Jandura said. “It looked like aluminum and it was coming right toward us.”

A loud crash followed when the iron beams fell, shaking the ground.

As the bridge fell, six construction workers ran toward the highway, he said.

“We saw three guys hiding behind a girder and when it was over, the workers reacted instantly. They ran to help and didn’t even think twice about it,” Jandura said.

The couple didn’t realize how serious the accident was until they read the newspaper the next morning. For Jandura, news of the death of 33-year-old Daniel Lopez, of Munster, brought back memories of the April 15, 1982, Cline Avenue bridge collapse. Indiana’s worst industrial accident killed Jandura’s neighbor and 13 other men when 444 feet of the bridge fell.

Lopez was trapped under 240 tons of steel. It took firefighters, ironworkers and construction workers more than 28 hours to free his body from the steel beams. The Cook County medical examiner’s office said Sunday Lopez died of multiple injuries and ruled his death a construction accident.

On Monday, attorneys for the Lopez family filed a wrongful death suit against the general construction contractor, Dunnet Bay Construction Co., alleging the company failed to take precautions for workers’ safety, according to NBC5. The suit, seeking unspecified damages in excess of $50,000, was filed in Cook County Circuit Court by the law firm of Goldberg, Weisman & Cairo.

Lopez, of 8801 White Oak Ave., worked for Wayne, Ill.-based Angus Construction and was a member of Ironworkers Local Union No. 1 for 15 years. Family members remembered him as a hard worker and good provider.

He and Crystal Lopez were divorced about three weeks ago, but the couple were still good friends, said Crystal’s father, Verrill Dean.

“I think she’s as upset as she would be if she were still married to him,” Verrill Dean said.

Mother-in-law Barbara Dean described Lopez as a great father to Daniel, 17, Amanda, 13, Mark, 9 and Jacob, 8.

“His kids were his life,” Barbara Dean said.

Lopez and his ex-wife didn’t live far from each other and spoke on the telephone every morning, Barbara Dean said.

Lopez was proud of the work he did. He often pointed out structures he worked on to his children.

He worked on the fountain at the former Goldblatts in downtown Hammond, the federal court building and bridges throughout the region in his 15-year career, brother-in-law Richard Dean said.

A native of north Hammond, Lopez grew up near Mason Street. He enjoyed riding his motorcycle and attending his children’s soccer and softball games.

Crystal and the couple’s four children are holding tight to each other, Barbara Dean said.

Lopez’s other family, the brotherhood of ironworkers, also are coping with his death.

“The ironworkers are a real tight union. They live and die by each other,” Richard Dean said.

The union’s business agent stayed at the accident scene until Lopez’s body was removed. Other co-workers returned his truck and personal things to his ex-wife, Richard said.

“Even when he wasn’t working, he was constantly going. He was a hyper kind of guy,” Richard said. “But when it’s all said and done, he took care of his family.”




[EXTRAS]
What’s next
Work on the flyover ramp at Ill. 394 and Interstate 80 has been suspended until the investigation is complete, Illinois Department of Transportation spokesman Mike Claffey said Monday.
No more steel will be set for the ramp until the department gets an explanation of what went wrong. Other work on the Kingery Expressway project, such as retainer walls, will continue, Claffey said.
The Occupational Safety Hazard Administration will continue its investigation into the collapse, though the agency has six months to file the citations, according to OSHA spokesman Bill Coulehan.

JON L. HENDRICKS | THE TIMES Emergency workers look over the scene of a collapsed bridge Friday near I-80/94 and Ill. 394 in Lansing. One man was killed and two others were injured.

JON L. HENDRICKS | THE TIMES Emergency workers assess the damage left after 240 tons of steel fell Friday during the construction project on Interstate 80/94 and Ill. 394.

Ramp collapses

BY MEMA AYI
mayi@nwitimes.com
219.933.3241

LANSING | One man was killed and two were sent to the hospital when 240 tons of steel fell on a crew of ironworkers completing the final phase of the ramp that will connect Interstates 80 and 294 to Interstate 94 north.

Daniel Lopez, an ironworker for Wayne, Ill.-based Angus Contractors, was crushed beneath the six 40-ton girders meant to hold up the concrete ramp on Ill. 394 at I-80, Illinois State Police Sgt. Joe Stangl said. Lopez age and hometown were not available Friday night.

Late Friday, authorities said engineers were working to determine how best to remove Lopez’s body from beneath the fallen 300-foot-long girders.

“We don’t know what happened except there was a catastrophic failure,” Illinois Department of Transportation spokesman Mike Claffey said.

Six beams, all connected, were being placed into the ground to complete the highway ramp when the girders fell.

Two injured workers were taken to St. James Hospital and Health Centers in Olympia Fields and St. Margaret Mercy Healthcare Centers in Hammond with nonlife-threatening injuries, Stangl said.

Claffey said four others were treated for injuries that ranged from trauma to cuts and bruises.

The Occupational Safety Hazard Administration cited the company on at least four occasions between 1997 and 2003, including projects on the Mannheim Bridge over the Cal-Sag River and a bridge at 183rd Street and I-80 in Tinley Park.

In the wake of the disaster, emergency crews closed Ill. 394 north at Interstate 80. Traffic headed north to the Bishop Ford Freeway was rerouted onto I-80/94 east to Calumet Avenue. Westbound lanes would take motorists back to the Bishop Ford.

Claffey said Ill. 394 North will be closed until crews can safely remove the iron. Stangl said he did not expect the highway to reopen today.

JON L. HENDRICKS | THE TIMES Firefighters on Friday overlook the remains of a collapsed bridge that was part of a ramp that will connect Interstates 80 and 294 to Interstate 94 north in Lansing. An ironworker was crushed beneath the six 40-ton girders meant to hold up the concrete ramp on Ill. 394 at I-80.

barnes Foundation

“The Temptation of St. Anthony,” formerly ascribed by the Barnes to Bosch, is now said to be a 16th-century copy by an unknown artist.

August 27, 2005
The Barnes Revises Attributions of Old Masters
By JULIA M. KLEIN

PHILADELPHIA, Aug. 26 – A review of the vast collection and archives of the Barnes Foundation is upending attributions of some of its old master paintings and revealing new details of its founder’s relationships with painters, collectors and other artistic luminaries of the 20th century, administrators say.

Among the 22 paintings whose attributions are changing in a continuing assessment project, now four years old, are works formerly credited to El Greco, Rubens, Titian, Tintoretto, Veronese, Giorgione and Bosch.

“I don’t think any of it was shocking or surprising,” said Emily Croll, the Barnes Foundation’s senior administrative officer, who has headed the project at the foundation, in suburban Merion, Pa. “For decades people have been saying some of our old masters weren’t what we said they were.”

Lending momentum to such stock-taking is an eight-month-old court ruling clearing the way for the financially troubled Barnes to relocate to Philadelphia, where it is expected to draw far bigger crowds. Students affiliated with the Barnes had challenged the move, saying it would violate the terms under which the patent-medicine magnate Albert C. Barnes founded the institution in 1922.

Although a study of the foundation’s large holdings of Matisse and Renoir is under way, said Joseph J. Rishel, a senior curator at the Philadelphia Museum of Art who is chairman of the assessment committee, none of the 19th- or 20th-century works for which the Barnes is renowned are likely to be reattributed.

“These are very published, very exposed paintings,” Mr. Rishel said of the collection’s Renoirs, Cézannes, Matisses and Picassos. “When purchased, they were some of the most famous things of their kind.”

The de-attributions of old master works were reported on Sunday by The Philadelphia Inquirer.

In an interview with The New York Times, Larry Silver, professor of art history at the University of Pennsylvania, said he had known for years that “The Temptation of St. Anthony” ascribed to Bosch (circa 1450-1516) in the Barnes collection was a copy, in part because he has seen the original twice in Lisbon and again at an exhibition in Washington.

Mr. Silver, one of 39 consultants involved in reassessing works owned by the Barnes, said the mid-16th- century copy represents only an excerpt of the original canvas and lacks Bosch’s “handling – the way he uses paint in thin, rather loosely brushed layers, and his color harmonies, which are much more delicate in undoubted originals.”

On the other hand, Mr. Silver said, his review confirmed the authenticity of other Northern European paintings in the collection, including “a spectacular example” of a late portrait by the 17th-century artist Frans Hals (“Portrait of a Man Holding a Watch”) and “The Square Watch-Tower,” a landscape by Jan van Goyen that the professor said would be the envy of many museums. The assessment project, which also includes the organization and preservation of the archives, digitizing files and images from the collection, and conservation assessment, is intended to remedy what Ms. Croll described as “80 years” of benign neglect since the foundation was established.

Conservation assessment at the Barnes over the last several years has turned up an array of problems, including Pueblo ceramics in the gallery with “inactive mold,” moth-eaten Navajo rugs at the Barnes’s Ker-Feal estate in Chester Springs, Pa., and a need for stabilization of paintings and especially works on paper. “We’re stopping the damage,” said Barbara Buckley, the foundation’s chief conservator.

As for authorship, Ms. Croll said, “reattributions are something that every museum does constantly, and we haven’t had the opportunity to do it officially till very recently,” she said.

Among the other reattributed works are “The Disrobing of Christ” (now considered “School of El Greco”) and an “Annunciation” (described as a “possibly 17th-century” copy of an El Greco); “The Holy Family With St. John and an Angel” (ascribed to the workshop of Peter Paul Rubens); “Christ and the Woman of Samaria” (ascribed to a follower of Tintoretto), and “Portrait of a Gentleman and Son” (credited now to an “unidentified artist, Brescian School” rather than Titian).

Ms. Croll said the project has also helped the foundation identify previously unidentified works, confirm the authenticity of others and establish the quality of some of its less-well-known collections of objects. For example, Edwin L. Wade, senior vice president of the Museum of Northern Arizona, described the Barnes’s Navajo jewelry as “one of the finest holdings of its kind in the United States.”

The Barnes Foundation is celebrated internationally for its multibillion-dollar collection of Impressionist, Post-Impressionist and early modern masterpieces. Most hang in ensembles assembled by Barnes himself in his galleries, with sculpture, textiles, ironwork and decorative arts objects.

The move to the Benjamin Franklin Parkway in downtown Philadelphia will allow the Barnes to expand its visiting hours and facilities. Rebecca W. Rimel, president and chief executive of the Pew Charitable Trusts, said yesterday that more than $110 million had been pledged toward a $150 million fund-raising goal to pay for the move and an endowment. The Pew is spearheading the drive with the Annenberg and Lenfest Foundations.

Ms. Rimel said that she was hopeful that a new Barnes could open on the parkway by late 2008. “If we beat that, that would be great,” she said. The search for an architect has not yet begun, she added.

Ms. Rimel also said that the Barnes board of trustees had named the search firm of Russell Reynolds Associates to find a replacement for Kimberly Camp, the former Barnes president and chief executive who resigned in June. That search should be completed in about four months, Ms. Rimel said.

Mr. Rishel said the assessment project, which has been supported by more than $2.1 million from the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation, $1 million from Pew and other grants, had yielded significant new information about Barnes’s collecting habits. The archives are “a treasure trove,” he said. “It’s a whole level of documentation that was not known before.”

“What’s most fascinating is Barnes’s own take on what he did and didn’t buy,” Mr. Rishel said. “Even then, it was clear how shrewd he was in his choices, and how he did have a very broad number of choices. He was a very famous collector and a very rich man. The world’s greatest collectors spread a great bounty of temptations before him.”

Katy Rawdon-Faucett, the foundation’s archivist, said that among “the things that really make me say wow” was correspondence in the 1930′s and 40′s between Barnes and the American landscape artist Georgia O’Keeffe. “It’s really a back and forth between two people who knew each other and had some kind of connection and understanding,” Ms. Rawdon-Faucett said.

In a letter dated March 21, 1930, Barnes, who had purchased two paintings from O’Keeffe that he called “Still Life” and “Indian Girl,” praises them as “authentic expressions of yourself and therefore, genuine art.” But he adds, “Like every other new arrival in our gallery, they will survive or die on what they have in themselves.” Ms. Rawdon-Faucett said Barnes later returned the two paintings with apologies, and although O’Keeffe expressed disappointment, their friendship continued.

In a July 17, 1914, letter to Leo Stein, the art collector and brother of the writer Gertrude Stein, Barnes tries to explain his fascination with Renoir, which has mystified some contemporary critics.

“Renoir has been to me the most all-satisfying of any man’s work I know,” Barnes writes. “Perhaps the thing that most interests me in Renoir, that most strikes a personal response is, what seems to me, his joy in painting the real life of red-blooded people, and his skill in conveying his sensations to my consciousness.”

Ms. Rawdon-Faucett said that as far as she knew, that material had not previously been published.

She said that when she first entered the storage room in the Barnes administration building that housed much of the archives, “it was basically like the attic of an old house,” with filing cabinets, boxes and other material in disarray.

Along with Barnes’s letters and writings, she said, the archives contain blueprints and drawings of foundation buildings and the arboretum, photographs and institutional records, including deeds for the land dating back to the 18th century.

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Rolling Stones are back on stage — with new wrinkles

By ROBERT HILBURN, Los Angeles Times

TORONTO — For years now, there have been three givens to a Rolling Stones interview: Keith Richards will tell you what’s really happening, Mick Jagger will keep his guard up, and there’s no reason to talk about the new music because it’s probably not very interesting.

But this time something was different. Jagger showed a new openness, especially in the music, and that helps make the Stones’ new album their strongest since “Tattoo You” almost a quarter-century ago.

As the Stones wrapped up rehearsals for a world tour that began Sunday in Boston, it was clear that after nearly two decades of off-and-on feuding, Jagger and Richards have not only re-established their friendship but also recaptured their creative partnership. And in doing so, they may have averted a showdown regarding the future of the band.

Some of the new songs offer classic jolts of the Stones’ blues-rock swagger, while others show a vulnerability that has rarely surfaced in the band’s work (that’s part of Jagger’s opening up).

“There was a time when Mick and I could have argued forever over the most mundane things,” Richards said. “The color of the album cover could turn into a life-and-death debate. I used to think he was getting too big for his boots, and he probably thought I was a cantankerous sod.”

Last year, though, instead of being pulled apart, Jagger and Richards found themselves coming together. The bridge: finding out that drummer Charlie Watts was battling throat cancer. Past differences suddenly seemed petty.

“When we got the news about Charlie, we sat there, looking at each other and thinking, ‘OK, what now?’” Richards said in his dimly lighted dressing room, reggae playing in the background. “We realized we may not totally agree on everything, but there are too many plusses to our relationship.”

They were at Jagger’s house in France at the time, and they threw themselves into writing songs.

“Mick and I hadn’t worked like this for God knows how long,” Richards continued. “We wrote ‘Satisfaction’ and ‘Get Off My Cloud’ in a little motel room. If I said, ‘Mick, I have an idea,’ he’d be in my room within five minutes or I’d be over in his.

“After ‘Exile on Main Street,’ we got used to being exiles ourselves, and it’s hard to write songs 3,000 miles apart. Talking on the phone isn’t like looking across the room, eyeball to eyeball.”

Don Was, who has produced Stones albums for more than a decade, said he’s never seen Jagger and Richards as close as they were during the making of the album.

“They didn’t just hang out together in the studio,” Was said. “They went out to dinner. They enjoyed each other’s company. In the past, I could tell in the studio if it was a Mick song or Keith song. But this time, everything sounded like a Rolling Stones song.”

Richards went even further in stressing the importance of the new work.

He wasn’t thrilled with the band’s 2002-03 tour, which was designed chiefly to promote the greatest hits package “Forty Licks.” It felt too retro, he said.

“The last tour, you might say, was basically resting on your laurels. It was like celebrating your wonderful career, your great success and all that — a hurdle to get over. After that, we needed to prove ourselves again. I don’t think we would be talking about the new tour if it was pure regurgitation.

“But now I feel like a kid again. I can’t wait every day to walk up to the rehearsal room and play with Mick and Charlie and Ron. It’s been like that ever since Charlie came back. He’s already playing with the intensity of being on stage at Madison Square Garden. What a thrill.”

For all the camaraderie surrounding the Stones these days, the rehearsals are serious business. Jagger and Richards frequently huddle in the rehearsal room, but they’re talking about bridges and choruses.

“This is my 30th-year anniversary with the band, and I’ve never enjoyed it more,” said Wood, who had previously been in the Faces with Rod Stewart. “Everyone is more relaxed, and I think the music is better for it.”

Everyone expects Richards, one of rock’s great eccentrics, to be relaxed. His image has softened considerably since the ’70s, when his renegade lifestyle made him the odds-on favorite to be the next celebrity casualty in office “ghoul pools.”

Jagger’s image hasn’t changed much, partly because he’s so private. Just about everything we know about him is from watching him swagger across the stage and from tabloid accounts of his latest affair. People close to the singer say he’s smart and extremely loyal, but his public image remains a bit cold — the love ‘em and leave ‘em playboy with a heart of stone.

In that same sort of “more here than meets the eye” way, the Stones’ new work toys with longtime assumptions about the band. They’ve never been known for confessional music. They’ve built their work around rebellion, sexual swagger and blues mythology, all framed by a rhythm section so seductive it can make words feel unnecessary. But the new album, “A Bigger Bang,” takes the band beyond mere pose.

The real breakthrough is the personal songs, including the melancholy, country-tinged “The Biggest Mistake” and stark, R&B-rooted “Laugh, I Nearly Died,” that not only help humanize Jagger but greatly extend his range as a writer.

Jagger has written about love and loneliness before, as in “Miss You,” but it seemed like a generic exercise, not a personal outpouring. This time, he doesn’t just talk about his own feelings more convincingly but laments his playboy tendencies.

“Of course, you are as vulnerable as anyone else,” Jagger said. “It’s crazy to think someone can’t be hurt just because he’s famous or he struts across a stage. If you go back through Stones albums, I’m sure you’ll find vulnerability along with the swagger.

“It may not have been as easy to see, though, because it’s not my temperament to share that feeling. I’ve often hid my feelings with humor. This time the songs were written very quickly, and I was in a certain frame of mind.

“I thought about some of the words afterward to see whether they were too personal, but I decided to just let them stay. Keith was very encouraging.”

Richards, whose “This Place Is Empty” on the new album is as tender and as introspective as the key Jagger tunes, was delighted when he first heard “Biggest Mistake” in France.

“I thought it was about time he owned up and stepped out of that closed shell,” Richards said. “I knew he went through bad periods, even if he didn’t want to write about it. I used to wrestle with that too. As a writer, you don’t want to bore people with your own story. But you eventually realize that you’re not the only one who is lonely or having problems.”

Copyright © 2005 Waterloo/Cedar Falls Courier

August 25, 2005
Google Gets Better. What’s Up With That?
EVER heard the old joke about the two psychiatrists who pass in a hallway? One says, “Hello there.” The other thinks, “I wonder what he meant by that?”

In high-tech circles, that’s pretty much what people are saying about Google these days. If you hadn’t noticed, Google is no longer just an Internet search tool; it’s now a full-blown software company. It develops elegant, efficient software programs – and then gives them away. In today’s culture of cynicism, such generosity and software excellence seems highly suspicious; surely it’s all a smokescreen for a darker, larger plot to suck us all in. What, exactly, is Google up to?

The mystery only intensified this week, as Google announced two more free software tools for Windows: a new version of Google Desktop Search and a free instant-messaging program called Google Talk.

The original version of Desktop Search, which Google unleashed last fall, brought the speed and effortlessness of Google’s Internet search to your own PC. You’d type a few letters, and in a fraction of a second, you’d be looking at a complete list of files that included your search term – even if that term appeared inside the body of a document. It could even search e-mail, chat-session transcripts and the contents of Web pages you’d seen.

Google Desktop 1.0 certainly blew away Windows’ own built-in search tool, which operates with all the speed of an anesthetized slug. But it was limited in three ways.

First, you had to operate it from within your Web browser, limiting its convenience. Second, because it could call up Web pages, e-mail messages and chat transcripts, Google Desktop alarmed people who, ahem, had something to hide from bosses or spouses. And finally, it could see inside only a limited number of document types. For example, it couldn’t search PDF files, Web sites visited with any browser except Internet Explorer, or e-mail messages except those in Outlook or Outlook Express.

VERSION 2 , now available at google.com in what’s technically in a public beta test version, attacks all of these drawbacks with a vengeance. In Version 2, you can begin a search with a keystroke or by clicking in the search box that’s always on the screen. A pop-up menu of search results appears as you begin to type and narrows itself with each additional keystroke. When you see the item you want, you can open it by clicking or by walking up the list with the arrow keys and pressing Enter.

In other words, you can now find and open a certain program, document or control panel entirely from the keyboard, with blazing speed and simplicity. This is old news to Mac fans, of course; the Spotlight feature in Mac OS X 10.4 works the same way. But for Windows XP and 2000 veterans, getting such an omniscient, speedy search feature free is truly liberating. ( Microsoft plans something similar for the next version of Windows, due at the end of 2006.)

Google has also beefed up your privacy options. You can omit search categories like secure Web sites (banking sites, for example), password-protected Microsoft Office files, and so on, and you can even flag individual files so that they’ll never appear in the search results again.

Finally, the program now recognizes many more document types: e-mail from Gmail, Outlook, Outlook Express, Netscape Mail, Thunderbird and Mozilla Mail; chat transcripts from AOL or MSN Messenger; Web pages you’ve visited using Internet Explorer, Firefox, Netscape or Mozilla; PDF files; and your Outlook calendar and address book. (And speaking of Outlook, Google Desktop now installs its own search bar right into Outlook, meaning that you can search your e-mail collection in the blink of a cursor.) The company expects to add more kinds of files to this list, thanks to a public plug-in protocol it has published online.

Yet believe it or not, the little search box is the last thing you’ll notice when you install Google Desktop. The first thing you’ll see is the Sidebar, a column of rectangular panels hugging the right edge of your screen. Each is a window onto a different kind of real-time information from the Internet.

Some are ho-hum, like your latest incoming Gmail and Outlook e-mail, news, stock and weather tickers. Others are refreshingly quirky: the Photos panel shows a continuous, two-inch-tall slideshow of pictures from your own collection, and the surprisingly useful Scratch Pad is a blank box where you can type casual notes throughout your workday (they’re saved automatically). Each panel expands horizontally, drawer-like, to reveal more details when clicked.

The Sidebar is about as clean-looking as anyone could make it, but it’s still a lot of clutter in a very small space, especially if you add new panels as they become available. On the other hand, you can tidy things up quite a bit: drag your Sidebar panels into a different order, hide the ones you don’t use, or collapse them into one-line summaries.

Once again, Google isn’t the first company to dream up a modular, Internet-connected suite of miniprograms; the Sidebar is a lot like Mac OS X’s Dashboard or the shareware programs Desktop X and Konfabulator. But never mind that; you can’t keep a good idea down, and this is a good one indeed.

Google’s second revelation this week, Google Talk, lets you communicate with your buddies either by typing or, if your PC has a microphone and speaker, by speaking. As long as you and your conversation partner are at Windows computers, you can converse with spectacular sound quality.

Now, Google Talk 1.0 is probably the most stripped-down chat program on earth. No conference calling, video chats or direct person-to-person file transfers. (Features like these are common in rivals like Skype, iChat and the messenger programs from AOL, MSN and Yahoo.) So what, exactly, is Google trying to prove here?

Its mission, in fact, is far grander. Google Talk aims to end the ridiculous era of proprietary chat networks. At the moment, AOL, MSN and Yahoo each maintain separate, incompatible networks. The big boys each want to be alone in the sandbox, and the losers are their customers.

Google Talk, however, is based on an open, published standard that the company is making available to all. Already, Google Talk communicates with popular chat programs like iChat, Trillian, Adium, Psi and GAIM, but that’s just the beginning. Google is making overtures to Yahoo, AOL and Microsoft about making their chat programs compatible; EarthLink has already agreed to join the federation; and Google is also inviting the makers of games, collaboration tools and even cellphones to join in what it hopes will one day be a grand, unified chat network.

In the meantime, Google Talk is significant for another reason: it requires a Gmail account. (Gmail is Google’s free, Web-based e-mail service, whose two most famous aspects are its vast capacity – over two gigabytes of storage for each account – and the ads that appear, in small type, off to the right side of each message you read. The ads are computer-matched to keywords in the body of the message, which disturbs some privacy advocates.)

Until now, Gmail accounts were available by invitation only. Google let the service spread gradually and virally, giving each existing member a few additional invitations to extend. At one point, people were actually selling these invitations on eBay.

As of yesterday, however, all that has changed. Now anyone can get a Gmail account – and can therefore use Google Talk. But to prevent spammers and other abusers from snapping up Gmail accounts by the thousands, Google has designed a clever safeguard: when you apply for a Gmail account, you must provide a cellphone number.

Google sends a code to your phone, which you use to complete the registration. (Actually, you don’t have to own a cellphone; you just have to know somebody with a cellphone. They can get the code for you, because each cellphone number is good for a number of registrations – just not hundreds of them.)

In a single week, then, Google, the software company, addressed deficiencies in Windows, tried to create a grand unified chat and voice network, and opened its clean, capable, capacious e-mail system to all comers. All of this software is beautifully done, quick to download and fun to use – not to mention free and (apart from the Gmail service) entirely free of ads and come-ons.

Wish they’d cut it out. Trying to figure out what this company’s really up to is enough to drive you crazy.

E-mail: Pogue@nytimes.com


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August 24, 2005
My Private Idaho
By MAUREEN DOWD

W. vacationed so hard in Texas he got bushed. He needed a vacation from his vacation.

The most rested president in American history headed West yesterday to get away from his Western getaway – and the mushrooming Crawford Woodstock – and spend a couple of days at the Tamarack Resort in the rural Idaho mountains.

“I’m kind of hangin’ loose, as they say,” he told reporters.

As The Financial Times noted, Mr. Bush is acting positively French in his love of le loafing, with 339 days at his ranch since he took office – nearly a year out of his five. Most Americans, on the other hand, take fewer vacations than anyone else in the developed world (even the Japanese), averaging only 13 to 16 days off a year.

W. didn’t go alone, of course. Just as he took his beloved feather pillow on the road during his 2000 campaign, now he takes his beloved bike. An Air Force One steward tenderly unloaded W.’s $3,000 Trek Fuel mountain bike when they landed in Boise.

Gas is guzzling toward $3 a gallon. U.S. troop casualties in Iraq are at their highest levels since the invasion. As Donald Rumsfeld conceded yesterday, “The lethality, however, is up.” Afghanistan’s getting more dangerous, too. The defense secretary says he’s raising troop levels in both places for coming elections.

So our overextended troops must prepare for more forced rotations, while the president hangs loose.

I mean, I like to exercise, but W. is psychopathic about it. He interviewed one potential Supreme Court nominee, Harvie Wilkinson III, by asking him how much he exercised. Last winter, Mr. Bush was obsessed with his love handles, telling people he was determined to get rid of seven pounds.

Shouldn’t the president worry more about body armor than body fat?

Instead of calling in Karl Rove to ask him if he’d leaked, W. probably called him in to order him to the gym.

The rest of us may be fixated on the depressing tableau in Iraq, where the U.S. seems to be delivering a fundamentalist Islamic state into the dirty hands of men like Ahmad Chalabi, who conned the neocons into pushing for war, and his ally Moktada al-Sadr, the Shiite cleric who started two armed uprisings against U.S. troops. It was his militiamen who ambushed Casey Sheehan’s convoy in Sadr City.

America has caved on Iraqi women’s rights. In fact, the women’s rights activists supported by George and Laura Bush may have to leave Iraq.

But, as a former C.I.A. Middle East specialist, Reuel Marc Gerecht, said on “Meet the Press,” U.S. democracy in 1900 didn’t let women vote. If Iraqi democracy resembled that, “we’d all be thrilled,” he said. “I mean, women’s social rights are not critical to the evolution of democracy.”

Yesterday, the president hailed the constitution establishing an Islamic republic as “an amazing process,” and said it “honors women’s rights, the rights of minorities.” Could he really think that? Or is he following the Vietnam model – declaring victory so we can leave?

The main point of writing a constitution was to move Sunnis into the mainstream and make them invested in the process, thereby removing the basis of the insurgency. But the Shiites and Kurds have frozen out the Sunnis, enhancing their resentment. So the insurgency is more likely to be inflamed than extinguished.

For political reasons, the president has a history of silence on America’s war dead. But he finally mentioned them on Monday because it became politically useful to use them as a rationale for war – now that all the other rationales have gone up in smoke.

“We owe them something,” he told veterans in Salt Lake City (even though his administration tried to shortchange the veterans agency by $1.5 billion). “We will finish the task that they gave their lives for.”

What twisted logic: with no W.M.D., no link to 9/11 and no democracy, now we have to keep killing people and have our kids killed because so many of our kids have been killed already? Talk about a vicious circle: the killing keeps justifying itself.

Just because the final reason the president came up with for invading Iraq – to create a democracy with freedom of religion and minority rights – has been dashed, why stop relaxing? W. is determined to stay the course on bike trails all over the West.

This president has never had to pull all-nighters or work very hard, because Daddy’s friends always gave him a boost when he flamed out. When was the last time Mr. Bush saw the clock strike midnight? At these prices, though, I guess he can’t afford to burn the midnight oil.

E-mail: liberties@nytimes.com

Thomas L. Friedman is on vacation.

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Fred R. Conrad/The New York Times; hair by Robert Smith and makeup by Vashaya Ramsey, both of the John Barrett Salon; stylist, Lindha Jacobsson

Balenciaga wool and denim jacket, $2,585, and blouse, $1,220, paired with skinny Acne jeans, $229 at Barneys. Gucci shoes, $550. Amethyst ring by Karim Mulji, $1,400 at Fragments

August 25, 2005
Who’s Afraid of Minimalism?
By CATHY HORYN

QUITE a few fashion designers have everything it takes, and more, to be minimalists. They have an excess of talent to make clean lines out of ornamental ones, yet they lack the will or the stamina to hold unpopular views, and minimalism has been out of vogue for a good 10 years.

Even its greatest practitioner, Giorgio Armani, today adds more than he subtracts. And to some extent we associate minimalism with failure – the failure of Jil Sander and Helmut Lang to continue under Prada ownership.

It’s encouraging, then, to see so many designers this season doing something spectacularly out of character and at the same time commercially sensible. You would never think to call Alexander McQueen a minimalist. He usually pursues more exotic themes, like the style of an Amazon tribe, but this fall, pursuing Tippi Hedren’s femme fatale character in “The Birds,” he came up with plain slim-fitting coats and suits. Huge is how Evelyn Gorman, a boutique owner in Houston, characterized demand for Mr. McQueen’s pencil suits.

“And our customers want the whole look, the shoes, the bag,” she said. “If he showed an outfit with gloves, they’d want the gloves, too.”

Almost all the designers getting special notice in the September fashion issues – Miuccia Prada, Nicolas Ghesquiere at Balenciaga, Olivier Theyskens at Rochas – have behaved more like minimalists than like showmen or decorators. Others, like Ralph Lauren, Roland Mouret and Francisco Costa at Calvin Klein, also proved farsighted, and the minimalist Narciso Rodriguez just had to sharpen his seams.

When these designers showed their collections in February and March, editors and buyers were struck merely by the leaner silhouette after seasons of frothy volume. Ms. Prada scraped off most of the ornamental trim, and though she still had volume in the dropped full sleeves, say, of a black wool suit, the news was in her straight, over-dyed camel coats, which she closed with rough leather belts.

Mr. Theyskens, one may recall, began his career at Rochas with lace and humpback dresses. He seemed to get carried away with couture techniques until this season, when his clothes became vividly modern, with long skirts and snug matching jackets.

Mr. Ghesquiere had the sharpest silhouette in Paris, achieved by drawing on the 1960′s minimalism of André Courrèges, who was an assistant to Cristobal Balenciaga, and by using stiff, grainy fabrics that hold their form: another Balenciaga tradition. Mr. Ghesquiere’s new clothes may have been souped up with fox trim and silver hardware, but the cut was all about subtraction.

For Susan Fales-Hill, a writer, the pared-down silhouette squares with her own tastes. “I think of a lot of fashion in the past couple of years became too youthful, too over the top, too silly,” she said. “I love a sharp line. To me Prada’s black jacket with the full sleeves and the portrait neckline is just exquisite. It’s timeless. Now a lot of the looks for fall are not innovative. They remind me of clothes my mother wore in 1965. But it’s a beautiful way to dress. And maybe it will mean the end of beads on day clothes. Call me a traditionalist.”

Ms. Gorman, whose shop, Mix, also carries Rochas and Balenciaga, says she has had a good response to these collections: “They’re serious clothes, and they’re easy clothes for a woman to go into her closet and put on. There’s no question mark over them.” She added that while many of her customers liked the floaty ruffled looks of the last few seasons, they gradually found them too contrived and too youthful. To her, fall was more than a shift, “it was a leap into mature dressing.”

Ronald Frasch, the vice chairman and chief merchant of Saks Fifth Avenue, agreed. “I think people like a more ordered way of dressing, and quite frankly we’ve heard from a lot of customers who wondered why we didn’t have it sooner,” he said, noting that at the men’s shows in June he was struck by how much better – more up to date – the men in the audiences looked than the women, in part because they had on classic suits.

Still, Mr. Frasch said, he expects to encounter some resistance to the pared-down silhouette. He said that many customers have an emotional response to flounced skirts and bright colors. By comparison a mod-inspired minicoat in black wool or a tweed pencil suit is more subdued and sophisticated. “They’re not as visually exciting as what we had in the store,” he said. “Customers are going to have to be sold on the look. It’s a dramatic change.”

Dawn Brown, the spokeswoman for Barneys New York, said that young trendy customers are going for Balenciaga’s new elongated trousers, but that’s in part, she said, because they like wearing the skinny denim styles from the store’s Co-op. Other customers are displaying more caution and buying the easier, more fluid McQueen and Balenciaga looks. And Mr. Frasch suggests there is likely to be an increasingly divided market between casual clothes and sophisticated suits. Weekend clothes will still be a mix-and-match game. “The next evolution in denim is more embellished,” he added.

Mr. Frasch hesitates to call the fall clothes minimalist. “To make the look work in today’s world you need something exciting – a strong shoulder line, more detail,” he said. “People are used to buying clothes that say, ‘What about me?’ ”

Mr. Costa at Calvin Klein agreed. “It’s not the 90′s minimalism, that’s for sure,” he said. “There was something not very approachable about that look.” Still, as he begins to choose fabrics for fall 2006, he foresees the streamlined trend continuing. “It’s almost an Armani thing that has to come back,” he said. “It’s ready to come back.”

And with Raf Simons, the Belgian men’s wear designer, starting at Jil Sander – he is to present his first men’s and women’s collections in February – minimalism will get more attention, if not more respect.

Meanwhile you can hedge your bets by wearing a sleek skirt or pair of trousers with a gust of volume on top. A number of designers, including Stella McCartney and Marc Jacobs (in both his own collection and that for Louis Vuitton), combined a romantic gesture with a masculine one. Mr. Jacobs, for instance, showed loose tops and boxy jackets with boyish trousers. It will be surprising if Ms. McCartney’s cocooning sweaters are not copied. After seeing all the flouncy skirts on the street this summer, you’re probably ready for an about-face.

Another way to look casually up to date – and sexy – is to pair a pencil skirt with a swingy jacket (Burberry’s draped-back pea jacket looks like a cape) or one of Zac Posen’s Moorish-looking blouses.

But if the early spring 2006 collections are an indication of what’s to come, don’t expect fashion to lose its new minimalist clarity. Some designers have been looking at early Zoran styles, others at the cool white simplicity of the Southwest. In Paris last month Alber Elbaz at Lanvin showed plain navy wrap dresses, which brought to mind the most sensible of all minimalists, the American designer Claire McCardell.

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Joe M. Nitzberg for The New York Times

Chloé cuffed boot, $995 at Bergdorf Goodman. Stella McCartney stretch denim jeans at Saks Fifth Avenue. Martin Margiela scarf-tie blouse at IF. La Crasia gloves.

Joe M. Nitzberg for The New York Times

Jil Sander lace-ups, $600 at Jil Sander. Balenciaga military-style jacket and cropped pants at Barneys.

Joe M. Nitzberg for The New York Times

Cesare Paciotti perforated leather witch boots, $815 at Cesare Paciotti. Roland Mouret trench coat

Joe M. Nitzberg for The New York Times

Marc by Marc Jacobs corduroy and leather boots, $675 at Barneys. Cropped wool trousers, to order through Pringle

Joe M. Nitzberg for The New York Times

Azzedine Alaïa suede ankle boots, $835 at Jeffrey New York. Marc Jacobs dress at Bergdorf

Joe M. Nitzberg for The New York Times

Dior crocodile-stamped leather boots, $1,265 at Jeffrey. Stella McCartney houndstooth coat at Saks. La Crasia gloves.

Joe M. Nitzberg for The New York Times

Over-the-knee distressed leather boots from Prada, $1,280. Prada pleated skirt.

Joe M. Nitzberg for The New York Times

Fleecy rabbit fur and leather boots from Dior, $1,435 at Saks. Martin Margiela skirt

Joe M. Nitzberg for The New York Times

Manolo Blahnik whipstitched cowgirl boots, $895 at Neiman Marcus. Fur skirt at Bally.

August 25, 2005
Choices, Up to Your Knees
By DAVID COLMAN

Full-length, half-length,
Fully fashion calf-length,
Brown boots, black boots,
Patent leather jackboots,
Low boots, high boots,
Lovely lanky thigh boots.
“Kinky Boots”

IF you want to know what’s in for fall, you can pop down to the newsstand for the 802-page September Vogue. Or you can log onto eBay and find a copy of the loony 1964 Decca single “Kinky Boots,” recorded by Patrick MacNee and Honor Blackman, then the stars of the supercool spy spoof “The Avengers,” where leather, sex, camp and high fashion collided (and colluded) for the first time.

Vogue will get you au courant (and does not require a record player), but the infectious pop of “Kinky Boots” will bore so deep into your brain that friends will beg you to learn a new tune. The song, a madly chipper send-up of the mid-1960′s boot craze, illuminates this fall’s fashion landscape in peculiarly expressive fashion.

That is, boots are everywhere. There are 60′s styles à la Nancy Sinatra; 70′s styles à la Stevie Nicks; 80′s styles à la Gloria Estefan; and 90′s styles à la Shirley Manson. It is a puzzling sight for fashion seers used to declaring that one style of boot – Midcalf! Thigh High! – is The One For Fall. With flat heels and high heels, stacked heels and wedge heels, citified styles and country-fried styles, it is clear that one boot does not cut it anymore.

“They’re really their own category now,” said Jeffrey Kalinsky, the founder of Jeffrey New York. Shoes? Who needs them.

“I just don’t feel good in anything else,” D D Allen, the Manhattan decorator, said. “They’re totally empowering. They make you feel taller and thinner and smarter and cooler, like your whole leg is one spring-loaded force.”

She appears to speak for many. At Barneys New York, fall boot sales are already double what they were at this time in 2004, said Lisa Park, a vice president who oversees women’s footwear. “We’re selling them in every style,” she said. “They’re buying a classic dress boot but also something more rugged for the weekend and something for cold weather, like a shearling.” Several styles are sold out, she added.

Valerie Steele, the director of the Museum at the Fashion Institute of Technology, said she has noticed more and more boots in her own closet in the last couple of years. “They’re now half my wardrobe, I think,” she said. “It’s almost frightening.” Ms. Steele noted that like boots themselves, fashion and its hemlines are increasingly varied. “That thing about there being one look for a season is over,” she said. “Having a few pairs of boots, which can go with a variety of lengths, is really functional.”

She added, though, that in her view the allure of boots is not their practicality. “Boots send a different message than shoes do,” she said. “They have a real Amazonian appeal. They’re the tough shoe.” Contrasting boots to sandals, with their suggestion of vulnerability, she said that boots imply no-nonsense practicality even when the reality – a pair in high-heeled purple suede, say – is something else.

Frivolous or hard-line, paired with floaty dresses or tailored suits, boots anchor looks with the offhand incongruity that is so appealing in fashion today. A high-heeled ankle boot gives an aggressive twist to a demure pencil skirt; an equestrian boot butches up a fuller, flouncier style; knee-high swashbucklers look sharp with stovepipe jeans. The overall effect is an unstudied, slightly tough chic that steps smartly from office to restaurant, fall to winter.

Come cold weather, some women are loath to wear anything else. “I love boots in the winter – short boots, tall boots, over-the-knee boots,” said Katherine Ross, who as a vice president at Prada has more options than most. “They’re the first thing I go to in the morning. I feel very comfortable in them, and there’s a certain strength to them as well. They get me where I need to go.”

They might take her clear into next summer. “I would say that more and more women are wearing boots 12 months of the year,” Mr. Kalinsky said. Citing this summer’s frenzy for cowboy boots, he said he had bought more boots for the spring season than in any previous spring and that, in relatively small number, they sold as briskly as sandals.

So why not pair those thigh-highs with a bikini? It certainly makes more sense than getting sand between your toes.

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Adriana Zehbrauskas for The New York Times

Turtles arriving last October to lay their eggs on Escobillo Beach in the state of Oaxaca in southern Mexico. Armed federal agents patrol the beach during the nesting period to help prevent the stealing of the eggs.


August 25, 2005
Turtle Eggs, Sex and Flirty Ads, Fixings of a Mexican Stew
By JAMES C. McKINLEY Jr.

MEXICO CITY, Aug. 22 – Women in scanty dress are used to sell everything from cars to cigars in Mexico, but the efforts of environmentalists to harness one model’s sex appeal to stop men from eating turtle eggs as an aphrodisiac have created a stir here.

The advertising campaign features a buxom Argentine model in a swimsuit giving the camera her loveliest come-hither look. Next to her are the words “My man doesn’t need turtle eggs.” The caption below reads, “Because he knows they don’t make him more potent.”

The environmentalists behind the campaign say they are trying to reach men who buy turtle eggs from street vendors for a dollar and eat them raw with lime and a pinch of salt in the belief they are a natural form of Viagra.

“We said, ‘Let’s have a sexy girl saying that the man I choose doesn’t need sea turtle eggs,’ ” said Fay Crevoshay, the communications director for Wildcoast, a San Diego-based environmental group. “This is what I call target marketing. We are talking to a certain type of man that will look at this and will get the message.”

But one woman’s marketing is another’s exploitation of the female body. Patricia Espinosa, the president of the National Institute for Women, a government agency, has denounced the advertisements as promoting a sexist stereotype. Her broadside has prompted the governor of Guerrero, the southern state where many of the turtle eggs are poached and sold, to retract a promise to let the ads be posted in markets next month.

“We are not against the campaign itself,” Ms. Espinosa said in an interview. “What we are against is the stereotype of a woman as a sex object.”

At the center of this struggle between feminists and naturalists are various types of sea turtles, a species much older than man that has faced an uphill battle for survival in recent decades.

Every year, hundreds of thousands of turtles haul themselves ashore to lay their eggs on Mexico’s Pacific beaches. Many fall prey to poachers who kill them for meat and steal eggs from the corpses to sell as aphrodisiacs. Other poachers raid the turtles’ sandy nests to get eggs.

In recent years, the olive ridley turtle has been making a comeback, mostly because armed federal agents and marines guard its nesting grounds in the state of Oaxaca. It has been a different story, however, in the state of Guerrero and some other spots along the Pacific coast, where poachers still operate with little opposition.

Even in Oaxaca, the turtles are not safe. This month, poachers bludgeoned and chopped to death some 80 protected olive ridley sea turtles, ripping out their eggs and leaving their shells scattered on Escobillo Beach in Oaxaca.

Ms. Crevoshay said that while the government here had tried to protect nests, her organization had gone after the consumers of turtle meat and eggs with public awareness campaigns, thinking that poaching would never stop as long as there was a demand.

Homero Aridjis, a poet and naturalist who has fought for years to save the turtles, said the feminists opposed to the advertisements were being overly prudish and should turn their attention to the rampant violence against women in places like Ciudad Juárez, where hundreds have been killed.

Besides, he pointed out, semi-naked women are seen on billboards all over the country selling perfumes, lingerie, beer and tequila. Why, he asked, are the women in the government institute scandalized by one more model in a bikini?

“They don’t understand the goal of the campaign,” said Mr. Aridjis, who leads the Group of 100, an influential organization of intellectuals and environmentalists. “It is directed at men, to capture the attention of the macho Mexican man who uses the turtle eggs for sexual ends. The campaign tries to be sexy precisely to capture their attention. We are in a country where there are boring government campaigns every day that no one watches.”

Ms. Espinosa, however, says the turtle lovers should find a different way to attract attention. “The end of discouraging the consumption of turtle eggs doesn’t justify a campaign like this,” she said. “I think this model, who is so lovely, could do the campaign, inviting people not to consume the eggs, without creating these stereotypes.”

The women’s institute is not without clout. It has gone to war with car companies, lingerie shops and other companies that peddle their wares with underdressed women. The agency once forced Mercedes-Benz to drop an advertisement with a sexual double entendre and halted a particularly sexy series of advertisements for Vicky Form lingerie.

The $30,000 campaign of television spots, billboards and posters is supposed to kick off officially in September – high season for poachers – but the opposition of the women’s institute may put it in jeopardy.

Not only has the government of Guerrero pulled back its support, but federal environmental officials, who initially supported the idea, have distanced the government from the campaign.

The reaction has stung Ms. Crevoshay, who vows to find volunteers to put up the posters even without the government’s blessing. A veteran of the feminist movement, she regards the ability to show off the female form without shame as a fundamental right. She points out that the model used in the campaign, Doris Mar, is working for free because she believes in the cause.

“Why can Pepsi-Cola use a woman in short shorts and a little top, sweating in the desert?” Ms. Crevoshay asked. “If I put a picture of a turtle up, who’s going to look?”

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David Paul Morris/Getty Images

Google headquarters in Mountain View, Calif. The company’s growth has created new rivals and critics
August 24, 2005

Relax, Bill Gates; It’s Google’s Turn as the Villain
By GARY RIVLIN
SAN FRANCISCO, Aug. 23 – For years, Silicon Valley hungered for a company mighty enough to best Microsoft. Now it has one such contender: the phenomenally successful Google.

But instead of embracing Google as one of their own, many in Silicon Valley are skittish about its size and power. They fret that the very strengths that made Google a search-engine phenomenon are distancing it from the entrepreneurial culture that produced it – and even transforming it into a threat.

A year after the company went public, those inside Google are learning the hard way what it means to be the top dog inside a culture accustomed to pulling for the underdog. And they are facing a hometown crowd that generally rebels against anything that smacks of corporate behavior.

Nowadays, when venture capitalists, entrepreneurs and technologists gather in Silicon Valley, they often find themselves grousing about Google, complaining about everything from a hoarding of top engineers to its treatment of partners and potential partners. The word arrogant is frequently used.

The news last week that Google plans to sell an additional 14 million shares of stock, adding $4 billion to its current cash reserves of $3 billion, will only provide more reasons to gripe.

“I’ve definitely been picking up on the resentment,” said Max Levchin, a founder of PayPal, the online payment service now owned by eBay. “They’re a big company now, doing things people didn’t expect them to do.”

Mr. Levchin, who last year founded a multimedia company in San Francisco called Slide, said Google “still has a long wick of good will to burn off,” but he added, “I’m surprised at how fast the company’s reputation is changing.”

It was not that long ago that Google reigned here as the upstart computer company that could do no wrong. Now some working in the technology field are starting to draw comparisons between Google and Microsoft, the company in Redmond, Wash., that Silicon Valley loves most to hate.

Bill Gates certainly sees similarities between Google and his own company. This spring, in an interview with Fortune, Mr. Gates, Microsoft’s chairman, said that Google was “more like us than anyone else we have ever competed with.”

Google’s success has already spurred Microsoft to develop its own Internet search engine (a project code-named Underdog), but Google has legions of engineers banging away on a range of projects of its own that, if successful, could dislodge Microsoft from the pre-eminent spot it has enjoyed since the early 1980′s.

Of course, Silicon Valley has had past pretenders to the throne. Netscape, which went public 10 years ago this month, and its Web browser, Navigator, were supposed to fell Microsoft – but it is Netscape that is no longer in business. And while Google is riding high, those closely following the company caution that it is hardly invincible; an inflated stock price, a desire to compete in too many sectors simultaneously or simple hubris might cause it to stumble, they say. Even Microsoft, after all, has had legal troubles.

Still, similarities between Google and Microsoft are evident to local entrepreneurs including Steven I. Lurie, who worked at Microsoft between 1993 and 1999 but now lives in San Francisco, and Joe Kraus, a founder of the 1990′s search firm Excite.

“There’s that same ‘think big’ attitude about markets and opportunities,” said Mr. Lurie, who has visited the Google campus in Mountain View many times to see friends who work there. “Maybe you can call it arrogance, but there’s that same sense that they can do anything and get into any area and dominate.”

To place Google in context, Mr. Kraus offered a brief history lesson. In the 1990′s, he said, I.B.M. was widely perceived in Silicon Valley as a “gentle giant” that was easy to partner with while Microsoft was perceived as an “extraordinarily fearsome, competitive company wanting to be in as many businesses as possible and with the engineering talent capable of implementing effectively anything.”

Now, in the view of Mr. Kraus, “Microsoft is becoming I.B.M. and Google is becoming Microsoft.” Mr. Kraus is the chief executive and a founder of JotSpot, a Silicon Valley start-up hoping to sell blogging and other self-publishing tools to corporations.

Just as Microsoft has been seen over the years as an aggressive, deep-pocketed competitor for talent, Internet start-ups in Silicon Valley complain that virtually every time they try to recruit a well-regarded computer programmer, that person is already contemplating an offer from Google.

“Google is doing more damage to innovation in the Valley right now than Microsoft ever did,” said Reid Hoffman, the founder of two Internet ventures, including LinkedIn, a business networking Web site popular among Silicon Valley’s digerati. “It’s largely that they’re hiring up so many talented people, and the fact they’re working on so many different things. It’s harder for start-ups to do interesting stuff right now.”

Google, Mr. Hoffman said, has caused “across the board a 25 to 50 percent salary inflation for engineers in Silicon Valley” – or at least those in a position to weigh competing offers. A sought-after computer programmer can now expect to make more than $150,000 a year.

David C. Drummond, vice president for corporate development at Google, acknowledged that the company was “very competitive” in its pursuit of talent, but added: “We’re very sensitive to how everybody is perceiving us. We think the Silicon Valley ecosystem is critical for Google’s success.”

Google is also making it more difficult for some start-ups to raise funds. In the second half of the 1990′s, entrepreneurs frequently complained that the specter of Microsoft hung over their every conversation with venture capitalists. Today, they say the same about Google.

“When I meet with venture capitalists, or if I’m engaged in a conversation about going into partnership with someone, inevitably the question is, ‘Why couldn’t Google do what you’re doing?’ ” said Craig Donato, the founder and chief executive of Oodle, a site for searching online classified listings more quickly.

“The answer is, ‘They could, and they’re probably thinking about it, but they can’t do everything and do it well,’ ” Mr. Donato said. “Or at least I’m hoping they can’t.”

Google has already added free e-mail, mapping, news aggregation and digital-photo management to its offerings, bringing it into competition in each case with two or more rivals. On Wednesday, it will announce plans for an instant-messaging system. And its plans for a new stock issue are fueling speculation that it is preparing to enter any number of other markets, from services for mobile phone users to an online payment service that would compete with PayPal.

Add to that list an Internet-based phone system and several products that would be directly aimed at Microsoft, including a Google browser and a software offering that would compete with Microsoft Office.

“If there’s a perception that we’re exploring lots of different areas, some of which might not be directly related to our core area of search, that’s true,” said Mr. Drummond, the Google vice president. “It’s part of our DNA to be always innovating and exploring lots of different areas.”

Yet so driven has Google been in its pursuit of new markets that at least a few in Silicon Valley are using an epithet to taunt Google that people here once reserved for Microsoft: “The Borg,” a reference to an army of creatures in “Star Trek: The Next Generation” that took over civilization after civilization with machinelike precision.

Perhaps an anti-Google reaction was to be expected, given the glowing press the company has enjoyed for several years. Or maybe the carping and complaining is the inevitable reaction to a company so successful that it cannot help stomping on toes, even if accidentally.

“Hubris is an issue at every one of these Silicon Valley companies that are successful,” said Peter Thiel, a founder of PayPal who has invested in roughly 15 Internet start-ups in recent years. “I don’t know if it’s any worse at Google than it’s been at other highly successful technology companies.”

Aggressiveness is another signal trait among successful companies like Google – something those in parts of the media world are starting to learn.

Google recently announced that it would not talk to any reporter from CNETNews.com, a technology news Web site, until July 2006, after a reporter for the site wrote an article raising privacy questions about the information Google collects about individuals.

The company also provoked the ire of many within the blogging world – not to mention snarky comments in Silicon Valley from those thinking Google was behaving like an old-line company that doesn’t get it – when earlier this year it fired a new employee who had joked online that the free meals, the on-site gym and all the other perks were a clever ploy to keep people at their desks longer.

“Google is at that inflection point where it’s starting to act like an establishment company, and Silicon Valley is a rebel culture,” said Gautam Godhwani, a founder and chief executive at Simply Hired, an online employment site.

Microsoft, of course, has its hold on the Windows world – and a market capitalization almost four times Google’s. By contrast, switching to a new search engine is as easy as calling up another Web page – if a new company is able to do to Google what Google did to some of the earliest leaders of search, including AltaVista and Excite.

For the moment, at least, Google is aiming for that most coveted position in technology: a platform that, like Microsoft’s operating system, is so popular that outside software developers write programs, and Web developers build new Google-related services, that render the Google home page indispensable to the personal computer ecosystem.

“In the day, you’d hear that Microsoft was the evil empire, especially in Silicon Valley,” said Brian Lent, the president of Medio Systems, a start-up in Seattle working on mobile-phone-based search. “Google is the new evil empire, because they’re in such a powerful position in terms of control. They have potential monopolistic control over access to information.”

Mr. Lent, who worked closely with Google’s founders, Sergey Brin and Larry Page, when all three were Ph.D. students at Stanford University, helped introduce Mr. Brin and Mr. Page to one of the company’s earliest investors.

“I like and respect the Google guys,” Mr. Lent said, “but let’s just say that their ultimate aim seems to me to be, ‘One Google under Google, for which it stands.’ “

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