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From http://www.bbc.co.uk/podcasts/series/how2

Dima: Hello and welcome to this edition of 6 Minute English with me, Dima Kostenko.
Kate: and me, Kate Colin.
D: Kate will be our language guide for today.
Today we'll hear a fascinating report about a new vending machine that's unlike any other. But first - Kate, how would you describe what a vending machine is?
K: Responds...(short dialogue to introduce synonyms, slot machine, dispenser, soft drinks-snacks-newspapers-transport tickets-Mars bars)

D: Well Kate, if you're only using vending machines to buy things like chocolate bars, you are in for a surprise! As Steve Rosenberg, the BBC's correspondent in Berlin has discovered, a German company is planning to install some very different dispensers at stations, airports and shopping centres. Would you like to hear more?

K: Well, hearing all these phrases from you - 'very different' and 'unlike any other'. I must say I'm a bit intrigued.
D: You won't be intrigued for too much longer because in a moment we'll hear from Steve Rosenberg to find out what those machine will be selling. I'll say just one thing: it's something really valuable.
K: OK, let's listen, and as you are listening, try to find out what it is. Also, listen out for these words and phrases. 'On the go goodies', meaning small things that we buy and consume without stopping - like chocolate bars, crisps and other snacks, for example. And - 'precious', which means very expensive and valuable.
D: Here's Steve Rosenberg:

Clip One
I'm standing next to a vending machine at a Berlin railway station. It offers a typical selection of on the go goodies. There are fizzy drinks and crisps, chewing gum... But very soon machines like this one could be selling something far more precious than a packet of peanuts.
As well as chocolate bars you'll be able to buy...gold bars.

D: So Kate, what is it that the new vending machines will be selling?
K: Steve says it isn't going to be 'on the go goodies'. Not chewing gum, not packets of peanuts. It will be the precious metal...gold! Well, sounds interesting, but I am not quite sure I understand… Why would anyone want to by a gold bar from a slot machine?

D: Well apparently, with the global financial crisis more and more people decide that they can no longer rely upon stocks and shares the way they used to.
K: 'Stocks and shares' - that's a useful expression, often heard among business people. It means part of the ownership of a company which people can buy as an investment.

D: Indeed, they can. But in reality many start turning to other types of investment, which they consider safer - like buying precious metals. And with this new slot machine, buying gold simply can't be easier! The price will be adjusted daily, and in the next part Steve Rosenberg quotes some prices at current rates. And here comes your challenge for this week: what currency unit is mentioned?

a) euro
b) dollar
c) pound

Kate, which of these three currencies would you expect to hear in a report about gold, recorded in Germany by a reporter of a British broadcaster?
K: Responds...

D: We'll check your guess later, but first, what's your language point for the second part of the report Kate?
K: It's the expression 'to keep a close eye on', meaning to watch closely. Steve says 'built-in video cameras will be keeping an especially close eye on all the customers', so his word of warning is, watch out how you behave when you use them:

Clip Two
The machine will dispense a gram of gold for about 40 dollars and a 10 gram bar - for just under 350 dollars. But one word of warning: if you put in your money and nothing comes out, don't start banging your fist on this treasure chest - built-in video cameras will be keeping an especially close eye on all the customers.

D: That was our correspondent Steve Rosenberg at a railway station in Berlin.
Now, before we talk about the answer to this week's question, do you mind going through some of today's vocabulary again Kate?
K: Responds...We began by talking about vending machines - that is machines from which small items such as packaged food or drinks can be bought by inserting money. Because cash is inserted through a slot, they are also known colloquially as slot machines. And another synonym is dispensers.

We then mentioned the phrase on the go goodies meaning small things that we buy and consume without stopping - like chocolate bars, crisps and other snacks, for example. And then, the word precious which means very expensive and valuable. We talked briefly about stocks and shares, which means part of the ownership of a company which people can buy as an investment. And finally, the expression to keep a close eye on, meaning to watch very closely.
D: Thanks Kate. Finally, back to our question. Which currency was used in the report to talk about the price of gold?
K: Responds (the choice was euro, dollar and pound and I said… which was correct/wrong…)
D: Responds...I'm afraid that's all we have time for today. Until next week.
Both: Goodbye!

Cormac McCarthy has written more than a dozen novels, several screenplays, two plays, two short stories, countless drafts, letters and more — and nearly every one of them was tapped out on a portable Olivetti manual typewriter he bought in a Knoxville, Tenn., pawnshop around 1963 for $50.

Lately this dependable machine has been showing irrevocable signs of age. So after his friend and colleague John Miller offered to buy him another, Mr. McCarthy agreed to auction off his Olivetti Lettera 32 and donate the proceeds to the Santa Fe Institute, a nonprofit interdisciplinary scientific research organization with which both men are affiliated.

“He found another one just like this,” a portable Olivetti that looks practically brand new, Mr. McCarthy said from his home in New Mexico. “I think he paid $11, and the shipping was about $19.95.”

Mr. McCarthy, 76, has won a wagon-full of honors including a Pulitzer Prize, a National Book Award and the MacArthur Foundation’s so-called genius grant. Books like “Blood Meridian,” “All the Pretty Horses” and “The Crossing” have propelled him to the top ranks of American fiction writers.

by Andy Hunter from http://www.guardian.co.uk/

Wednesday 25 November 2009

Rafael Benítez has been assured his position as Liverpool manager will not be undermined by Champions League failure as he admitted the 2005 winners and 2007 runners-up had only themselves to blame for a damaging group-stage exit. The unequivocal support arrived from the Liverpool managing director, Christian Purslow, who insisted the Anfield club could withstand the financial impact of their early elimination.

David Ngog's fourth-minute goal gave Liverpool victory over Debrecen but a first win in six matches was rendered irrelevant by Fiorentina's defeat of Lyon. The result in Tuscany ensured Fiorentina progressed at Liverpool's expense, and prompted Purslow to issue firm backing for Benítez before his future at the club could come under scrutiny again.

"This will have no bearing on Rafa whatsoever," Purslow said. "He signed a new five-year deal four months ago and in those terms he is four months into a five-year journey. You don't deviate from long‑term plans for people and the way to take the club to the next level because of two late goals against Lyon, and that's what it boils down to."

Purslow is currently searching for new investors willing to meet Tom Hicks's and George Gillett's asking price of £100m for a 25% stake in Liverpool. While that process may be complicated by demotion to the Europa League, Liverpool are expected to suffer a budgetary shortfall of only £2.4m for this season as a consequence of their group exit.

"We budget for a level of performance that maybe fans would not like to be at, it's prudent," the managing director added. "If we have three home games in the Europa League we are equivalent to what we budget for in the Champions League.

"We are very disappointed but we could have played one home leg, one away leg and been out. I like to think we'll be taking 40 or 50,000 fans to Hamburg in May and if we get halfway to doing that we will make more money than we would from one round in the Champions League. It is a missed opportunity financially but it has no effect on budgeted performance, and that's the key thing. Budget prudently and then you don't get negative surprises if football doesn't go the right way."

Purslow's guarantee was the only tangible consolation in Hungary for Benítez, who now travels to Merseyside rivals Everton on Sunday with qualification for next season's Champions League an absolute priority. The Liverpool manager, whose players gathered around a screen to watch the closing minutes from Florence, pinned the blame on his team's exit on Lyon's stoppage-time winner at Anfield, their 90th minute equaliser at Stade Gerland plus a poor first-half display in Italy.

The Liverpool manager said: "You have to be disappointed. We knew we had to win and we did. We can't change what happened in the other match, but at least we did our job. If you look at the games, two late goals made a massive difference. We were not any worse in them than others but we paid for the two late goals against Lyon. It's part of football but it's difficult to control.

"We made mistakes in those games in the last minute, so it's our fault in the end. I'm really disappointed because we had chances in all games and could have won them all."

Benítez also claimed Liverpool's previous success in the Champions League had clouded analysis of this season's struggles in the group. "We have been so good in the last years that people think it is easy to go through in this competition. They think it has to be every year. We could have done it but have to be positive now. Now we have a massive game on Sunday and we have to be ready for it.

"It really hurts, especially in the way we went out. We're in a very bad position and can't win the Champions League now so we will just have to do our best in the next game. A lot of teams don't even reach the Champions League. Because we have qualified for five years in a row people think it's easy, but it's not."

Steven Gerrard, the Liverpool captain, admitted the task of winning the inaugural Europa League in Hamburg next May represented a dispiriting consolation. "The main prize has gone and to be playing in the Europa League is disappointing but we have to accept that, move on and try to win that competition," he said. "The only consolation in this is if we go on and win the secondary one."

from http://www.reuters.com/

LIMA, Nov 24 (Reuters) - Workers at Repsol's (REP.MC) La Pampilla oil refinery in Peru said on Tuesday they had started a two-day strike to pressure the company for better benefits and to end forced overtime.
La Pampilla, located near the Pacific coast, has a precessing capacity of some 107,000 barrels per day, and is Peru's largest refinery.

The country is a net oil importer and the government is encouraging foreign investment in the sector to boost output.

"It's a 48-hour (strike)," union leader Jose Guerrero told Reuters outside Repsol's corporate office in Lima, Peru's capital.

Roughly 100 workers, wearing blue and orange Repsol vests, were outside the office mid-Monday, carrying protest signs and chanting strike slogans.

Company officials were not immediately available to comment.

On Monday, Repsol said it had taken precautions so that production would not be "significantly affected" by a strike.

London, England (CNN) -- The governing body of world football, FIFA, has turned down the request from the Irish Football Association (FAI) to replay their deciding World Cup play-off game against France.

The controversial match, that was played on Wednesday, has caused a diplomatic storm after French forward Thierry Henry admitted to illegally using his hand to set-up the goal that gave his team a 2-1 aggregate victory to seal qualification to the tournament.

But despite a letter sent to FIFA by the FAI, and calls from both the Irish prime minister Brian Cowen and Irish justice minister Dermot Ahern for the game to be replayed, the sport's organizing body has refused the request.

In a statement on their official Web site FIFA stated: "The result of the match cannot be changed and the match cannot be replayed. As is clearly mentioned in the Laws of the Game, during matches, decisions are taken by the referee and these decisions are final."

Irish football officials lodged an official complaint with FIFA on Thursday and sent a letter to the French Football Federation (FFF) in a bid to get the game reconvened. The world's worst football injustices

"The governing body of world football have to step up to the plate and accede to our call for a replay," FAI chief executive John Delaney told reporters.

The FAI pointed to a precedent set in 2005 when a World Cup qualifier between Uzbekistan and Bahrain was replayed after the referee was found to have committed a technical error in the application of the laws of the game.

But a FIFA spokesman said the precedent did not apply because the referee in the match "saw the incident in question and simply failed to apply the proper rules".

Irish prime minister Cowen raised the issue with French president Nicolas Sarkozy at a European Union (EU) summit in Brussels, where the two leaders were meeting to vote for the next president of Europe.

Cowen told the Irish Independent newspaper: "I didn't ask for a replay. I said, you know: 'What do you think?' and he said: 'Look, I understand totally the sense of disappointment that you feel about the game. I'm not trying to mix politics and sport in this respect. We just had a chat. [But] it's not going to be resolved by he and I."

Mr Sarkozy, however, said he did not want to get involved: "I said to Brian Cowen, who is a friend of mine as you know, that I was sorry for them and how I was struck by the talent and vigor of the Irish team.

"Now do not ask me to stand in for the referee of the game or the football decision -- be they in France or in Europe," he said.

"What will be done will be done. But leave me out of it, please. And to be perfectly frank with you that is the sort of answer I want to give," he added.

Despite Sarkozy's comments, French finance minister Christine Lagarde said she supported moves for a replay.

"I think it's very sad. I'm of course very happy that the French team will play in the World Cup, but I find it very sad that it did qualify with... you know... an act of cheating," she told RTL radio station.

But former captain Roy Keane accused the FAI of hypocrisy, claiming that Ireland had benefited from other poor refereeing decisions in their qualifying campaign.

"Ireland had their chances in the two games (against France), and they never took them," Keane told Sky Sports News.

But it's the usual FAI reaction -- 'we've been robbed, the honesty of the game."

Keane went on to put the blame on the Irish defense for the controversial winning goal.

"I'd focus on why they didn't clear it," he said. "I'd be more annoyed with my defenders and my goalkeeper than Thierry Henry. How can you let the ball bounce in your six-yard box?

"How can you let Thierry Henry get goal-side of you? "If the ball goes into the six-yard box, where the hell is my goalkeeper?"

The game between France and Ireland was one of six play offs played on Wednesday which decided the final 32 teams heading South Africa in 2010.

Video replays showed Henry used his hand to stop the ball going out of play in extra-time, before he passed to William Gallas who booked his nation's place with a headed goal.

The draw for next year's finals is due to be made in Cape Town on December 4.

By KERMIT PATTISON

Business owner, you might want to friend Facebook.

A growing number of businesses are making Facebook an indispensible part of hanging out their shingles. Small businesses are using it to find new customers, build online communities of fans and dig into gold mines of demographic information.

“You need to be where your customers are and your prospective customers are,” said Clara Shih, author of “The Facebook Era” (Pearson Education, 2009). “And with 300 million people on Facebook, and still growing, that’s increasingly where your audience is for a lot of products and services.”

Start Small

For most businesses, Facebook Pages (distinct from individual profiles and Facebook groups) are the best place to start. Pages allow businesses to collect “fans” the way celebrities, sports teams, musicians and politicians do. There are now 1.4 million Facebook Pages and they collect more than 10 million fans every day, according to the site.

Businesses can easily create a Web presence with Facebook, even if they don’t have their own Web site (most companies still should maintain a Web site to reach people who don’t use Facebook or whose employers block access to the site). Businesses can claim a vanity address so that their Facebook address reflects the business name, like www.facebook.com/Starbucks. Facebook pages can link to the company’s Web site or direct sales to e-commerce sites like Ticketmaster or Amazon.

Facebook offers an array of tools and networks, and it’s easy to wander down too many paths. Ms. Shih recommends that newcomers start by asking themselves a simple question: What is your basic objective? Is it getting more customers in the door? Building brand awareness? Creating a venue for customer support? Once you have set your goal, you can strategize accordingly.

“You can waste a lot of time on Facebook,” said Ms. Shih, founder of Hearsay Labs, a Facebook marketing software company. “But if you’re a business, you don’t have any time to waste. Figure out your objectives first, start small and do things that help you accomplish your objectives.”

Ms. Shih suggests that businesses ask friends and family to become fans of their pages so that they display a respectable crowd of supporters when they debut. Pages can grow organically by word of mouth — the average Facebook user has 130 friends on the site — or by advertising or promotion.

You can enliven your page with photos, comments and useful information. As you grow more comfortable, you can add videos or business applications. Flaunt your personality. The page of an ice cream parlor should feel different than that of a funeral parlor. “The pages that are most successful,” said Tim Kendall, the director of monetization at Facebook, “are the ones that really replicate the personality of the business.”

It’s Not All About Selling

Art Meets Commerce, a New York marketing firm, has struck up a never-ending conversation with fans. The company uses Facebook as a crucial part of its publicity campaigns for theatrical productions. Its Facebook page for the show “Rock of Ages,” for example, has more than 13,000 fans.

Staff members constantly update the page with new photos, videos and quotes from the cast. They’ve also learned what not to do: Once they posted a video of Paris Hilton plugging the show and got negative feedback from fans who professed to be sick of her.

But it’s not just about marketing — or, at least, it’s not just about selling. “You end up moving away from being an Internet marketer and go into almost customer service,” said Jim Glaub, creative director at the agency. “A lot of times people use Facebook to ask questions: What’s the student rush? How long is the show? Where’s parking? You have to answer.”

Some basic rules: Buy-buy-buy messages won’t fly. The best practitioners make Facebook less about selling and more about interacting. Engage with fans and critics. Listen to what people are saying, good and bad. You may even pick up ideas for how to improve your business. Keep content fresh. Use status updates and newsfeeds to tell fans about specials, events, contests or anything of interest.

These interactions can take a vast amount of time — the “Rock of Ages” page has 300 to 600 interactions every week — but they can also provide a big payoff. Facebook is one of the show’s top sources of new ticket sales.

Last year, Art Meets Commerce introduced a Facebook ad campaign to promote an Off Broadway run of the musical “Fela!” The campaign aimed at Facebook users with interests like theatrical shows or Afro beat. According to the company, it generated 18 million impressions, more than 5,700 clicks and $40,000 in ticket sales — all for $4,400 spent on advertising.

“We can advertise all day, but if we don’t give them what they want they will not be a fan anymore,” said Mark Seeley, a marketing associate at Art Meets Commerce. “Even though we represent the shows as marketers, we don’t want to constantly tell people to buy tickets. You talk to them like you talk to your friends on Facebook.”

Aim at Potential Customers Only

Some guys use Facebook to find single women. Chris Meyer used it to find women who are already engaged.

Mr. Meyer, a wedding photographer in Woodbury, Minn., had had little luck with traditional advertising. A full-page ad in a bridal magazine generated zero leads and a trade show yielded only four bookings, barely covering the cost of his booth. But Facebook proved a digital bonanza.

Mr. Meyer aimed at women ages 22 to 28 who listed their marital status as engaged in the Minneapolis-St. Paul metropolitan area. He estimates that he has spent about $300 on Facebook ads in the last two years and has generated more than $60,000 in business. He says about three-quarters of his clients now come to him through Facebook, either from ads or recommendations from friends.

“I’d be out of business if I didn’t have Facebook,” Mr. Meyer said. “Especially with this economy, I need to stretch each marketing dollar as much as I possibly can.”

Facebook enables small businesses to engage in targeted marketing that they only could have dreamed about a few years ago. Facebook users fill out profiles with information like hometown, employer, religious beliefs, interests, education and favorite books, movies and TV shows — all of which can help advertisers deliver messages to specific demographic slices.

As you create an ad, you can add demographic criteria and keywords and see how many Facebook users fall into your target audience and modify it accordingly to get the most bang for your buck. Advertisers can elect to pay per impression or per click, set maximum budgets and schedule the ad to run on specific dates.

Thus a coffee shop in San Francisco can display advertisements only to local people whose profiles or group affiliations suggest they like coffee. According to Mr. Kendall, Facebook’s director of monetization, ads can also aim at people based on social exchanges, like a person who sends a message to a friend, “let’s get together for coffee” or who posts a status update about just having awakened and needing some java.

“We can help you find customers before they even think about searching for you,” Mr. Kendall said. “We’re very, very well-positioned to generate demand, based on the fact that we know a tremendous amount about a user.”

The Facebook ad system provides instant feedback with metrics like the number of impressions and clicks-through. This reporting allows Mr. Meyer to improve his advertising; if one ad doesn’t generate enough hits within 24 hours, he pulls it and tries something new.

Give Away Cupcakes!

Charles Nelson has an M.B.A. and is a former investment banker who owns a growing national chain of stores. Yet this 40-year-old entrepreneur checks Facebook with the frequency of a college student. Up to 30 times a day, he logs onto the social networking site via his laptop or Blackberry.

For Mr. Nelson, this is serious business. He and his wife, Candace, own Sprinkles, a cupcake bakery that relies on social media in lieu of traditional advertising. Mr. Nelson considers Facebook marketing essential. “People are out there talking about your business everyday, whether you’re looking or not,” he said. “This gives people a place to come and speak directly to us.”

Sprinkles uses Facebook to give customers a whiff of what’s cooking. Every day it posts a password on Facebook that can be redeemed for a free cupcake. Since April, its fan base has risen tenfold to 70,000.

Mr. Nelson and his wife previously worked as investment bankers in the technology sector and were keenly aware that, even for a traditional business like a bakery, social media is a crucial ingredient. His advice: make it relevant to the customer, keep it fresh and remember that the return on investment may come slowly.

“Be patient with it,” Mr. Nelson advised. “People are not going to flock to your social media site overnight. Technology is about the network effect. It takes time for those connections to build.”

Undercover with a Michelin inspector.
by John Colapinto

from http://www.newyorker.com/

One afternoon last month, a woman in her early thirties, with shoulder-length blond hair and large brown eyes, arrived at Jean Georges, on the ground floor of the Trump International Hotel, in midtown Manhattan. The restaurant, which is owned by the chef Jean-Georges Vongerichten, and is one of the highest rated in the world, has an understated décor, with bare white walls and floor-to-ceiling windows. The woman took a seat at one of the tables in the center of the room. She wore a light-blue dress with a high neckline, little makeup, and no jewelry. There was nothing remarkable about her appearance, and her demeanor was quiet and unassuming, as if designed to deflect attention—a trait indispensable for her profession as an inspector for the Michelin hotel-and-restaurant guide.

Conceived in France at the beginning of the last century, the Michelin guide today has editions in twenty-three countries and is one of the best-selling restaurant guides in the world. It operates on the principle that only reviews by anonymous, professionally trained experts can be trusted for accurate assessments of a restaurant’s food and service. Major newspapers like the Times aspire to anonymity for their restaurant reviewers but rarely achieve it. In his recent memoir, “Born Round,” Frank Bruni, who served as the Times’ restaurant reviewer from 2004 until earlier this year, describes his efforts at camouflage—using aliases, wearing a wig and fake mustache—which were mostly futile once the dust-jacket photograph from one of his early books was posted on the Internet. Photographs of Bruni’s successor, Sam Sifton, doctored in several ways to suggest what he might look like in disguise, began to circulate on foodie Web sites like Eater months before he took up his duties.

Michelin has gone to extraordinary lengths to maintain the anonymity of its inspectors. Many of the company’s top executives have never met an inspector; inspectors themselves are advised not to disclose their line of work, even to their parents (who might be tempted to boast about it); and, in all the years that it has been putting out the guide, Michelin has refused to allow its inspectors to speak to journalists. The inspectors write reports that are distilled, in annual “stars meetings” at the guide’s various national offices, into the ranking of three stars, two stars, or one star—or no stars. (Establishments that Michelin deems unworthy of a visit are not included in the guide.) A three-star Michelin ranking—like that enjoyed by Jean Georges—is exceedingly rare. Only twenty-six three-star restaurants exist in France, and only eighty-one in the world.

In 2005, Michelin launched its first foray into North America, with the publication of the 2006 New York City guide. (It has also published guides to Los Angeles, Las Vegas, and San Francisco.) Since coming to America, Michelin has learned that its brand of Gallic opacity and unapologetic gastronomic élitism has been a tougher sell here than it was in Europe or Asia. (The Tokyo edition of the guide, which débuted in 2007, sold more than a hundred thousand copies on its first day.) Five years after its arrival in New York City, Michelin has failed to knock the Times from its perch as the premier arbiter of restaurants in the city, or to outsell the Zagat guide, which relies on customer surveys for its restaurant rankings.

This fall, in an effort to promote what the managing director of the guides, a forty-eight-year-old Frenchman named Jean-Luc Naret, calls a “better understanding” of the guides’ means and methods, Michelin launched a Web site, Famously Anonymous, to explain to Americans the concept of the Michelin inspector; it has also recently opened Twitter accounts for its reviewers. But by far the most salient sign of Michelin’s new openness was its decision, this fall, to allow me to meet—and to eat with—one of its New York-based inspectors.

Naret joined me and the inspector for lunch. He has a handsome, darkly tanned face, and favors designer suits with flared-collar shirts and no tie. Although the inspector was never identified to the staff, Naret, who eats often at Jean Georges and is well-known to the restaurant’s staff, considered her anonymity compromised; she would never pay an inspection visit to the restaurant again. As a precondition of our interview, I was told that certain details of the inspector’s personal life would be obscured—or not divulged to me at all. When I asked her name, the inspector laughed nervously. “No,” she said. “Let’s not even say it. Make something up.”

I suggested the first thing that came to mind. “Maxime?”

Naret smiled, and then, with a soupçon of extra secrecy, began referring to her as M.

Maxime is a New Yorker. She said that speaking to me about her work felt “surreal.” “We spend all our time not letting people know who we are,” she said, but admitted that she had told her husband what she does for a living. “He’s an attorney; he knows all about confidentiality.” For most others, she keeps her occupation vague. “We try not to lie,” she said. “You say you’re ‘in publishing,’ something like that.”

The waiter, a young man in a dark suit, handed us menus. I asked Maxime how she chooses what to order.

“You’re looking for something that really tests a number of quality ingredients and then something that’s a little complex, because you want to see what the kitchen can do,” she said. “We would never order something like a salad. We rarely order soup.” She decided to try the foie-gras brûlée, “although I usually avoid it, because of the calories.”

Maxime eats out more than two hundred days of the year, lunch and dinner. She eats the maximum number of courses offered—at Jean Georges, we were having three courses, plus dessert; that way, she said, “you really get to see the most food”—and she is required to eat everything on her plate. It is a regimen that calls to mind the force-feeding of the ducks that supply Vongerichten with his velvety foie gras, but Maxime, blessed with a quick metabolism, had managed to avoid obesity, an occupational hazard.

She was tending toward the Arctic char for her main course but couldn’t decide about her second course. The waiter reappeared and asked if he could answer any questions.

“Can you tell me about the crab toast?” she asked.

“It’s Peekytoe crab, a chiffonade of tarragon as well as chives topped with white sesame seeds, toasted in the oven, finished with a miso mustard, and a pear salad on the side,” he said.

“It’s new?” she said.

“About a week on the menu.”

She asked the waiter to give her a minute and then leaned in to me. Inspectors love it when they ask a question and can tell that a waiter has made up an answer, she explained, adding, “That never happens here.”

The original Guide Michelin was developed by André Michelin, an engineer, and his younger brother, Édouard. Born into a wealthy manufacturing family in Clermont-Ferrand, the brothers, in 1895, presented a new design for a pneumatic tire for cars. Automobiles were still a rarity on roads in France. The brothers had the idea that a guidebook to hotels in the French countryside would encourage people to climb into a car (equipped with Michelin tires) and hit the open road. The first edition, published in 1900, was a five-hundred-and-seventy-five-page alphabetical listing of towns throughout France and the distances between them, with recommendations for hotels and places to refuel, and instructions on how to change a flat. In a preface to the first edition, André wrote, “This work comes out with the century; it will last as long.” In 1933, the Michelin brothers introduced the first countrywide restaurant listings and unveiled the star system for ranking food, with one star denoting “a very good restaurant in its class”; two stars “excellent cooking, worth a detour”; and three stars “exceptional cuisine, worth a special journey.”

Over the years, other publications attempted to challenge Michelin but without success. To offset the expense of sending inspectors to restaurants across the country, rival guides were obliged to accept free meals, or to offer favors, like free advertising in the guides’ pages. Michelin’s inspectors faced no such quid pro quo. A century after André and Édouard created their first tire patent, Michelin has grown into one of the most successful multinational corporations in the world, a company more than three times the size of Goodyear. Michelin’s profits help to defray the costs of food inspectors’ salaries, travel budgets, and restaurant bills (which can run into real money at the upper end of the gastronomic scale: six years ago, at Bernard Loiseau’s La Côte d’Or, a three-star restaurant in Burgundy, the chicken stuffed with carrots, leeks, and truffles was two hundred and sixty-seven dollars). This independence, coupled with the jealously guarded anonymity of its inspectors, is what gives Michelin its aura of incorruptibility. The French chef Paul Bocuse, who helped create nouvelle cuisine in the nineteen-sixties, and whose restaurant near Lyons has held a three-star Michelin ranking for a record forty-five years, has said, “Michelin is the only guide that counts.” Indeed, in France publication of the guide each year sparks the kind of media excitement attendant on the Academy Awards. The days and weeks leading up to publication day are given over to endless debate, speculation, and rumor on TV and in newspapers over who might lose, and who might gain, a star. The results, revealed in early March, provide either a very public triumph or a very public humiliation for the chefs concerned, and a corresponding rise or drop in revenues for their restaurants.

Not everyone, however, is convinced that anonymous experts with bottomless expense accounts are the key to a dependable restaurant guide. “We’re coming at it from a completely different perspective,” says Nina Zagat, who dreamed up the idea of a customer-driven food survey with her husband, Tim, in their Upper West Side apartment thirty-one years ago. Today, Zagat covers more than ninety cities worldwide, is available as an iPhone app, and remains the top-selling restaurant guide in New York. “We’ve never believed that there were experts that should tell you what to do.”

“I’d love to know what their training is,” Tim Zagat added, speaking about Michelin’s inspectors. “Usually, the experts—for example, the major critics for the major papers—you know what their background is. But this business of making a virtue out of not knowing? I question it. How are you supposed to judge their expertise if you don’t have any idea who they are?”

Bernard Loiseau, the chef and owner of La Côte d’Or, once told a fellow-chef that if he ever lost one of his Michelin stars he would kill himself. Loiseau had made a life’s ambition of becoming a three-star chef, a goal he achieved in 1991, seventeen years after arriving at La Côte d’Or. His ranking led to a line of frozen food bearing his name and likeness, and the Legion of Honor, awarded by President François Mitterrand. But by 2002 Loiseau’s classic cooking was losing ground to trendier fusion styles, business was slowing, and he was swimming in debt. As Rudolph Chelminski relates in his 2005 book “The Perfectionist,” the food writer François Simon published a story in Le Figaro hinting that Loiseau was on thin ice with Michelin. Loiseau, who had suffered periodic depression for years, sank into despair. In early February, 2003, he was notified by Michelin that he would keep his third star. Still, Simon wrote another piece, in which he suggested that Loiseau and his third star were “living on borrowed time.” Two and a half weeks later, after a day at work in the kitchen, Loiseau killed himself with a shotgun blast to the head. He was fifty-two.

Loiseau’s death ushered in a dark period for the guide. In early 2004, an inspector named Pascal Rémy broke the company’s code of silence when he published a book based on a diary that he had kept of fifteen years on the road as a Michelin inspector in France. (Rémy, having notified Michelin of his plans to publish, was fired; he later sued.) Rémy’s book, “L’Inspecteur Se Met à Table” (“The Inspector Sits Down at the Table”), described the inspector’s life as one of loneliness and underpaid drudgery, driving around the French countryside for weeks on end, dining alone and under intense pressure to file reports. Michelin had always hinted that it employed roughly a hundred inspectors to cover Europe, but Rémy claimed that it employed only eleven within France when he was first hired, in 1988—a number that had shrunk to five by the time he left, in 2003. Contrary to Michelin’s assertion that every starred restaurant was revisited several times a year, Rémy said only one visit every few years was possible. Furthermore, he wrote, the guide played favorites—most notably with Bocuse, whose restaurant in Lyons was known, according to Rémy, to have declined drastically in quality yet continued to hold three stars. Rémy’s revelations made the front page of Le Monde. Derek Brown, the director of the guides at the time, denied Rémy’s assertions in an interview in the Times, but he remained vague about how many full-time inspectors the guide employs in France and offered an anemic rebuttal to Rémy’s claim that certain three-star chefs were untouchable: “There would be little sense in saying a restaurant was worth three stars if it weren’t true, if for no other reason than that the customer would write and tell us.”

The Rémy affair occurred during Brown’s final year at the guide. As his successor, Michelin hired the charismatic and outgoing Naret, who worked for many years as a hotelier, but whose professional focus has not been food. He boasts of giving more than two thousand interviews a year, in which he tells journalists how many inspectors Michelin employs in France (about fifteen), throughout the world (ninety), and in the United States (ten).

Naret introduced the idea of expanding into North America and chose New York City as the best place to start. The first New York City guide, which appeared in November, 2005, was created by a team of five European inspectors, who examined fifteen hundred restaurants in all five boroughs, and selected five hundred for inclusion. Their selection was criticized, by some, as Francocentric. The Times noted that more than half the restaurants that received at least two stars “could be considered French.” Among the one-star restaurants was the now defunct La Goulue, which one highly regarded New York food critic describes as “this dinosaur of an outdated, mediocre kind of French bistro on the Upper East Side.” And the 2006 guide failed to award stars to Eleven Madison Park (Danny Meyer’s haute-cuisine restaurant), Craft (the “Top Chef” head judge Tom Colicchio’s take on contemporary American food), “or any number of celebrated restaurants,” the critic adds. “It was one of those things, like, only a bunch of French people could respond that way.”

Naret, who says that he never intended to continue to use European teams, established an office in New York for the next year’s guide and began recruiting New Yorkers. He received thirty-five hundred applications.

Though born in New York City, Maxime moved with her family to a nearby “rural countryside” town, which, she says, has “an extraordinarily active foodie community.” Maxime’s family was discerning about food, and came into the city frequently to sample the restaurants. “I ate falafel at Mamoun’s and bagels and lox from Russ & Daughters before I’d even heard of a peanut-butter sandwich,” she said. The family also travelled abroad, and she learned early about the Michelin guide. “Other kids wanted a Barbie or something. I wanted to go to a three-star restaurant in Paris.” Maxime’s fascination with food was not confined to haute cuisine. “It’s a global food passion,” as she put it. Big Macs, tacos from “these divey little delis in Sunset Park,” Chinese food from “a Szechuan restaurant that’s a total dump,” even hot dogs from Papaya King’s grimy corner kiosks in Manhattan elicit groans of pleasure: “Oh, fantastic hot dogs!”

Linda Bartoshuk, a professor of community dentistry and behavioral science at the University of Florida, has for more than three decades done research into genetic variations in the perception of taste. Through studies of the disposition and the density of taste buds on the tongues of test subjects, Bartoshuk has divided people into three categories: supertasters, tasters, and non-tasters. Most food and wine experts would fall into the “taster” category. (Supertasters, despite their name, have too many taste buds and are thus oversensitive to flavor, and tend to prefer bland foods; non-tasters can eat an exquisite risotto and say, “Eh.”) I asked Maxime if she believed that she had some biological advantage when it came to tasting and discerning flavors. “You could argue that the inspectors have some biological makeup, or you could argue that they eat so much that they have the grounds for comparison,” she said. “And they have their training, the professional training.”

A degree in hospitality, hotel management, or cooking is mandatory for Michelin inspectors. Every job that Maxime held, from high school on, had been in the domestic food, wine, or restaurant industry. She got a master’s from N.Y.U. in food studies, and obtained a sommelier’s certification. Six years ago, she was working in a food-and-hospitality job in a city far from New York when she learned that Michelin was recruiting inspectors to produce a New York City guide. “I immediately started stalking Jean-Luc,” she said. She had several preliminary interviews in New York, during which she was warned about the rigors of life as an inspector—the travel, the regimen of constant eating, the pressure to fill out meticulously detailed reports on time, the enforced anonymity, the low pay. (“Let’s just say it’s not about the money,” she said.)

“The interview process is a bit like trying to scare you off,” she went on. “You really have to be committed. It’s your life. It’s not like a nine-to-five job.” Nor is it all about three-star dining. “The stars are only ten per cent of the selection,” she said. “The vast majority of the time, we’re hiking around the Upper East Side, we’re eating at neighborhood restaurants, we’re hiking around Brooklyn.” Assigned specific areas of the city to cover, Maxime, who lives in Manhattan, spends weeks riding the subway out to the farthest reaches of Queens to make her way through a selection of Thai restaurants, eating two meals a day, every day, and she typically eats alone, since talking with a spouse or friend is frowned upon.

After making the first cut, she was obliged to order and eat a series of dinners in New York restaurants under the scrutiny of seasoned European inspectors. “You don’t know what you’re doing, so you’re, like, What do I pick? What do I eat? And then they show you the wine list to see what wine you choose.” After the meal, she was required to write a paper analyzing the experience, while an inspector looked on. “And then there’s also the kind of covert-ops part,” she said. “You never know the name of the person you’re meeting, you never know where they’re meeting you until right before, so they call you up and say ‘Meet me at the corner of XYZ and XYZ.’ ”

All candidates are flown to France to take part in the Michelin training program. “You’ve got to go to the mother ship to understand the origins of the system,” she said. The fundamentals include not only the star rankings but also the couverts: the crossed-knife-and-spoon icons used to rank the ambience, comfort, and service of a given restaurant. The couverts range from one to four, in ascending order of quality, and they can be in black or red ink. (Red ink denotes exceptional service and décor.) After their time in France, trainees receive additional instruction in another European country. Maxime was sent to England, where, she says, she contracted her only bout of food poisoning, from a pork-belly dish.

When she returned to New York, she was required to apprentice under one of the European inspectors. “There’s no point in sending you off on your own if you’re going to come back and say, ‘I don’t know if it’s a two-couvert or a three-couvert’ or ‘Oh, I thought it was a star’ ”—only to have the senior inspector go back to the restaurant and discover that the food is, as she put it, “junk.” This period of apprenticeship generally lasts three to six months, but at any point an applicant can be told that he or she is not working out.

The waiter arrived and placed before Maxime a large white plate. At the center was her foie gras, a short pillar of puréed duck liver on a piece of crisp toast with a lacy web of caramelized sugar on top; the sides were studded with cherries and sprinkled with pistachios, and a transparent sauce, made of white port gelée, surrounded the entire creation like a moat. She considered the dish for a few moments, as if trying to determine the best angle of attack. With the side of her fork, she broke off a piece of the complicated construction, and tasted it. The dish, which I later tried, activated every sense with which humans are equipped: the foie gras was smooth and as rich as butter, its silky texture contrasting with the caramelized sugar, which shattered like a pane of microscopically thin glass against the teeth and tongue, its sweetness offset by the sour cherries, the rounded aromatic flavor of the toasted nuts, and the texture and taste of the port gelée.

“Excellent,” Maxime said.

I asked her what she liked about it.

“It’s not really a ‘like’ and a ‘not like,’ ” she said. “It’s an analysis. You’re eating it and you’re looking for the quality of the products. At this level, they have to be top quality. You’re looking at ‘Was every single element prepared exactly perfectly, technically correct?’ And then you’re looking at the creativity. Did it work? Did the balance of ingredients work? Was there good texture? Did everything come together? Did something overpower something else? Did something not work with something else? The pistachios—everything was perfect.”

When her second appetizer arrived—the crab toast topped with toasted sesame seeds—she dipped the tines of her fork into a thick line of dark-green sauce that bisected the narrow rectangle of crab toast, and touched it to her tongue. Her eyes grew wide.

“This sauce is really good,” she said. “It’s so Jean-Georges. He does this French-and-Asian thing.” She warned me that she would need a few seconds to figure out its precise ingredients. (She refused to divulge them, on the ground that Vongerichten would consider the recipe “a trade secret.” I later learned from one of the waiters that the ingredients include powdered English mustard and soy sauce.) “It’s so complex,” she said. “It makes me smile.”

Her Arctic char arrived, on a bed of watercress rémoulade, and accompanied by a julienne of apple. She took a bite. “It’s perfectly cooked,” she said, excitedly. “I mean, it’s textbook.”

For New York City’s chefs—particularly those raised and trained in France—the arrival of the Michelin guide was both a blessing and a curse. Eric Ripert, the chef and co-owner of Le Bernardin, a three-star Michelin restaurant in midtown Manhattan, attended culinary school in France and trained in several three-star restaurants there. “Most of us very young cooks were aspiring to be one day a three-star chef,” Ripert told me. “Very few of us were aspiring to have a bistro.” But when Ripert joined Le Bernardin, in 1991, Michelin did not yet have an outpost in New York, and there were no plans to open one. “I remember sometimes chefs here, especially the French ones—and even some American ones—we were a bit frustrated that we will never be judged by Michelin,” Ripert said. “But at the same time we were a little bit, like, more relaxed because obviously the Michelin puts pressure on chefs and restaurateurs to be excellent.”

Le Bernardin was one of only four restaurants in New York (along with Jean Georges, Thomas Keller’s Per Se, and the now defunct Alain Ducasse at the Essex House) that earned three stars in the début issue of the Michelin guide, and it has held on to its three stars ever since. Ripert estimates that revenues increased by eighteen per cent when the first guide came out, but the pressure to hold on to his stars has also escalated. “Today when I wake up and I go to work I don’t think guide, I don’t think stars,” he insisted. “You can’t. When I go to work, I think about my day and about what I have to achieve during my day as a chef.” Still, Ripert admitted that, just before the publication of a new guide, he gets nervous. “It’s not in my mind until a week before, and then every day I think about it,” he said.

Like Ripert, Jean-Georges Vongerichten trained in three-star restaurants in France, and he was eager to know how its inspectors would rate him internationally, yet he also dreaded that knowledge. At a party thrown by Michelin at Rockefeller Center on the evening that this year’s star rankings were announced, I spoke to Vongerichten, a dapper man with slicked-back dark hair and intense dark eyes. He was “happy and relieved,” he said, to have retained his three-star ranking for Jean Georges, but he added, “Ah, but we lost a star, too—for my restaurant JoJo.” He was referring to the moderately priced restaurant he runs out of a town house on East Sixty-fourth Street. In the previous four guides, JoJo had earned one star. Now it had none. Vongerichten was determined to get the rating back. “I will ask for the report on JoJo,” Vongerichten told me. (Michelin will, on request, supply to chefs the inspectors’ written report on their restaurant.) “I will study it. The good thing is, you have a year to make it better!”

Also at the party was the chef Daniel Boulud, a short, dark-haired man in a double-breasted suit, who bustled through the crowd, happily accepting congratulations from all who recognized him. That morning, Boulud had received a call from Naret informing him that, for the first time, his restaurant Daniel had been promoted from two stars to three. To many in the food-and-restaurant industry, it was overdue. Daniel consistently drew top rankings in the Zagat guide and for years had earned the Times’ highest rank of four stars. During my lunch with Maxime, I had asked about Michelin’s ranking of Daniel.

“We got beat up a lot the last five years for not giving him three,” she said. “But it wasn’t there.”

“In terms of consistency?” I asked.

“Consistency—and accuracy,” she said. “It’s just technical. I mean, cooking is a science, and either it’s right or it’s wrong. And that’s something that’s very objective. Either a sauce is prepared accurately—or it’s not. A fish is cooked accurately—or it’s not. There’s the talent, the creativity that has to be applied to get a three-star—he has to be a very talented chef—but there was just a lot of inconsistency.” This year, she added, “it was so obvious. It was so solid.” Michelin sent inspectors back to eat at Daniel eight times over the year, Naret told me. At the stars meeting, which he oversees, every inspector’s report described the restaurant as faultless.

I talked to Boulud a couple of days later. Like Ripert and Vongerichten, he trained in multiple three-star restaurants in France. He pronounced himself “proud and happy” to get his third star, but I sensed a less immediate embrace of the Michelin system. When I told him that Naret and the inspector had said that the restaurant, in previous years, lacked consistency and accuracy, he didn’t exactly disagree. But he bridled a little, saying, “My restaurant is extremely chef-driven and extremely market-driven, and so the menu changes a lot—to the pleasure of my customers. Maybe the success I have today is because we keep giving pleasure in very simple ways or sometimes in a very spontaneous way and without thinking, Oh my God, am I perfectly consistent with that dish? I mean, Did I create the masterpiece where I don’t need to change anything? I just need to program it now?”

Boulud’s comments called to mind criticisms often levelled against Michelin: that its approach to restaurants and food is too wedded to an ideal of formal, technical accuracy that is not applicable to restaurants outside France. “When I lived abroad, in Rome, the Michelin guide was not, to be utterly candid, very helpful,” Frank Bruni, the former Times restaurant reviewer, told me recently. “The kinds of restaurant in Italy that Michelin smiles on are restaurants that feel sort of fussily French.” He added that the New York guide seemed to be trying to address this. “In New York—maybe because Michelin is trying to Americanize—you see the inspectors trying to move beyond that. Right from the get-go they gave a star to the Spotted Pig”—the chef April Bloomfield’s upscale pub-food restaurant. “In years since, they’ve given stars to places like Dressler, in Brooklyn”—a restaurant that serves contemporary American food with a French twist. “So you can see them trying. . . . But I wonder if a certain sort of chromosomal stodginess can ever really be completely leached out of the Michelin guide and the system.” He added, “The other thing that has always made me wonder about Michelin rankings is that they claim a lot of science to them, but is there a lot of soul to them? When Michelin describes its own system, I think, Where is the allowance for just a visceral, emotional response to a restaurant?” Bruni is also no fan of the couverts and other icons that Michelin uses: “Those crosses and spoons and all those symbols—it’s like hieroglyphics, it’s like cave etchings.”

The waiter arrived with dessert. He placed a rectangular plate before Maxime. He pointed to one end, where a small piece of strawberry gâteau rested. “It begins on the right, with cumel-macerated strawberries, cream-cheese sponge cake, and pear-de-vanilla-center crème fraîche; to the left is strawberry sorbet swirled with lemongrass glacée and lavender crisp; and, lastly, a blueberry soda with fresh blueberries, which you can drink directly from the glass.”

She thanked him, and the waiter moved off.

If she were on an inspection visit, she said, she would go home directly after finishing dessert and paying her bill, and begin filling out her report, which is made in the form of entries in a classification form supplied to all Michelin inspectors. She would list every ingredient in everything she ate, and the specifics of every preparation. She would rate these according to several criteria, including quality of the products, mastery in the cooking, technical accuracy, balance of flavors, and creativity of the chef. Then she would fill out the section that deals with setting, comfort, and service—and that determines the number of couverts the restaurant will earn. “I’ll talk about the service, the crowd, the décor, the ambience, the wine list, the sake list—whatever is applicable,” Maxime said. “The salt, the glasses, everything about the experience you had from the second you made the phone call to book the reservation, to when you walked in the door, when the hostess greeted you—or didn’t greet you—to whatever little goodies you have at the end of the meal.” For a restaurant like Jean Georges, filling out the reports would take two to three hours. A Chinese restaurant might take an hour.

It was three o’clock by the time we emerged onto the street in front of the restaurant. I couldn’t recall ever feeling so full. I asked Maxime what she would do with the rest of her day. She said that she had to work that night, reviewing a restaurant in another borough.

Which one? I asked.

“I’m sorry,” she said. “I can’t tell you that.” ♦

We often celebrate birthdays at school. We sing ‘Happy Birthday’ and share some cake together. And we usually circulate a birthday card that everyone can sign. It’s a pleasant custom that is repeated in offices and schools and homes everywhere. But yesterday it was a little different. It was a quiet afternoon when Sylvia came into the class at about 2 o’clock, just before our break. She said it was Kim’s birthday so she was going to bring in a cake for her. Kim is a cheerful, helpful woman who works in the office and many of the students know her. Sylvia rounded up some of the other people at the school and they started coming into the classroom. It’s not too difficult to find people when cake is going to be served! Sylvia brought in a big, rectangular slab cake. It was a chocolate cake, with chocolate icing. There was a little owl piped onto the cake with Kim’s name because Kim loves owls. In fact, she collects them. Sylvia put some candles on the cake and lit them. And the secretary, Ruth, went to get Kim. Kim looked pleasantly surprised when she walked into the room and everyone started singing. But her look of surprise turned to shock as she leaned forward to blow out the candles and her long, blonde hair caught fire. Well, there was a domino effect. One thing led to another. First, Sylvia quickly reached out to put the fire out with her hand. As she did so, the cake flew out of her other hand. It sailed through the air and flipped up-side down. Judy, who had been standing nearby, lunged forward and stuck out her hand. Amazingly, she caught the cake with one hand. Luckily, it didn’t fall on the floor. And fortunately, Kim’s hair was only singed a little bit on the end. After everyone recovered from the shock and stopped laughing, we all had some cake. It was really quite delicious, too!

From www.nytimes.com

By DOUGLAS QUENQUA

AT high schools and colleges across the country, students are hard at work, tilling their land and harvesting their vegetables.

“It is clear this obsession with FarmVille is an issue, especially since it is taking away time from studying and schoolwork,” Danielle Susi wrote this month in The Quad News, a student newspaper at Quinnipiac University in Hamden, Conn.

Adults, too, are blaming their problems on FarmVille, an online game in which people must tend their virtual farms carefully. On blogs like FarmVille Freak (slogan: “I can’t stop watching my crops!”) and others, people share tips on fertilizer and complain about, for example, a spouse’s addiction. An anonymous blogger who said she was pregnant wrote: “I was starving ... and he told me I’d have to wait a few more minutes so he could HARVEST HIS RASPBERRIES! I waited ... in the car and waited for his stupid raspberries to be harvested.”

That there are actual farmers who spend less time on their crops is beside the point. FarmVille has quickly become the most popular application in the history of Facebook. More than 62 million people have signed up to play the game since it made its debut in June, with 22 million logging on at least once a day, according to Zynga, the company that brought FarmVille into the world.

Crazes on Facebook seem to come in waves — remember sheep-throwing, Vampire Wars and lists of “25 Random Things About Me?” — but devotion to FarmVille has moved beyond the social network. Players gather online to share homemade spreadsheets showing which crops will provide the greatest return on investment. YouTube is rife with musical odes to the game, including versions of its theme song. There is a “Farmville Art” movement, in which people arrange crops to resemble the Mona Lisa or Mr. Peanut. And many a promising dinner date has been cut short to harvest squash.

“I can’t hang out with any of my friends without talk of apple fields and rice paddies,” said Taylor Lee Sivils, a student at the University of California, Riverside, in an e-mail message. “I have to wait for my friends’ soybeans to grow, because we can’t chill until they’ve been harvested. All I want is to be able to go back to talking about anything tangible, but FarmVille overcomes.”

The game starts off simply: You are given land and seeds that can be planted, harvested and sold for online coins. As you accrue currency, you can buy things, from basics like rice and pumpkin seeds to the truly superfluous, like elephants and hot-air balloons. Impatient players can use credit cards or a PayPal account to buy more money, although purists tend to frown on the practice.

But like The Sims and Tamagotchi pets, FarmVille soon becomes less of a game than a Sisyphean baby-sitting assignment. Crops must be harvested in a timely fashion, cows must be milked, and social obligations — like exchanging gifts and fertilizing your neighbor’s pumpkins — must be met.

The game seems to have mesmerized people from all walks of life. Every night for the last two weeks, Jil Wrinkle, a 40-year-old medical transcriber in the Philippines, has set his alarm for 1:30 a.m., when he will wake up, roll over and harvest his blueberries.

“I keep my laptop next to my bed,” he explained by phone. “The first thing I do when I wake up in the morning is harvest, then I harvest again at 10 in the morning, then again in midafternoon, then in the evening, and then again right before going to bed.”

Robert Thompson, a professor of popular culture at Syracuse University, said he had seen the craze firsthand among his students.

“Just like Guitar Hero lets you feel a little like being a rock star — you get to pose and dance a little while you’re doing it — with FarmVille there is a real sense that you’re actually doing something that has a cause and effect,” he said. “The method of dragging food out of the ground and getting something for it is really satisfying.”

FarmVille isn’t the only popular farm-theme game on Facebook. MyFarm and FarmTown, which are made by different companies, also have huge followings. Some academics have gone so far as to suggest that their collective popularity points to a widespread yearning for the pastoral life.

“The whole concept of ‘I’m sick of this modern, urban lifestyle, I wish I could just grow plants and vegetables and watch them grow,’ there is something very therapeutic about that,” said Philip Tan, director of the Singapore-M.I.T. Gambit Game Lab, a joint venture between the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and the government of Singapore to develop digital games.

Of course, real-life farming is quite a bit messier and more dangerous than FarmVille (perhaps just one reason that FarmVille players outnumber actual farmers in the United States by more than 60 to 1). Yet some of the game’s biggest fans are farmers.

“I was having all these deaths on the farm and hurting myself on a daily basis doing real farming,” said Donna Schoonover, of Schoonover Farm in Skagit County, Wash., who raises sheep, goats and Satin Angora rabbits (real ones!). “This was a way to remind myself of the mythology of farming, and why I started farming in the first place.”

Zynga, which is based in San Francisco, specializes in games that are easy to learn but hard to walk away from. It also makes Mafia Wars (25 million players) and Café World (24 million), the second and third most popular games on Facebook, respectively.

Mark Pincus, the founder and chief executive, said that Zynga earns money from advertising, sponsorships and players who buy in-game cash. Zynga has been profitable since 2007, he said.

“It’s really the same formula that makes Facebook successful,” Mr. Pincus said, “the ability to connect with your friends, to express yourself, and to invest in the game.”

FarmVille takes advantage of Facebook by allowing — nay, nagging — players to become “neighbors” with their friends, even those who have not joined the game. Players can earn points by helping with their neighbors’ work. They can also irritate friends who don’t want to play FarmVille with endless notifications and invitations to join, which has led to a vocal backlash.

Cropping up alongside fan blogs like Farmville Freak, which after just one month is getting 25,000 unique visitors a day, are Facebook groups for people who are tired of listening to their friends talk about their eggplants. On “I Hate FarmVille,” the largest of the anti-Farmville affinity groups on Facebook (it has more than 17,000 members), one person commented, “No, I will not give you a tree! No, I will not be your neighbor!”