From yesterday’s Wall Street Journal:

Almost 20% of the 400,000 or so people who play EverQuest-Sony Online Entertainment Inc.’s popular online game-say they actually spend most of their time in the game world, Norrath, and “commute to Earth.”
posted by Arne at 3:55 PM

A "No, I'm not making this up" anecdote: the flyer from a local church listing a wide variety of classes in bell ringing and their instructors includes these:

Bell Techniques from A to Z-Raleigh Ringers
Bell Techniques, Bass-Raleigh Ringers
Ensemble Ringing Techniques-Raleigh Ringers
Change Ringing-Raleigh Ringers
posted by Arne at 7:50 PM

Excerpts from a book on the Russian Revolution by Orlando Figes, called A People's Tragedy. The first describes theatre under the new Soviet regime:

The new dramas highlighted the revolutionary struggle both on the national scale and on the scale of private human lives....One such drama, Do You Hear, Moscow?, staged by Eisenstein in 1924, aroused such emotions that in the final act, when the German workers were shown storming the stronghold of the Fascists, the audience itself tried to join in. Every murdered Fascist was met with wild cheers. One spectator even drew his gun to shoot an actress playing the part of a Fascist cocotte; but his neighbours brought him to his senses.

Another excerpt describes the ideology of machines that sprung up circa 1920:

The mechanistic motifs of Proletkult art were supposed to foster this new Machine World. There was even a League of Time, whose 25,000 members in 800 local branches by the time Zamyatin wrote We, kept a 'chronocard' on which they recorded how they spent each minute of their day ('7.00 a.m. got out of bed; 7.01 a.m. went to the lavatory) so as to be more efficient in their use of time.
posted by Arne at 4:38 PM