If you know anything about Al Di Meola, it won't surprise you that he turned in a sizzling and precise guitar performance Thursday night at Toad's Place in New Haven.

After all, he has been perhaps the foremost jazz guitarist for almost two decades, since he flashed onto the scene as the teenage wonder of the all-star jazz band Return to Forever in 1974.

But the Di Meola who so satisfied the 200-or-so fans in New Haven was also passionate, playful, expressive and engaging, not to mention a fairly persistent huckster.

The Tangerine Dream show at The Sting Wednesday night, the first U.S. stop of the band's current North American tour, was not unlike the Hartford Whalers' opening night the day before.

Laser lights were important parts of the entertainment, and both would have been better if the performers had shown a little more emotion.

Luckily for the sizable crowd at the New Britain night spot, their event was much more successful than the Whalers' drubbing at the hands of the Montreal Canadiens.

Even if they've never been seen in the same room together, it's a safe bet that British entrepreneur deluxe Richard Branson and Arizona senator John McCain are separate people.

But if separate profiles in separate magazines on the newsstand now have it right, they're the same kind of admirable fellow most people would be proud to follow.

Branson, most recently visible for his flight halfway around the world in a balloon, comes to us via the low-profile quarterly Strategy & Business. McCain, who's contemplating a run for the presidency, is a subject of the January George.

The biggest impression left by the newsstand this week is that Brand 2000 is near the height of its marketing appeal. In a couple of days, it will begin taking on the stench of decay, but right now practically everyone is selling a piece of it.

In the 1989 movie "Say Anything," pure-hearted teenager Lloyd Dobler doesn't know what he wants to do with his life, but he knows he doesn't "want to sell anything bought or processed, or buy anything sold or processed, or process anything sold, bought, or processed."

It was a manifesto then, and it is only more so today, bolstered by Eric Schlosser's fascinating article on the $1.4 billion US flavor business in the January Atlantic Monthly, which shucks away any remaining shred of illusion that the foods we eat are anything other than industrial products.

I've never met Jane Pratt, but I have an idea of what she's like: direct, unabashed, and aggressive, with plenty of mojo.

I think this because that's how her magazine, not-at-all-modestly named Jane, presents itself, and part of its attraction is a refreshing honesty.

Take it's December fashion story, headlined, "Where you think you're going in that?" An auditor, a waitress, and an office administrator are given a nearly backless Comme des Garcons suit, green with outrigger frills, to wear for a day, to see how it will play in the Peoria parts of Manhattan.

It starts off sounding pretty juicy: Tom Peters, coauthor of the influential '80s management manual "In Search of Excellence," writes in the December Fast Company that "we faked the data" used for selecting the 43 "excellent" companies cited in the book.

Juicy enough that on the same day Fast Company arrived in the mail this week, so did the Dec. 3 Business Week with single-page coverage of the Fast Company article, which makes Business Week a fast company indeed.

The powers that be have come a long way from Katharine Graham, William S. Paley, and the others from David Halberstam's great book of that name. Today, according to the November Brill's Content, they have names such as Xana Antunes, Renan Almendarez Coello, and Sorious Samura.

God forbid this should sound anything like Raymond Oglethorpe, the president of America Online, who said last week that the anthrax attacks responsible for the deaths of three people have been "incredibly positive for the Internet." Clearly, Ray needs to get a new speechwriter.

It is grand to have illusions, until you find out they're illusions. It's even worse when one illusion sets out to destroy another.

That disheartening lesson comes in the November Vanity Fair, in Robert Sam Anson's breezy report on Seymour Hersh's forthcoming book on the Kennedys, which, he gleefully says, "will cause trouble."