I WAS as mesmerised as anyone else by the Eurovision performance of Russian pop superstar Alla Pugacheva - my own theory is that her platform shoes were weighted with lead - and was disappointed with this paper's subsequent critical piece on her supposed has been status in Russia today.

The implication was that Alla does not know when the show is over, and that if the fat lady herself does not know, then who does? It was alleged that she is a middle aged pop dinosaur who has refused to bow out gracefully.

How a dinosaur is supposed to bow gracefully is beyond me, but the notion that there is always a right time at which to leave the stage is misguided. Nevertheless, the media world is full of experts who believe - they instantly recognise such moments.

Alla might better be described as a survivor. She has known when no to go, and there were quite a few not to go moments in Russia of the 1970s and early 1980s, Alla's hey day. Alla has resisted being pushed, or putsched, in a tough country. In more recent years she has fought successfully for power and influence.

At the other extreme we have the eccentric Australian pianist David Helfgott in effect picking the right moment to return (bow in, perhaps). That is, after his rise to international fame by means of Shine, the film based on his life.

But Helfgott, while now a huge commercial success, is getting a poor response from the music critics.

There is a certain snobbery involved. Helfgott's musical contemporaries have turned up disdainful noses. The cellist Julian Lloyd Webber says: "I would have wanted my interest in his playing to be brought to my attention in another way.

Not by means of a commercially successful film, it seems. But how? A private phone call? Word of mouth from a trusted friend and advisers A quiet guarantee that concerts would be limited to non filmgoers?

Meanwhile the London Independent has been crowing quietly over the defeat of chess maestro Garry Kasparov by a computer known as Deep Blue.

You can be fairly sure however that Garry will note bowing out just yet.

The paper quoted IBM as saying that the chess game, and all the technological development which was poured into it, was really all about creating a better world, improving weather forecasting, developing gene therapies and so on: "But let us not be fooled. Weather forecasting wasn't why a bunch of programmers created Deep Blue any more than rocket scientists are really trying to develop better toasters. They wanted to beat Kasparov. It is a very human thing to want to do."

The paper is correct about beating Kasparov being a very human thing to want to do - but perhaps for the wrong reasons. Kasparov's chess talent is probably matched only by the size of his ego. He was once described by Nigel Short as an animal", and he has described the breakup of his marriage a couple of years ago as follows: "I make the money, and I represent the importance of the family. I am Garry Kasparov, and my life has bigger horizons. I live in wider dimensions, and you cannot diminish it to a normal family life."

So Masha and baby daughter Polina left Moscow for New Jersey where horizons are no doubt more constricted.

But it is not necessarily true that rocket scientists are uninterested in the development of better toasters. The notion that rocket scientists and the like all have their heads in the clouds (understandably enough) and are uninterested in ordinary or domestic engineering is misguided.

Even when Albert Einstein was a household name and had already won the Nobel Prize, he was still interested in the seemingly mundane problems of household appliance design. A new study of his papers by Gene Dannen, an American academic, has revealed that Einstein, intrigued by a report on how a Berlin family died from toxic fumes leaking from their fridge, spent a large chunk of the mid 1920s designing a revolutionary kind of fridge.

He and fellow scientist Leo Szilard filed a number of patents, some of which were later purchased by Electrolux and by AEG. However, when CFC gases like freon were developed, these seemed a safer bet and Einstein's designs never made it to the kitchen. {CORRECTION} 97050700002