With luck, the TuneUp Guys won’t botch them.

By Pat Dane & Mike Walter

Each week since the first broadcast of our top 10 radio show (the companion to this, the most-read column in America), we’ve been highlighting the news and views of what we have called the World WILD Web. We choose our stories, opinions and insights for their bite quotient, rather than their byte quotient. We seek out the weird, the bizarre, the voyeuristic. The human.

In short, we pursue people and stories that fascinate us, and that help to illuminate the phenomena that is the Net.

Many of the stories we’ve covered, the sites we’ve reviewed, and the on-air interviews we’ve conducted, have been about, by, or with women (or grrls in Net vernacular).

Here are are a couple of the most memorable.

Which way to the holodeck?
Around New Years, we covered the story of a new pop idol, a Japanese teen-age singing sensation named Kyoko Date. She’s seventeen years old, 5’4 tall, and has jet black hair that she wears in a fetchingly short style.

A full-color picture of her seated on a stone bench and casually leaning against the wall, one leg tucked under the other, appears on her Web site. Her figure is long-legged and busty. Her face is thin and shows delicate brows over big, Western-looking eyes. Her clothes tend to be sexy -- shorts, tube tops, form-fitting dresses. Her biography says that she likes to draw. Her favorites actors are Christian Slater and fellow countryman, Kyozo Nagazuka.

In addition to singing, Kyoko also works part-time in a fast food restaurant. She speaks some foreign languages, and she has a sister who is a year younger.

There’s just one catch: Kyoko Date isn’t exactly human. She is made of 40,000 polygons -- and it took the work of 10 people to produce her face alone. You see, Kyoko is cyberspace’s first "Virtual Girl," a creation of the engineers and designers at HoriPro, Japan’s top modeling agency.

Parts are parts
The Net provides unlimited entrepreneurial opportunities for people who want to start and grow online businesses -- regardless of how twisted or bizarre.

Case in point: Andrea LéVine of Van Nuys, CA.

In addition to starting an online greeting card company, LéVine decided to get a piece of the Net’s action by selling pieces on the Net.

Body pieces.

From eyeballs to fingers, LéVine’s Body Parts Web Site (www.nobis.com/btech/index.html) features it all.

But then, that’s not unusual for a woman who is known on Hollywood movie sets as "the pain giver." If actors lose a body part in a role, she's the one directors turn to for a prosthetic match. From Interview with the Vampire to The Mask, her anatomical prosthetics and specialty contact lenses have been seen in some of Hollywood's biggest films.

Utilizing her experience as a make-up artist, LéVine formed her effects firm, Bodytech, more than four years ago. Indeed, LéVine’s entrepreneurial spirit -- combined with her on-set success -- has pushed her to branch out to one of the creepiest retail outlets around.

Today, Bodytech has touched a nerve with the gore-seeking public. Bodytech's catalog includes a variety of teeth, fingernails and specialty contact lenses, including the same styles worn by Tom Cruise and Brad Pitt in Interview With the Vampire. Browse the Bodytech website catalog to see samples.

Weary of the "hurry up and wait" days on the set and the phenomenal growth of computer-generated effects, LéVine clearly has her sights set on the future. Her long-range business plan includes starting a school to teach special effects makeup and prosthetics. And someday, she would like to work with medical professionals and put her 25 years of experience to help others.

Her objective: to put her innovations with lenses, prosthetics and makeup to use helping burn victims and those with eye injuries and missing limbs. She has even developed a specialty line of makeup for burn victims -- and hopes to work directly with patients and plastic surgeons to teach the techniques she’s perfected. She has already used her experience with custom lenses to paint a cosmetic lens to match the eye of a man who had lost his iris and cornea in one eye.

Just another amazing woman’s tale, straight from the Net.