Mr. Marsalis and company are working on a quixotic but worthy idea: that jazz should be reconnected with its roots as a dance music.

Late last year, Senator Edward M. Kennedy began his latest crusade for health insurance with a seemingly quixotic idea: providing coverage for millions of uninsured children by raising taxes on one of Washington's most powerful special interests, the tobacco industry.

He has offered up ideas, sometimes quixotic, on everything from settling the drug war in Colombia to reunifying the Koreas.

ADRIAEN'S LANDING, the roughly $870 million riverfront development that was perceived for years as a quixotic idea, is at last under construction in downtown Hartford.

Having gambled everything on this quixotic idea, he finds himself hobbled by debt and six days from losing his family home to a mortgage company.

"We feel called upon to respond before quixotic ideas harden into disastrous policies," the petition said.

But Pagad's leaders say they do not endorse an Islamic revolution here - a quixotic idea anyway, since less than two percent of South Africa is Muslim.

On the WNYC Web site, a quixotic idea: write a haiku (with the classic Western definition as a three-liner of 5 - 7 - 5 syllables) whose middle line is Biden's "This is a big...

At one point I entertained the quixotic and, retrospectively, stupid idea of requiring every employee at Fog Creek to be a programmer... even the receptionist would have to have done some BASIC programming in high school to qualify.

Ever since hyperwave made transmission easy, she had been putting hundreds of writings by extrasolar dwellers into the discs, with the quixotic idea of eventually getting to know most of them.