Alice Tully Hall shows transparency

It will soon be three years since the more intimate auditorium of Lincoln Center for the Performing Arts, known as Alice Tully Hall, closed for renovations as part of a massive redevelopment plan for the entire campus. This first major completed component of the plan reopened to the public with a new transparent appearance.

"a melancholy loner in search of his place in the world"

The Canadian company marks its 25th anniversary with a new big-top touring show that tells of a melancholy loner in search of his place in the world. The production marks a return to the troupe's origins of combining two circus traditions — high-caliber acrobatic artistry and bold, slapstick clowning.

"The Magnificent Seven"

I love that movie !!!!!!

"Lights make me dizzy!"

(Photo by Bob on Flickr)

"Fotoreis IJsland Ellie Postma augustus 2009"

(Photo by jaapmuurlinck on Flickr)

Do people still live in places like this???

(Photo by bimplebean on Flickr)

Aye, Aye Sir . . .

South Korea’s Armed Forces Day is an annual event held on October 1.

The country’s military puts on a variety of displays that include performances by military bands, drills by honor guard contingents and martial arts displays by special warfare units. There are also air shows with helicopters and fighting planes. One of the highlights of the event is a skydiving performance by South Korea’s Special Warfare Command soldiers.

The "Loeb Boathouse " in New York's Central Park

With their 1858 landscaping plan under construction, Frederick Law Olmsted and Calvert Vaux began adding architectural features to their Park design. Around 1874, Vaux designed a two-story boathouse at the eastern end of the Lake. Here visitors could purchase refreshments, take boat rides, and watch other boats. After this wooden Victorian structure with sloping mansard roof burned down, the current Loeb Boathouse took its place in the 1950s.

Today at the Boathouse visitors can enjoy a meal in any season, with overhead heating helping to extend as long as possible the pleasure of dining on the deck overlooking the Lake. More informal snacks are available on the outside terrace across from the bicycle rental concession. At Loeb you can also rent rowboats or take a ride in an authentic Venetian gondola. This is more than a ride, it is an "event" – with luck, your gondolier might just break into song at some point in the trip.

"Saab Story"

General Motors Co.'s plans to save Saab by selling it have failed, and the storied Swedish brand will be the latest to hit the scrap pile. Shown above is the 1937 first SAAB Model 92001.

One of the most modern and futuristic car models of its time. Sixten Sason´s Saab protoype 92001 has inspired Playsam to design a wooden model painted in high lustre black paint. Length: 220 mm.

(http://www.trollhattansaab.net/archives/2005/07/toys.html)

Doheny Mansion

Today the newly renovated Doheny Mansion at Mount St. Mary’s College, shown above, reopens for public tours at 9, 9:45, 10:30 and 11:15 a.m. Tours include the first floor of the mansion and surrounding grounds. $25. No. 8 Chester Place, Los Angeles. (213) 477-2962.

"stylish birdhouses and feeders"

Give your backyard habitat a modern vibe with these nifty bird feeders and houses.
First up, a window-mounted bird feeder (upper left) by the new design group Born in Sweden. Rose Apodaca, co-founder of the contemporary design store A+R, discovered the clear, globe-shaped feeder in Paris last summer and started importing it for her Venice shop and online store. “We think it’s going to do gangbusters this winter given its reasonable $18 price tag, cool packaging and even cooler design,” she says. The 4.5-inch-diameter bubble of recyclable plastic mounts on windows with a double suction cup.

Jayme Jenkins, owner of Aha! Modern Living, an online store based in Eugene, Ore., says the hanging glass bird feeder (upper right) by Eva Solo is one of her most popular items. “It’s hard to find stylish birdhouses and feeders. Hence, I had an ‘Aha’ moment when I found this one.” Made of hand-blown glass, the doughnut-shaped feeder is 7.5 by 5 inches and costs $52.80. For a 20% discount through Jan. 31, use “LATIMES” as a promotional code when checking out.

Loll, maker of eye-catching and durable outdoor furniture, has added the Cube and Pitch birdhouses (bottom left and right) to its line of products made in the U.S.A. from recycled plastic milk jugs. (It takes about 24 one-gallon jugs to fabricate each little house.) The Pitch, shown in leaf-green, is 7 inches square and has a 7-3/4-inch-wide mid-century-style sloped roof. Loll’s Cube birdhouse, shown in white, is 5 inches high and the base measures 5.5 by 6.5 inches. Its horizontal siding evokes modernist lines. Both styles come in six colors, and cost $68 each.

-- Debra Prinzing

Photo credits, clockwise from top left: A+R, Aha! Modern Living, Loll

Too Many Toys ???

In David Shannon's excellent book "Too Many Toys" (pictured above), he tells the story of a boy named Spencer who has way too many toys. It's a children's book of course, but as a mother, I learned a lesson from it: Parents don't necessarily have control of how many toys they have in their home. Spencer gets toys from his parents and his grandparents, his aunts, his uncles, even from his cousin Drew. He also gets them from friends on his birthday, and on their birthdays (in goody bags). He gets toys at the drive-through, at school "for having lots of Peace Person Points," and at the doctor's office when he doesn't squirm. How can a parent keep up with it all?

"Sign stolen from former Auschwitz death camp"

OSWIECIM, Poland - The Nazis' infamous iron sign declaring "Arbeit Macht Frei" -- German for "Work Sets You Free" -- was stolen today from the entrance of the former Auschwitz death camp, Polish police said.

The Auschwitz death camp's main gate at sunrise. "The theft of such a symbolic object is an attack on the memory of the Holocaust," Yad Vashem Chairman Avner Shalev said in a statement from Jerusalem. (Janek Skarzynski, AFP/Getty Images / January 13, 2005)

"Avatar" ticket sales big but not top-grossing

"Avatar" may be the highest-profile movie of the year, but it's not one that got out hordes of fans early in the morning.

James Cameron's new 3-D science-fiction flick grossed $3.54 million from shows that started at or soon after midnight today in the U.S. and Canada, according to distributor 20th Century Fox.

Despite the huge hype for the film, there turned out to be a relatively small number of Cameron devotees who came out to watch a two-hour-and-42-minute film after 12 a.m.

The top-grossing midnight debuts of all time, November's "The Twilight Saga: New Moon" and July's "Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince" started off with $26.3 million and $22.2 million, respectively.

Opera for the masses and ME

Opera purists often turn their noses up at Andrea Bocelli. But for a great many people, he is opera. For better or for worse, Bocelli -- who has made a career out of moving between classical and pop -- represents the closest thing to opera that most people will ever experience.

No stranger to Southern California, Bocelli was in town recently to appear at the Honda Center in Anaheim last Sunday evening. The Italian tenor performed a set of holiday music from his latest album, "My Christmas," which was released in November. He also performed some operatic arias and duets.

Open for Excitement

A monorail passes through the $8.5-billion CityCenter complex, which has three hotels and a mall. The 61-story Aria Resort & Casino opened Thursday. (Ricardo DeAratanha / Los Angeles Times / November 19, 2009)

"dead-sexy sports car"

The Audi e-tron -- a spectacularly cool and highly evolved prototype of an electric sports car due from the German giant at the end of 2011 -- may not be the car that crushes California's bold pioneers of electric mobility.

But what it represents could.

In the next couple of years, globe-striding automakers such as Nissan-Renault, Mercedes-Benz, VW Group, GM and Ford will begin cranking out tens of thousands of electric cars. Not just small electric city cars and mid-size family sedans (like GM's Volt and Nissan's Leaf) but powerful, dead-sexy sports cars.

The Audi e-tron, whose only shared component with the look-alike Audi R8 are the halfshafts, will at some point have company in the luxury electric sports car segment in the form of Mercedes' electric-version SLS gullwing (and no, I never thought I'd be writing those words).

This armada of electron-burners will not be diffident, underbaked beta-testers. No asterisks they. These will be -- they have to be -- fully fledged Nissans, Mercedes and VWs, built to these companies' exacting standards and sold at a price that economizes their global scale.

(Dan Neil. L A Times)

New Art Museum

EAST LANSING, Mich. - Michigan State University's trustees have approved the start of construction for a new art museum on the East Lansing campus.

The school says it will break ground March 16, 2010 for the Eli and Edythe Broad (BROHD) Art Museum. It's expected to open in early 2012.

In 2007, Michigan State alumnus Eli Broad and his wife Edythe donated $18.5 million toward building the museum. The couple also gave $7.5 million to commission a sculpture, buy art works and fund operations and an endowment.

"When dreams come true . . ."

At long last, Boeing Co.'s 787 passenger jet took to the skies Tuesday, making its maiden test flight and marking a major milestone in commercial aviation.

Thousands of Boeing workers and journalists were on hand at Paine Field just north of Seattle to witness the takeoff of the Dreamliner, a 250-seat jetliner that promises to burn less fuel and last longer than other aircraft flying today.

History of a Legend Grown Old

In 1936, the East and West communities of the San Francisco Bay Area came together like never before. While ferries had long carried people across the Bay's often choppy waters, automobiles were the future of transportation. This meant local residents wanted a quick way to drive between the rapidly growing cities of San Francisco and Oakland. As expected, as soon as the San Francisco-Oakland Bay Bridge was built in 1936, it immediately became the favorite way to travel between San Francisco and the East Bay.

Cynics believed that the bridge would be impossible to build due to the potential impact of turbulent waters and gusty winds. Engineers had assumed that the area's high winds posed a greater threat than earthquakes, despite the bridge's proximity to two major fault lines. The varying soils and water depths, the inaccessibility to bedrock, and the unique design challenges inherent in developing a bridge to span eight miles across the Bay led some to believe that building such a bridge was unthinkable.

The largest and most expensive bridge ($77 million) of its time, the Bay Bridge faced not just natural obstacles, but political hurdles as well. There had been discussion of building a bridge between San Francisco and Oakland since the 1870s, but construction did not move forward until the Reconstruction Finance Corporation, with support from President Herbert Hoover, agreed to purchase bonds to be repaid later with bridge tolls.