Shining Light on the Past

The lighthouse at Point Montara was never the biggest or brightest, but its historical legacy is now secure. In news that set beacons spinning among lighthouse fanciers, researchers have revealed that the tower that has guided mariners into San Francisco Bay for the last 80 years had an earlier life guiding mariners into Wellfleet Harbor on Cape Cod in the late 1800s.

A signpost points to faraway places at the southern end of Golden Gate National Recreation Area, which encompasses 75,000 acres along the Northern California coastline.

I know you're from New York . . . you've got "Yankees" written all over your face.

What have I done to deserve this?

Joe Girardi: Fired after one year as Florida Marlins manager. During the 2006 season, Girardi led the Marlins, who had the lowest payroll in baseball, to a 78-84 record and had them in contention for the National League wild-card spot. Girardi was fired because of disagreements with the Marlins' front office. Six weeks after his firing on Oct. 3, Girardi won the NL manager-of-the-year award. Girardi is now manager for the New York Yankees.

Reluctance of Stardom

Julie Christie's performance in "Away From Her" is superb, and has garnered her the National Board of Review's Best Actress Award.

Julie Christie fans who have waited decades for the handful of films made by the luminous star wonder "Would we have wanted it any other way? We are the Red Sox fans of the movies, once again rewarded with a world-class masterpiece by our heroine. Perhaps, like all human beings, we want more, but we have learned over the last thirty-five years to be content with the diamonds that are Julie's leading performances that she gives just once a decade, content to feel that these are a surfeit of riches, our surfeit of riches, so great is their luminescence."

Whoopi Goldberg "flew in" for the 2008 Tony Awards Show

"You Are Under Surveillance"

WASHINGTON -- From a dimly lit room in a secure command center, 21 streaming video feeds from 4,775 surveillance cameras around the nation's capital are projected across three screens and monitored at all hours. Every few seconds, footage from a different location pops up -- a busy road, a picnic bench, the entrance to the new baseball stadium.

Seven years after the Sept. 11 attacks, Mayor Adrian M. Fenty is trying to set up one of the most comprehensive centrally controlled visual surveillance systems in the world. In the nerve center, which opened last month, the city's Homeland Security and Emergency Management Agency can monitor video from four city agencies -- covering streets, schools, housing projects, parks and roads -- for threats and other nefarious activities.

For those who have accepted the city's fate as a prime terrorist target, this may be cause for relief. But to the many civil liberties groups headquartered in Washington, the move undermines privacy, encourages abuse and represents the first step toward a surveillance system like London's, where a person's every public move can be tracked on about 10,000 government-funded cameras that have been dubbed a "ring of steel."

"Double Hitter"

On Aug. 17, 1957, Hall of Fame member Richie Ashburn of the Philadelphia Phillies fouled off a pitch that struck Alice Roth, wife of Philadelphia Bulletin sports editor Earl Roth, breaking her nose. As Roth was being helped from the stands, Ashburn fouled off another pitch, striking Roth as she lay on a stretcher. She was not seriously injured

Doing Battle Against the Curse

Leading, 3-0, and five outs from reaching their first World Series in 58 years, the Chicago Cubs watched spectator Steve Bartman reach for a foul ball, deflecting it away from left fielder Moises Alou. Given new life, Luis Castillo drew a walk, starting an eight-run rally that propelled the Florida Marlins to the 2003 National League championship and earned Bartman infamy in Chicago. Alou said this spring he doubts he could have caught the ball.

Celebration !!!!!

Turkey players celebrate during their Group A Euro 2008 soccer match against Czech Republic at Stade de Geneve stadium in Geneva June 15, 2008. REUTERS/Max Rossi (SWITZERLAND)

NO GOAL !!!!!!! "the agony of defeat"

Turkey's goalkeeper Volkan Demirel makes a save next to Czech Republik's Jan Polak during their Group A Euro 2008 soccer match at Stade de Geneve stadium in Geneva. REUTERS/Pascal Lauener (SWITZERLAND)

Some things take a long time

Established in 1911 by presidential proclamation, Devils Postpile National Monument protects and preserves the Devils Postpile formation, the 101-foot high Rainbow Falls, and the pristine mountain scenery in California's High Sierras. The formation is a rare sight in the geologic world and ranks as one of the world’s finest examples of columnar basalt. Its columns tower 60 feet high and display an unusual symmetry.

Approximately 100,000 years ago, a lava flow erupted two miles upstream from the location of today's Monument. As it flowed down the Valley, it eventually ran into an obstruction which served as a dam to the lava's path. Pooling up to as deep as 400 feet behind the natural dam, the lava cooled. Conditions were such that the lava--that was incredibly uniform in its mineral composition--cooled at a very slow rate. As it cooled, it contracted and cracked, forming hexagonal columns. 80,000 years later, a glacier flowed through the same valley, overriding the formation and eventually revealing the sides and tops of the columns. Glacial polish can still be seen today at the top of the formation.
Rainbow Falls

Sights on a European Road Trip and you could brag that you "stayed at a Holiday Inn Express last night"

A Holiday Inn Express lies not far from this picture-perfect alpine scene north of Lucerne, Switzerland. Crossing the Alps is a cinch on today's superhighways.

The Lower Corniche near Monaco winds along the Mediterranean coast, twisting along – and sometimes through – the seaside mountains.

To Fetch a Jug of Water 1200 Years Ago

In March, Marshall Pura of Los Feliz stopped in the village of Abhaneri, India, and came across this little-known wonder from the ancient world -- a well from the 8th century. "The step well was nearly 10 stories deep, and I pictured the women carrying those large jugs down and up those 110 steps more than 1,200 years ago," he said in an e-mail to the Times. "It was completely unexpected, all these arrangements of steps going every which way." He used a Kodak Z740 to plumb the depths.

They Know They Saw Something

It was a cool, clear January night when Steve Allen, 50, and a group of friends were warming themselves around a fire of brush and debris in nearby Selden, just south of Stephenville, Texas.

They first saw a set of brilliant white lights heading from the east that looked like they were at the corners of something a mile long and a half-mile wide. The lights were quicker and quieter than anything Allen had ever seen.

"They came within a mile of us," said Allen, the owner of L&S Enterprises and Texas Freight, a local trucking company. "It flipped us all out."

The lights headed toward Stephenville, where they came to a stop. They reconfigured to form an arch "shaped like the top of a football," Allen said, and realigned into two vertical lines of randomly flashing lights. Then the object burst into a dirty white flame.

"It looked like something firing up, like a blowtorch," Allen said. "It simply vanished."

Ten minutes later, the group saw the lights coming from the opposite direction. Trailing them closely, Allen was certain, were two military jets, followed by two massive red orbs.

Allen, who as a licensed pilot was comfortable judging distance, said the lights were 3,000 feet above the ground.

When the light show was over, he went home and told his wife, who urged him to keep the encounter to himself.

D.B. Cooper bills sold at auction

Fifteen tattered $20 bills recovered from the 1971 D.B. Cooper skyjacking sold for more than 120 times their face value at a Dallas auction.

Heritage Auction Galleries said the bills sold for a total of more than $37,000 -- two to three times higher than expected.

Winning bidders paid about $6,500 each for two of the $20 bills. The money has the handwritten initials of investigators who examined the bills, which were found buried in sand in 1980.

Cooper skyjacked a flight from Portland, Ore., to Seattle, claiming he had a bomb.
Left: An FBI sketch of "D.B. Cooper." Right: Kenneth Christiansen, Northwest purser and former paratrooper; a suspect in the case.

Keep Your Eye on the Ball . . . but duck !!!

"I wanna be a star"

Shown above is a few Peruvian soccer players.

"Camelot" Forever

The New York Philharmonic's recent performances of Lerner & Loewe’s Camelot musical was a smash. Among Broadway, theater, and opera stars, Nathan Gunn played Lancelot along with Gabriel Byrne's Arthur and Marin Mazzie's Guenevere.

Classy and Classic

The Lincoln Center Theater production of Rodgers & Hammerstein's "South Pacific" is one of the hottest tickets in town -- and one of several revivals that have struck a chord with audiences. Shown above is Brazilian Paulo Szot and Kelli O'Hara.

"Mantis Assassin"

Peter Chan's painting "Mantis Assassin" was inspired, the artist says, "by the elegant forms of the praying mantis' exoskeleton. This graceful but deadly dancer was sent on a mission to seduce and assassinate an enemy king. Weapons concealed beneath her striking formal costume are employed to provide a most exciting climax to her performance."

Concept art comes to life

“The Landing” is among Scott Robertson’s series of sketches and renderings found in his book “Lift Off.”

"One thing I like about this piece is that you can still recognize the building forms that came from my original marker sketch," Robertson says. "A rendering like this is really about having the patience and determination to sit for about a week at the computer and pick away at it. The most enjoyable part was the painting of each ship and the addition of the figures. The process of adding the figures was a fun project. At our studio, there is a decent-sized parking lot. One morning I took a ladder outside, climbed up to match the eye level of my rendering with a camera and then asked my studio partner, Neville Page, to walk to different parts of the parking lot and pose in different positions. The photos were added to the rendering and then painted over to change the clothing and characters."

>"Criss Cross"

"Over the past 15 years," Scott Robertson says, "I have designed many production and concept bicycles for a variety of companies and myself. My professional experience with bicycle design began with the designing of advanced composite bike frames for Kestrel, where I had been granted an internship between my fifth and sixth terms of study at Art Center. Since then I have continued to design frames for Kestrel and others.

"During 2001, I had the good fortune of being asked to design a series of advanced concept bikes for the film 'Minority Report.' The bikes were going to be ridden by extras through many of the street scenes. Twelve fully functioning, futuristic bikes were built for the film but only one is seen in the finished film. If you watch really, really closely you might see it through a window for about half a second, being ridden by a newspaper delivery boy. Oh well, the designs were still very fun to do. The bike you see here is not from the film but is an evolution of the types of bikes I had done for that project. All of the bikes I designed were rendered in Photoshop over side-view line sketches I had done. I had always wanted to do a bike rendering that had a bit more dramatic lighting and perspective to it than I usually do for typical industrial design work. What you see here is the result. I used all of the layering abilities and path functions in Photoshop to help me achieve a fairly high level of finish with this piece. I'm sure some of you might be wondering, 'How does that front wheel turn?' The way it works, in theory, is that the front fork is a kind of diamond-shape when viewed from above. This allows for the front wheel to turn left and right from the center hub pivot. The front wheel is pulled left or right via a closed-loop cable system that runs through the frame."

Office of famed Nazi hunter Simon Wiesenthal transplanted to Museum of Tolerance in West L.A.

By the time U.S. troops liberated the Mauthausen concentration camp in Austria on May 5, 1945, Simon Wiesenthal was so weak from hunger and hard labor that he collapsed at their feet.

Days later, the survivor of Buchenwald and other notorious camps found the strength to embark on what would become a lifelong quest: to bring to justice the major and minor Nazi killers who had exterminated 6 million of his fellow Jews and millions of Gypsies, Poles and other "inferior" peoples.

For nearly half a century, Wiesenthal conducted much of his sleuthing from behind a darkly stained wooden desk in a compact Vienna office. There, in his Jewish Documentation Center, he pored over SS directories, photographs, city phone books and Holocaust survivors' letters in his bid to track offenders literally to the ends of the Earth. Biographers credit him with ferreting out 1,100 war criminals.

Now the famed Nazi hunter's office has been transplanted to the Museum of Tolerance in West Los Angeles, as part of an exhibit examining the Holocaust. Museum officials say the room is just as Wiesenthal left it at his death in 2005 at 96, down to the last pipe, newspaper clipping and sunflower tchotchke.

Stranded scuba divers chase off Komodo dragon

BALI, Indonesia (AP) — Elena Neralairen threw rocks at an aggressive Komodo dragon and scavenged for mussels on a remote Indonesian island where she and fellow divers were stranded for days after being swept away in treacherous currents.

The group — three from Britain and one each from France and Sweden — drifted 20 miles in sharp-infested waters before landing after nightfall on Rinca's palm-fringed beach, their last chance to avoid being swept into the open ocean.

But the next morning, it became clear their ordeal was not yet over. They came face-to-face with a deadly Komodo dragon, which can weigh as much as 365 pounds, and scared the beast away by screaming and pelting it with rocks and sticks.

Interesting and Unusual Photography by Judy Melton

Look closely at this image of an Arizona slot canyon and you can see the silhouette of a bear.
(Photo by Judy Melton of Burbank, California)

Newfoundland's icebergs can be beautiful or terrifying

Iceberg "Large Eye"
Iceberg waterfall
"Iceberg with a bite out of it"
Boat provides visitors a view.

This guy made a "goalie" and a "goal"

Eastern Conference forwardEric Staal (12), of the Carolina Hurricanes, sends the puck pastWestern Conference goaltender Chris Osgood for a goal during the firstperiod of the NHL All-Star hockey game Sunday, Jan. 27, 2008 inAtlanta, Ga.

Brooklyn man, French daredevil climb New York Times building

Alain Robert, also known as The French Spiderman, pumps his fist at the cheering crowd after hanging a banner on the New York Times building, a new 52-story tower, while climbing it with his bare hands Thursday, June 5, 2008 in New York. In a press release Robert says the stunt is a peaceful way to create support for far greater and urgent action from world leaders on global warming.
It was daredevil deja vu.

Just fives hours after the French Spiderman scaled the New York Times building on Eighth Avenue Thursday, a man from Brooklyn matched his death-defying feat by climbing to the tower's roof, raising questions about the skyscraper 's security.

Fueled by anger that hours earlier, Alain Robert, 45, had scaled his way barehanded up the facade of the 52-story Times building, Clarke took on the Times building that he had been planning to climb for two years, f riends said.

"I know him well, and I think it's crazy," said Nick Ruzhnikov, 37. "But I love him. I gave him a hug, and wished him luck."

The climbers each successfully reached the roof and had a message of their own. Alain Robert, 45, scaled the building in the morning to mark World Environment Day at the United Nations, telling police that he picked the Times building because the Renzo Piano-designed edifice was green. Meanwhile, Clarke wore a T-shirt that read "Malaria No More."

But the fact that the illegal climb occurred twice in one day - and received such widespread attention - raised concerns that copycat daredevils would return. "Two climbers used our headquarters building to make personal statements," said Catherine Mathis, the Times' spokeswoman. "Their illegal and ill-considered actions jeopardized their safety and the safety of others. We are taking steps to prevent future occurrences."

The Times did not elaborate on what measures would be taken. Meanwhile, the NYPD referred questions about security at the site to the paper.

"This probably raises the bar a little higher for what building owners in Manhattan have to be on the lookout for," said Barbara Nadel, a Forest Hills-based architect and author of "Building Security: Handbook for Architectural Planning and Design."

As Clarke made his ascent, hundreds of passersby stopped in the streets below. The crowd gaped upward, half-fascinated half-horrified.

Unlike Robert who had climbed the Eiffel Tower among other high-rise structures, Clarke had scaled the likes of construction sites, nothing compared to Times' building, said a friend, Monica Escobar, 33.

News channels all switched their cameras to monitor Clarke's climb and many announced that they were showing it on a time-delay, the obvious fear being that he would be seen falling to his death on live television.

Bob Steele, a journalism ethics scholar, described the event as being of minor news value. "It's about sensationalism and it's about drawing eyeballs to the televisions," he said.

Clarke certainly seemed to play to the media and the crowds as he stopped to wave to employees inside the building. At other times, he stopped to rest his exhausted arms and legs.

Both men were taken into police custody when they reached the roof. Robert was arrested on reckless endangerment and criminal trespass charges. Charges against Clarke were pending the outcome of a pyschiatric evaluation, police said.

The Gems of Ireland

Kylemore Abbey (Irish: Mainistir na Coille Móire) is a Benedictine monastery founded in 1920 on the grounds of Kylemore Castle, in Connemara, County Galway, Republic of Ireland. The abbey was founded when Benedictine Nuns fled Belgium in World War I.

Originally called Kylemore Castle, it was built between 1863 and 1868 as a private home for the family of Mitchell Henry, a wealthy politician from Manchester, England.

Ireland's 13th Century Ashford Castle

Ashford Castle, Cong Co. Mayo

Northern Ireland's Belfast Castle

The beautiful Belfast Castle situated in Cavehill Mountain.

Carrick a Rede Rope Bridge from the Sea of Moyle, Antrim Coast Road, Northern Ireland

Bobby Kennedy: Marking the 40th anniversary of his assassination

Ambassador Hotel busboy Juan Romero kneels next to the body of Kennedy after the senator was shot on June 5,1968. When Life magazine ceased publication in 1972, Bill Eppridge went to New York to pick up this 16-by-20-inch print. In the epilogue of his book, photographer Bill Eppridge wrote that he had never hung the print on the wall but instead put it behind his sofa. Years later, a canyon fire totally destroyed his house. The day after the fire, he found the picture behind the sofa mostly protected from the fire.

Rome: Imagine How it Was

The Colosseum is one of Rome's most visited ancient landmarks. (The wooden walkway in the center is a modern addition.) At the site, costumed gladiators pose for pictures, and tourists can experience a new way of touring the Colosseum, called the Time Machine, which uses hand-held video monitors showing digitalized images of what the arena looked like in ancient times.
(Richard Derk / Los Angeles Times)

GALAPAGOS ISLANDS

Located to 960 km approximately of the American continental coast.

The islands are based on the plate Is born, one of the points with greater volcanic activity of the World.

13 great islands, 17 small and 47 rocky small barren islands.

A great part of the archipelago is to the south of the equatorial line, where the sea currents of Humboldt (fries) and Cromwell (warm converge)

All the reptiles of these islands, half of the birds, 32 % of the plants and 25% of the fish, as well as a good number of invertebrates, is exclusively in this archipelago.

In 1959 they were declared National Park on the part of the Ecuadorian government. In 1978, UNESCO considered Patrimony Natural of the Humanity and 5 years later were declared Reserve of the Biosphere.

"Time After Time"