Amusement Park Ride

There's no business like show business when it comes to attracting teenage workers in Southern California. But even the ever-popular entertainment venues admit to feeling the pinch in today's super-tight job market. With Los Angeles County's unemployment rate at 5.3%--and even lower in certain booming areas within the region--employers who rely on teenage workers are redoubling efforts to recruit and hold onto the entry-level employees on whom they depend.

Steve Wicke is "just big into space. " The Westminster man took four months off his warehouse job last year to visit every NASA site in the United States. On Saturday, he joined an estimated 20,000 people who swarmed the Jet Propulsion Laboratory's leafy campus for its annual open house weekend. Buses and SUVs clogged Oak Grove Drive near the La Cañada Flintridge boundary with Pasadena and filled JPL parking lots to disgorge passengers of all ages, who descended on the exhibits and activities as if they were new amusement park rides.

Michael Jackson was never a fixture on the county fair circuit, but his Neverland rides now are on a never-ending tour. The attractions he set up in his estate's private amusement park have been auctioned off and are being trucked from carnival to carnival, pitched as a chance to take a spin on a piece of history. At the far end of the midway at the Tulare County Fair in the Central Valley this month, signs announced: "Michael ride here! This is one of Michael Jackson's rides from Neverland Ranch!"

A malfunction on an amusement park ride sent 27 people to hospitals, most with minor chest and neck injuries, police said. Witnesses reportedly saw the Son of Beast roller coaster at Paramount's Kings Island just northeast of Cincinnati come to an abrupt stop.

Hours after an off-duty Philadelphia police officer reported losing a small gun he had in his pocket, a 17-year-old girl found it on an amusement park ride in Ocean City and, thinking the gun was a toy, fired it into a beach dune. She inadvertently sat on the gun while climbing into the Slingshot ride at Gillian's Wonderland Pier. Even after firing it, she thought the .22-caliber revolver was a toy. The girl and her family contacted police the next day once they realized the gun was real.

PARK CITY, Utah -- About three years ago, Randy Moore, a struggling screenwriter living in Burbank, had an out-there idea: What if he took a tiny camera and, without asking permission, began shooting a narrative movie at Disney theme parks? Moore had been visiting Disney World in Orlando, Fla., with his now-estranged father since he was a child, and he'd also begun taking his two children, then 1 and 3, to Disneyland. He thought that juxtaposing the all-American iconography of Mickey Mouse with a dark scripted tale would be cinematic gold, or at least deeply weird.

Robert Boswell introduces the the reader to the Warren family in an oddly upbeat moment: a party celebrating their second son's decision to drop out of college. (The Warrens celebrate failure regularly--it's about the only thing they have to celebrate.) But after this quirky, original opening, the story quickly degenerates into a turgid soap opera that borrows heavily from "Death of Salesman."

COLORADO A man fell to his death after standing up on a Six Flags amusement park ride in Denver, authorities said. The death came a day after a worker at Six Flags Over Georgia was killed when he was struck in the head by a roller coaster passenger's dangling legs. The 24-year-old in Denver, whose name was not released, was seen unlatching his seat belt before he fell, authorities said.

An amusement park ride accident that injured 31 people last summer was caused by loose bolts that bent, then broke under riders' weight, a state investigation found. Officials at Michigan's Adventure near Muskegon could not prove that the bolts on the Chaos ride had been properly inspected, the state said. The Michigan Department of Consumer & Industry Services and the Michigan Carnival-Amusement Safety Board ordered the ride closed until it has passed a thorough state inspection.