Arthur Gross

Junk bonds may have lost their cachet, but one entrepreneur has found a new way to milk cash from trash. He packages it in plastic, adds a pink and green label--"100% Beverly Hills Trash"--and sells it for $4.95. Arthur Gross plunged headfirst into the realm of rubbish last July, when he says he was teaching a graduate course in "entrepreneurial management" at the University of Pennsylvania's Wharton School of Business.

Junk bonds may have lost their cachet, but one entrepreneur has found a new way to milk cash from trash. He packages it in plastic, adds a pink and green label--"100% Beverly Hills Trash"--and sells it for $4.95. Arthur Gross plunged headfirst into the realm of rubbish last July, when he says he was teaching a graduate course in "entrepreneurial management" at the University of Pennsylvania's Wharton School of Business.

K'hilat Ha Aloneem, the Jewish Community of the Oaks, is holding a special memorial service for slain Israeli leader Yitzhak Rabin tonight. The organization invites residents to honor the late prime minister at the Jewish Community of the Oaks at 619 W. El Roblar Drive in Meiners Oaks at 7:15 p.m. The ceremony will be led by Rabbi Arthur Gross Schaefer. In lieu of flowers, donations can be sent to the Yitzhak Rabin Children's Fund for Peace, in care of K'hilat Ha Aloneem.

Republican calls to "end the IRS as we know it" always seem attractive as April 15 approaches. But they have appeared especially so since last month, when IRS information chief Arthur Gross admitted that $400 million of the $3.3 billion that Congress gave the agency for computer modernization had been wasted on "non-continuing projects." Nevertheless, recent IRS studies suggest that the agency's real problem is not waste but chiseling.

At the dawn of the Information Age, utopian theorists predicted that computers would free us from laborious tasks to focus on more challenging problems. But the Internal Revenue Service is now finding the opposite to be true, at least in one instance. To prevent its computers from going haywire when they have to process dates involving the year 2000, the agency is hastily launching a conversion program that will require at least 1,800 staff years of labor by Jan. 1, 1999.

Jewish congregations throughout Ventura County are planning special activities to observe Rosh Hashanah, the Jewish new year, which begins Sunday. K'hilat Ha'Aloneem, Jewish Community of the Oaks, will host two guest rabbis Sunday and Monday at the Jewish Community Center in Ojai. Rabbis Arthur Gross Schaefer of Santa Barbara and Judith HaLevy of Los Angeles will take part in services on Rosh Hashanah Eve Sunday and on Monday morning. The Jewish Community Center is at 619 W. El Roblar Drive.

A group of lifeguards from Los Angeles County were narrowly defeated down under recently by counterparts from Victoria, Australia, as part of the biannual Wieland Shield trophy competition. The L.A. county group had held the trophy since 1988, when it defeated a group of Aussies at the International Surf Festival held along South Bay beaches. The event moves to California in 1992.

This week's suspension of Reform Judaism's central seminary leader for alleged sexual misconduct highlighted the Reform movement's crackdown on such behavior in recent years, officials said Wednesday. Rabbi Sheldon Zimmerman resigned from his post as president of the Hebrew Union College-Jewish Institute of Religion after the Reform rabbinate's ethics committee suspended him for two years.

In another embarrassing snafu, the Internal Revenue Service said Tuesday that it sent out a million 1040 tax return packages with erroneous bar codes on the return mailing labels. If taxpayers try to use the labels, they will probably find their completed returns delivered to their own doorsteps rather than to the IRS, the agency said. The setback comes after more than two years of effort to improve IRS customer service and correct long-standing problems with the agency's antiquated technology.

Southern California Sikhs, followers of the world's fifth-largest religion, will celebrate a major religious holiday Sunday--Baisakhi Day--with colorful floats, devotional music, chanting and a free kitchen serving Indian vegetarian food. Baisakhi Day commemorates the expanded religious vision that Sikhs believe was given to them by Guru Gobind Singh more than 300 years ago.

I was sitting in a tunnel composed of 50 bags of trash when it occurred to me I probably didn't have the proper attitude toward art. I find it difficult, for example, to think of used condoms and empty chili cans as evocative of contemporary society in whatever form they might be presented. It could have been, I suppose, that crawling on my hands and knees to get into the tunnel in the first place twisted my disposition toward the art which at the moment I was experiencing.