Atrocious

"The Honeymooners Reunion" gave me a bushel of laughs. They don't make 'em like that anymore. I never watch any of the modern-day sitcoms. They are atrocious. Frederick D. Mullen, Upland

TORONTO — Don't get too high, don't get too low. That has been the Clippers' motto all season. So after the low of all lows, a 98-73 loss to the Toronto Raptors on Friday night at Air Canada Centre, Clippers All-Star forward Blake Griffin was asked if it still was easy to apply the team's principle. "No, it's never easy really, but it's important for us to do, especially on an eight-game road trip," Griffin said. "It's only two games down. We've got six more to go. We can't hang our head and let the way we feel or let our emotions from this game affect us going forward.

Peter Rainer writes, in his review of "The Complete Essays" (Aug. 16) of "the enormity of Montaigne's achievement." Surely he means the vastness of those achievements, and not that they were, as my dictionary says, outrageous or atrocious. Mr. Rainer may argue "common usage," but isn't it better to be exacting? MARVIN SCHACHTER, PASADENA

At last, we can finally have that celebration — oh, not quite yet? Amid repeated replays of LeBron James' announcement he was "taking my talents" to you-know-where, and his prediction at the welcome in Miami that the Heat would win "not one, not two, not three, not four, not five, not six, not seven but eight titles," the actual NBA Finals started on a subdued note Tuesday night as the Heat beat the Dallas Mavericks, 92-84, to take a 1-0 lead....

As a species, we are capable of a wide spectrum of behavior--from the most atrocious cruelties to our fellow man to absolute beauty that realizes our loftiest potential--the latter being epitomized in your recent article about Dr. Ronald Busuttil ("God's Right Hand," by Scott Harris, July 11). What a complete human being he is, and what an inspiration to all of us to fulfill and use the gifts we've been given. We are bombarded daily with stories of unspeakable horrors happening the world over, and it is a breath of fresh air to read about the difference one individual can make.

Thank you, KABC, for your atrocious mutilation of the film "Lawrence of Arabia," which the station itself announced as being "internationally acclaimed" and winner of the Oscar for best picture. It was bad enough that you split the showing into two parts over two nights, but why did you choose to cut (in their entirety) two crucial segments that contribute so much to the understanding of the enigmatic T. E. Lawrence? Give yourself a pat, KABC, for once more ruining a work of art. Joyce E. Kuhn, Encino

Your article on the death penalty ("Degraded by a Lust for Death," by William J. Wood, Op-Ed Page, Feb. 7) is not only outrageous but also insulting. How dare you characterize proponents of capital punishment as having a "lust for death"? Your sanctimonious opposition doesn't give you the right to slander those with whom you disagree! Furthermore, Father Wood's hand-wringing discourse adds nothing to the debate over capital punishment. I was astounded to read that "our democratic experiment is such a failure that we have to resort to legalized killing in order to protect ourselves," and that violent crimes "are symptomatic of a very dysfunctional society."

In John Clark's interview with Woody Allen and cast members of his movie "The Curse of the Jade Scorpion" ("It's Just How He Works," Aug. 12), Dan Aykroyd mentions having called his agent weeping to have a supporting actor he didn't respect replaced in a film that Aykroyd was starring in. The film was Bob Clark's "Loose Cannons" and the disrespected actor was that fine actor J.T. Walsh, who left us much too soon and on whose backside Aykroyd could...

Imagine Batman and the Joker are interested in fractional ownership of the same pickup truck. The caped crusader would want it all-black, eminently capable of off-roading, with a penchant for getting airborne. His nemesis might favor it in a crazy shade of orange, with a maniacal engine under the hood and an anarchists' disregard for fuel economy. The truck would be order and chaos fused together. Yin and yang. It would be the 2011 Ford F-150 SVT Raptor. Based on the F-150, a truck that's been the most popular vehicle in the U.S. for decades, the Raptor package adds a whole mess of menace and off-road accoutrement.

EVERYBODY IN LA JOLLA knew the Brodericks. Daniel T. Broderick III and his wife, Betty, seemed to have a classic society-page marriage. Dan was a celebrity in local legal circles. Armed with degrees from both Harvard Law School and Cornell School of Medicine, the prominent malpractice attorney was aggressive, persuasive and cunning--a $1-million-a-year lawyer at the top of his game.

I've seen "How to Train Your Dragon" twice. My daughter loves it (the lead dragon reminds us of her cat). And I think it's pretty great too. (Note: Some pretty obvious spoilers heading your way.) Perhaps I'm mellowing in my middle years, but I don't much mind what Entertainment Weekly calls the movie's "layer of age-of-terror allegory about the ignorance bred by jingoism." This refers to the fact that the Vikings in the film have been raised for seven generations to kill dragons: "It's what we do."

The videos, aired mostly by Fox News and other cable news outlets, are truly shocking: A pair of conservative activists posing as a pimp and a prostitute go to the offices of the Assn. of Community Organizations for Reform Now, pretending to be seeking assistance getting a loan to run a brothel. Their hidden camera captures ACORN workers dispensing such advice as how to create a fictitious business name, how to classify the business on tax forms ("performance arts") and how to handle the tax consequences of smuggling more than a dozen underage prostitutes from El Salvador to work at the facility (an ACORN worker helpfully advises them to write off the girls as "dependents")

Local officials and residents of this New Orleans suburb voiced outrage Monday over what they said was the deliberate neglect of inhabitants of a housing complex that was predominantly home to Latinos. The Redwood Park Apartments, a privately owned project subsidized by the Department of Housing and Urban Development, is home to one of the largest concentrations of Latinos in Kenner, a largely white community of 70,000 about 12 miles west of New Orleans in Jefferson Parish.

Re "In Modern Imperialism, U.S. Needs to Walk Softly," Commentary, July 15: It was not long ago that Max Boot was using England's colonial efforts in India as a shining example of what the U.S. should emulate in Iraq and the Middle East (Commentary, May 27). Boot conveniently forgets that the British, through creating an empire, inserting puppet rulers and not preparing indigenous peoples for self-rule, produced unstable countries and regions ripe for civil war. The historically accurate examples are many: India, Egypt, Pakistan, Afghanistan, etc. And now Boot praises American imperialism and our puppet government in Afghanistan -- a glowing example of the way our staunch allies, the British, created empire and set up puppet governments that answered to the mother imperial power, thereby not learning self-rule and the most hallowed of terms, democracy and self-rule.

Al Gore delivered a blistering denunciation Wednesday of the Bush administration's "twisted values and atrocious policies" in Iraq and demanded the resignation of Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld, national security advisor Condoleezza Rice and CIA Director George J. Tenet. Raising his voice to a yell in a speech at New York University, Gore said: "How dare they subject us to such dishonor and disgrace!

An immigration attorney Sunday accused the Immigration and Naturalization Service of subjecting her clients to "atrocious and inhumane" treatment after they were arrested last week as part of the USA Patriot Act registration program for men from five Muslim countries. The San Diego case also brings up an issue that the federal government has yet to fully address -- reports of widely differing treatment accorded detainees, depending on where they live.

In his July 22 Times Op-Ed article, " Every soldier a hero? Hardly ," retired U.S. Air Force Lt. Col. William J. Astore lists all the technical, logical and semantic reasons why our fighting men and women should not collectively be called "heroes." I am one of those misguided people who, when writing about our military men and women slugging it out in Iraq and Afghanistan — engaged in combat, just trying not to get killed or maimed by an improvised explosive device or just driving a truck with supplies across the desert — instinctively and invariably refers to them as heroes.

Fashion trends have multiple lives. And like films, the originals don't have to be great to warrant a remake. Case in point: striped T-shirts. They're making another touchdown on the fashion timeline. "It's a nerdy surfer look," says fashion designer Todd Oldham, who, even with that disparaging remark, admits he's quite enamored of the oversized T's in atrocious color combinations that are disappearing from the shelves in the Gap and surf shops around town.

In John Clark's interview with Woody Allen and cast members of his movie "The Curse of the Jade Scorpion" ("It's Just How He Works," Aug. 12), Dan Aykroyd mentions having called his agent weeping to have a supporting actor he didn't respect replaced in a film that Aykroyd was starring in. The film was Bob Clark's "Loose Cannons" and the disrespected actor was that fine actor J.T. Walsh, who left us much too soon and on whose backside Aykroyd could...

John Denver used to sing of West Virginia as "almost heaven." Except, perhaps, for the considerable portion of the state systematically wasted by a primitive form of coal mining known as "mountaintop removal." It's a simple concept and cost-effective: Blast away the top of a mountain with explosives, bulldoze the rubble into the nearest valley or stream and mine the exposed coal.