Bedding

Your choices in San Francisco hotels are overwhelming. The prices can be too. So during our staff visit to the City by the Bay, we looked for reasonably priced hotels that had charm, location or both. We came back with 14 ideas on places to bed down. It's not a complete list, but it is eclectic, like the city itself. Mystic Hotel. This property, which opened in April, stands on a tunnel-adjacent block of Stockton Street that you'll never see on a picture postcard, yet it has style, as do the Burritt Tavern bar and restaurant downstairs.

Southern California is miserably accustomed to serial killers - the Manson Family, the Hillside Strangler, the Freeway Killer, the Skid Row Slasher. But there had never been one quite like Richard Ramirez, who deserved the flashy, fearsome tabloid nickname "The Night Stalker. " In the spring of 1984, Los Angeles was about to hoist its flags to welcome the world to the Summer Olympics. Richard Ramirez, as slapdash car thief, a weed and junk-food fancier, a dabbler in satanism, began the slow, bloody trek of murders that would build to a gory frenzy by the following summer.

Jail-issued mattresses and blankets designed to prevent suicides have failed to meet their safety goals, as several Los Angeles County inmates have been able to fashion nooses from their bedding. In one instance last year, an inmate was found in his cell in the sitting position, hanging from a makeshift noose tied to the top of a bunk bed. The noose in the April 2009 suicide was made from a strip of fabric torn from a mattress cover that had been designed to guard against suicides, according to the Los Angeles County Sheriff's Department.

Randy McDonald darted his eyes between the lotus bed and a pack of police officers, wondering if he could get away with it. He figured it was worth a try and walked from Echo Park Lake back to his car. After opening the glove compartment, he pulled out a hacksaw blade and stuck it into his back pocket. He tugged his T-shirt to cover it and returned to the lake. He worked his way through the thick crowd of revelers gathered for the 28th annual Lotus Festival and then crouched down at the water's edge.

Doug Smith and Ed McLean are a couple of Orange County surfers in their 20s hoping to catch the next big wave in bedding design. They've created a line of comforter covers and sheet sets with Polynesian prints designed to appeal to those whose beach-oriented lifestyle doesn't jibe with dull solids, stripes or Laura Ashley florals.

Jackie Palmer of Los Angeles hasn't been able to find fitted top sheets for five years, but she's bedding that some of our readers know of a source. So can you help before Palmer has a fit, or will she have to really blow her top before someone comes to her rescue? Jay Olins of West Los Angeles would like to find a clear-plastic face shield with a handle so that the possibly harmful ingredients in hair sprays can be kept out of the eyes and nose.

A report presented this week to scientists here concludes that many babies whose deaths have been linked to Sudden Infant Death Syndrome may have suffocated by lying face down on cushioned bedding, such as comforters and sheepskin rugs. In the report delivered at the annual meeting of the Federation of American Societies for Experimental Biology, Drs. James Kemp and Bradley Thach, pediatricians at the Washington University School of Medicine in St.

By the time you start yawning in the evening, it may be too late to start thinking about a good night's sleep. Better to consider the concept when you are wide awake, paying attention in broad daylight to all those little details that can make a bedroom a restful retreat or turn it into a torture chamber when the lights go out.

If there were truth in advertising, Al Greenwood would be known as the Bedspread Philosopher-King. In the time it takes to make up a bed, the man can rail against the perils of big business devouring the little guy. He can rant against the appalling absence of humanity in the modern world. And don't get him started on interior decorators. "Whatever they buy, they are never happy with it," Greenwood said.

IT'S Frette at the Ritz Paris and the London Savoy, Pratesi at the St. Regis in San Francisco, Fili D'oro at the Plaza Athenee in New York and Anichini at the Signature at MGM Grand in Las Vegas. We're not talking designer cocktails. We're talking sheets -- an increasingly important amenity at hotels. Even workaday Holiday Inn Express recently spent $53 million upgrading linens, adding duvets and 200-thread-count sheets on beds in the chain's 1,400 North American hotels.

No, wait, don't turn the page. Yes, I'll admit it. This is yet another column on Tuesday's election in Los Angeles, the race half the city doesn't care about and the other half hasn't heard about, but DO NOT turn the page. OK, I'll give you $5 to read this. All right, make it $10. Would you stay with me for $20 if I promise Randy Newman's going to make a cameo? Sure, you've got your reasons for tuning out. Some of you think Wendy Garcetti and Eric Greuel are the same person, so it doesn't matter which of them is the next mayor.

Hoping to reduce the number of infant deaths, Los Angeles County officials unveiled a campaign Wednesday to educate parents about how to safely put their babies to bed. Over the last four years, 278 babies in the county have died from suffocating while they were sleeping - more than all other accidental deaths of children under age 14, officials said. The deaths are more common among Latino and black babies, officials said. "Accidental suffocation poses the greatest risk for babies from 1 day to the age of 1," said Deanne Tilton Durfee, executive director of the county Inter-Agency Council on Child Abuse and Neglect.

The nearly 3 in 10 white girls of high school age who use indoor tanning beds likely will soon come face-to-face with a new and stiffer warning aimed at young people eager to get that sun-kissed glow in a hurry: Don't. Faced with mounting evidence that indoor tanning greatly increases cancer risk among younger users, the Food & Drug Administration proposed Monday to require tanning booths and beds to carry a warning encouraging young people not to use the devices. Businesses that use devices and beds that use UV-A and UV-B rays to promote tanning currently are required to post signs warning consumers about health risks that come with their use. But the devices themselves are exempt from pre-market review.

Gov. Jerry Brown is pursuing a prison contract in California, too small to meet federal orders to reduce crowding, but enough to help Brown end the shipment of inmates to for-profit prisons out of state. According to bid documents, California offers to pay no more than $63 a day, on top of facility costs, to house up to 1,225 additional inmates in what the state calls "modified community" prisons. California currently has 600 inmates in one such private prison, paying more than $13 million a year to the GEO Group Inc . Bids for the new facilities are due May 28. At one point, California housed more than 5,600 inmates in 13 small "community" prisons built for state prisoners by local governments or by private prison operators.

CARLSBAD, Calif. - The Legoland Hotel, which opened April 5, got plenty of little things wrong in its first weeks. But its designers got one thing enormously right, and that will make this place a screaming success: kid-centricity. "The dragon is made out of Legos!" my daughter, Grace, who is about to turn 9, said as we approached the hotel entrance a week after the opening. Inside the lobby, Grace; my wife, Mary Frances; and I found a faux fountain, a play pit full of little plastic bricks and dozens of deeply absorbed children who were collaborating on a rainbow-hued monolith, constructing pretend weapons, hollering, whispering, running, jumping and dragging their parents from one discovery to the next.

WEST, Texas - At the Veterans of Foreign Wars post just a few blocks past City Hall here, the donated mattresses form a stack that nearly touches the ceiling. Rows of folding tables are piled high with clothes, and the porch out back has enough water bottles to hydrate an army. That's just Saturday's haul. And the first thing visitors hear when they step inside: "You hungry?" PHOTOS: Texas explosion The smoky scent of barbecue wafted through the room, as did the smell of meatloaf fresh off the grill.

Hoping to decrease the number of deaths linked to sudden infant death syndrome, consumer and health groups are asking parents to dress their babies in warm nightclothes instead of wrapping them in quilts, sheepskins and blankets. The groups plan to release their recommendations at a news conference today, The Times has learned.

No question, Bubba, if it's truly laid back you want, you have to get a hammock. It's the quintessential device for hanging around the yard, swaying in the breeze, idling away an afternoon or the whole summer. But it most certainly doesn't have to be confined to the back yard; that's an American idea. Most of the hammocks of the world are used indoors instead of beds.

A Sacramento County woman was arrested this week after an infant found dead under a bed. The woman, identified as 24-year-old Courtney Addington, was examined in January by personnel at Mercy General Hospital for excessive bleeding. Although hospital staff said she showed signs of recently giving birth, Addington reportedly denied those claims, officials said. The hospital contacted Sacramento County sheriff's deputies, who stopped by Addington's home later that night.

Bed bugs have re-emerged as an urban blight in the past several years, forcing people out of homes, resisting chemical pesticides and evading other removal tactics. But researchers are building bug-catchers inspired by an age-old folk remedy to this “ancient scourge”: kidney bean leaves. Their experiments, described in the Journal of the Royal Society Interface, tested the home-grown solution and even made synthetic leaves that could help scientists devise an easy, environmentally friendly method of trapping bugs before they establish a full invasion.