Blind Date

On a recent Tuesday night, I met with my blind date for drinks after a weeklong text courtship. Only this time I wasn't set up by my friend or neighbor. My smartphone played the role of matchmaker thanks to Tinder , a new free dating app that, in a twist on the "hot or not" game, matches users with potential partners in their area without the risk of rejection. The Tinder app, created by Los Angeles entrepreneurs Sean Rad, Justin Mateen, Jonathan Badeen and Christopher Gulczunski, was first introduced across college campuses and quickly downloaded by millions of millennials.

I was on my way to a stand-up comedy gig in some Godforsaken place about three hours out of Los Angeles, and I asked the headliner, who was driving and rolling a joint simultaneously, if he knew anybody who might be able to tolerate me. He'd been married for more than 25 years, had a couple of great kids and his wife hadn't yet come to her senses. What could it hurt? My fellow comic thought his friend Terry was a good pick but wasn't sure of his romantic status at the moment. Men, I've discovered, are like that.

American comedy, which has been sagging on the ropes recently ("Burglar," "Raising Arizona"), gives up with a keening death moan in "Blind Date" (citywide), directed by Blake Edwards from an archaic, lobotomized screenplay by Dale Launer ("Ruthless People"). What boggles the mind is how this bit of navel lint could have seemed even remotely funny to anyone at any stage along its way. Even as a low moment in high concept, it is inconceivable that someone would undertake to make this into a film.

Called up Bill Iffrig the other morning; he answers - no agent, no publicist. We chat awhile about running and how he came to be America's most famous marathon man. Iffrig is the older gentleman - all table legs and elbows - blown off his feet in Boston last week, crumpling to the ground as if fragged by shrapnel, bystanders rushing to his side. Looped over and over in the hours after the crash, it was something you almost had to have seen on TV, or later on the cover of Sports Illustrated.

It began in high school when a blind date took her for an airplane ride. Now, 16 years later, Linda Meyers is not only one of the best acrobatic pilots in the world but she is also managing director of an unusual aviation museum here. "When the plane took off, I knew I was going to be a pilot," Meyers recalled of her first flight from a Michigan City, Ind., airport when she was 17.

Al Campanis, the man who signed a teen-aged Fernando Valenzuela out of the Mexican League in 1979, stood on the Anaheim Stadium grass early Friday evening, so many years later, groping for the proper words to describe Fernando's debut on a different plot of foreign soil. "It's going to be like the first date with a girl you've never met," Campanis said. "What do you call it? A blind date? Yeah. You toss a coin. You never know what's going to happen."

It may have been meant as a compliment, but it failed to register as a positive sign for a woman on her way to her first blind date in years. "You look good," my friend said, peering at me through her car window as we dropped our kids off at school. "You're wearing makeup!" Not exactly music to the ears of a woman trying hard to pull off that natural beauty thing . . .

The relationship show "Blind Date" will hold an open casting call for contestants today from 7 to 9 p.m. The event takes place at Cafe Tu Tu Tango at Universal CityWalk, 100 Universal City Drive, Universal City. Producers are seeking eligible singles between the ages of 23 and 40. Information: (818) 769-2222.

Before they ever met, Jackie and Randy Young had a couple of very important things in common: two friends. Thanks to the matchmaking efforts of their mutual buddies, the newlyweds today are, well, newlyweds. "I was in relationship limbo," Jackie, of Orange, wrote Single Life. "Some good friends, Bruce and Dee Dee, had known Randy for about a year. He had just broken up with his girlfriend and asked Bruce and Dee Dee if they knew of any nice women he could meet.

BY almost every measure, 2007 has been a good, if hectic, year for postmodern choreographer Bill T. Jones, who will bring his topical evening-length meditation on patriotism, "Blind Date," to UCLA's Royce Hall next weekend. Apart from touring almost nonstop with the Bill T. Jones / Arnie Zane Dance Company, Jones, 55, was inducted in June into the Hall of Fame at the National Museum of Dance in Saratoga Springs, N.Y.

On a recent Tuesday night, I met with my blind date for drinks after a weeklong text courtship. Only this time I wasn't set up by my friend or neighbor. My smartphone played the role of matchmaker thanks to Tinder , a new free dating app that, in a twist on the "hot or not" game, matches users with potential partners in their area without the risk of rejection. The Tinder app, created by Los Angeles entrepreneurs Sean Rad, Justin Mateen, Jonathan Badeen and Christopher Gulczunski, was first introduced across college campuses and quickly downloaded by millions of millennials.

Quietly giddy, Sarah Thornblade sat on the couch of a Pasadena home nervously anticipating the encounter. She'd been waiting for this moment for weeks; when it finally came she wasted no time. Thornblade stood, unzipped a soft, green case and extended both hands, carefully lifting her much awaited blind date: an $8-million Stradivarius violin. The connection last week was a test run for a more intimate rendezvous coming Thursday. Thornblade, second violin for the Los Angeles Chamber Orchestra, will play the coveted instrument during the orchestra's all-Bach Valentine's Day concert.

How many directors does it take to screw in a star-studded piece of aggressive stupidity and call it a movie? An even dozen, and there is no punch line. Comic payoffs are MIA in the bad-taste extravaganza "Movie 43," a monumental missed opportunity of a comedy anthology that opened Friday, understandably without screening first for press. The one-joke shorts include a few successful sight gags, chief among them Dennis Quaid in boy-band hair and a hoodie. He plays a has-been filmmaker whose desperate pitch to a put-upon studio exec (Greg Kinnear)

One's tolerance for man-child protagonists gets a healthy workout with "Spooner," a bite-sized indie from a few years ago that marks the feature directorial debut of Drake Doremus, this year's Sundance Grand Jury winner for "Like Crazy. " Doremus also directed last year's indie road comedy "Douchebag," but unlike that shaky-camera mumblecore effort ? or the improvised nature of "Like Crazy" ? he went with Coens-esque, static camera rigor for this slight portrait of male stuntedness.

James L. Brooks always follows his heart. Both what's best about his work as a writer-director ? and sections of his new "How Do You Know" are wonderful ? and what is not come from the same source: a complete faith in his personal instincts. Instincts that, inevitably, can let him down. Brooks' films include "Terms of Endearment," "Broadcast News" and "As Good as It Gets" and no one working today creates romantic comedy characters as invigorating, involving and idiosyncratic. No one has his ability to depict people as they are, people so self-aware we hold our breath in anticipation of what their next move will be in the neurotic dance of insecurity and attraction, despair and love.

Unbuckling the mailbag: Question: Must say I find your weekly criticism of the SEC amusing. You actually mock Alabama for playing Georgia State while continually ranking Boise State No. 1, based on what? Is Boise State a good team? Who knows, they don't play anybody! Rick Davidson Los Feliz Answer: I know, I know. I'm hearing from SEC fans all over the country. It's getting so bad I may have to get a restraining order against Verne Lundquist.

Was it a date that will live in infamy? Redondo Beach Mayor Greg Hill is waiting to learn whether he's dropped a bomb on his political career by appearing on the sex-themed TV show "Blind Date." The 44-year-old bachelor was depicted romancing a Redondo Beach woman over drinks, dinner and drums on an episode of the nationally syndicated program that aired Wednesday.

"Blind Date," a 90-minute dance-theater work by choreographer Bill T. Jones, is a meditation on patriotism and the conflict between enlightenment and anti-intellectual, consumerist and religious values that Jones believes threatens America today. We know all that perhaps more clearly from the choreographer's program notes than from the work itself. Presented Friday by the Bill T.

Georgetown University law professor Martin D. Ginsburg, the husband of Supreme Court Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg, died Sunday of cancer, the Supreme Court announced. He was 78. Though he was among the nation's foremost experts on tax law, Ginsburg relished his role as the outgoing half of one of Washington's prominent couples. Marty and Ruth Ginsburg were married for 56 years, and friends often described theirs as a successful marriage of two seemingly quite different individuals.

Only toward dawn did the sea begin to calm. I rose from my berth and glanced out the window. The setting moon cast a broad light on the rolling waters of the Bass Strait, and in the distance, the lights of Tasmania began to dot the darkness. We had been traveling since Sunday. My wife, Margie, and I had left a rainy Los Angeles, exchanged winter for summer, overnighted in Melbourne and were two hours away from a landfall that we had been anticipating for almost a year. It was Thursday morning, and it seemed right that getting here had taken so long.