Blind Man

Nevin Musgrave figures that when it comes to tandem bicycle racing, he's got about the best possible partner pedaling behind him. A blind man. And Ray Patterson--who is that blind man--thinks he's finally found a sport in which he can participate with absolutely no handicap. After all, when you're stoking from the rear and hunched over so your nose is just about touching your partner's tail bone, what's there to see?

Nevin Musgrave figures that when it comes to tandem bicycle racing, he's got about the best possible partner to peddle from the back seat: A blind man. And Ray Patterson--the blind man--thinks he's finally found a sport in which he can participate with absolutely no handicap. After all, when hunched over so your nose is just about touching your partner's tail bone, what's there to see?

Directed by James Ivory, produced by Ismail Merchant and finished shortly before Merchant's death in May, "The White Countess" marks the final work in a collaboration that spanned 40 years. It's a funny distinction that seems especially discordant in conjunction with its honorees in this case, but it also indirectly reflects the immense popular appeal of Merchant-Ivory films.

In the center of Los Angeles' Koreatown, amid the babble of mysterious signs, there is a large and expensive hot-springs spa. Given the modesty of Korean culture, there is surprisingly little here. In the women's room, bared bodies turn lobster red in the burning waters.

The damp air and cooler temperatures in San Francisco were a welcome change from hometown San Diego. Riding the trolley, I wished for my gloves. Soon after arriving at the Wharf, I was sitting in a restaurant bar with a warm drink, looking down from the second-story windows onto the festive crowd. Weather never deters tourists in their hunt for souvenirs. Two young couples sitting next to me were staring at one spot on the street.

In "Hugo," Martin Scorsese's 3-D fable about a boy who lives inside the clocks at a 1930s Paris train station, Ben Kingsley plays real-life cinema pioneer Georges Melies, a magician turned filmmaker who created his remarkably imaginative body of work before a single feature film was ever shot in Hollywood. When the tides of war and change abruptly ended his career, he bought a toy shop and exiled himself to a life in anonymity. Kingsley next appears in "The Dictator" with Sacha Baron Cohen, whom he met on the set of "Hugo.

Joe Cerrell, a prominent political consultant who over several decades helped steer successful campaigns for both the presidency and top offices in California, died Friday. He was 75. Cerrell, who had pneumonia, died at St. John's Pleasant Valley Hospital in Camarillo, his family said. Sen. Dianne Feinstein (D-Calif.) called him the "indefatigable wise man of California politics" whom "you could always count on ? to give it to you straight, and with a big dose of his characteristic humor.

John Chaney's eyes seem sunken and hollow. The bags under them are dark. Is it just us, or after all these years at Temple does he actually look like a wise old wide-eyed owl? He is back in the final eight for a fifth time, one step shy of his first Final Four at 69. This time there is no Duke to stop him, as happened twice before. Merely a defending national champion, Michigan State, stands in the way of his 11th-seeded Owls today in the South Regional final at the Georgia Dome.

Gul Hussein was standing under a pale street lamp in a poor section of east Kabul when the entire neighborhood went black. "As you can see, it is dark everywhere," said Hussein, 62, adding that his family would light a costly kerosene lamp for dinner that evening. "Some of our neighbors are using candles, but candles are expensive too." More than six years after the fall of the Taliban -- and despite hundreds of millions of dollars in international aid -- dinner by candlelight remains common in Kabul, the Afghan capital.

The crowd at New York's legendary Comedy Cellar is always primed for high-profile drop-ins like Louis C.K. and Jerry Seinfeld. But this was different. Dave Chappelle was in New York - and on stage. Chappelle, one of the country's most sought-after yet reclusive comedians after walking away in 2005 from his still-influential Comedy Central show, spent three recent nights onstage at the Cellar, sometimes joined by friends, including Chris Rock, Kevin Hart, Marlon Wayans and Paul Mooney.