Blogging

Who knew chefs see macarons in Christian Louboutin colors? Who knew restaurant plates and saucers are sold like hot dogs and buns, in mismatching quantities? And who would ever expect chefs to be as proficient with a keyboard as they are with a knife? The answer: Anyone who has noticed chefs are suddenly taking to blogging as if it were the foam of 2008. In the last few months some of the bigger names in food across the country have joined the online chattering class, posting their innermost thoughts, with photos and recipes, just as home cooks have been doing for years.

Here's a big oops for Ferrari, the maker of mega-bucks sports cars. It made a mistake building the crankshafts for the engines in its California and 458 Italia models and now will have to repair or replace them, depending on what the owner picks. Ferrari said it will recall the 2011 and 2012 model-year cars because the crankshaft error can cause the engines in the vehicles, which sell for $200,000 or more, to freeze suddenly and possibly cause a crash. The Italian automaker learned of the problem in a uniquely embarrassing way. The first of these models to have its engine freeze was the car the company was lending to critics to review.

The Times is pleased to have Green Bay Packers wide receiver Donald Driver guest-blogging for us while he competes on " Dancing With the Stars . " Each week, Driver, a Super Bowl champion and three-time Pro Bowl player, will answer a few questions from Sports Now editor Houston Mitchell and give some insight into the competition. Here are Driver's thoughts about Week 3, which he offered via email. Q: It was an incredibly emotional night for everyone.

A lot has been made of organic cotton and other eco-friendly fabrics made from Tencel, hemp and bamboo as fashion rides the mega-trend of environmentalism. But recycled clothes purchased at thrift and consignment stores, as well as upcycled items reworked from out-of-date castoffs, may be an even greener choice. Almost half of the climate impact of clothing occurs before it reaches consumers. It was this idea I embraced when I hired a wardrobe consultant for a desperately needed eco fashion makeover.

When Trish Collins gets done with her job working as an administrative assistant for Santa Rosa County, she might have dinner with her husband or take her poodle for a walk — but most other times she'll have her nose in a book. A soft-spoken redhead with a sweet smile, the 31-year-old Collins' love of reading led her to start blogging about books. And online, Collins has quietly emerged as one of the de facto leaders of the book blogging community, a community publishers are beginning to see as vital.

Twitter is taking the San Francisco startup Posterous under its wing. On Monday, the two companies announced that Twitter had purchased Posterous for an undisclosed amount of money and that the team that built the Posterous Spaces blogging platform would now be working on Twitter products. Spaces, a popular service in its own right with about 15 million users, won't be going away anytime soon in the takeover, Twitter and Posterous said. "Posterous Spaces will remain up and running without disruption," the two companies said in a statement.

Apparently there's a self-proclaimed militia leader named Mike Vanderboegh who runs an obscure, low-traffic blog out of Pinson, Ala. (population 5,007). Mr. Vanderboegh recently called on his fellow "sons of liberty" to break the windows of Democrats who voted for healthcare reform. So let's start with the obvious: Vanderboegh is an idiot, and anyone who followed his advice is an idiot too. These people are buffoons, not just because such tactics help Democrats but because such behavior is simply wrong, reprehensible and clownish.

As a blogger, Michael Gardner relies on a familiar celeb-tracker formula, lacing beauty shots with exclamation-pointed prose about the "super sexy" and "crazy famous. " But Gardner's drool-worthy subjects aren't people — they're properties. Gardner writes the Malibu Real Estate Blog, which helps him sell houses in beachside neighborhoods where some of the world's wealthiest individuals own second homes the size of palaces. Gardner, with Prudential Malibu Realty, is among the growing legion of real estate agents who have begun making broader use of the Web. More than half of the National Assn.

Stupid criminals and Facebook don't go together. Just ask Joseph Luebke, a convicted burglar in state prison. Luebke, 19, of the Chicago suburb of Romeoville, was just months away from finishing a prison term for burglary at a halfway house. But his feet got itchy, authorities say, so on St. Patrick's Day, he skipped. Then he Facebooked all about it. Until then, he'd spent nights sleeping at the halfway house and days working as a telemarketer. On his Facebook page, he described it as "selling rich people vacations.

Harry Reid and Sharron Angle meet tonight in a debate pitting the Democratic majority leader and top conservative target against a former state lawmaker and "tea party" favorite in a race emblematic of the nation's anti-incumbent mood. After Angle, 61, scored a come-from-behind victory in June's U.S. Senate primary, political observers wondered if she'd cool her fiery rhetoric in hopes of ousting Reid, 70, the unpopular but well-funded Nevada Democrat who has shepherded President Obama's agenda.

The Times is pleased to have Green Bay Packers wide receiver Donald Driver guest-blogging for us while he competes on " Dancing With the Stars . " Each week, Driver, a Super Bowl champion and three-time Pro Bowl player, will answer a few questions from Sports Now editor Houston Mitchell and give some insight into the competition. Here are Driver's thoughts about Week 3, which he offered via email. Q: It was an incredibly emotional night for everyone.

Twitter is taking the San Francisco startup Posterous under its wing. On Monday, the two companies announced that Twitter had purchased Posterous for an undisclosed amount of money and that the team that built the Posterous Spaces blogging platform would now be working on Twitter products. Spaces, a popular service in its own right with about 15 million users, won't be going away anytime soon in the takeover, Twitter and Posterous said. "Posterous Spaces will remain up and running without disruption," the two companies said in a statement.

Here's a real news break for my fellow bloggers: I am not one of you. Anyway, not exactly. Not at my little journalistic roots. I was borne from the newspaper business and not from fandom or fascination with sabermetrics. I do not worship at the feet of Bill James. This is not to say I wholly disregard modern baseball statistical analysis. Far from it. It's just not my alpha and omega. Try to think of me as something of a hybrid, only I'm not getting the mileage I once did. Yet even if your interest in the new numbers is less than paramount, and you don't know your WAR from your PECOTA, you had to be taken back a tad by Andre Ethier's comment to The Times' Dylan Hernandez on Tuesday about his struggles hitting against left-handed pitching.

He has only been on the job for two months, but Yahoo's new chief executive, Scott Thompson, is already preparing a bold plan to turn around the struggling Internet company. Thompson is weighing a significant restructuring of Yahoo that could include thousands of layoffs, according to technology blog All Things D. The moves, the first major ones from the former PayPal president, could be announced as early as this month, Kara Swisher reported, citing anonymous sources. Yahoo recently hired the Boston Consulting Group to focus on the cuts to its products group.

The joys of Clifton's Re "Clifton's Cafeteria peels back the years," Feb. 9 What wonderful memories I have of the old Clifton's Cafeteria when I was a young boy around 1951. I remember my mother patiently waiting for me to return home from my morning kindergarten class. We would take the trolley to downtown L.A.. My mother would shop, and we would end up at Clifton's for lunch. Can you imagine what this 5-year-old thought of the rain-forest motif, the endless display of foods and (of course, my favorite)

Washington state is promenading down a controversial aisle that's familiar to Californians after its Senate approved a bill last week legalizing same-sex marriage. The lower house and the governor are expected to approve the bill as well. But such civil rights victories can be fleeting, as Californians learned after a court decision legalizing gay marriage was overturned by Proposition 8 in 2008. A similar battle is looming in Washington, where opponents plan to gather signatures for a November ballot initiative declaring marriage to be reserved for opposite-sex couples only.

Re "Antidote to the Liberal Monotone: Blogging," Commentary, April 4: Where did Norah Vincent get the idea that I think "blogging" is a bad idea? I think Andrew Sullivan's blogging is a bad idea. I can't imagine many people care about his bathroom troubles and his dinner parties. But are exploding toilets and "stomach evacuations" really what blogging is about? A worthwhile blog is one that sticks to topics that are likely to be of interest to significant numbers of people and treats them intelligently and (relatively)

It was just after 7:30 last Saturday morning when anyone following Buzz Bissinger's Twitter feed might have sensed the first pop and hiss of another gathering eruption. The initial message from Bissinger promised, "No ranting today. " But the acclaimed author of the book "Friday Night Lights" followed with a potshot at "that judge in England [who] should be shot (gently and without permanent damage) for convicting guy of bad Tweet. " Seconds later, another message derided all "dangerous judges.

Thunder power forward Nick Collison blogged for GQ about rookie hazing: "We make sure our rookies this season — Reggie Jackson and Ryan Reid — wear their pink Justin Bieber and 'My Little Pony' backpacks and carry their oversized teddy bears on all road trips. Kendrick Perkins says in Boston they made a rookie go out in a foot of snow and do 100 push-ups in only his spandex shorts. " The Magic's erratic play has raised questions about Orlando Coach Stan Van Gundy's future.

Austin Winston is discovering the art of the old-fashioned shave. Each day, the 21-year-old engineering student walks into his dormitory bathroom at the Illinois Institute of Technology toting a basket of shaving supplies reminiscent of his grandfather's generation: hand-held bowl, cotton washcloth, round bar of shaving soap, double-edged safety razor, stainless-steel straightedge razor, badger-hair shaving brush and a good dose of patience....