Chairs

"I used to win like crazy," my friend Juanita Mendonca would tell me. "Every slot machine turned to gold. I'd come home and my purse would be stuffed with money. " Juanita, a retired parochial school teacher with a magic touch at the slots, loved to regale me with tales of her exploits at Valley View Casino. I had never been there, so when my husband, Lou, suggested we take a quick trip to Las Vegas, I proposed an overnighter to check out Valley View's new hotel instead. So there we were, driving into the hills of Valley Center in north San Diego County's backcountry.

Deborah Pauly, the outspoken Villa Park councilwoman who drew community ire when she protested outside an Islamic charity event, was removed this week from a leadership position with the Orange County Republican Party's central committee. Party officials said Pauly, who is running for county supervisor, has been a divisive figure. Her removal comes a month after Orange businessman Bob Walters mailed out letters supporting Pauly's candidacy on a "George Wallace for President" letterhead.

That humble staple of holiday parties, the folding chair, has been getting an artful makeover lately. Whether you're a space-crunched urban dweller or a host with a long guest list, choices are expanding dramatically. We've highlighted a couple from midpriced retailers plus boundary-pushing designs (including Moooi's Clip chair pictured on Page E1) whose creativity very well could filter down to the mass market in the months to come. -- Katherine E. Nelson

The California Science Center has received what officials describe as an "extraordinary" financial contribution to the new Air and Space Center that will house the space shuttle Endeavour. The gift, to be announced at a news conference Thursday, comes from a foundation chaired by Lynda Oschin, wife of the late Los Angeles businessman and philanthropist Samuel Oschin, whose name already graces the Griffith Observatory planetarium and the Cedars-Sinai Medical Center cancer institute stemming from charitable contributions there.

A typical American family survives a plane crash and emerges with super powers. Meet the Powells, the title characters of ABC's new action series "No Ordinary Family" and the residents of no ordinary house: With a fireplace and winding staircase as its center, the house spreads out with dramatic trusses, angular windows in unusual places and abundant sightlines. "When you are in the kitchen, you can see down the hall to the master bedroom, into the TV room and upstairs to where the kids rooms are," production designer Maria Caso says of the set, which imitates a 2,600 square-foot, three-bedroom, two-bath house.

It can be a bit delicate to ask a furniture shopper: "Oh, sir, um, maybe, ah, you'd like to see something a bit, hmmm, sturdier?" We are, as a people, as a sitting-in-chairs public, big. Bigger than we ought to be, health authorities frequently tell us. And bigger than many standard chairs of years past were made to hold comfortably. So the scale of furniture has increased over the last decade — to suit both the size of homes and the size of their occupants, said Max Shangle, professor and chairman of the furniture design department at Kendall College of Art and Design in Michigan.

The father of four children who were stabbed to death in April had himself arrested Wednesday in an effort to meet the children's killer in jail, police said. But police said that the father, Ernest A. Mann, was unaware that Leo Narvaiz Jr., 20, already had been transferred to Death Row in Huntsville. Narvaiz was convicted last week of murdering Mann's daughters, Shannon, 17, Jennifer, 19, and Martha, 15, and son Ernest Jr., 13. Narvaiz was a former boyfriend of Shannon Mann.

The lights are bright, the vinyl chairs are never sticky, and the Jell-O squares on platters look like orange, red and blue jewels. Nonetheless, Schaber's Cafeteria is slowly fading. It's not the food, insists owner Michael Weinreich, 68, it's the clientele. "They keep dying," said the white-haired restaurateur looking glum. "We lost 20 or 30 this year. So many. It's terrible." Such is the fate of one of the last 1920s-style cafeterias still in business in Los Angeles.

Libya said it was uncomfortable with the idea of sanctions against Iran but vowed to be "constructive" in dealing with Tehran's nuclear program while chairing the U.N. Security Council this month. Libya took over the rotating presidency this week. Among the issues that may come up are Western calls for a new round of sanctions against Iran, which has ignored demands that it halt its enrichment program. Libyan Ambassador Giadalla Ettalhi said that "as a country that has suffered from sanctions we would definitely be in a difficult position."

About 216,000 OfficeMax Task Chairs, made in China and imported by OfficeMax Inc., are being recalled because the chair's back and base post can break while in use, causing falls. The company has received about 35 reports of the chair backs or posts breaking, including 15 reports of injuries involving cuts, bruises, muscle strains and concussions. The recalled chairs have model numbers OM182 and OM96614, which are located under the chairs' seats on a white label. The chairs come in charcoal or dark charcoal.

SCOTTSDALE, Ariz. -- Can Mitt Romney overcome the Latino gap? Polls show President Obama running well ahead of the presumptive GOP presidential candidate among Latino voters -- 64% to 24% in one recent poll. But as Romney arrived in Arizona today, the chairman of the state Republican Party said he believes Romney can -- and must -- reach out to Latinos. "He's very strong on that," Thomas Morrissey insisted in an interview outside a meeting of the Republican National Committee in Scottsdale, "and I think you'll be seeing more and more of that as we go along.

Shark movies have been suffering under comparisons to "Jaws" for more than 35 years, and with good reason: Steven Spielberg's 1975 waterborne frightfest remains a classic. "Dark Tide," directed with hopelessly flagging energy by John Stockwell, barely musters up enough interest to be thuddingly bad. Halle Berry stars as a shark-loving, Cape Town-based marine biologist who's backslid into a life of guided tours since losing close friends to great-white attacks on one of her uncaged, communing-with-sharks excursions a year prior.

  Tennis player Bernard Tomic made a strange request of the chair umpire during a changeover in his match against David Ferrer at the Sony Ericsson Open on Saturday: Can you please ask my dad to leave the stands. A television camera picked up the exchange after Tomic held serve to go up, 3-2, in the second set. "He's annoying me. I know he's my father, but he's annoying me," Tomic says. "I want him to leave as soon as possible. " An obviously surprised chair umpire responds "If you tell him to leave what will happen?"

Senate Assistant Majority Leader Dick Durbin (D-Ill.) said Thursday that he would chair a hearing of the Judiciary Committee on bounties in sports to determine whether federal bribery laws should be expanded to include such activities. Durbin made the announcement a day after the NFL suspended New Orleans Saints Coach Sean Payton for one year and imposed other suspensions and fines on Saints personnel for their involvement in a bounty program. “ Many sports involve human contact and the chance of serious injury.

Los Angeles Mayor Antonio Villaraigosa -- a one-time student organizer, union leader and now one of the nation's most prominent Latino politicians -- stepped into his role Wednesday as the face of a Democratic Party convention that is being pitched as the most open ever. "This is an effort to spread our wings and really include a cross-section of people," Villaraigosa said in a conference call a day after it was announced he would be the convention chairman. "It's not just about voting.

Los Angeles Mayor Antonio Villaraigosa has been selected chairman of this summer's Democratic National Convention, elevating his role as a campaign surrogate and raising his national profile as he weighs his political future. A formal announcement was scheduled Wednesday in Washington, and the mayor plans to join President Obama in Holmby Hills at a Wednesday night fundraiser for Obama's reelection effort. "I've always planned to campaign" for the president, Villaraigosa said in an interview, and he readily accepted when Jim Messina, Obama's campaign manager, and Debbie Wasserman Schultz, the head of the Democratic National Committee, called last week to offer him the convention post.

Atlantic City's rolling chairs, once almost extinct, have recovered, thanks to Larry Belfer, a 32-year-old entrepreneur who dresses in designer suits and prefers getting around the city now in his Mercedes-Benz. "I don't push the chairs--it's not me," he said.