Charms

TWO remarkable things happened in Budapest around 1900: The city shot up almost overnight, and Art Nouveau arrived, reshaping the face of Hungary's capital along glorious new lines. It was a happy coincidence for Budapest then and for visitors now, especially those who have a passion for Art Nouveau, which put its richly ornamental stamp on buildings, furniture, glass, ceramics, textiles and jewelry.

Summer's the time for wearing baseball caps, but this season the soft hats with the long bills are no longer just for taking out to the ballgame. Baseball caps are everywhere, from the fashion runways of Milan to the streets of Los Angeles. Hollywood's beautiful people--including Janet Jackson, Madonna and Eddie Murphy--are wearing baseball caps as symbols of their street-wise chic.

Richard Dawson, the British actor who went from comedy co-star in the popular TV series "Hogan's Heroes" to his best-known role as the charming host of the TV game show "Family Feud" with his trademark of kissing the female contestants on the lips, has died. He was 79. Dawson died Saturday at Ronald Reagan UCLA Medical Center from complications related to esophageal cancer. The actor, who had been living in Beverly Hills, was diagnosed with the disease about three weeks ago, said his son Gary.

An epic love story, like a good horror movie, relies more on possibility than actuality. Surprise and anticipation, of what is to come and what it might mean, are what draw viewers in, binding them in fetters of pleasure and pain. Subtlety and nuance create the space between word and glance, between shadow and revelation, where imagination digs in and magnificence blooms. None of which happens, in any way, shape or form, during Lifetime's television event "Liz & Dick," a wildly graceless biopic that careens through the decades-long relationship between Elizabeth Taylor and Richard Burton with more petulance than passion, knocking down gin bottles and rumpling silk sheets for no better reason than that's what it says to do in the script.

Every Sunday, the weavers of the Oaxaca Valley travel to the weekly market in Tlacolula to sell their handmade wool rugs. Working our way through crowded streets, past vendors selling freshly plucked chickens, exotic peppers and homemade mescal, my wife, Lietza, and I found the renowned artisans on a quiet side street.

Health and fitness products can make great holiday gifts. A thoughtfully chosen natural remedy or exercise device sends all of the right messages: I care about you, I want you to feel your best and I don't want to risk guessing wrong about your sweater size. But if you give a health product that doesn't live up to its claims, you end up sending a different message: I didn't do my homework, sorry for the disappointment and, hey, better luck next year. In an annual tradition, the Healthy Skeptic has gathered several items that could conceivably end up on a gift list.

The Hotel Normandie, a mid-Los Angeles inn with a checkered past, is on the way to becoming respectable again as its new owners labor to restore its Jazz Age charms. It's a testament to how fortunes have improved in one of the city's oldest neighborhoods that investors are eager to spend millions of dollars restoring a beaten down building with a modest pedigree. The squat brick structure at Normandie Avenue and 6th Street drew attention in 2010 when its then-owner vowed to turn it into a "pot-tel" catering to medical marijuana smokers.

Most of us know the scent of lavender from soap. Putting the best and strongest flower smells in cleaners is such an old practice that it gave lavender its name: It comes from the Latin lavare -- to wash. But with all due respect to lavender's preeminence in antiquity's laundry room, and to its continuing glory in English toiletries, it merits pointing out that there is another way to enjoy it. Grow it. Grow a lot of it. No plant is better suited to California gardens than this fragrant beauty.

Dressed in black, Vladimir Rakovsky glides around with the air of a guru -- albeit a self-appointed one -- as he holds forth before a group of admiring students on the virtues of womanly wiles. This softly lighted room on the second floor of a Moscow theater is as appropriate a place as any to stage a master class for women on how to act -- literally -- to get men, and what they want from men.

Alberto Limon Padilla started with a shabby clapboard store in a working-class neighborhood. He went on to build Tijuana's first shopping mall and today presides over a business empire. Aurora Pelayo came to Tijuana a penniless single mother to work in a factory. Today she is secretary-general of the Baja California Democratic Revolutionary Party. Justina and Rafael Brambila opened a street-side taco stand, La Especial, on Avenida Revolucion when they came from Jalisco in 1948.