Clock

In an age of long commutes, late sports practices, endless workdays and 24/7 television programming, the image of Mom hanging up her dish towel at 7 p.m. and declaring "the kitchen is closed" seems a quaint relic of an earlier era. It also harks back to a thinner America. And that may be no coincidence. A new study, conducted on mice, hints at an unexpected contributor to the nation's epidemic of obesity - and, if later human studies bear it out, a possible way to have our cake and eat it too, with less risk of weight gain and the diseases that come with it. Just eat your cake - or better yet, an apple - earlier.

You absolutely have, have, have to get up at 6 a.m. - for a meeting at work, a flight to Paris, a casting call for your dog to be in a Fido's Faves commercial. But you worry. You don't trust yourself. You've snored through alarms before. Fear not. There are gadgeteers out there who've got your back. Some examples: Math Alarm Clock: An Android app that plays music you've chosen to wake up to. That might sound a tad sleep-through-able for a hard-core zzz-ster, except that it plays and plays and plays the music until you come up with the right answer to a math problem.

"Oh, you mean the guy with the 70-year-old head and the 20-year-old body-builder body? That picture has got to be Photoshopped." Dr. Jeffry Life smiles when I tell him about the general reaction I get about the famous picture of him with his shirt off, the shot that turned a mild-mannered doctor in his mid-60s into a poster boy for super-fit aging and controversial hormone replacement Appearing in medical-clinic ads in airline magazines and...

Turning heads is what 20-year-old outfielder Mike Trout has done in the minor leagues. Now he's trying to make an impact with the Angels, and those who saw his tremendous burst of speed on a bunt single Tuesday against Minnesota got a glimpse at one of his strengths. "That's as good as it gets," Manager Mike Scioscia said. "I've seen guys who can fly. He's in a class that's as fast as I've ever seen. " Trout was clocked running from home to first in 3.53 seconds by third base coach Dino Ebel . "I was just doing my thing," Trout said.

'The Clock' Where: Los Angeles County Museum of Art, 5905 Wilshire Blvd., Los Angeles When: Noon-8 p.m. Monday, Tuesday and Thursday; noon-9 p.m. Friday; 11 a.m.-8 p.m. Saturday and Sunday. Closed Wednesday. Admission: $15 Contact: (323) 857-6000 or publicinfo@lacma.org

Around here, they're sometimes called the "clock people. " They zip over from San Francisco every summer to this remote valley, heave their vehicles up the mountain and while away hours gawking at bristlecone pines, considered among the world's oldest living things. Over time an unlikely bond formed between the city-dwellers and a rural patch of Nevada that the rest of the state ignores. How else to explain the visitors leaping into this region's water war with Las Vegas? In the late 1990s, when Dave Tilford was working in real estate, he got a call.

It's Always Four O'Clock/Iron Man W.R. Burnett Stark House: 296 pp., $19.95 paper

Happily for the Celtics, it's not over when some writer says it's over, but when the clock actually strikes 12. Right now, it's only, say, 11:46 p.m. Going into the weekend, they were 17-18 since Christmas with recent losses to the lowly Nets at home and last week's back-to-back games in Milwaukee and at home to Memphis. Not that losing by 20 to the Grizzlies was torture, but Celtics Coach Doc Rivers called the two-minute warning "the only good message this entire game."

Officials in the NHL's situation room will more closely observe the final minute of each period of each game and will refine the overall game-timing process as the result of the league's investigation into a pause of the Staples Center clock during the Kings' game against Columbus on Feb. 1. That hesitation added a second to the final period and allowed Drew Doughty score the winning goal. Colin Campbell, the NHL's senior vice president of hockey operations, said Thursday that the clock's maker, Daktronics, had examined the clock and found "no defects.

Marcel Proust had his madeleines, delicate confections whose mere taste stirred up powerful private memories. Americans have movies and television shows, and the personal associations we ascribe to rewatching "Casablanca" or "Star Wars," or seeing an old TV clip of "Columbo," can be as piquant as the scent of popcorn. This summer at LACMA, Christian Marclay's cinematic artwork "The Clock" (2010), a 24-hour-long compilation of thousands of film and TV clips, will offer remembrances of Hollywood matinees past.

ARIZONA Heady move: Fourth-rounder Bobby Massie of Mississippi can play right tackle, and some scouts had him going in the second. Head scratcher: In taking Oklahoma's Jamell Fleming in the third, the Cardinals picked up their ninth corner. ATLANTA Heady move: The Falcons have a 35-year-old center and need help on the interior of the offensive line, so getting Wisconsin's Peter Konz in the second was huge. Head scratcher: Took Southern Mississippi's Lamar Holmes in the third, a player Mel Kiper rated as the 29th tackle.

Tempers flared at Los Angeles City Hall on Tuesday when a councilman said he was tempted to "clock" a speaker who called out "Heil Hitler" during a public comment period. The spat began when political gadfly Michael Carreon stood up during the City Council meeting to talk about problems in the 14th Council District, where he lives. When Carreon turned his attention to several council members who he said weren't paying attention, Councilman Tom LaBonge, who was chairing the meeting, stopped him. LaBonge instructed Carreon not to address his comments to specific members, as per city rules.

The interventionist liberals of the Obama administration were a doleful bunch last week. It was the 20th anniversary of the siege of Sarajevo, when a Bosnian Serb army battered a city full of civilians with artillery while the United States issued ineffective cries of alarm. The comparison with this year's massacres in Syria was painfully apt. Now, as then, the United Nations Security Council has asked both sides to stop shooting, to no great effect. Now, as then, the United States and its allies are rejecting the idea of military intervention as too difficult, too risky, too likely to add to the violence instead of ending it. In Bosnia, it took the United States more than three years and many massacres to decide that diplomatic measures and sanctions weren't enough.

Reporting from Denver -- Peyton Manning has his doctorate in deception, and that's one of his major strengths as a quarterback. Consider how he fooled virtually everyone in the sweepstakes for his services, how the outside world interpreted all the logical signs — but they weren't the right signs at all. He was a college star in Tennessee? His wife grew up in Memphis? The team just signed his buddy, Steve Hutchinson? Peyton's going to the Titans. Nope. San Francisco secretly scouted him?

Around here, they're sometimes called the "clock people. " They zip over from San Francisco every summer to this remote valley, heave their vehicles up the mountain and while away hours gawking at bristlecone pines, considered among the world's oldest living things. Over time an unlikely bond formed between the city-dwellers and a rural patch of Nevada that the rest of the state ignores. How else to explain the visitors leaping into this region's water war with Las Vegas? In the late 1990s, when Dave Tilford was working in real estate, he got a call.

Daylight saving time starts this weekend, as it does at roughly this time every year. It's when we "spring forward" one hour with the clocks so we can enjoy more sunshine at the end of the day. Sounds like a perfectly good thing, right? As benign as it might seem, daylight saving time has a dark side. Although many people quickly acclimate to the change, others suffer sleep setbacks, anxiety, missed appointments, even car accidents as a result. In extreme cases, they can spend days feeling as if something is "off," experts say. The jet-lag feeling will pass in time, said Helena Schotland, a clinical assistant professor of medicine at the University of Michigan and a researcher at the school's sleep disorders laboratory.

While the NHL investigates the addition of one second to the third period of the Kings' game against Columbus on Wednesday, footage has surfaced of another apparent pause by the clock at Staples Center during a game last month. A video clip posted on the website thescore.com Friday appeared to show the clock stop twice in the final seconds of the Kings' game against Colorado on Jan. 21, once with 3.9 seconds left and again with 2.1 seconds remaining. It went unnoticed because nothing extraordinary occurred that required video review.

The NHL is investigating whether human error or a glitch in the clock system at Staples Center was responsible for prolonging the Kings' game against the Columbus Blue Jackets on Wednesday long enough for Kings defenseman Drew Doughty to score the decisive goal in a 3-2 victory. Colin Campbell, the league's senior vice president of hockey operations, said Thursday he believes the Blue Jackets were wronged because the clock was paused with 1.8 seconds left in the third period and Doughty's goal with 0.4 of a second left should not have been allowed.

Dean Armentrout's problem clocks keep him awake at night. Some run fast. Some run slow, and some don't run at all. Repairs often mean cleaning and oiling the mechanism; balky escapements, missing parts and hidden friction points are trickier. Each day, walking into his shop in Laguna Beach, Armentrout sees his workbench cluttered with tools and the pieces of jobs he hasn't finished or figured out. In his hands, a clock is not so much an instrument for measuring time as a puzzle to be solved.

Reporting from Phoenix — Clayton Kershaw pitched in his first game of the spring Sunday, completely overpowering minor league hitters in two scoreless innings of an intrasquad game. Kershaw faced seven batters, striking out five. He forced a groundout and gave up a broken-bat single. His pitches were clocked as high as 94 mph. The game put Kershaw in line to face the Texas Rangers on Friday, which, in turn, would line him up to pitch on opening day in San Diego on April 5. "It's good to get in that game setting and getting in the routine of every fifth day, having something to do," Kershaw said.