Closet

To grab a beer, Israel Arrieta doesn't just stroll to the fridge; he has to walk out his back door to the side of the house, where he pries a chicken-wire screen off a basement window and scrambles, crab position, down a wooden ladder. Several minutes later, he emerges cradling half a dozen cool, dusty bottles of beer. Arrieta, 27, keeps his beer in the closest thing to a cave: the crawl space under his parents' North Pasadena house. To test it out years ago, he crawled down on a 100-degree afternoon holding a thermometer.

Television personality and model Kim Kardashian has closed escrow on a furnished estate in the Beverly Hills Post Office area. She paid about $3.5 million. The new home was designed, built and decorated by Beverly Hills-based Lucien Lacasse. The Tuscan-style walled and gated house has fireplaces in the dining room, family room, living room, master bedroom and kitchen as well as outdoors. One wall of the kitchen opens up to the outside. The two-story home of about 4,000 square feet includes detailed ironwork, dark hardwood floors, French doors, a screening room, five bedrooms and 4 1/2 bathrooms.

Even though more out-of-work executives are on the interview circuit, neckties still can't muster a comeback. As the unemployment rate climbed to 10% last year, tie industry executives pinned their hopes on men buying ties to dress up their old suits. But that didn't happen. Instead, suit sales in the U.S. rebounded to end 2009 virtually unchanged from a year earlier, a marked improvement after years of decline. Ties, on the other hand, had their worst year since the dawn of casual Fridays relegated neckwear to the back of the closet.

What would an Olympics be without a controversy in the sliding sports? For such relatively tiny sports that joined the Winter Games fairly recently, luge, a 1964 arrival, and skeleton, a 2002 addition, always manage to create a good headline or two. For some reason, bobsled -- in all three of its configurations -- has managed to keep a low profile in recent years, the exception being the messy and public breakup of the U.S. women's bobsled...

At first glance, the tall, steeply pitched roof of this historic Glendale house gives the illusion that the Tudor Revival-style home is a charming cottage, surrounded by ferns, holly and miniature English ivy. But once inside, the grandeur of another age reveals itself with a dramatic two-story foyer lined with wood paneling, open-beam ceilings and mahogany door frames. Designed by architect Radcliffe Hollingsworth, the 1931 property is designated as a historic home on the Glendale Register of Historic Resources and has Mills Act status, which provides property tax relief in exchange for the owners' maintenance of the historical and architectural character of the property.

Some houses are heart-stopping perfect. But John Boyd's ticker skipped a beat a few years ago for another reason when he was previewing a house on behalf of a client. It was a "pretty expensive house," said Boyd of Home Buyer's Agent in Ann Arbor, Mich. "It was mostly vacant. There was some furniture, but it was clear no one was living there anymore. And I was alone." When he reached the basement, it was pitch black, so he had to fumble around for a light switch. Finally, he found one around a corner.

When you've dressed hundreds, perhaps thousands of performers over the course of more than 20 years, your wardrobe is bound to get crowded with the old and the outdated. Los Angeles Opera is putting more than 2,500 items up for sale today from its costume department in downtown L.A. (The sale runs from 10 a.m. to 6 p.m. at 330 S. Alameda St.) Some of the clothes hitting the racks were worn by such stars as Placido Domingo, Karita Mattila and Carol Vaness. The sale also includes costumes from productions by Robert Wilson ("Parsifal")

Wah Cheong, a lifelong Republican and the soon-to-be divorced father of two teenage boys, sometimes surprises his co-workers and neighbors in a relatively conservative community outside San Francisco when he says he supports same-sex marriage. "Here is my situation," the 47-year-old chemical engineer tells them when the hot-button topic comes up. "If gays and lesbians were more accepted, I wouldn't have married a closeted lesbian." Silence usually follows. Then, a spark of understanding.

Our Pickett's Charge into the Midwest is a roaring success. We drop off the little girl at a fine school that, for a mere 30 or 40 grand, will keep tabs on her for an entire academic year. Good deal, I say. Heck, she spends that much on Starbucks. "I'd have paid more," I tell Posh. "We don't have any more," she says. "Oh." By the way, if you're taking a daughter to college soon, might I recommend renting one of those C-130 transport planes, a whopping-big aircraft with abundant trunk space.