Clutter

I'm another who has noticed the clutter in so many home interiors shown in your magazine, but now I've really had it. Imagine, a cactus plant in a room! Added to that, a piece of desert wood to stumble over. Take those out, and the rest of it is lovely. Seeing a nice fat magazine is the thing that pleases many of us who have become hooked on Home magazine. Lily M. Gurnee Granada Hills

Now that the homeless are prohibited from camping overnight on Ocean Front Walk in Venice, many have migrated to other spots in the beach town. After numerous complaints about trash, city workers, accompanied by police, raided the new areas last month and confiscated unattended belongings, prompting a lawsuit from a civil rights attorney. According to the suit, filed on behalf of 11 named homeless people, employees of the Los Angeles Police Department and the Department of Public Works seized property found on 3rd Avenue in Venice that included birth certificates, food stamp eligibility cards, prescription medication, wallets with cash, and even laptop computers.

It's a risky business when adult novelists take a chance on writing for a younger crowd, say 3- to 7-year-olds: Sappy, boring and ugly picture-book flops are plentiful, successes few and far between. The latest writer to tempt fate is Anne Tyler of "Dinner at the Homesick Restaurant" and "The Accidental Tourist" fame, with a fairy tale entitled Tumble Tower (Orchard: $14.95; ages 3-7). It's illustrated by her daughter, Mitra Modarressi. Tyler's gamble has paid off.

I realized the house needed a little work when a crew from Habitat for Humanity showed up the other day and started rebuilding walls. I'd have let them continue, but I was afraid FEMA would roll in next, and who needs all those trailers in the yard? Well, I guess we do. It's a coach's lament. During baseball season, the house goes all to Helsinki. This visible decay makes my wife, Posh, a little crazy. I soothe her with bird sounds and keen observations, such as: "You know, wood looks better when it has a little weather in it. " Or, "I like the way that Adirondack chair peels in the sun — like in an Andrew Wyeth painting.

She told me not to straighten up. She needed to see my home office "to see how your mind thinks," she said. But as I sat at my computer, waiting for hired organizer Suzanne O'Donnell, the thinking process reflected in my messy desk suddenly struck me as horrifying. It wouldn't hurt, I told myself, to haul these batches of newspapers to the recycling bin. And it's not really straightening up if I just shift things around a bit to make a place for the calendar I discovered hidden under those newspaper piles.

Talk about junk in the trunk. The authors, a couple of self-described hard-core junkers, are hooked on stuff such as rusting cheese graters and discarded doors. But in their book, the dumpster divas set about repurposing those forgotten tennis racket presses and tractor gears into inspired-looking pieces of furniture and accessories that speak cleverness, not cobwebs.

Despite current tragedies here and abroad, the article "Kitsch and Clutter Fading Fast in Anaheim" caught my eye. As a local baby boomer, I remember the excitement of the fascinating signage near Disneyland; the Peter Pan Motel's neon representation of that "never-grow-up child" was my favorite, though the Space Age Motor Lodge was a close second. I wanted so much to stay in their rooms, swim in their pools and take one of their motel shuttles to Disneyland ... even though we lived in Orange!

In response to the article "Ojai Law" on Sept. 20, I am sure "The Krishnamurti People" rejoice, as I do, in businesses that advertise with beauty. I fail to see this as "failure for Krishnamurti"! I do complain, however. One of my complaints is about a small building completely covered with signs--29 violations of the ordinance. I also complain about the "clutter" of hanging signs in the Arcade. But I congratulate the businesses in the Arcade whose signs are part of their facade.

The Times' review of John le Carre's "The Russia House" by Elliott Roosevelt was clear and precise, unlike many others. It is a delight to understand what the reviewer thinks of a book and what he thinks I might think of it. I feel too many reviewers take the opportunity to clutter the review with literary pedantry and personal prejudices, making the search for a conclusion very difficult. P. ARNDT LAGUNA HILLS

I laughed and nodded in recognition over Emily Green's hilarious and true essay about digging out simplicity from beneath clutter and dog hairs ("Making the Perfect Kitchen," Jan. 16). I too long for a clean and clear kitchen, but I have two dogs (one a black Lab nicknamed Rolling Blackout for his shedding capabilities) plus a large cockatoo, all firmly entrenched in the heart of the house (a.k.a. the kitchen). VIRGINIA WEBER Ventura

She told me not to straighten up. She needed to see my home office "to see how your mind thinks," she said. But as I sat at my computer, waiting for hired organizer Suzanne O'Donnell, the thinking process reflected in my messy desk suddenly struck me as horrifying. It wouldn't hurt, I told myself, to haul these batches of newspapers to the recycling bin. And it's not really straightening up if I just shift things around a bit to make a place for the calendar I discovered hidden under those newspaper piles.

Aries (March 21-April 19): Words can change you down to your DNA. Expose yourself to the very best — the brightest minds and the deepest thinkers. Reading a book could be the catalyst that begins a new era for you. Taurus (April 20-May 20): You'll be privy to private information, and yet it's still not the whole story. You can, however, sniff out the rest by being observant. Gemini (May 21-June 21): In order to stay energized, you need time to yourself almost as much as you need food.

Visitors to Downtown Disney were given a special treat Saturday afternoon when a Disneyland character ventured outside the park gates to bless them with his charm. Look, it's Grumpy! "Is this fun?" Alabama Coach Nick Saban said, pausing, pausing, pausing. The answer was in his grimace, the "Happiest Place on Earth" clouded with the unhappiest face in town. The answer was in his wardrobe: black shirt, black pants, black socks, black shoes, and silly me, I thought they were the Crimson Tide.

Ben Hecht used Oscars for doorstops and routinely heaped scorn on the studio pontiffs who, throughout the 1930s and 1940s, paid him an average of $3,500 a day. Before he co-wrote "The Front Page," the play that brought him fame and opportunity, before he laid the story foundations of two basic movie genres (the gangster film and the screwball comedy), before he called into being the myth of the Hollywood screenwriter (overpaid yet endlessly put-upon), Hecht was a reporter, a newspaper man in America's hottest crime city during American journalism's golden age. "I have lived in other cities but been inside only one," Hecht said, and "1,001 Afternoons in Chicago" ( University of Chicago Press: 288 pp., $15)

The message of the proposed freeway signs doesn't seem controversial, memorializing individuals killed in traffic accidents and urging California motorists to drive safely. But a proposal to allow families to pay the California Department of Transportation to put up dozens of such signs along state highways has been caught up in a revolt by environmentalists against what they see as the growing clutter of signs and billboards along California roadways. The latest flare-up involves plans to expand a program that allows families to pay $1,000 to cover the cost of signs that read, "Please Don't Drink and Drive -- In Memory of . . ."

Even over the last decade, when the United States became the dominant team in its World Cup qualifying zone, it has remained a given that road games in Costa Rica are no-win propositions. Under those circumstances, it also is a given that allowing the home team to score in the first two minutes was guaranteed to keep the U.S. team from ending its historic winless streak in the Central American country. For all that, rarely in recent memory has the U.S.

Billy Mays sounds tired, which is a huge relief to me. I had braced myself for the onslaught of moon-barking enthusiasm the bearded pitchman brings to his direct-response TV ads for OxiClean, Kaboom, Mighty Putty, the Awesome Auger, the Samurai Shark sharpener. The Billy Mays in those ads seems to have the same problem as the de-hibernated Austin Powers, who can't control the volume of his voice. But it's late in Odessa, Fla.

These are tough times for real estate agents, who say some cities make it tougher than it has to be. Real estate agent Ronald Shore is mounting a campaign -- both with signatures and on the Internet -- against a West Hollywood ordinance that he says limits the ability of prospective buyers to find homes for sale while driving on city streets.