Contests

A favorite money-raiser of churches and school clubs, the raffle goes big time next month when the California Lottery launches a game with million-dollar prizes. Modeled after a raffle held by the Pennsylvania Lottery in 2005 and copied by 10 other states since, the California Lottery raffle is expected to generate $7 million to $8 million for public schools in a 40-day spurt of ticket-buying. Tickets go on sale Feb. 5 and will be available until 6 p.m. on St. Patrick's Day, March 17.

IT was the best of times. It was the grungiest of times. For a couple of minutes back in the early '90s, during MTV's curiously chic "House of Style," Todd Oldham democratized interior design for an ambivalent generation. His aesthetic: cheap quirk, a sort of anti-design for those who conflate a refusal to throw things away with an affinity for vintage. That it's taken this long for Oldham to end up hosting a Bravo show is one of the great mysteries of the late cable age.

Inveterate gamblers, rejoice. If the Super Bowl wasn't occasionally deadly dull, you probably wouldn't be able to bet this week on which will be greater Sunday, the number of passes caught by Marvin Harrison against the Chicago Bears in Miami or the number of free throws made by LeBron James against the Detroit Pistons in Cleveland.

Silence settled over the high school classroom. The students stared at one another, the same question stamped on their baffled faces: What the heck is \o7jinwen\f7? On this recent Wednesday afternoon, the nine classmates had mostly breezed through the multiple-choice questions. Until \o7jinwen\f7. "This is just a guess," said Carlos Ochoa, 18, the first to pipe up, "but is it D?" The teacher shook her head. "B?" another student ventured. Another head shake. The answer?

Dan McCoig was thrilled when he heard last fall that Doritos was soliciting regular folks to create a homemade ad for the snack to air during today's Super Bowl. Enticed by the year's biggest advertising showcase -- 30-second spots on the Bears-Colts matchup are going for $2.6 million -- McCoig crafted nine commercials to post on the contest's website. Among the Charlotte, N.C., resident's subjects: a village for nutcrackers, hippies and a grandmother.

Whoops, cheers and a couple of tears punctuated Saturday night for California Academic Decathlon teams from Granada Hills Charter and North Hollywood high schools, which tied for first place in the Super Quiz, the climactic part of the grueling scholastic competition. About 550 students in 62 nine-member teams from Los Angeles Unified School District high schools competed in the regional contest, which wrapped up Saturday night in the John Wooden Center at UCLA.

L.A. architect Eric Owen Moss' vision for restoring and harnessing the Los Angeles River and building along and above freeways gathered no garlands on the History Channel's website, where visitors voted a competing plan from Chicago's UrbanLab team as winner of the "City of the Future" contest and its $20,000 first prize. Moss earned $10,000 in winning the L.A.

Airline tycoon Richard Branson announced Friday that he would award a $25-million prize to the first person to come up with a way of scrubbing greenhouse gases from the atmosphere and alleviate global warming. The prize will initially be open for five years, with ideas assessed by a panel of judges. The winning technique must remove 1 billion tons of carbon gases a year from the atmosphere for 10 years -- with $5 million going to the inventor at the start and $20 million at the end.

More than two years ago, after the first privately funded manned rocket soared into space to claim a $10-million prize, the man behind the contest brimmed with jubilation, a profound sense of relief and visions of the next frontier to conquer. "I'm going to the stars," he said at the time. But, in fact, Peter Diamandis has moved on to something that, in many respects, is even more momentous.