Crate

With sprawling sound stages, elaborate movie sets and a hands-on curriculum, the Brooks Institute of Photography officially opened its new film school in Ventura on Thursday, attracting more than 300 officials and industry professionals to its west side campus. The 70,000-square-foot facility, which will serve 200 students from all over the world, offers everything from screenwriting to movie production to digital animation, school officials said.

Fifteen years ago, an impoverished potter named Juan Hamilton wangled three introductions to artist Georgia O'Keeffe, the only woman of independent means in this strangely verdant desert settlement beside a trickle called the Rio Chama. The first time, Hamilton tagged along with a friend visiting O'Keeffe's home. It so annoyed the 84-year-old doyenne of modern American art, he remembers, that she looked right through him during the entire visit.

When South Pasadena homeowners recycle, it's as easy as throwing their tuna cans and soda bottles into the trash can along with their food scraps and meat wrappers. It's called mixed waste processing, and it's an alternative way some cities have tried to increase recycling rates. In 2000, just 6% of South Pasadena's single-family residential waste was being recycled under a voluntary program that had residents sort recycling into a separate container. That percentage shot up to 25% in 2001 after the city decided to let waste and recycling go into one bin bound for a so-called dirty MRF, or mixed-waste materials recovery facility, where sorting equipment and trained workers separate paper, glass, plastic, metal and other commodities on the back end instead of the front.

When the landmark Long Beach bookstore Acres of Books closed its doors in 2008 to make way for a city redevelopment project, a big question remained: what to do with its acres of bookshelves? The decision was made to let them live on in a way, even after the bookstore was long gone. This summer, workers are using hammers to knock down and harvest an estimated 6-1/2 miles of wooden shelving. Most of the 1930s-era building will be demolished this fall to make way for an art center.

It's one thing for your menorah to burn brightly this Hanukkah. But the whole house? Housewares retailer Crate & Barrel said Friday that it was recalling about 800 menorahs that may catch fire if the candles they hold are allowed to burn all the way down, as is customary in Jewish tradition. The clear acrylic menorahs, which were made in India, were sold in 60 Crate & Barrel stores and online from October through Thursday.

Gordon Elwood of Medford, Ore., kept his pants up with a bungee cord, accepted handouts from a food bank and refused to have a phone installed in his home because of the cost. When he died in October at age 79, he left a $10-million fortune. Elwood was among a small fraternity of America's upper class: the penny-pinching, often shabbily dressed wealthy who are almost as much a mystery to the people who know them as to the millions of strangers who read their stories and wonder, "Why?"

As they walk through the halls of the Capitol in Sacramento, Orange County legislators try not to glance at the 5-by-3-foot window display that is supposed to boast of the best things in their home area. It doesn't, they say. "It's an embarrassment," Supervisor Harriett M. Wieder said Wednesday. " . . . For those of you who have not had the dubious privilege of seeing the exhibit there, it is a crate of oranges."

In the mean-streets-of-Beverly-Hills file, Paula Van Gelder sent along an item from the police log of the Beverly Hills Courier, which listed the arrest of a man "for unauthorized possession of a milk crate." OR COULD IT BE A HOT CEILING? No sooner had this column published a for-sale notice offering a "ceiling for light fixture" than Janet Mauk of La Crescenta wrote: "Think we've found a buyer."

Wooden crates with Russian and Spanish writing on the outside and filled with live mortar shells and possibly radioactive materials washed ashore along a 50-mile stretch of Florida beaches, authorities said. Police and Navy officials speculated that the weapons came from the Soviet nuclear submarine that sank off the Bermuda coast Oct. 6 or from a freighter that went down two weeks ago off Lake Worth Inlet. The Palm Beach bomb squad placed the weapons in a bombproof trailer.

It may be the biggest home store you've never heard of, but Urban Home is getting harder not to notice. The company, whose first five stores are in the San Fernando Valley and points north, has opened its sixth location in the 30,000-square-foot Westside Pavilion space at the prime corner of Westwood and Pico boulevards. It's a big expansion for the Oxnard-based company, and yet the West L.A. store is not even the company's largest. That title would go to the 35,000-square-foot Urban Home at the Sherman Oaks Galleria.