Dance

The most ballyhooed name change of the year became official Friday morning when a Los Angeles County Superior Court commissioner approved the former Ron Artest's request to become Metta World Peace. Amid labor discord that threatens to delay, if not wipe out, the NBA season, there is World Peace. Photos: Famous name-changers He is 6 feet 7, wears No. 15 for the Lakers and once participated in the infamous "Palace brawl. " Anyone now making his acquaintance will be meeting Metta World Peace.

The Times is pleased to have Green Bay Packers wide receiver Donald Driver guest-blogging for us while he competes on "Dancing With the Stars." Driver, a Super Bowl champion and three-time Pro Bowl player, was named the winner of the competition this week and, as he has throughout the season, answered a few questions from Sports Now editor Houston Mitchell. Here are Driver's thoughts about winning the competition, which he offered via email. Q: Champions! Congratulations!

The Times is pleased to have Green Bay Packers wide receiver Donald Driver guest-blogging for us while he competes on "Dancing With the Stars. " Each week, Driver, a Super Bowl champion and three-time Pro Bowl player, will answer a few questions from Sports Now editor Houston Mitchell and give some insight into the competition. Here are Driver's thoughts about Week 3, which he offered via email. Q: You seemed to be having a lot of fun dancing the paso doble. Was that the easiest dance for you to connect to so far?

After weeks of competition, we are down to the finale of "Dancing With the Stars" on Tuesday night, when the final three competitors will learn who has won, and who goes home without the Mirrorball Trophy. Breaking down the three remaining competitors:William Levy: The world's perfect man, whom every woman loves. All he has to do is smile and hearts flutter around the world. And every time I see him, I think I'm looking in a mirror.

Rats fed fructose-laced drinking water for six weeks performed more slowly in a maze-navigating task, UCLA researchers have found. (Read this L.A. Times opinion article .) They think the effect is due to changes in the way the brain responds to insulin as a result of exposure to fructose. “Our study shows that a high fructose diet harms the brain as well as the body,” study senior author and UCLA professor Fernando Gomez-Pinilla said in a release about the finding, which was published in the Journal of Physiology (postdoc Rahul Agrawal was first author)

The way people move is as unique as their DNA -- indeed, it is their DNA in action, living proof of their singularity. But most dancers have to give it up to become professionals, to lose themselves in the style of a school, a choreographer, a company, an image of unanimity. Not Michael Jackson. It was his supreme achievement as a dancer to remain indomitably himself and, in the process of entertaining us, to offer a vision of expanded human potential. What's more, long before excesses and obsessions claimed him, he helped turn MTV into DTV, making television the place where dance films set to new music inspired a generation with their creative power and originality.

It would not be out of character for actress, dancer and choreographer Zina Bethune to stop her car for an injured animal, say those who knew her. Bethune, 66, a former New York City Ballet soloist and the founder of a Los Angeles multimedia dance and theatrical company, was struck by two vehicles and killed shortly after midnight Sunday after she apparently stopped to help an injured animal along Forest Lawn Drive in L.A. "Zina has been...

In 1975, Donna Summer released a pop single unlike any before it. The singer, then an unknown in the U.S., was living in Germany and working with Italian producer Giorgio Moroder and lyricist Pete Bellotte. Together they came up with a breathy, minimalist number that sounded flagrantly sexy. Summer's coos acted as musical erotica atop a simple, four-on-the-floor drum beat. "Love to Love You Baby," all 17 minutes of it, set a template that would ignite Summer's career, and a style that defined an era: disco.

NEW YORK - It may be the understatement of the theater season when the choreographer Steven Hoggett, says, in the quiet British way, "It's a very interesting time for me. " But understatement is not actually his thing. The emphatic flailing and ecstatic flying he devised forGreen Day's"American Idiot" are pumping up audiences at the Ahmanson Theatre through April 22. The stamping, stomping, full-out dancing actor-musicians of "Once," the downtown hit based on the 2006 indie film of the same name, have been rapturously received on Broadway.

MUSIC Dance your heart out in the desert at the 10th Annual Joshua Tree Music Festival. This fantastic roster of bands including Fork Knox Five, Gaudi, Breakestra and MC Rai is guaranteed to satisfy all your world-music and open-space cravings. The Joshua Tree Lake Campground, 2601 Sunfair Road, Joshua Tree. Various times, Fri. to Sun. $120. http://www.joshuatreemusicfestival.com.

Good form makes for a better workout, and that's one of the keys to ballet-inspired barre workouts. These exercises also increase flexibility and tone the muscles without adding bulk. Pasadena-based fitness expert, video host and teacher Tracey Mallett (www.traceymallett.com) is the founder of Booty Barre, a technique that combines elements of dance, yoga and Pilates to strengthen and stretch the body. No prior experience in any of those disciplines is necessary. Make sure the spine, neck and head are aligned and the movements are slow and deliberate.

Cranberry is not vodka's best friend. Real vodka drinkers know this, but for years their taste has been marginalized by a craft cocktail scene obsessed with whiskey. Change is on the horizon, however. As Los Angeles bartenders vie to keep up with the next trending drink wave, venues all over town are favoring clear spirits. Well-regarded mixologists including Aidan Demarest and Marcos Tello of the cocktail consulting firm Tello/Demarest Liquid Assets are leading the way, serving as brand ambassadors to Stoli Elit vodka and Bols Genever (a grain-based, gin-like spirit)

MOVIES Comprised of Amy Poehler, Matt Besser, Ian Roberts and Matt Walsh, the original Upright Citizens Brigade helped shaped a generation's worth of sketch comedy with their now bi-coastal improv schools and Comedy Central series. Now reunited in a feature film directed by Besser, "Freak Dance" promises a glimpse of "the dirtiest of all the boogaloos," but like all the best in movement-based movies, it's all done in the name of saving a community center (so it's completely justified)

MUSIC Dance your heart out in the desert at the 10th Annual Joshua Tree Music Festival. This fantastic roster of bands including Fork Knox Five, Gaudi, Breakestra and MC Rai is guaranteed to satisfy all your world-music and open-space cravings. The Joshua Tree Lake Campground, 2601 Sunfair Road, Joshua Tree. Various times, Fri. to Sun. $120. http://www.joshuatreemusicfestival.com.

Imagine tens of thousands of cycling fans gathered in front of Staples Center on Sunday morning for the final leg of the country's largest stage cycling race, the Amgen Tour of California. Now mix in 20,000 hockey fans, nearly all of them giddy in the anticipation of watching their underdog Kings clinch a berth in the Stanley Cup finals, and another 20,000 basketball fans, with the Clippers trying to reach the Western Conference finals for the first time. Those sports worlds will collide on the streets outside the arena Sunday; the Kings are scheduled to take on the Phoenix Coyotes in Game 4 of the NHL Western Conference finals at noon — about the same time some of the world's best cyclists will be barreling toward the finish line.

LA JOLLA - From Florenz Ziegfeld's synchronized showgirls toAndrew Lloyd Webber's roller-skating actors to aSpider-Man who flies, musical theater has often encouraged dance and movement extravaganzas. So imagine the anxiety of the team putting together the new musical, "Hands on a Hardbody," which has its premiere Saturday at the La Jolla Playhouse. The story's 10 characters are tied - figuratively - to a Nissan pickup truck. How do you take that reality and turn it into a show-stopping number?

Martha Graham was a troublemaker. She depicted sex so unsparingly that her "Phaedra" was denounced in Congress as obscene. She refused to represent America at the Olympic Arts Festival in Berlin in 1936 because it meant dignifying the regime of Adolf Hitler. She gave artists of color prominence in her company during a period when they were seen as "exotics"--or not at all.

I'm quite certain that somewhere right now, emotionally shattered BMW technicians are gathering in a church basement for a support group, huddled around the cookies and the coffee urn, their hands fairly vibrating with frustration. For as well deserved as is the title Ultimate Driving Machine, BMWs also have earned the reputation as the Ultimate Hangar Queen, taking up residence in dealership service bays and sending mechanics over the crumbling edge of insanity. Hello -- sob!

Packing a lot of action - if not a lot of sense - into its story, the Indian film "Dangerous Ishhq" likely won't win over any new believers to the idea of reincarnation as it weaves between a quilt of romantic thriller and historical drama. The film opens with a Mumbai supermodel (Karisma Kapoor, a star making her return to the screen after an absence of a number of years) preparing to leave for Paris to be an international face for a luxury fashion brand. As she is wavering about whether to leave behind her wealthy industrialist boyfriend, his beachfront home is attacked by a gang of kidnappers.

There are myriad reasons why the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences is celebrating Gene Kelly's centennial with two special evenings this Thursday and Friday. After all, he was the complete package, an innovative actor, dancer, choreographer and director. But let's not forget another obvious fact - few dancers have looked as sexy on the silver screen. While lean, dapper Fred Astaire, who came into films almost a decade before Kelly in 1933, often danced dressed in a top hat, white tie and tails, the athletic Kelly preferred tight, form-fitting pants and shirts.