Darth Vader

Looking for a West Coast location, the trendy New York nightspot Planet Hollywood passed up Los Angeles' Melrose Avenue and Restaurant Row in Beverly Hills. Instead, its owners chose the site of a Reuben's restaurant at South Coast Plaza Village. On Friday, to help pump up interest in a Planet Hollywood sequel that will be an hour's drive from its namesake community, the restaurant trotted out superstar Sylvester Stallone.

A man dressed as film villain Darth Vader ordered two auto supply employees to handcuff themselves to a bathroom railing Wednesday morning, then cleaned out the cash registers and escaped, police said. The man drove up to Trak Auto on Harbor Boulevard in Fountain Valley on a racing motorcycle wearing a black motorcycle helmet with a black face guard, a black jacket, black Levis, black shoes and black gloves. He met the two employees as they opened the store at 7:58 a.m.

In a country purged of normal politics by an authoritarian government, national issues are often taken to the streets. Since the anti-government protests broke out June 10, student leaders have put more than 100,000 followers into street demonstrations. Word was passed on Seoul's more than 20 college campuses, and for Friday night's demonstrations leaflets were distributed downtown asking for support and designating assembly points.

When I was very young and innocent, Superman comic books provided many moments of fanciful safety from real and imagined bullies. I could crawl into those flimsy pages and find more pleasant realities. Much later I became a lighthearted fan of Lord Darth Vader, my type of monster because he wasn't really that bad. Even when Vader did away with someone, you couldn't help but like him just a little bit. At least he didn't use bad language or torture people physically. Children understood this.