Daylight

In much of Sunday's news there was no reason to even smile. However, "Why You're So Tired Today" (editorial, April 7) made me laugh out loud. I could visualize those dairy cows waiting an extra hour. . . . Thanks for a much-needed respite. Emma Gottlieb-Ellinoy Seal Beach Why do we make the daylight saving time shifts at 2 a.m. on Sunday? It would be much nicer if the switches were made at 1 p.m. Monday. That way, when we set the clocks forward we would lose an hour of work.

The Watts Towers, closed to the public for seven years during a state-funded $1.2-million restoration, officially reopened to the public Saturday at 10 a.m. during the ninth annual Simon Rodia Watts Towers Music & Arts Festival. Simon Rodia, an unlettered immigrant from Italy, built the three towers and subsidiary structures alone and by hand over 33 years, beginning in 1921. He used concrete over "armatures" of steel rods and wire.

OAKLAND - State and regional transportation officials announced plans Wednesday for a retrofit to the new eastern span of the San Francisco-Oakland Bay Bridge that will cost up to $10 million and effectively do the job of nearly 100 massive bolts that failed earlier this year. Questions remain, however, about whether the world's largest single-tower, self-anchored suspension span will open on Labor Day weekend as planned. The new span will replace the one that partially collapsed in the 1989 Loma Prieta earthquake.

"Zombie apocalypse," voodoo curses and a potent street drug called "bath salts. " Those are just a few of the angles the media have pursued after the bizarre case of a naked man shot and killed by Miami police as he was eating the face of another man. A less sensational angle? The long, sad journey that awaits the  homeless victim, Ronald Poppo, 65, who is believed to have lost about 80% of his face -- including one eye -- in the gruesome daylight attack. Poppo is not likely to get a face transplant, experts say. Such procedures are extremely rare.

Two people were dead in Fort Wayne, Ind., after a man pulled his ex-girlfriend off a bus Wednesday and shot her in broad daylight, then ran away, police said. Police identified the woman as Jacqueline Bouvier Hardy, 49, and the man as Kenneth Knight, 45. Hardy had recently obtained a restraining order against Knight.  About four hours later, police tracked Knight to a house where he had holed up with a 3-year-old and three adults, police said. The three adults reportedly ran out of the house when police arrived.

Up all night? Been chowing down on rare steaks? Trying to land a job at your local blood bank? If you answered yes to any of these queries, then you might possibly be a vampire. Or, at least, a vannabe. For starters, you're in the right place. The City of Angels is Vampireville to slightly more than 50 vampires, claims the VPR, or Vampire Research Center, in New York, another favorite haunt.

I've flown in the Goodyear blimp. I've paddled down the L.A. River. I've spoken at two Hollywood Walk of Fame events. I've driven the wrong way at 90 mph on a new, still-unopened stretch of freeway (with a Caltrans guy beside me). But I'd never done the ultimate L.A. thing: I'd never been to the Oscars. Until Sunday. I came away from the very long day -- dressing up in evening clothes in broad daylight at 1 p.m., home from the Governors Ball at 1 a.m. -- with two impressions I hadn't had as an ordinary Oscar TV viewer: FULL COVERAGE: Oscars 2013 | Winners One was the finely tuned organization of a massive event.

From the veranda of his house, Bruce Gleason looks down, down, down onto a swath of the San Fernando Valley floor. Daylight is departing, and a rainy mist has furred the vista. A river of car headlamps on Van Nuys Boulevard glows more brilliantly by the moment. "The view. Each night when I come home, I'm re-charmed by it," he says. "Life is in session down there--150,000 people going about their life."