Drums

Not surprisingly, this is a big time of year for the Hallmark Channel, which has been offering a non-stop medley of new and old original movies since Thanksgiving week, all testifying to the various transformative powers of Christmas. This Saturday it's "Annie Claus Is Coming to Town," a slight, sweet tale that should appeal to fans of the Big E's — "Elf" and "Enchanted," the two films from which it borrows most heavily, (although "The Santa Clause" franchise also figures in.) Annie (Maria Thayer)

No saber-rattling Re "The Iran threat," Opinion, Dec. 1 I read Max Boot's article carefully, but nowhere did I find any mention in the tallying of Iran's aggression against the West the overthrow of Prime Minister Mohammad Mosaddeq's government by the CIA in 1953, our installing the shah and our close relationship with that oppressive regime as possible reasons for Iran not liking or trusting us. With regard to Iran's possibly...

Zynga Inc., creator of FarmVille and other social games, is fixing to reap a billion-dollar bumper crop from its initial public offering after company executives spend the next two weeks trying to convince potential investors that their 4-year-old firm is worth $9 billion or more. The valuation of the San Francisco online game publisher, derived from documents filed Friday with the Securities and Exchange Commission, would put Zynga on par with Electronic Arts Inc., valued at $7.7 billion, even though EA's revenue is roughly three times that of Zynga's.

Las Vegas is the land of bizarre service-industry auditions, where would-be cocktail waitresses are photographed in bikinis and experience often matters less than a fat-free figure and Chiclets teeth. And yet, the recent interviews inside the Plaza casino showroom were their own sort of odd. One by one, women climbed onto a stage to endure the polite grilling typical of a Miss America pageant. This made sense, because they were essentially competing for a title. A panel of questioners asked each one: What does being a "broad" mean to you?

Almost every year, the run-up to the Academy Awards features a film no one has heard of, a film like "Slumdog Millionaire" that seems to have come out of nowhere to become a possible best picture nominee. This year, that film is an especially unlikely one: a black-and-white silent French film called "The Artist" that festival audiences have simply adored. While most years I'm as surprised as anyone at this kind of emergence, "The Artist" is a different story for me. Because of a combination of happenstance and luck, I have been tracking this unusual film from before the beginning, and I've been in a position to observe it win hearts and minds across a wide spectrum.

It turns out that the Pacific 12 Conference's taste in video selections was a little too pointed for UCLA's liking. The conference had posted on its website a promotional video that included a segment on rivalries. The chosen clip showed a Trojans drum major planting a sword in the UCLA logo near midfield at the Rose Bowl. That didn't go over too well in Westwood. "I felt the clip was inappropriate and expressed my displeasure to Pac-12 officials," UCLA Athletic Director Dan Guerrero said.

Using such modern tools as ground-penetrating radar and conducting analyses of water and soil core samples, a team of investigators in South Korea is searching for clues to a decades-old mystery: Did American soldiers dispose of the defoliant Agent Orange at a U.S.-run base about 150 miles southeast of Seoul in 1978? For weeks, a U.S.-South Korean survey team has focused on a helipad site at the Camp Carroll base. Recently, tiny amounts of a toxic element found in Agent Orange were discovered in three nearby streams.

The process behind Brian Eno's new album, "Drums Between the Bells," a collaboration with the English poet Rick Holland, is based on a simple premise but one that could change the way you hear your next conversation. "We are all singing. We call it speech, but we're singing to each other," Eno said (sang?) from London during a recent phone exchange. Eight years ago the British-born composer, producer, visual artist and sonic conceptualist began putting his belief to a test: "I thought, as soon as you put spoken word onto music, you start to hear it like singing anyway.

— A 50,000-acre wildfire raging through tinder-dry ponderosa forest sent up towering plumes of smoke, rained down ash and forced the mandatory evacuation Monday of Los Alamos, home to the nation's premier nuclear weapons research lab. The Las Conchas fire started Sunday in parched, windy conditions in the Jemez Mountains, 12 miles west of Los Alamos. By early Monday, it had destroyed 30 structures south and west of town and forced the closure of the Los Alamos National Laboratory, where scientists developed the first atomic bomb during World War II. The blaze stirred memories of a devastating fire in May 2000 that destroyed hundreds of homes and buildings.

President Obama, at recent campaign stops, has pointed out that his hair is now getting gray, a sign of how he has aged and the toll taken by his job. But on Thursday, the president had a different kind of senior moment. Speaking at Ft. Drum in upstate New York, Obama thanked troops from the 10th Mountain Division for their deployments to Iraq and Afghanistan. To hammer home his point, he told a story of awarding the Medal of Honor to a living member of the division. Obama, however, misspoke.