Entertainment

SOUTHERN CALIFORNIA has several dozen accredited senior universities and colleges, but this week you might be forgiven for thinking it has just two schools. As UCLA and USC get set to battle on the football field Saturday at the Rose Bowl, one's inner Bruin or Trojan inevitably comes out, even if you've never set foot on either campus.

Charles McNulty theater critic Here's a gift idea that connects recipients to the richness of the dramatic past and the boldness of the theatrical present. That allows them to become more involved in the cultural and communal life of the city. And that gets them off the couch and mingling with new people and unexpected points of view. Beyond buying tickets for a show (always a nice idea if you're sure of the person's schedule), there are other ways of giving the gift of theater.

PIONEERTOWN looks like a ghost town seen in countless westerns. Probably because it is. Built as a 1940s movie set where the likes of Gene Autry, the Cisco Kid and Annie Oakley shot the films that made them western heroes, rural Pioneertown managed to fight off most of the Sawtooth fire and still holds on to its own identity, honky-tonk and motel. And aside from the post office on Mane Street, Pappy & Harriet's Pioneertown Palace may be its biggest attraction.

IT'S happy hour at funky Bar 107 in downtown Los Angeles. "Johnny Hit and Run Pauline" by the iconic punk band X plays on the stereo as bartender Felicia Cox, her chest and arms covered in intricate tattoos, pours stiff vodka tonics for several members of the burgeoning inner-city hip set. A homeless man shambles in, sits at the end of the long wooden bar and carefully lays down three crumpled dollar bills.

Sometimes you find a video-store clerk who knows exactly what movie you'll like. Or a clerk in a music store who senses your taste in bands. Or a bookworm who can deliver one terrific novel after another from the shelves. Marc Pickett wants to take luck out of that equation. And win a million dollars in the process. Pickett, a doctoral student at the University of Maryland, Baltimore County, is trying to perfect a "recommender."

I have to say I was kind of happy when our big-screen TV broke. Relieved. Liberated. The 15-year-old honking monstrosity dated from the pre-plasma days and resembled Jabba the Hutt, but it worked, sucking us into its vortex of images and sound. My husband and I watched movies when we could find something at the local video store we hadn't seen, but increasingly it became TV shows -- "Prime Suspect," "Cracker" and, for one hallucinatory summer, three entire seasons of "The Shield."

During the dot-com bust, Mondo Media almost befell the same fate as the adorable animals in its "Happy Tree Friends" cartoons: brutal death. The animation studio -- specializing in funny, violent and politically incorrect programming aimed at teens and young adults -- took in $30 million in venture capital from 1999 to 2001 to distribute its content on the Internet. Then the bottom fell out of the online advertising market.

Tucked in a desert valley in southern Idaho, the Mountain Home Air Force Base is about as close to the middle of nowhere as you can get. So when the Charlie Daniels Band rolled into town last July to crank out its roster of country-fried hits, it was the biggest of big deals for the base's 5,000 enlisted personnel and their families. "The closest thing was in '98, when we gave Bruce Willis a flight -- but it was nothing like this," said Sgt. Erien Chasse, a base spokeswoman.

Continuing its yearlong push into the living room, Hewlett-Packard Co. will launch a series of devices to make it easier to move digital entertainment throughout the home. Chief Executive Carly Fiorina will unveil new computers, televisions and an "entertainment hub" at this week's International Consumer Electronics Show in Las Vegas. HP's move is part of a larger effort by information technology companies to compete more directly against consumer electronics makers.