Franchise

Word-association time. Buffalo Braves? "I know Bob McAdoo," said the Clippers' Jamal Crawford. On Friday, he was being asked about his knowledge of the place where it all started for this Clippers' franchise, years ago, in Buffalo. The Buffalo Braves established a franchise-record 11-game winning streak in 1974. But it's hard to expect the Clippers to know that much about the pioneers of the franchise and achievements from 38 years ago. Especially when Crawford was born in 1980.

President Gerald Ford and Soviet leader Leonid Brezhnev negotiated the SALT II Treaty in Vladivostok, a 3.2-million-year-old skeleton later named "Lucy" was discovered by anthropologists in Ethiopia and the top song on the charts was "I Can Help," by crossover artist Billy Swan. And … the Buffalo Braves' franchise record 11-game winning streak ended with a two-point loss in Chicago, despite Bob McAdoo's 31-point performance. The date of all these seismic events? Nov. 24, 1974.

  This game was about more than the Clippers extending their 10-game winning streak and making franchise history in the process. This game also was about the Clippers looking for some revenge against a New Orleans Hornets team that had defeated L.A. earlier this season and did a little too much celebrating for the Clippers' liking. The Clippers were able to do both, blasting the Hornets, 93-77, pushing their winning streak to 11 games and seeing Chris Paul reach an NBA milestone Wednesday night at Staples center.

— It was the end of a four-game, eight-day trip and the Clippers' opponent was a not-so-good Detroit Pistons team. It would have been easy for the Clippers to give in to the elements, to play for another day even though a winning streak was on the line. Instead, the Clippers played enough solid defense and got just enough contributions to pull out an 88-76 victory over the Pistons on Monday night. "Tonight was a game maybe earlier in the season we would have lost," Coach Vinny Del Negro said.

By one standard, the $84.8 million in receipts over the weekend for Peter Jackson's first crack at "The Hobbit"  was a success. The 3-D film about Bilbo Baggins' unexpected journey was, as box-office pundits reminded us, the biggest-ever opening for a December release. And the film's "A" CinemaScore suggested the fans got what they came for. But there was also plenty lacking. Pre-release estimates had the New Line/Warner Bros/MGM movie (budgeted at a whopping $250 million)

MILWAUKEE - The Clippers are on such a roll right now that the nine teams they've defeated in the last 21/2 weeks seem like little more than bystanders. The Milwaukee Bucks became their latest victims Saturday night, the Clippers winning handily, 111-85, at the Bradley Center. Their nine-game winning streak is the second-longest in franchise history. The franchise record is 11 consecutive victories by the Buffalo Braves during the 1974-75 season. The Clippers have won the first three games on a four-game trip, and they have scored at least 100 points in eight of the nine victories during the streak.

SACRAMENTO - State employees misused $613,000 in taxpayer funds through bribery schemes, mail fraud, waste, and improper billings for travel and pay, officials said Tuesday. The misdeeds were detailed in a report by state Auditor Elaine Howle on whistle-blower investigations concluded by her office in the last two years. "This report details nine substantiated allegations involving several state departments," Howle wrote to Gov. Jerry Brown. The biggest loss occurred in the bribery case, in the Los Angeles offices of the state Franchise Tax Board and the Secretary of State.

Even coming home after a disastrous trip couldn't change the losing ways of the Clippers. Even being among their fans at Staples Center on Monday night couldn't change how poorly the Clippers are playing defense or how they continue to lose their composure when things don't go their way. The Clippers lost their fourth consecutive game, this time a 105-98 defeat to a New Orleans Hornets team that entered with one of the worst records in the...

The gig: Rick Wetzel and Bill Phelps are the chieftains of pretzel empire Wetzel's Pretzels. As co-founders of the Pasadena chain, the pair oversee a company with 263 franchises worldwide, 3,000 employees and $107 million in annual sales. There's also 12 company-owned stores that employ 150 people. Origin story: In 1994, the two were working in marketing at Nestle USA. On a business trip to Seattle, the colleagues, who weren't friends at the time, started kicking around the idea of pretzels as a new snack-food business.

In the end, "Breaking Dawn" couldn't generate as much light as "New Moon. " The fifth and final "Twilight" film hit theaters this weekend and did incredible business, grossing $141.3 million domestically, according to an estimate from distributor Summit Entertainment. Although that is a fantastic start for "The Twilight Saga: Breaking Dawn - Part 2," the film came in just shy of the franchise opening-weekend record held by 2009's "New Moon" with $142.8 million. However, the final "Twilight" film could easily become the highest-grossing domestic film in the "Twilight" franchise, surpassing the record $300.5 million the third film, "Eclipse," made in 2010. Those Twi-hards who saw the movie this weekend loved it, assigning the movie an average grade of A, according to market research firm CinemaScore.