Garbage

Every year around this time millions of eggs are hard-boiled, artistically decorated and then thrown into the garbage. Frankly, that's probably just as well. Because most hard-boiled eggs are pretty terrible. The whites are rubbery, the yolks are pale and mealy and, even worse, surrounded by that sulfur-green ring of shame. Cooking hard-boiled eggs is easy; cooking them right is not. Unless you know what you're doing. Then it's as close to a foolproof no-brainer as you can get in the kitchen.

Last month, Garbage played its first concerts since October 2005, when the members of the influential alternative-rock group cut short a world tour and began what they referred to at the time as an indefinite hiatus. Yet before a boisterous capacity crowd at L.A.'s El Rey Theater - where the band played a sold-out two-night stand following a last-minute warm-up gig at the Bootleg in Echo Park - Garbage sounded like it had never left, powering through its set with a muscular precision that belied the seven years it spent offstage.

'Trash Inc: The Secret Life of Garbage' Where: CNBC When: 6, 7, 9 and 10 tonight Rating: Not rated

NEW DELHI - The children didn't notice the ravens and occasional vulture circling overhead, or the stream of black ooze that flowed nearby, or the inescapable stench of decay. They were squealing over a 4-cent ride on a small, hand-powered Ferris wheel. The kids are growing up in New Delhi's 70-acre Ghazipur landfill, a post-apocalyptic world where hundreds of pickers climb a 100-foot-high trash pile daily, dodging and occasionally dying beneath belching bulldozers that reshape the putrid landscape.

Throw the computers down a mine shaft and exile the nerds to East Timor. Surely Miami has a great team, but with all of the crucial penalties, that same ragged performance against Oregon would have produced a contest. Gilbert S. Bahn Moorpark After watching over a quarter of the Miami-Nebraska fiasco, I have a suggestion for the BCS computer. Somebody should HARD DRIVE that thing into a wall. No more RAMming these mismatches down our throats. It MEGA-HERTZ watching, even my MOTHER was BOARD.

Now that the Supreme Court has spoken, shouldn't trash collectors be required to read my garbage its Miranda rights before every pickup? IRWIN SAFCHIK Tarzana

Regarding British director Adrian Lyne's upcoming attempt to remake the film "Lolita" ("Not Your Average Nymphet," Calendar, July 14) and his comments that "I could make a movie about a 13-year-old girl getting chopped up and eaten and no one in the United States would say anything." Well, I am here to say to Lyne: Wrong! No matter how you package garbage, no matter what label you put on it, garbage is still garbage. Whether it is labeled satanic cannibalism or erotic, gratuitous sex, it's garbage.

The attempt by the country's major garbage disposal firms to buy up Indian reservation land for mega-garbage dumps (Part I, Sept. 26) is an obscene illustration of our system of waste. In this latest twist of the "Manhattan Island" syndrome, it should not pass the notice of Los Angeles residents that such far-flung sites for garbage--outside the state or even outside the country--are likely intended as the destination of garbage produced in the Los Angeles basin. It's an absurd but very possible future for local garbage unless major changes are made in the current "collect and dump" system.

In his native Argentina, Máximo González studied the usual prerequisites for an art degree — drawing and painting — but he didn't find his true métier until he delved into other people's garbage. It began in 1991 when he found pieces of wood from a house about to be torn down, He made wall sculptures from them. Then in 1992 he found a tin box full of old coins on the street. He made an installation with them. "I found money in the garbage," the artist says, his mischievous blue eyes dancing behind oversized glasses.

It's Friday, and this suburb just seven miles from the capital and dangerously close to the epicenter of the Syrian regime's control is in lockdown. Army trucks carrying extra troops trundle through the nearly deserted streets around the central mosque. The hunched green outlines of soldiers can be made out on the tops of tall buildings, following the movement below with the tracer points on their sniper rifles. Down the street, locals position their defenses: flaming barricades made of the week's trash, rocks and garbage cans.

A man suspected of hiding precious artwork stolen from the Paris Museum of Modern Art last year claims that in a panic, he threw the paintings into the garbage. Picasso, Braque, Modigliani, Matisse and Leger paintings stolen in May 2010, and worth about $134 million, may have been dumped in a garbage bin on a Paris street and destroyed with the rest of that day's trash, according to testimony by one of three suspects connected to the theft. The suspect, a 34-year-old watch repairman, was identified only as Jonathan B. by the French weekly Le Journal du Dimanche.

Empty soda bottle? Blue bin. Small wood box? Black bin. Magazine? Blue again. It's become part of life for millions of L.A. residents to sort their trash based on what can be recycled and what can't. How much gets diverted from the landfill gives L.A. some bragging rights: It's at the top of the charts among major cities. More than 450 natural gas-powered trucks make a coordinated effort to divert about 65% of the city's trash from landfills. But that's just for single-family homes.

When Ben Lear's mother first told him about the Great Pacific Garbage Patch — a gigantic gyre of plastic bottles, tires and other debris floating between California and Japan — he was shocked. But it became a creative turning point for Lear, who in 2009 was struggling to find a focus for his senior project at New York University. "Lillian," a folk opera blending acoustic guitar songs with chamber and orchestral music, was a promising yet unshaped story about longing and loss.

Reporting from Big Bear Lake — Boxer Shane Mosley, 39 and coming off two lethargic performances, stared into the video camera unblinkingly and said, "Don't believe the garbage some of these writers are saying. " Only if you didn't watch any of his last 22 rounds — in his unanimous-decision loss to Floyd Mayweather Jr. last May and his sluggish draw against Sergio Mora in September — could you not believe the "garbage. " But it would get even better with Mosley as he conducted a media-day workout Tuesday at his training compound here.

A recent city survey found that garbage pickup is the public's favorite municipal service. No wonder: It's efficient, environment-friendly and, for most, free. Although most apartment and condo dwellers and businesses pay for garbage pickup, residents of single-family homes do not, thanks to the so-called People's Ordinance of 1919. The unusual law was spurred by civic anger over a Los Angeles entrepreneur who was charging to pick up San Diego garbage and then selling it as pig slop, reaping a large profit.

A man walking in Tahrir Square fished his last cigarette out of a pack, dropped the empty box on the ground and kept walking. Passing him, a man in a suit jacket looked back at the litterer with disapproval and picked up the pack himself and deposited it in a side area where trash was being collected. It was a scene Friday that would have been rare in other parts of the Egyptian capital. Despite the thousands of protesters who have made it their home for 12 days, and the even greater numbers who stream in each day, the downtown square that is the epicenter of the anti-government movement is free of giant piles of garbage.