Goods

PORT ST. LUCIE, Fla. - Wearing a 2010 vintage Marco Rubio campaign T-shirt and matching button, Cheryl Griffin spewed frustration that the man she helped win a long-shot conservative bid for Senate is now leading an immigration overhaul. An evening downpour was falling on this coastal town, less a city than a hodgepodge of new and old subdivisions. But the weather did not deter Griffin, a small, skeptical woman, or her husband, Mark, a friendly man twice her size with rain dripping from his straw cowboy hat. The Griffins, who came down from neighboring Fort Pierce, were protesting Rubio's appearance at the annual Republican Party dinner.

With a nod toward Saturday's Kentucky Derby, these are Times staff writer Kevin Baxter's rankings as the teams come out of the clubhouse turn. (Statistics through Friday's game. Last week's rankings in parentheses): Setting the pace 1; BOSTON Trying to go wire to wire behind Buchholz (6-0, 1.01), Ortiz (.465, 15 RBIs in 11 games) (4) 2; TEXAS Yu Darvish (5-1, MLB-best 58 strikeouts) has Rangers riding high in the saddle (1) 3; ST. LOUIS Cards charges though pack to division lead despite losing two closers (3)

MAE WANG, Thailand - As we sat together on a long, narrow raft of bamboo, Alexa Pham dipped her hand into the quickly moving river. "It's the really simple things," she said with a long breath, "that make it beautiful here in Mae Wang. " Two wiry boatmen, steering with long poles, navigated the raft beneath the branches of overhanging trees, around boulders and through bars of late-afternoon sunlight. The men are part of Pham's staff, hired from the hill tribes and Burmese refugee communities of northern Thailand.

Fifty miles north of San Francisco, straddling U.S. Highway 101, sits Santa Rosa, former home of Charles M. Schulz and the gang from "Peanuts. " From the highway, as you boom past at 70 mph, Santa Rosa appears to be just another somewhere on the way to somewhere else. But a short detour east into downtown or west into the wine country quickly proves otherwise. The tab: We spent $163 for a night at the Hotel La Rose, dinner for two at Willi's Wine Bar was $84, including wine, and a lavish picnic from Whole Foods Market came to $43. Gas and incidentals added $100 to the tab. Wine at Bella and Iron Horse vineyards, of course, was extra.

You can go through life like a cool guy hitting a golf ball off a yacht, or you can go through life as a real person. Both have their rewards. Have you seen that Tommy Hilfiger ad of a young, ripped Gatsby hitting the golf ball off the deck? What you don't see is that, in the next instant, a phantom wave sends the golden boy pinwheeling into the drink, where he winds up marrying a mermaid with abandonment issues and living happily never after. Eventually, someone is going to remake the "Incredible Mister Limpet" exactly like that.

So many home cooks are obsessed with making dishes just like the professionals do. They buy hand-forged Japanese chefs knives, seek out $50 bottles of olive oil and spend hours preparing elaborately composed dishes from "The French Laundry Cookbook" or "Eleven Madison Park. " But a lot of them have never even heard of one of the most basic techniques of cooking, one that requires no special equipment or expensive ingredients. In fact, you can probably do it in just a few minutes with what you have in your kitchen right now. It's called glazing vegetables, and it's as fundamental to a cook's repertoire as roasting a chicken.

On the day Frank McCourt surrendered the keys to Dodger Stadium and cashed out, the Dodgers had the best record in the National League. In the year since Mark Walter flashed his cash and Magic Johnson flashed his smile - from May 1 of last year through May 1 of this year - the Dodgers were 83-83. Money can't buy you love, at least in the standings. The Dodgers might be looking up at three teams in the National League West, but "looking up" just might be the best way to describe the state of the franchise.

RATHOLE, Tenn. - Made it. Got a ride back to the hotel Thursday night after the Clippers' collapse, the final 10 yards covered on foot in a dash to the door. It was touch and go, but bravery won out. On Friday, there was daylight here. So I took a break from the Memphis email threats to walk the streets while I could. Right away I noticed someone else looking over his shoulder with every step he was taking. I won't say it was a friendly face, but it was a familiar one: Henry Bibby , the former UCLA great, USC turncoat and now an assistant coach for the Grizzlies.

During the 1960s, when most African nature reserves were being established, lions tended to be born free. But today, freedom doesn't always serve them well. Fifty years ago, human population densities were low in the areas where lions roamed. But since then, the human population in that part of Africa has increased fourfold to fivefold, and demands on land have intensified. The prey that lions rely on has been reduced by poaching and habitat loss, which means that lions living in unfenced preserves roam out into farms and pastures, where they kill livestock - or humans.

Re "Soaking taxpayers, again," Opinion, April 17 Each law that Lloyd Billingsley considers as "soaking taxpayers" is aimed at rectifying some of the many social costs that occur when the notion of some mythical freedom includes destroying the environment and our well-being. The price of a healthy society for all is taxes. Billingsley can deride these taxes if he wishes, but when he says that "hundreds of millions of dollars" spent on mental health care and affordable housing will never be enough for the politicians, you have to wonder where he thinks our social resources should be going.