Hangover

"Mickey, make me a combo, will ya?" yells Coney Dog owner Mike Binder at a grill cook from his table midway across his bustling West Hollywood restaurant. Then he flashes a broad grin. "I've been waiting my whole life to have a restaurant, just so I could do that. " The combo soon comes out. It's a deluxe Coney dog nestled inside a Detroit loose burger (which is crumbled ground beef as opposed to a patty) in a freshly steamed bun, smothered with chili. "That's the Rolls-Royce of hot dogs, right there," says Binder, who is better known as a comedian and director but whose passion for Detroit-style dogs has consumed him for the last year.

Hard liquor has taken a nose-dive in sales recently. And if the club scene is a barometer, beer and wine might be the next to crash. It's becoming more and more common for clubbies to consume so-called "smart drinks" made from vitamins, amino acids and oxygen, plus lots of hype. The Miss Kitty Koncession girls who stroll the clubs sell them powdered in packets to be mixed with water or fruit juice.

Whether for yourself or your nearest and dearest, the gift of a foreign language can last a lifetime. Here's a look at some language programs and what they offer: Beverly Hills Lingual Institute My memories of high school and college French are mostly negative because I usually felt dimwitted anytime I tried to speak. So I was surprised to find that the Beverly Hills Lingual Institute felt like a social club, where learning a language isn't a chore. The institute offers 20 to 25 languages for all levels of learners, from beginning through advanced.

A Is for Armageddon A Catalogue of Disasters That May Culminate in the End of the World as We Know It Richard Horne Harper: 272 pp., $19.99 paper After reading Richard Horne's "A Is for Armageddon," there's an obvious question to ask this New Year's weekend (besides how to get rid of a doozy of a hangover): Why bother making any resolutions this year? Life on Earth could end tomorrow ? or today, for that matter ? thanks to any of a gallery of horrors served up by the universe or produced by ourselves.

When a woman tries to keep up with a man -- drink for drink -- she's more likely to become intoxicated, and now a University of Missouri-Columbia study has found she's also more likely to have a hangover. "We don't know yet why ... but it may be due to differences between men and women, on average, in body weight, percentage of body water and fat," says lead author Wendy Slutske, associate professor of psychology. Whether women's hangovers are more severe has not yet been determined.

It worked with Mike Tyson in "The Hangover. " But can director Todd Phillips make a celebrity cameo uncomfortably funny with a much more recently controversial figure? The New York Post reported Monday that Mel Gibson will play a Bangkok tattoo artist in "The Hangover 2. " Two people close to the production confirmed to The Times that Gibson ? who's maintained public silence since recordings apparently capturing his violent rants against ex-girlfriend Oksana Grigorieva surfaced last summer ?

President Bush, in an unguarded moment, said Wall Street "got drunk and now it's got a hangover." He made the comment at a political fund-raiser in Houston last week after asking members of the audience to turn off their video cameras. Someone obviously ignored his request and a snippet wound up on a blog Tuesday by Miya Shay of ABC affiliate KTRK-TV in Houston. Bush was in a good mood as he addressed a crowd in a private home. The media were barred from the appearance.

UCLA got no more than a few hours to celebrate its victory over California, going from the 40-point turnaround Thursday night in Berkeley to practicing late Friday morning at Stanford in preparation for today's nationally televised game against the top-ranked Cardinal. But going from 19 points behind in the first half at Cal to a 21-point victory may live on as a confidence boost.

The Trojans spent Friday recovering from a 17-point loss to Stanford, their second Pacific 10 Conference defeat in a row. "Some guys are down," guard Adam Spanich said. "It was tough." So tough that center Brian Scalabrine wondered after the game if the team was playing with enough heart. Spanich harbored no such doubts. "That's [Scalabrine's] opinion," Spanich said. "I'm a senior and I don't have too many games left. I know I played as hard as I could."

The worst day of vacation is not the last day of your trip. It's the one after that. It's the day that you go back to work after 10 days of carefree sloth. It's the day that your spouse or roommate goes back to work and leaves you with the luggage to unpack, the laundry to sort, the mail to decode and the bills, the bills. The Trash, the Phone It's the day that the toilet backs up and the plumber does not want to hear about the sun that was splashing on the ancient baths of Rome.