Icarus

The parents of a 15-year-old girl have filed suit against Nintendo, claiming the video game caused an epileptic seizure. Laura Moceri of Mt. Clemons, Mich., was playing the Nintendo game Kid Icarus when she suffered a seizure, said the lawyer representing her and her father, Joseph. The suit filed in Macomb County Circuit Court seeks at least $10,000 in damages.

Sierra Pecheur has always loved bones, so it's fitting that the L.A. artist created an installation evoking famous and infamous collections of human remains. But "DIG: An Imagined Archeo-logism," a show of more than 350 ceramic works at Pasadena's Xiem Gallery, is meant to look more like an archaeological dig than a morbid curiosity. "My intention was to answer the questions: 'What do we want to leave behind? How do we want to be remembered?' " Pecheur says.

Brightness has never seemed as menacing as it does in "Sunshine," the nail-bitingly tense science-fiction thriller that emphasizes both the fearsome power of our friend the sun and how bereft we earthlings would be without its warming rays. "Sunshine" is the latest film from British director Danny Boyle, whose eclectic resume, including "Millions," "Trainspotting," and "28 Days Later," reveals a fierce disinclination to make the same film twice.

Traditional elementary school art classes involved crayons, construction paper, glue and gloppy paint. Teachers called it "fuzzy bunnies," and that's what state legislators had in their gun sights when fiscal crisis hit in the early 1980s: They virtually eliminated arts education. In recent years, though, innovative arts programs have proven to be effective tools for teaching students the thinking skills essential to success in any academic discipline.

The celebration of composer/conductor Gerhard Samuel's 65th birthday was no retiring affair. Taking part in his own birthday tribute, Samuel conducted three of his own works, including a world premiere, for an appreciative gathering in Bing Theater at the County Museum of Art on the latest Monday Evening Concert.

As the social psychologists keep telling us, it's a great advantage for kids if they can have a dad around. What's true in the home proved just as true on the concert stage Thursday night at the Celebrity Theatre in Anaheim. Those talented but wayward Levert boys, Gerald and Sean, tended to mess around when left to their own devices in an aimless and stilted set with their contemporary R&B trio, LeVert.

Zdenek Kopal, an astronomer whose discoveries about neighboring stars called close binaries shook astrophysics, has died of cancer at age 79. Kopal died at his home in Wilmslow in northwest England on Wednesday. Kopal's discovery of how close binaries work "ranks with the most important developments in astrophysics of the 20th Century," astronomer Fritz D. Kahn wrote in the Independent newspaper.