Ideas

Manny Hamelburg, 68, a retired businessman, had fought prostate cancer for years. First, he tried radiation, then a drug with side effects that nearly killed him, and finally Lupron, a drug that blocks production of testosterone, the hormone that can fuel prostate cancer. The cancer disappeared. But life was miserable. Without normal levels of testosterone, Hamelburg says, he had no energy, and "zero libido for seven years. I was like a eunuch. I was chemically castrated. Sex was just hugs."

WASHINGTON - "Super PACs," the free-ranging groups formed to exploit a new era of unbridled campaign spending, have dominated the 2012 presidential race, buoying a succession of Republican candidates and helping propel Mitt Romney to the party's nomination. But the bombs-away mentality threatened to blow up on Romney on Thursday when plans surfaced for an ad blitz reminding voters of President Obama's past ties to the Rev. Jeremiah A. Wright Jr., his controversial former Chicago pastor.

When Pink Floyd first took its concept album "The Wall" to the concert stage more than three decades ago, even lead singer and chief songwriter Roger Waters couldn't imagine a day when rock music might get any bigger. But 32 years later, his magnum opus about the battle between individual freedoms and authoritarian oppression has magnified beyond Waters' own expectations of yore. Now the man who once excoriated the voluminous expansion of the rock concert experience has helped institutionalize it. "I famously hated playing to large numbers of people and playing in stadiums," Waters, 68, said from a tour stop in Austin, Texas, earlier this month.

AGA, Egypt - After an unfriendly journalist was tossed off, Amr Moussa's campaign bus headed north to the Nile Delta, where barefoot boys and peasants greeted him with horns, drums and two dancing horses. Moussa arrived as both novelty and sensation, a front-runner in Egypt's first freely contested presidential election. The former diplomat who once negotiated with world leaders walked roads strewn with hay and spotted with manure, giving speeches on dignity and chatting with elders near herds of sheep and sheds full of broken farm equipment.

washington -- Mitt Romney twice emphasized his unique business background when he and eight other Republican presidential candidates faced off in a debate last week in Iowa. "I've spent the last, as I've told you, 25 years in the private sector," former Massachusetts Gov. Romney declared at one point. "I understand why jobs come and why jobs go. I've done business in 20 countries."

Americans spend upward of 30 hours a month staring at their computer screens, shopping and browsing and seeking. We relish the efficiency, the expanse of information, the anonymity and the freedom. But we are social creatures and as such, can't seem to stop gathering in various online communities to share music or photos of fabulous dinners or handbags. We come together when rumors circle over a Kim Kardashian-Kanye West courtship or the replacement for John Galliano is announced at Dior.

Ideas to steal Some tips used in Priscilla Woolworth's home: Instead of using dryer sheets, add a few drops of lavender essential oil to a wash cloth and toss it in with your drying laundry. Instead of using chemicals to unblock a plugged drain, pour a cup of baking powder down the drain followed by a half-cup of vinegar. Wait 10 minutes, then pour in boiling water from a teakettle. Instead of using a chemical furniture cleaner, dust your wooden pieces with a few drops of olive oil on a rag. Instead of using chemical weed killer on patios and driveways, pour boiling water onto the weed from a teakettle.

America's favorite boy genius, Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg, has announced a new form of messaging. E-mail, the last Internet link to traditional, epistolary, interpersonal communication, is, he said, outmoded. Young people, by which he meant younger than his own 26 years, desired something more nimble for their iPads, mobile phones and other devices. What he proposed was a "social inbox" where users could readily access messages from friends and then sort them ? sort of a cross between instant messaging and Twitter.

When I spent some months in Venice, Italy, years ago, my friend Paolo would show up at dinner parties with prosciutto. I'm not talking about a paper packet of sliced ham but a whole prosciutto di San Daniele, the famous ham from Friuli, cured with the foot on. The host would hand him a glass of Prosecco, he'd pull his well-traveled prosciutto out of the bag and proceed to carve off slices as his contribution to the cicchetti (antipasti) spread. Brilliant. And after, it would go home with him to be trotted out for the next dinner party.

What better way to welcome spring than with lambs, flowers and fluffy white geese? Charlotta Westergren proffers them all in this intriguing but somewhat muddled exhibition at Patrick Painter. Saddled with the ponderous title, “SERE: Survival, Evasion, Resistance, Escape,” taken from a military training program, the show gestures toward many topics -- fecundity, Christianity, torture, war -- but never quite takes a satisfying bite out of any of them. Sheep, geese and dead game, rendered in Westergren's skillful hand, evoke Old Master still lifes, photorealism, and, with their flat backgrounds, Pop art. The lambs in particular give the lie to idealized notions of fertility and rebirth, with umbilical cords dangling and hindquarters splattered with excrement.

TRIVANDRUM, India - R. Padmanathan Nair sits on a plastic chair in the entryway of the Heritage senior home talking about the fellow residents who treat him like family, which is helpful seeing as his own rarely visits. His wife tried to abscond with their valuables, he said, so he gave the house to a niece, who ignored him after she got the property. Now his daughter is the only one who visits the 76-year-old retired teacher here in the capital of the southern state of Kerala, and that's just a few times a year.

Washington Bureau WASHINGTON - In 1988, well-heeled gay activists went to Michael Dukakis' presidential campaign with an offer to raise $1 million for his election effort. The campaign said no, according to the activists. "They turned us down flat because it was gay money," said longtime gay rights advocate David Mixner. Less than a quarter-century later, the gay and lesbian community ranks as one of the most important parts of President Obama's campaign-finance operation.

Patricia McIntosh and her fellow La Puente residents have seen more than their fair share of city turmoil in recent years: Government officials accused of sexual harassment and excessive travel expenses. The threatened loss of municipal insurance. But when McIntosh got wind of a proposal to change the name of her beloved San Gabriel Valley city, the 82-year-old president of the La Puente Valley Historical Society had to speak out. "That's ludicrous," she said. "It'd be like coming in and saying we'd like to change the name of California.

State Sen. Ted Lieu (D-Torrance) is right to be offended by "conversion therapy," the pseudo-psychiatric treatment that purports to talk patients out of being gay and into being straight. There's no medical basis for the treatment, and there's some evidence that it causes harm while failing to do any good. As is so often the case, Lieu and his colleagues in the Legislature reacted to a perceived problem by proposing a bill. Lieu's legislation, SB 1172, which would make it illegal for California psychologists to attempt to convert gay minors, has passed the Senate Judiciary Committee and is working its way through the statehouse.

Willie Robert Middlebrook, a photographer who sought to enlarge public perceptions of the African American community through painterly depictions of its people and places, died Saturday at Brotman Medical Center in Culver City. He was 54. The cause was complications of a stroke suffered last month, said his daughter, Jessica Middlebrook. Middlebrook's death came just a week after the unveiling at the new Expo/Crenshaw Metro station of one of his largest public installations, a series of 24 mosaic panels based on his photographs.

To anyone who does not make a living peddling leadership courses, it might seem unsurprising to be told the whole leadership industry is nonsense. Whoever took seriously all those professors cruising the corporate training circuit promising leadership magic? Of all the dubious subjects chosen by academics, leadership may well be the most dubious. Barbara Kellerman, the James MacGregor Burns lecturer in public leadership at Harvard's John F. Kennedy School of Government, is an academic leadership all-star.

Wow! More than 175,000 submissions have been received by the congressional "super committee" on deficit reduction. Apparently,  Americans -- or quite a few of them, anyway -- have some ideas on how to trim $1.5 trillion from the nation's deficit. Friday is the deadline for formal submissions from House and Senate committees that want to weigh in. House Democrats offered their packet of ideas Thursday, while  committees in the Republican House have largely declined to submit formal recommendations.  So far, 28 recommendations have been offered.

Wanted: television scriptwriter. Job requirement: an Internet connection and a keyboard. No experience necessary. No, seriously. The creators of a new television drama on Current TV have been recruiting thousands of budding scriptwriters to help create each episode of "Bar Karma," which premieres Friday. The show's producers, TV veteran Albie Hecht and renowned video game designer Will Wright, have spent the last year plumbing thousands of ideas from a vast community of visitors to a members-only website.

Americans spend upward of 30 hours a month staring at their computer screens, shopping and browsing and seeking. We relish the efficiency, the expanse of information, the anonymity and the freedom. But we are social creatures and as such, can't seem to stop gathering in various online communities to share music or photos of fabulous dinners or handbags. We come together when rumors circle over a Kim Kardashian-Kanye West courtship or the replacement for John Galliano is announced at Dior.

Seven and a half years ago, a woman approached screenwriter Alex Kurtzman at a party and introduced herself. "She said, 'Hi, I'm your sister,' " Kurtzman said. "I was in shock. " Kurtzman clearly saw his father's features reflected in the woman's face, but here he was at age 30 and he'd never met her. The stunning experience of encountering his half-sister for the first time led to Kurtzman's latest movie and his directorial debut, "People Like Us," which opens June 29. A heavily fictionalized version of his own story, the film stars Chris Pine as Sam, a self-absorbed young man charged with delivering $150,000 of his recently deceased father's money to a sister he never knew he had (played by Elizabeth Banks)