Laziness

A full moon hangs over the inky water as the canoes slip past and send silent ripples marching toward the volcanoes looming in the distance. "Sometimes it's just nice to sit and float," says Dave Huycke, an affable 63-year-old guide whom everyone calls Hiker. My fiancee, Heidi, and I dip our paddles into the warm lake and inch up next to him, letting the languid currents nudge us along in the cool air at 6,000 feet. "It's so quiet here," he says. Indeed it is.

IN RECENT YEARS, college students have been giving some of their professors bad marks in anonymous postings at ratemyprofessors.com. The site has become as much a part of college life as course catalogs, with students consulting it for the inside word on who's hard and who's easy. The professoriate struck back at rateyourstudents.blogspot.com, where, without naming names, academics vented about lazy students, overindulged students, students who have no business being in college.

TELEVISION is by nature a kingdom of the known; it plays upon our desire to return to a familiar place, for familiar fun, week after week, or even day after day, same time, same channel. Yet there is no pleasure quite like that of happening upon a strange program for the very first time, of being for an instant flummoxed, intrigued, disturbed. In such moments television gets a little of its mystery back. So it was when I first stumbled upon "LazyTown."

Re "Making the Rounds" [June 30]: I enjoyed your neighborhood story. It reminded me of when we could and would sit on the porch and visit once it started to cool down for the evening. Now, there are rarely porches, and I'm at a point where I stay indoors with air conditioning as few cool breezes from the ocean reach here. Connie Ramirez Corona

"Bonjour Laziness" is an exhilarating complaint against work. At first it seems strange that a French person, who has a workweek limited to 35 hours and gets five weeks' annual vacation by law, along with numerous religious and secular holidays, would have any complaint against work. But on reflection: who better?

I enjoy David Shaw's Sunday column and generally agree with his year-end rap ["When the Journalism Itself Was the Bad News," Dec. 19], but I disagree with the way he characterizes election coverage. Because we live in California, a safely blue state -- never mind the huge division between coastal and inland precincts -- we were spared the vitriolic and slanderous attacks on Sen. John Kerry's war record by the so-called "Swift Boat Veterans." (As a disclosure, I did not vote for Kerry in the general election.

Can the Simms family teach a new dog old tricks? It's a natural question for the Simms clan, which has deep roots in the Southern California dining scene and last summer sold the Mimi's Cafe chain for a reported $103 million. Scion Chris Simms, a 30-year-old Ivy League grad who initially resisted the lure of the restaurant business, hopes the answer lies in the Lazy Dog Cafe, an elaborate canine-centric eatery in Westminster.

My family used to go to Julian in apple season, and every year brought a new surprise. Once it was an honors system farm where we picked apples and pears and left our money in a basket. Another year, when we came past the prime season, a noncommercial orchard owner invited the kids to pick the remaining fruit on his trees for free -- apples so sweet they tasted candied. But in recent years, my husband, Amnon, and I have found less to love.

One of the little ironies of what lies ahead this weekend is that labor is the last thing anyone wants to think about, especially in the kitchen. What started as a commemoration of the working life is now all about sloth in the name of a send-off for summer. Once you start thinking lazy, there's one sure menu that is not only suited to long, languid days but also symbolizes the season. It doesn't even involve dropping by a hot grill.

Professional athlete, aerobics guru and business mogul Magnus Scheving, founder of a children's entertainment empire in Iceland, has partnered with Nickelodeon in the creation of a new Nick Jr. series, "LazyTown," beginning today.