Lotus

ONE is British, the other German. The Brit is a 1-ton, mid-engine atomic pixie stripped to the bare metal floor, a car so loud and raw that when its 220-horsepower supercharged four is at -- how to put this delicately? -- full suck, it sounds like an Oreck vacuum cleaner has taken up residence in your helmet. The German is almost exactly a half-ton heavier, a winged, ground-skimming vampire with a 415-hp, 3.6-liter flat six stuck in its keister.

I'VE been publisher of the Fairfield (Iowa) Daily Ledger for more than 15 years. I've seen dozens of reporters from metro dailies and national television try to tell the story about "small town Iowa meets Maharishi TM." Carina Chocano nailed it ["A Lotus Amid the Iowa Corn," Sept. 10]. Unraveling the Fairfield and Maharishi Vedic City story is hard enough for people who live here, let alone a reporter visiting for a few days. You got it. Congratulations. JEFF WILSON Fairfield, Iowa Send letters to Travel, L.A. Times, 202 W. 1st St., L.A., CA 90012; travel@latimes.

WHEN I booked my trip last April to attend a conference on Transcendental Meditation at the Maharishi University of Management in Fairfield, Iowa, I had no idea I would be visiting another country. My airline ticket clearly indicated Cedar Rapids, and from there I would rent a car and drive about two hours to a small town 50 miles from the Mississippi River.

There will be Asian and Pacific Islander artwork, music and food. There will be Chinese dragon boat races and a nighttime fireworks show set to the beat of taiko drummers. All that will be missing from this weekend's Lotus Festival are lotus blossoms. A cooler than normal winter is being blamed for causing lotus plants at Echo Park's lake north of downtown Los Angeles to grow slowly and bloom late this year. "It's not up to me.

IN the summer garden, few plants are as refreshing or riveting as flowers growing in still water, and of those, none is as dramatic as the Asian lotus. These are the blooms that have slowed traffic on the west side of Echo Park Lake for years, casting a spell with fragrant flowers, starry white to rosy pink, and inspiring a Lotus Festival, to be held July 8 and 9 this year. As flora goes, their beauty is obvious. What many gardeners don't realize is that it doesn't take a lake to grow lotus.

Hesitant to get on the 101 after 5 p.m. even though your wife has just gone into labor? Do you coast in neutral down the 405 to save gas? Well, here are some foodies who will actually drive an hour or more to satisfy their cravings. * Smokin Jacks Kansas City BBQ Sometimes I get the jones for real Kansas City-style barbecue and I'll drive up to Smokin Jacks in Carpinteria to gorge on a plate of spareribs, along with a monstrous 28-ounce pork chop doused in spicy apricot sauce.

This tantalizing reference opens with a full-color "Gallery of Waterlilies and Lotuses" -- scores of blossoms, leaves and seedpods in exotic forms and sun-washed hues. There's enough concentrated beauty to make a plant-lover swoon. Next, nearly 500 of the aquatic wonders are described: hardy and tropical, day- and night-blooming, scentless or fragrant, classic and new -- many with colorful names.

The complex relationship that F. Scott Fitzgerald and William Faulkner had with Hollywood has been described on many occasions. Less well known is what happened when P.G. Wodehouse, the English humorist and creator of Jeeves, worked for Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer in the days of Irving Thalberg. From the first days of the "talkies," Wodehouse was always in the thick of the movie business. He was not alone in flirting with the studios. The talkies had triggered a new gold rush.

When Rodolfo Rivademar drove from San Pedro to Echo Park Lake this week, he parked his car, bee-lined across the grass and sat down cross-legged as close as he could to the water's edge. So low to the ground, he couldn't see the downtown skyline, the sprays of the fountain, the paddleboats or the swans. All he saw was all that he'd come to see: lotus after lotus after lotus. No one's sure who brought the first lotuses to the lake, but since the 1920s, they've made a home in its northwest corner.

Sir ISAAC NEWTON was English, as anyone who tasted his cooking could tell you. Catty, egocentric and quite the God-haunted lunatic in his way, Newton was also the greatest scientist before Einstein. One need only ask him, verily. It was Newton who in "Principa" (1687) laid down the law of fast cars -- though for convenience's sake he called it the Second Law of Motion, owing to the fact that fast cars had not yet been invented.