Mayhem

T.J. Miller is easy to spot, poolside, at the Hollywood Roosevelt Hotel. On a warm, midweek afternoon, Miller is relaxing between the afternoon's meetings. But even while kicking back, he's hamming it up for this reporter, who has just arrived and is scanning the bustling crowd for him. Amid the twiggy, burgeoning starlets in wispy bikinis and smartly dressed, fedora-clad producer types, the 6-foot-3 Miller stands frozen in midjog — fruity drink in hand, a manic smile on his face and wearing a glaring, red-and-white candy-striped shirt that screams T.G.I.

Beauty Queens A Novel Libba Bray Scholastic: 396 pp., $18.99, ages 13 and up Few events are more intrinsically ridiculous than the sequined spectacle of surgically enhanced females fake-baked to perfection and trotted on stage to one-up one another with vacuous platitudes in the hopes of winning … a tiara. Long derided by feminists as a patriarchal shill to oppress women, beauty pageants are nevertheless fascinating — if only for their comedic value, which bestselling young-adult novelist Libba Bray mines for all it's worth in "Beauty Queens.

Hot on the heels of Coachella, metal music's biggest names — Metallica, Slayer, Megadeth and Anthrax — are set to invade the Empire Polo Club for over seven hours of head-banging mayhem. A sighting of all four acts in the same set is as rare as a snowball's chance in — well, you know where. Empire Polo Club. Ave. 51, Indio. 2 p.m. Sat. $99. http://thebig4festival.com.

You loved him in purple and gold. You missed him when he put on the red, white and black in Miami. You may have lost track when he was the Big Cactus in Phoenix before donning wine and gold in Cleveland, where he was going to "win a ring for the King. " But now . . . green? Et tu, Shaquille? Yes, Shaquille O'Neal is a Boston Celtic, even it it's not the way it was, as a role player in the shadow of the Big Three, bound for the bench as soon as Kendrick Perkins is in shape.

In the dream, you're in the back of a van, asleep and dreaming that you are walking down a long hotel hallway, followed by security operatives. The van, itself pursued by security forces, is run off the road and tips precariously off a bridge. In the dream within the dream, the entire hotel tumbles as the van rolls. Then you wake up to the potential nightmare: You are working on Christopher Nolan's mind-bending "Inception" and have been charged with bringing those images to the screen, using practical ?

She has a bullet in her face, another in her leg and every reason not to trust humans. But when Johannesburg Zoo rhino keeper Alice Masombuka calls her name, the wild black rhino flutters her ears delicately and stands alert, gazing in the direction of the voice. "Hey Phila, Phila! Hey big girl, good girlie. Phila!" says Masombuka, leaning against the fence, her singsong voice floating irresistibly in Johannesburg's damp spring air. Phila takes a few steps, hesitates, stops, changes her mind, takes a few more steps and halts again fearfully.

One minute, Ian Archer is playing an online fantasy game and complaining about being trapped in "jerkwater suburbia. " The next, he wakes up in an unfamiliar dorm room surrounded by three strangers wearing prep-school uniforms. Disoriented and scared, he demands to know, "Where am I?" The teenager (played by Drew Van Acker) has arrived at "Tower Prep," a mysterious academy for teens with special abilities — and the title of a new hourlong live action series premiering Oct. 19 on Cartoon Network.

I'm no Jerry Jones. I'm not even Jerry Seinfeld, whose show I miss very much. A friend reminded me the other day about the episode where George goes to tip a counter guy, but the counter guy doesn't see George drop the tip in the jar. So George reaches in to pull out his dollar — to re-tip, so to speak — at which point the counter guy turns around and assumes George is stealing his tips. Mayhem ensues, as it so often does in real life. Mayhem ensues, on that you can always rely.

I'm talkin' 'bout Machete! He's the federale who's a sex machine to all the chicks, and no friend of the racist whitefolk out to mess with all the murderous, blade-flashing attitude for which he stands. The character, played by the authentic tough guy and character actor Danny Trejo, was introduced in a fake trailer, part of the 2007 Robert Rodriguez/Quentin Tarantino double bill known as "Grindhouse. " Now Rodriguez and Trejo have delivered the movie to go with the trailer. It's outlandishly gory and bluntly political, the latter being more interesting than the former.

A homeless man who went on a crime rampage in downtown Long Beach that included slashing two women's throats was sentenced Monday to 11 life terms and 433 years in prison. Charles Juan Proctor, 45, was convicted this month of 22 counts including attempted murder, kidnapping for robbery and mayhem. He was accused of robbing various Long Beach businesses and one in Hawaiian Gardens for cash ranging from $35 to about $700, said Deputy Dist. Atty. Carol Rose. In the process, Proctor threatened, slashed, stabbed or strangled six female shop owners, according to Rose.