Mystery

Maintaining privacy in the digital age is no easy feat ? particularly if you are the subject of a movie. And yet Angela Wesselman-Pierce, the woman who holds the key to the mystery at the center of "Catfish," has remained a quiet enigma for more than eight months since the movie became a sensation at the Sundance Film Festival. She's avoided requests for interviews about the film, which is being marketed as a documentary thriller and has taken in more than $1.6 million at the box office since its Sept.

What could possibly cause rocks picked up at a popular state beach to ignite in the pocket of a woman's cargo shorts? To scientists, the answer is - well, there is no clear answer. The case of an Orange County woman severely burned after rocks collected last weekend from San Onofre State Beach ignited in her pocket has puzzled scientists, who say they've never seen anything like it and aren't quite sure how it happened. "It's pretty implausible," said Larry Overman, a professor of chemistry at UC Irvine.

A few charred $20 bills in the forest, a bunch of unidentified fingerprints and a few witnesses' descriptions are among the tantalizing bits of evidence left by elusive airline hijacker D.B. Cooper, who parachuted out of a Boeing 727 with a $200,000 ransom in 1971 and vanished. The mysterious Cooper became a legend for outsmarting corporate America and evading the FBI for 40 years. But now investigators are pursuing a new lead that might put the case to rest — or not. The FBI's Seattle office is looking into a tip from a witness who contends the hijacker died 10 years ago, FBI Special Agent Frederick Gutt said Monday.

In"Lovely Molly,"a young woman moves with her new husband back into her family's empty old house. She immediately begins behaving strangely, as if the house itself exerts some mysterious power - whether she is being overtaken by bad memories and old habits or something supernatural is initially unclear. If the story sounds somewhat similar to the recent Elizabeth Olsen vehicle"Silent House,"it is, and unfortunately, "Lovely Molly" and its star, newcomer Gretchen Lodge, only suffer in comparison.

If you buy something from online auctioneer Property Room, you don't have to wonder if it was stolen. That's because it probably was. Property Room, started by a former police detective, gets its items from law enforcement property rooms nationwide. Most of its inventory of jewelry, bicycles, computers, furniture, tools, car stereos, cameras, sports equipment, portable music players and things that could best be categorized under miscellaneous -- or bizarre -- was seized from crooks.

Nobody in wealthy Benedict Canyon can say for sure what his name is or where he's from, but the owner of a pricey 5.2-acre property on Tower Lane is fast becoming persona non grata among an exclusive club of Los Angeles homeowners. In a neighborhood whose residents include Bruce Springsteen, Jay Leno, Michael Ovitz and David Beckham, this mystery landowner is preparing to build an 85,000-square-foot family compound, fit for royalty. The proposed complex is an eclectic mix of European architecture in the coveted 90210 ZIP Code.

The Coen brothers' new movie, "A Serious Man," opens with a piece of advice from medieval French rabbi Rashi: "Receive with simplicity everything that happens to you." Fast forward to the film's long-suffering hero, physics professor Larry Gopnik, who would really like to heed those words, but after entering a world of pain and enduring a series of misfortunes that would put Job to shame, Larry needs answers, not proverbs. What did he do to deserve all this? And why does he seem so suddenly alone in a cruel, cruel world?

In"Lovely Molly,"a young woman moves with her new husband back into her family's empty old house. She immediately begins behaving strangely, as if the house itself exerts some mysterious power - whether she is being overtaken by bad memories and old habits or something supernatural is initially unclear. If the story sounds somewhat similar to the recent Elizabeth Olsen vehicle"Silent House,"it is, and unfortunately, "Lovely Molly" and its star, newcomer Gretchen Lodge, only suffer in comparison.

In 1994, a young Philadelphia man named Justin Duerr began to notice the series of tile mosaics appliquéd to the pavement all over town. The tiles contained a message that seemed to draw a line from historian Arnold Toynbee to Stanley Kubrick's "2001," while expressing the notion that humans could be resurrected. And something about Jupiter. Duerr began researching and investigating the origins of the strange tiles, meeting other curious folks who wanted to know who or what was behind these odd pieces and whether they were some sort of naive art project, the work of a troubled mind or a genuine message from the cosmos.

MOVIES One of the great films of noir intrigue, "The Mystery of the Double Cross" finds a man bound to inherit a fortune when a mysterious warning to, yep, avoid the "double cross" proves prescient after a woman bearing the mark enters his life. Coincidence or harbinger of doom? Either way, it's a must-see engagement of the episodic series in 8mm format. Egyptian Theatre, 6712 Hollywood Blvd., L.A. 7:30 p.m. Fri.-Sat. american cinematheque.com.

MOVIES One of the great films of noir intrigue, "The Mystery of the Double Cross" finds a man bound to inherit a fortune when a mysterious warning to, yep, avoid the "double cross" proves prescient after a woman bearing the mark enters his life. Coincidence or harbinger of doom? Either way, it's a must-see engagement of the episodic series in 8mm format. Egyptian Theatre, 6712 Hollywood Blvd., L.A. 7:30 p.m. Fri.-Sat. american cinematheque.com.

On Jan. 31, alarms alerted the control room at the San Onofre Nuclear Generating Station that a radiation leak was occurring in one of the nearly 39,000 tubes that carry radioactive water in the steam generators. That failure led to an unparalleled shutdown of one of California's two nuclear power plants and triggered more than three months of detective work by Southern California Edison officials and federal nuclear regulators that has yet to determine the problem's root cause or when San Onofre will reopen.

Thanks to a new method of modeling earthquakes, scientists may now understand why the Parkfield segment of the San Andreas fault - a carefully studied region known for producing moderate temblors every 20 years or so - has been behaving unexpectedly since around the time Ronald Reagan was in the White House. Taking data collected by sensors on the ground and in space and combining them with observations from laboratory physics experiments, Caltech researchers conducted a computer simulation of tectonic events at Parkfield and discovered that a series of small quakes there may have staved off a larger shaker that geologists predicted would occur in the late 1980s or early 1990s.

An environmental crusader known as "Mr. Malibu" has apologized to Pepperdine University and retracted accusations that the school is to blame for effluent flowing down Marie Canyon Creek and into the Pacific Ocean. In exchange, the university has agreed to drop a lawsuit against activist Cary ONeal that alleged libel and "invasion of privacy by placing person in a false light in public eye. " In two videos he posted online, ONeal claimed that a foamy substance pooling on a Malibu beach was sewage released by Pepperdine.

'Masterpiece Mystery! Sherlock, Series II: A Scandal in Belgravia' Where: KOCE When: 9 p.m. Sunday Rating: TV-14 (may be unsuitable for children under the age of 14)

For those in preemptive mourning for Fox's Sherlock Holmes-inspired "House,"which comes to an end later this month, a bit of comfort: Season 2 of "Sherlock,"the BBC's flirty but still faithful contemporary rendition of the unforgettable detective, begins on PBS' "Masterpiece Mystery" Sunday night. As reimagined by British TV maestro Steven Moffat ("Doctor Who," "Jekyll") and Mark Gatiss ("Doctor Who"), this Sherlock, played with aquamarine and alabaster radiance by Benedict Cumberbatch, is a London consulting detective as brilliant, icy and occasionally preening as the original.

Until Saturday morning, Jared Lee Loughner was a sometime community college student who had attended high school in northwest Tucson, lived with his parents there in a quiet, working-class neighborhood of ranch homes and had recently posted several rambling messages on YouTube. Now, the 22-year-old is in police custody, the chief suspect in a shooting rampage 10 minutes from his house that left six dead and 12 wounded, including U.S. Rep. Gabrielle Giffords (D-Ariz.), the apparent target of the attack, who remained in critical condition.

He spent his life trying to determine how people died. But now his colleagues are searching for answers after he died under mysterious circumstances. Los Angeles police detectives, with the help of the Los Angeles County coroner's office, are investigating the death of Michael Cormier, a coroner's technician. Officials said he might have died of poisoning, but they have not provided further information. Cormier, 61, died last week after being taken to Providence St. Joseph Medical Center in Burbank from his North Hollywood home.

In the worlds of myth and literature, plenty of figures have had their "lost" years. There are, to name a few, Sherlock Holmes (after the plunge from Reichenbach Falls), the wizard Merlin (was he imprisoned in a cave or was he killed?), Shakespeare (what was his education and upbringing?) and Jesus (did he or didn't he go to India as a child?). What did they do during those years? How did they live? Such questions have lured many writers into producing books that try to fill in these tantalizing gaps with definitive evidence.