Obsessions

"Silver Linings Playbook" is rich in life's complications. It will make you laugh, but don't expect it to fit in any snug genre pigeonhole. Dramatic, emotional, even heartbreaking, as well as wickedly funny, it has the gift of going its own way, a complete success from a singular talent. That would be the gifted writer-director David O. Russell, whose triumph with "The Fighter" two years ago marked a return to form after a spate of lean years. Russell, whose early successes include "Three Kings" and "Flirting With Disaster," always brings intensity and passion to the proceedings: We aren't coolly observing life in his films, we are compelled to live it full-bore along with his characters.

Re "Deficit extremists, blind to data, are doing active economic harm," Column, June 12 It is so refreshing to read Michael Hiltzik's explanation of how Congress' ill-timed obsession with deficit reduction actually retards economic growth. Other priorities, especially job creation, deserve much greater emphasis. But Hiltzik makes another valuable point that merits wider discussion: With current interest rates so low, this is an ideal time to start digging ourselves out of our backlog in infrastructure maintenance.

A Canoga Park man arrested on suspicion of stabbing his former girlfriend--a woman he shot in 1991--was described Sunday by family and friends as a family man with a dark obsession with his victim. Ronald Dale Harden, 54, who was released from state prison a month ago, is accused of chasing down and stabbing Diane Pierce-Hamrick, 49, Saturday outside her apartment in the 8200 block of Owensmouth Avenue in Canoga Park, said Los Angeles Police Officer Vic Monroe.

As he tried to ready himself for his anticipated comeback tour, Michael Jackson was "trembling, rambling, obsessing" and eventually needed a mental health evaluation, the singer's tour director wrote in an email just six days before the pop star died. The email from Kenny Ortega was one of several that AEG Live executive Randy Phillips received in the days before Jackson's death that expressed concern over the singer's mental and physical health as the 2009 "This Is It" tour approached.

The most surprising thing about the attack on figure skater Nancy Kerrigan is not how her assailant smuggled a crowbar into Cobo Hall, or how he was able to sneak into the ice-level interview area, or how he was able to escape unimpeded and unidentified, although those definitely make the top five.

"Obsessions" (at the Los Feliz) is a modest, engaging and sensitive independent feature that is impressive in various ways even though it ends unsatisfactorily. The film has no distributor, so there is a possibility that its makers--executive producer Vic Burner, cinematographer-director Jacob Eleasari and his co-writer, Randall Ullmer--could still work out a more satisfying finish. It's a drama of psychological suspense in which a battle of wills develops between a pretty religious fanatic (d.

A Westminster man convicted of sending Olympic champion Katarina Witt obscene and threatening mail was sentenced Monday to more than three years in prison by a federal judge who cited the man's "continuing denial of responsibility" for his acts. Harry Veltman III, 47, a former crop duster, will serve the sentence in a psychiatric hospital. He was convicted March 12 on six counts of sending graphic letters and photos of himself to the German skater in hopes of getting her to marry him.

A man who killed seven people during a 1988 office rampage blamed on unrequited love was convicted Tuesday of first-degree murder and could face the death penalty. Relatives of Richard Farley's victims said they hope he will be sent to the gas chamber. "The death penalty is absolutely what I want to see," said Bob Silva, who drove 100 miles from Solano County nearly every day to attend the trial of the man who killed his brother, Joe Silva. "He should die."

Jerome Bettis was unstoppable. He twisted out of tackles. He plunged over piles of players. He dented the helmets of defenders who stood in his path. He wasn't just the star running back for the Pittsburgh Steelers, he was a tireless touchdown machine. Eventually, however, he had to climb off the couch and return to the real world. That's when he shelved his joystick and gave up the Madden NFL video game for good. "I had to quit cold turkey three years ago," Bettis said.

About a week ago, Mark Richard Hilbun left Kim Springer the final and most frightening of a string of obsessive notes. "I love you," it read. "I'm going to kill us both and take us both to hell." Hilbun, 38, a diagnosed manic-depressive who was fired from his job as a mail carrier last year, was obsessed with Springer, also a mail carrier, for more than a year.

Five days before he died, Michael Jackson was in such a sorry mental state that the director of his ill-fated “This Is It”  concert series said he needed a psychiatric evaluation. Kenny Ortega sent the June 20, 2009, email to Randy Phillips, president and chief executive of AEG Live, which was putting on the 50 London concerts. He wrote “trouble at the front” in the email's subject line.  “I honestly don't think he is ready for this based on the continued physical weakening and deepening emotional state,” Ortega wrote.

Where there is avocado, you will find Los Angeles food blogger Gaby Dalkin. Dalkin is absolutely obsessed with the creamy, luscious avocado, something you already know if you are among her thousands of followers on Twitter, or a regular reader of her blog, What's Gaby Cooking . There, she writes, tweets and experiments about all the ways you can put avocado to delicious use. So it's not surprising that the title of her new cookbook is...

MEXICO CITY - They were tweeting about it, turning it into memes and ogling it in real life along the route that President Obama took from Mexico City's airport to the colonial front gate of the National Palace. Throughout Obama's visit, which ended Friday, the president's super-armored presidential limousine, nicknamed "The Beast" when it was unveiled four years ago, almost stole the show from the cool and cordial display of diplomacy between Obama and Mexican President Enrique Peña Nieto.

Most of us are collectors, whether we display our obsessions in the workplace or hide them in their original boxes at home. We devote hours to researching and buying wine and designer bags, comic books and antique buttons, action figures and shoes. Neil Zevnik is a slave to costume jewelry. Zevnik has been an actor, a personal chef (his client list has included Liz Taylor and Pierce Brosnan) and a marine mammal rescuer, but it's his 21-year-old hobby that has turned into an obsession.

When you write a book that is titled "Breasts: A Natural and Unnatural History," you probably expect a question something like this: What on Earth was the impetus for the work ... and the title? Florence Williams, the winner of the Los Angeles Times Book Prize for science and technology, proved to be ready for the query. During a video chat at the Los Angeles Times Festival of Books on Saturday, she explained that she had been nursing her second child and wondered about toxins in her breast milk.

Despite a diverse range of topics -- Mexican food, the coca plant, the world's most complicated watch and the federal duck stamp art program -- the authors participating in Saturday's Festival of Books panel discussion "A Singular Passion" all described similar experiences when it came to writing an entire book on a single, seemingly niche topic. Among them were the "a ha" moments when it first became apparent that the topic they were researching, writing or talking about deserved a deeper treatment.

A few years ago, a man showed up in San Francisco psychologist Jim Taylor's office with his daughter, a competitive figure skater. "You need to fix her jump," he told Taylor, explaining that his daughter had been struggling to execute a new move on the ice. After meeting with the 15-year-old girl a few times, Taylor says it became clear that it was her father who was the problem.

A New York man who was obsessed with pop singer Janet Jackson and believed he was married to her was sentenced Monday to two years in prison on one count of mailing a threatening communication. Frank Paul Jones, 34, initially was charged with four counts of sending threatening letters, including two to Jackson, one to her boyfriend, Rene Elizondo, and another to director John Singleton, who worked with her on the soon-to-be-released film "Poetic Justice."

MAMMOTH LAKES, Calif. - Howard Sheckter was a painfully shy 10-year-old when he found his calling in a Glendora hailstorm. As lightning and thunder crackled all around him, he looked up and felt chunks of ice bounce off his cheeks. The experience ignited an obsession. FOR THE RECORD: An earlier version of this article misspelled Sheckter's name as Schecter. "My mother's telephone bills were huge because I was calling the weather service 10 times a day," said Sheckter, now 62. "One day, my mother called the operator and asked, 'What number is this?

On a piano keyboard, which mimics the human vocal range, the middle C is the C closest to the center. That's Joseph Skizzen - the protagonist of William H. Gass' long-awaited follow-up to his 1995 masterpiece "The Tunnel" - a middle-of-the-road yet slightly off-center academic who wants nothing but "the chance of an unnoticed life. " But it just might be a stand-in for the author. If Gass' body of work were a keyboard, you'd have his debut novel, "Omensetter's Luck" on one end and of "The Tunnel" at the other.