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Gold is one holiday gift that has kept on giving for the last seven years. The metal's market price, which last month surged above $800 an ounce for the first time in nearly three decades, has risen every year since 2000. It has trounced the U.S. stock market in that period, rocketing 190%, compared with a 26% total return for the Standard & Poor's 500 index.

To the uninitiated, the boysenberry may look like a big, blowzy, underripe blackberry, but it is in fact a noble fruit, as distinct from a common blackberry as a thoroughbred is from a mule. Large, dark purple, juicy and intense, it derives its unique flavor from its complex ancestry: sweetness and floral aroma from its raspberry grandmother, and a winy, feral tang from three native blackberry species. It's a California classic, emblematic of the joys of growing up in the Southland before it succumbed completely to sprawl.

In the rarefied, regimented world of ballroom dancing, an incident in 1982 proved nothing short of a fashion coup: During an international competition, half a dozen of the world's reigning ballroom dancers--queens of the floor--threw down their tutus. For decades they'd been consigned to wear short skirts with layer upon layer of netting that made them look as if they had stick legs and huge hips. They'd had enough.

The first electric motorcycle that promises to deliver near the performance of traditional sport bikes was unveiled in Hollywood. The Brammo Empulse is designed to be "the first viable motorcycle that just happens to be electric," said Brammo Chief Executive Craig Bramscher, whose team started working on the bike in 2010. The company, based in Ashland, Ore., said the Empulse is capable of going at least 100 mph and as far as 121 miles per charge in city riding. It carries a 9.3-kilowatt-hour lithium ion battery pack and liquid-cooled motor.

Comedian Ellen DeGeneres has sold the Ojai home she shared with actress Anne Heche before the couple's breakup last August. The asking price was $2.75 million. DeGeneres has been spending less time in Ojai because of her plans to host the 53rd Primetime Emmy Awards airing Sept. 16 and her return this fall to weekly TV on the new CBS comedy "The Ellen Show." She will star in and serve as executive producer of the show, which is scheduled to run on Fridays.

On the wall in the Pasadena headquarters of the Goldstar ticket service is a concert poster from a decade ago, framed with the will call list showing the names of every Goldstar customer who bought tickets to the show. Both of them. There were just two customers for the first event the fledgling ticket company offered, a dramatic contrast with the 3 million who are now Goldstar members. Many of them are drawn by the 50% discount that Goldstar Events Inc. routinely offers on tickets to rock and pop concerts, plays, traveling circuses, Dodgers and Angels baseball games and other sporting and live entertainment events.

Eddie Feigner, the hard-throwing softball showman who barnstormed for more than 50 years with "The King and His Court" four-man team, has died. He was 81. Feigner, a former Marine known for his trademark crew cut and bulging right arm, died Friday in Huntsville, Ala., from a respiratory ailment related to dementia, said his wife, Anne Marie Feigner.

Google Earth's 3D imagery is now available for the iDevices. Or at least some of them. If you have an iPad 2, an iPhone 4S or the latest iPod touch, then you can enjoy swooping virtually through detailed 3D landscapes, like the one of downtown Los Angeles pictured above. Android users have been able to use this feature since late June, but the 3D maps were just made available to Apple users on Thursday. To create the maps, Google uses chartered planes that snap aerial images of every street and structure in major cities from different angles, The Times reported in early June.  So far, about a dozen cities have received the Google Earth 3D map treatment, including Boulder, Colo.; Boston; Charlotte, N.C.; Los Angeles; Portland, Ore.; the San Francisco Bay Area; and Santa Cruz.

Laughing as they killed, two youths clad in dark ski masks and long black coats fired handguns at will and blithely tossed pipe bombs into a crowd of their terrified classmates Tuesday inside a suburban high school southwest of Denver, littering halls with as many as 23 bodies and wounding at least 25 others.

Whenever Samuel Benitez, who now lives in Portland, Ore., even thinks about his old job as a Los Angeles policeman, he says he starts coughing. And the closer he gets to Los Angeles, the worse the hacking gets. Benitez, 35, claims that the cough is caused by stress from working for the Los Angeles Police Department. Complaining that the cough disabled him, he recently won a lifetime tax-free disability pension of $1,480 a month, plus $51,390 in back benefits.