Plumbing

Like Goldilocks searching for the perfect perch, Dong Yu tested one seat after another in the glitzy showroom. Some were too pricey, others too fussy. Then he found one that was just right. "You've got to try this," he shouted to his wife, to the delight of a fawning saleswoman. "This one's really comfortable. " The seat in question was a $400 toilet made by Japan-based Toto Ltd. Dong and his wife had just bought a 2,200-square-foot apartment in a tony section of China's capital and were prepared to splurge on a pair of eye-catching commodes.

A friend of a man accused of killing and burying his landlady's adult son in the mid-1980s testified Tuesday that she questioned him about a freshly dug patch of dirt in the backyard of the San Marino home. Dana Glad Farrar, who knew Christian Karl Gerhartsreiter as Christopher Chichester, told jurors she asked about the overturned dirt while playing Trivial Pursuit at the home months after the landlady's son and his wife went missing in 1985. "He said he had been having plumbing problems," she testified.

Talk about cruel and unusual punishment. A plumbing problem at the state-of-the-art Twin Towers jail downtown left thousands of inmates with toilets that backed up and couldn't be flushed, authorities said Tuesday. While some inmates complained about serving unnecessarily hard time during the weekend mishap, sheriff's officials said a team of plumbers had worked around the clock to fix the problem at the $373-million facility, which was opened in January.

There's a subtle arc to Jim Gavin's first book, "Middle Men" (Simon & Schuster: 224 pp., $23). Gathering seven stories largely set in Southern California, it opens with a high school basketball player and ends with Marty Costello, a plumbing supply salesman who "averages 50,000 miles per year, vast territories, circles of latitude, Inglewood to Barstow, sailing across SoCal, all day every day. " In between, we meet men of different ages, from Costello's...

When your kitchen sink fills up with waste from the toilet, you usually call a plumber or the landlord. But if you're living in public housing, in one of the poorest parts of Los Angeles and your landlord is the city, you call The Times. At least that's what several residents of Jordan Downs, a south Los Angeles project, did when they were dissatisfied with the city housing authority's response to their complaints about sewage from the toilets backing up into their kitchen sinks.

Vice President Dan Quayle has discussed the possibility that the aged plumbing system at the vice presidential mansion might be linked to Graves' disease, the thyroid ailment suffered by President and Barbara Bush, a published report said. David Beckwith, press aide to Quayle, told the New York Times that Quayle and his wife wondered if the plumbing at the mansion might be involved. The Bushes lived at the vice president's quarters for eight years before moving to the White House.

The plumbing at Riverside General Hospital could not have leaked toxic fumes that overcame an emergency room crew treating a patient in February, authorities said Tuesday. A review of the plumbing system eliminated any possible link between pipes in the hospital and the Feb. 19 incident in which patient Gloria Ramirez died and six doctors, nurses and attendants got sick or passed out after some noticed an ammonia-like smell.

Daniel Rossel, a Culver City plumber, believes that he has a new product that will shake up the plumbing business in America, one that could create a new multimillion-dollar industry and generate hundreds--maybe thousands--of jobs in Southern California. But he is worried that the city of Los Angeles may not give him the opportunity to start his business here.

It is a fact of life that faucets hardly ever begin leaking during normal business hours, when the local plumber is around and not charging overtime on top of his or her usual fee of about $60 an hour. But you don't have to put up with that annoying and water-wasting drip all night or all weekend. In many cases, you can fix a leak yourself. You can even fix one during normal business hours and use the $60 plus parts you would have paid the plumber to help treat yourself to a nice evening out.

Water cutbacks or increased costs got you in a tizzy about how to reduce your household usage? Although some California cities have ordered water cutbacks, others are still in the voluntary stage. But residents of those cities can be sure that mandated reduction of water usage is coming, sooner than later. So what can you do? Sit down and figure out how much you are willing to spend to retrofit your home, condominium or apartment with water-saving devices.

Visionaries. Blake had a special name for them: "Mental Travellers. " Their bodies might be enslaved, but not their minds, which roamed and saw things "cold earth wanderers never knew. " If you consider yourself one of these travelers, you're in good company. Think of the Buddha, Blake himself or Jean-Dominique Bauby ("The Diving Bell and the Butterfly") - mental travelers all. Nostradamus too. Seated on an uncomfortable chair in the upper room of his home in Salon-de-Provence, seeing shapes from the far-off future, the 16th century Frenchman was a mental traveler par excellence.

Question: When I moved into my apartment, I knew the refrigerator was old. One weekend I filled it with food for a family barbecue and it broke down. I was at work all day and didn't realize this until a number of hours later. I called my property manager but it was the weekend and a new unit wasn't installed for two more days. By then, the food was ruined. I have asked the manager to pay the cost of the lost food, but she has refused. I was thinking about deducting the cost from next month's rent, but I don't want to get into trouble.

In his twilight years, Zhang Shan has simplified his daily schedule to the bare essentials: Wake up, eat breakfast, walk to Shuangxing Bathhouse and undress. The bathhouse, on the southern outskirts of the Chinese capital, is a remnant of a time long past when homes here lacked plumbing and all bathing was communal. The bathhouse was also a social gathering point where men flocked to sweat, talk politics and relax. But now, local authorities with an eye toward redevelopment appear intent on demolishing what is believed to be the last traditional public bathhouse in Beijing and the social culture that emanates from it. Zhang, 67, used to commute more than an hour by public bus to fulfill his daily ritual, but two years ago he moved within walking distance.

When it comes to the crime-based fiction that long has played such an important role in the literary life of Los Angeles, we're living through what amounts to a golden age. The dark ecstasies of James Ellroy, Michael Connelly's artful probing of the inner monologue, Joe Wambaugh's explorations of black comedy as morality play, Walter Mosley's blend of empathy and formal ambition and T. Jefferson Parker's propulsive but pitch-perfect works of...

Angry homeowners in rural Calabasas persuaded city leaders early Thursday to delay approval of a strict new building code after charging that neither citizens nor the City Council itself had been given time to read the 134 pages of changes. Residents of Old Topanga Canyon and other mountainous neighborhoods on the southern edge of the upscale town southwest of the San Fernando Valley are already at war with the city after a crackdown on reputedly leaky septic tanks triggered a flurry of citations for alleged zoning violations.

Two Los Angeles city workers accused of defrauding the Department of Water and Power pocketed thousands of dollars by marking up the cost of furniture and other materials delivered to the offices used by Mayor Antonio Villaraigosa's five-member DWP commission, officials said Friday. Over the past two years, the utility obtained new office furniture for the utility's executives, even though there was no money in its budget for such expenditures, said Joe Ramallo, a spokesman for the utility.

Price Pfister Inc., a major plumbing-supplies maker in Pacoima, is apparently hurting from publicity surrounding the lead that its faucets leave in drinking water. Last month the state attorney general filed suit against Price Pfister, and more than 20 other major faucet companies, for selling products that leach too much lead into water. The suit is intended to force manufacturers to stop selling these faucets, or substantially reduce the lead in their products.

A San Diego jury ordered Shell Chemical Co. and two other companies to pay almost $50 million in punitive damages to homeowners and a developer for water damage caused by faulty plumbing pipe that the companies manufactured. The class-action lawsuit was brought by 41 San Diego homeowners and the builder of the Briarwood Pointe project against Shell Chemical Co., the U.S. Brass unit of Eljer Industries Inc. and Hoechst Celanese Corp.

Like Goldilocks searching for the perfect perch, Dong Yu tested one seat after another in the glitzy showroom. Some were too pricey, others too fussy. Then he found one that was just right. "You've got to try this," he shouted to his wife, to the delight of a fawning saleswoman. "This one's really comfortable. " The seat in question was a $400 toilet made by Japan-based Toto Ltd. Dong and his wife had just bought a 2,200-square-foot apartment in a tony section of China's capital and were prepared to splurge on a pair of eye-catching commodes.

Ageneration ago, Southern California water managers thought they had the solution for dealing with the hub of the state's water system -- the magnificent Northern California estuary known as the Sacramento-San Joaquin River Delta. They wanted to build a canal from the delta to the existing aqueduct system that sustains San Joaquin Valley agriculture and Southern California. They were wrong. And now we finally have the chance to do it right. Five draft bills as part of an overall plan have been introduced in the Legislature that could lead to better governance in the delta and wise water management statewide.