Prognosis

"Progressive" rock has always been as likely to mean pointless self-indulgence as something truly mind-expanding. The newest generation of prog has at least moved away from the worst habits, with Coheed and Cambria discovering the previously unknown nexus of prog, metal and emo.

Flyweight Ruben Contreras continued to fight for his life Sunday in a Los Angeles hospital a day after suffering a serious head injury in a match against Brian Viloria at Staples Center. Contreras, who underwent 2 1/2 hours of surgery at California Hospital Medical Center late Saturday night to relieve pressure caused by bleeding around the brain, remains in critical condition. "He still has some ways to go. He is still in danger for his life right now," said trauma surgeon Dr. David Duarte.

Mountain climbers have Mt. Everest. Fans of America's pastime can journey to Cooperstown to see the Baseball Hall of Fame. For the hard-core video-gamer, there is only one holy place: E3. The Electronic Entertainment Expo (or E3), the world's biggest "interactive entertainment trade show," took over the Los Angeles Convention Center last week, with 70,000 industry professionals, 5,000 products on display and more than 400 exhibitors at what sounded like 400 decibels.

Federal regulators are planning a more measured approach to flu vaccinations for the 2005-06 flu season, telling lawmakers Wednesday it was too early to predict this year's vaccine supply. Progress has been made, they said, in fixing manufacturing problems at Chiron Corp.'s factory in Liverpool, England, where bacterial contamination forced the company to withdraw more than 50 million doses of the vaccine -- almost half the U.S. supply -- from the market last season.

Is you-know-what, that hot place down below, about to freeze over? Sara Oldberg of Tujunga has been wondering ever since "a check for $82 arrived in my mail for an UNsolicited, UNexpected, and UNexplained refund from my HMO." (Editing -- and delight -- hers.) Visitors raiding your fridge: Don't you find it irritating? Well, imagine the feelings of the Laguna Beach resident who, according to the News-Post crime log, "called police about a snake under her refrigerator." In other animal news ...

Now that the Los Angeles County Medical Assn. is doing what a lot of Americans do -- downsizing and moving to smaller quarters -- it's facing the same problem that individuals have: What to do with all this stuff?

I don't know if anyone else has noticed, but the two big health insurance companies that have been telling us they can scarcely face the future without undertaking an $18-billion acquisition deal recently turned in pretty good quarterly reports. Thousand Oaks-based WellPoint Health Networks Inc. reported a rise in profit of 28% for the quarter ended Sept. 30. At its betrothed, Indianapolis-based Anthem Inc., the increase topped 23%.

Bucking a trend toward larger and fewer hospitals in California, two rural Ventura County medical centers have taken different routes to survive as emergency lifelines for their communities. While dozens of small California hospitals closed over the last decade, Ojai Valley Community Hospital and Santa Paula Memorial Hospital both signed deals in October that could ensure their existence for years to come.

For nearly 60 years, Lucien Napoleon Brunswig was Los Angeles' biggest wholesale drug supplier -- dispenser of legitimate medications, patent medicines and headache remedies that he sometimes whipped up himself and sent to the city's drugstores from his downtown headquarters.

An international team of earthquake scientists said the 6.5-magnitude San Simeon earthquake fell within its broad prediction that a significant temblor would hit the region. The prediction has caught the interest of other scientists prominent in the study of earthquakes, although they caution that more work is needed to verify that the technique works.