Quaint

What would it take to get you into an electric car today? Forced by state regulators to sell more zero-emission vehicles, automakers are tripping over each other to offer consumers rock-bottom lease deals. For the first time, electric vehicles are penciling out cheaper than their gas-powered counterparts. Honda joined the price war this week by dropping the lease on its Fit EV from $389 to $259 a month. It threw in collision and vehicle theft coverage, maintenance, roadside assistance - even a charging station at your house.

Around the corner from the bustle and roar of Broadway's Jewelry District in downtown L.A., a quiet alley serves as a respite for locals and tourists. Shops and restaurants with colorful awnings and peeling brick facades present a kitschy, Old World scene, complete with a potbellied chef statue, and a Marilyn Monroe perched in a pink Cadillac. On most days, a group of Armenian men can be spotted hunched over a backgammon board, shrouded in cigarette smoke. But the fate of St. Vincent's Court - a California historical landmark - has been thrown into question after a complaint prompted a city crackdown on outdoor seating.

In her article on Romanian health spas (Feb. 9) Patricia Matthews refers to "Hungarians wearing quaint, old-fashioned dress and carrying bundles of sticks or goods upon their backs." She may consider this quaint, but in fact it reflects the cultural and economic repression to which Hungarians are subjected in Romania. As she mentions, all Romanians lack many basic goods we take for granted, but she may not know that Hungarians are a repressed minority, 10 times worse off than those living in Hungary.

Perhaps Mitt Romney played it right when he was meek and contrite in response to the Washington Post's front-page allegations that he bullied a kid half a century ago in high school. Romney no doubt feels embarrassed by the charges, even if most of us struggle to understand their relevance or gauge their veracity. But the time is coming for Romney to get angry, very angry, with what is increasingly, quaintly called "the mainstream media. " The Post's decision to play up the story as if it were major news - front page, thousands of drably dull self-serious words piled high as if to justify the one buzzy nugget - is an embarrassment.

I really thought that my eyes were playing a Halloween prank! I even put on stronger reading glasses, but the message my eyes conveyed was not false or misread. I refer to the ridiculous few paragraphs written by David Kolpacoff. No wonder my glasses fogged over. Put Ronald Reagan's image on Mt. Rushmore! The ramblings and sometimes nearly sinister writings of the pro-Reagan crowd are just about too much for this "quaint" liberal to comprehend, as well as for most middle-of-the-roaders.

Oxnard City Manager Ed Sotelo announced that the city plans to hire a public information officer. In my quaint way of seeing things, based on conversation and observation, the city will now have an official liar. Good. Now we won't have to guess about what they don't want us to know. MARTIN JONES Oxnard

Thank you for the article "Ganging Up" (Nov. 30) on the wonderful world of 'Skinheads.' These youths need all the publicity you can give them. We will all be eternally grateful to them for their fine artistic endeavors as displayed on the building walls of downtown Huntington Beach. We find their quaint style of dress extremely appealing. We also need to give as much publicity as we can to any organization, no matter how small, that advocates terrorism, racism, violence and hate.

I have no doubt that once there was a day when Keith Jackson spoke a variant of modern English that some of us enjoyed. But who at ABC is so dense that he fails to grasp: That day is gone! How many more times do I have to hear this dinosaur say the "big uglies have hunkered down?" Why do I have to listen to Jackson confuse the 43 with the 37 and call the quarterback a "young un?" After 30 years of this quaint idiocy, haven't I suffered enough? Yeah, I know he's a nice old guy and I wish him no harm, but he can't talk sense.

I read with interest your article "Tourists' Imminent Departure Has Laguna's Walkarounders Reeling." The story focused on the locals celebration of the departure of the summer tourist swarm and quoted one Laguna Beach local making reference to the increased number of tourists year-round as saying, "I wish it was like in the old days where, when Labor Day came, you really got your town back." Some of us remember the Laguna of the "old" days. Here in Seal Beach we still have a bit of that "old" days feeling left, but we are having to fight very hard to save our city from the city government.

As if you didn't know this already, we're coddling criminals in America. By that I don't mean the petty drug dealers, three-strikes necklace-snatchers and other mooks filling up our state prisons; many of them are doing hard time. I'm talking about people like Jeff Skilling. Skilling, you may recall, was a key architect of the rise and fall of the energy and commodities trading firm Enron, which around the beginning of the last decade claimed the trophy for the biggest securities fraud of all time.

Clint Eastwood knows how to set a scene on screen or at Mission Ranch, his strikingly handsome hotel and restaurant in Carmel. The hotel, a historic property, has a multimillion dollar view of the sea and beautiful grounds to match. Magenta bougainvillea spills from balconies, flowering pots decorate porches, huge cypress trees shade buildings and lawns. You'd expect a room to cost $500 a night or more. So how about $120 a night? Hard to believe, especially in a pricey tourist area like Carmel.

A few years ago I got lost in the woods near the eastern border of Belgium. I was looking for Battle of the Bulge sites, and before I knew it I had crossed into Germany. The little road I was on rounded a bend and came into a clearing where I saw, in the valley below, a village on a lake. The sign said "Einruhr. " I stopped for tea in a waterfront cafe, where I watched people board an excursion boat and wished I could join them. But I had to move on. A traveler passes many places that cannot be explored, roads not taken.

The most troubling thing about the Keith Olbermann affair is just how quaint and beside the point the NBC network rule he broke now appears. The MSNBC cable news commentator returned to the air Tuesday night after a two-day suspension without pay for violating an NBC rule against contributing to political candidates without permission. The former sports broadcaster turned rancorous liberal shouter gave a total of $7,200 to three Democratic congressional candidates in the midterm elections.

It's a trade-off, living on Naples. In exchange for inhabiting an island with quaint canals where kayakers, paddlers and opera-singing gondoliers float past million-dollar homes, residents of this Long Beach neighborhood live with the anxiety of knowing that the only thing protecting their property from the ocean is a crumbling sea wall. "If the sea wall fails, we're in real trouble," said Bob Fletcher, a retired lawyer who has experienced the sinking feeling of spotting ocean water seeping under the floorboards of his Spanish-style home on Rivo Alto Canal.

Visitors to Kauai who venture beyond the beach may be rewarded with a few hours in a town where time has slowed, at a Hindu monastery high in the hills, a small museum chronicling the history of Kauai and a garden of the gods. HANAPEPE On a typical day in Hanapepe, a sleepy town on Kauai's south shore, roosters strut across the wide main street, a parrot named Tabasco greets you at an art gallery, and a sign on the door of a boutique explains that the owner has gone to the bank but will return soon.

Re: "Balboa Island still lives large," July 31: Having lived three miles northwest of Balboa for the last 12 years in west Newport Beach, I am quite familiar with the quaintness, the magic and the overall seagoing atmosphere of Balboa Island. I frequent the island occasionally via my bike and a short ferry ride across the bay. Hugo Martin's article sadly but accurately points out that even the well-to-do who spend between $3,000 to $5,000 a week to vacation on the island are looking for ways to budget their money like cooking their own meals rather than eating out. For most of us who can ill afford to stay there, however, the island still welcomes everyone who can get there and enjoy the magic and ocean atmosphere of a user-friendly village.

Urs Fischer is an artist of the big gesture. It's a mixed blessing. Emblematic is a monumental outdoor sculpture in his newly opened, 16-year survey exhibition, which is divided between the Museum of Contemporary Art 's two downtown L.A. buildings. The monolith of cast aluminum, one of a series made over the last seven years, rises 45 feet above a parking lot. Its shape is chunky and abstract, the color a light-absorbent gray against a bright blue sky. TIMELINE: MOCA in flux Move in for a closer look, and soon it's apparent that the form has been blown up from a small lump of casually manipulated clay.

It is a simple shoe, really. A canvas slip-on sneaker with a vulcanized basket-weave sole. It has no laces, no grommets, no fancy air pumps, heart monitors or iPod jacks. But it is the blank canvas upon which three generations have shown their true colors -- solids, two-tones, checks, plaids, stripes, watermelons, winged hearts, Santa skulls and peace signs.

When I planned this trip to Connecticut, I expected to be awash in a sea of blue blazers, pink polo shirts and cream-colored sweaters knotted around the tanned necks of lacrosse players. The upper-crust area I planned to visit, in the picturesque northwestern region of Connecticut, is Preppy Central; it's also a playground and retreat for Oscar de la Renta, Henry Kissinger, Dustin Hoffman, Meryl Streep and Kevin Bacon.

When KGFJ went on the air in 1927, the radio station explained that its call letters stood for "Keeping Good Folks Joyful." Especially good insomniac folks, since it was L.A.'s first 24-hour station. KGFJ stayed on the air at AM (1230) until 1996. Less fortunate were the founders of Orange County's first radio station, whose unwieldy slogan was "KFAW: Kept From Awful Winters."