Rain

Spend an evening wandering the sonic fun house that is SoundCloud, an online music- and sound-sharing site that contains some of the world's most active virtual music scenes, and you're likely to land in some strange realms. Roam through the millions of hours and you'll find, for example, the new single "Millions" by Def Jam Records and Kanye West-affiliated rapper Pusha T; a brief recording of an Estonian thunderstorm; an analog synth improv by Boston composer Keith Fullerton Whitman; a group of the DJ mix that got DJ Shadow booted off the decks at a Miami dance club; and a new hip-hop track recorded in the "trap" subgenre featuring a sampled Homer Simpson barking "d'oh!"

New music in Manila is a too-little-looked-at phenomenon. We've been missing something. For a Monday Evening Concerts program, built around the U.S. premieres of works by two Philippine composers, Zipper Concert Hall became, in Jonas Baes' "Patangis-Buwaya," a rain forest. The sounds made by a quartet of low winds and whistles and stones handed out to the audience were so uncannily authentic that all that was said to be missing were the mosquitoes. But the big piece of the night, José Maceda's "Strata," proved an even more peculiar sonic and spiritual wonder.

Re "A parade grows up," Opinion, Jan. 1 While I applaud a Rose Parade with more diversity and variety, I was thrown off when Patt Morrison described the military heroes and astronauts who have served as grand marshals as "lagging behind the culture. " Sure, actors like John Wayne and Roy Rogers had had their best years behind them when they were the marshals, but they were each very accomplished. Would you rather have Kim Kardashian? Despite a few uninspired and perhaps lackluster characters over the years, the Rose Parade deserves a little bit more credit for its choice of personnel.

A deadly winter storm that dropped twisters onto the South on Christmas Day raced across the Northeast on Thursday, bringing with it heavy snowfall, high winds and more canceled flights. Over the last two days, the storm has dropped heavy amounts of snow, sleet or rain on a vast swath of the country. High winds toppled trees, twisters tore up homes and icy roads became death traps. On Thursday morning, the heaviest snow was falling across northern New York and into northern New England, the National Weather Service said.

Watching water stream under parked cars and through the gutters every time it rained made Alice Abler cringe. "What a terrible waste," Abler recalled thinking, pondering all the pollutants being swept down drains and into waterways. Her chance to act came with a new program that provides homeowners with free rain gardens installed in their yards. These shallow depressions surrounded by dirt berms and planted with climate-appropriate flowering plants are designed to hold rainwater from rooftops and paved surfaces and keep it from flowing to streets.

The Hollywood sign was too fogged in for photos. Rain slicked the pink terrazzo stars along the Walk of Fame. And under an umbrella, outside Grauman's Chinese Theatre, Narjeet Beda faced the fact that he was three hours away from flying home to New Delhi without ever enjoying the Southern California sun. "The rain played a spoilsport today," Beda said Friday morning, which was his chance to see the sights after attending an IT conference....

You know what they say: L.A. drivers can't handle the rain. Many motorists didn't disprove the stereotype Thursday as rain slickened roadways and snarled the morning commute. The California Highway Patrol reported more than three times as many accidents (294) between 12:01 a.m. and 4:30 p.m. Thursday than in the same time period a week ago (90), on Thanksgiving. Although there were some morning crashes that shut down area freeways - including a jackknifed big rig on the 5 Freeway in Glendale and a fatal crash on the 134 in Toluca Lake - CHP Officer Ed Jacobs said most were single-car spinouts.

When Thanksgiving Day parade-goers in Manhattan looked into the confetti-filled sky last week, they may have seen more than they bargained for. Nassau County police announced that they are investigating how some of their confidential records including social security numbers and even details about a motorcade for Mitt Romney, then the GOP presidential candidate, ended up as joyous scraps raining from buildings on the Macy's Thanksgiving Day parade....

On a Sunday when the sprinklers accidentally went off at Sun Life Stadium, dousing the Seattle Seahawks and Miami Dolphins, playoff-minded teams all over the NFL were treated to a cold, harsh splash of reality. The New Orleans Saints, who had clawed their way back to .500 after digging an 0-4 hole, lost at home to San Francisco, 31-21, in a rematch of a divisional playoff thriller. The similarly resurgent Tampa Bay Buccaneers, who had won four in a row, put together a solid performance at home but still lost to Atlanta, 24-23.

NEW YORK — The NCAA is investigating a conversation pertaining to UCLA basketball player Shabazz Muhammad that a Memphis, Tenn., attorney said she overheard on an Aug. 7 commuter flight. The attorney, Florence Johnson Raines, said she heard a man who said he was dating "an NCAA attorney" loudly telling people around him that his girlfriend had said Muhammad would never play college basketball this season because he broke rules. Raines emailed a letter to Dennis Thomas, then a member of the NCAA infractions committee, saying she was concerned that what should have been a confidential matter was being discussed in such a way. Muhammad, a highly recruited freshman swingman, was declared ineligible Nov. 9, just hours before UCLA opened the season against Indiana State.