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When Pink Floyd first took its concept album "The Wall" to the concert stage more than three decades ago, even lead singer and chief songwriter Roger Waters couldn't imagine a day when rock music might get any bigger. But 32 years later, his magnum opus about the battle between individual freedoms and authoritarian oppression has magnified beyond Waters' own expectations of yore. Now the man who once excoriated the voluminous expansion of the rock concert experience has helped institutionalize it. "I famously hated playing to large numbers of people and playing in stadiums," Waters, 68, said from a tour stop in Austin, Texas, earlier this month.

Maurice Sendak's death was announced Tuesday just a few minutes before I was due at the residential foster home and school where I volunteer, teaching writing to abused teenagers. Sendak, the author and illustrator of "In the Night Kitchen," "Where the Wild Things Are"and other children's classics, once told NPR's Terry Gross that as a kid he thought that "adults seemed mostly dreadful. " I suspect the kids who find themselves in our foster care system would agree. I got to the school library before the class arrived, so the librarian and I had a moment to grieve about Sendak.

The biggest home in Los Angeles County is ready for a new nickname: The 56,500-square-foot Manor, dubbed Candyland after owner Candy Spelling, has been sold to another wealthy socialite, British heiress Petra Ecclestone, in an all-cash deal for $85 million. As steep as that price is, it's not a record or even close to what Spelling was asking. The priciest Southland home transaction was the 2000 sale of an 8-acre estate in Bel-Air to financial executive Gary Winnick in a deal that included the trade of other land, for a total value of about $94 million.

Reaching out to a 30,000-strong Christian crowd at Liberty University on Saturday, Mitt Romney delivered the school's commencement address, half congratulating the students, and half delivering campaign remarks. In the speech, Romney reiterated his opposition to gay marriage in the wake of President Obama's announcement of personal support for the issue, and made tacit references to his own Mormon faith. For Romney's full remarks, read below: For the graduates, this moment marks a clear ending and a clear beginning.

"Oh, you mean the guy with the 70-year-old head and the 20-year-old body-builder body? That picture has got to be Photoshopped." Dr. Jeffry Life smiles when I tell him about the general reaction I get about the famous picture of him with his shirt off, the shot that turned a mild-mannered doctor in his mid-60s into a poster boy for super-fit aging and controversial hormone replacement Appearing in medical-clinic ads in airline magazines and...

Auto leasing deals abound these days, with offers that often seem too good to be true. How about a well-equipped Honda Accord for $250 a month with no down payment or any other drive-off fees? Or better yet, $199 a month for a Chevrolet Malibu? So, what's the catch? There isn't any if you know what you're getting into. There are always details. You need top-tier credit to qualify. You pay a penalty if you turn that Honda in with more than 36,000 miles. And the payment is not $250 a month because of that little matter of tax. It is more like $275, depending on where you live.

Rats fed fructose-laced drinking water for six weeks performed more slowly in a maze-navigating task, UCLA researchers have found. (Read this L.A. Times opinion article .) They think the effect is due to changes in the way the brain responds to insulin as a result of exposure to fructose. “Our study shows that a high fructose diet harms the brain as well as the body,” study senior author and UCLA professor Fernando Gomez-Pinilla said in a release about the finding, which was published in the Journal of Physiology (postdoc Rahul Agrawal was first author)

Bob Brickman spent months fighting a ticket he got last fall from a red-light traffic camera at Wilshire and Sepulveda boulevards in West Los Angeles. The 61-year-old from Playa Vista eventually decided to give up the fight and fork over the $476 fine. Now he's regretting paying every penny. City officials this week spotlighted a surprising revelation involving red-light camera tickets: Authorities cannot force violators who simply don't respond to pay them. For a variety of reasons, including the way the law was written, Los Angeles officials say the fines for ticketed motorists are essentially "voluntary" and there are virtually no tangible consequences for those who refuse to pay. The disclosure comes as the city is considering whether to drop the controversial photo enforcement program, with the City Council scheduled to vote on the matter Wednesday.

BEIJING - "Beijing power struggle heralds end of China Communist Party," screams one headline. More sensational headlines purport to reveal how the wife of recently sacked Politburo member Bo Xilai poisoned an Englishman, who may have been her lover. And if that weren't enough, other stories claim that "Bo planned airline crash" and "slept with more than 100 women. " It's payback time for Chinese exiles, especially those with a printing press, television station or just a computer at their disposal.

Hollywood High School keeps its doors open 12 months a year to ease overcrowding. The year-round schedule allows the campus to run hundreds more students through its cramped classrooms. It also chips away at their education. Teachers skip pages of material, assign less homework and give fewer tests because their school year has been slashed by 17 days. Hundreds of pupils take the Stanford 9 exam shortly after returning from an eight-week vacation.

Want to learn more about meat? There are several recent good books. "Whole Beast Butchery" by Ryan Farr with Brigit Binns (Chronicle, $40). Do you really like cutting meat? I mean, really like it? This book, from the owner of San Francisco's 4505 Meats, is packed with very detailed, somewhat graphic photos of that being done. Granted, most of us will never be in a position to break down a whole short loin of beef, but there is a certain reassurance in knowing how it's done.

MINNEAPOLIS — As a reward for last week's no-hitter against the Minnesota Twins, Jered Weaver took part in one of his favorite shows Tuesday night, presenting the top-10 list on CBS' "Late Show with David Letterman. " "I watch Dave before I go to bed when I'm home, so it's pretty cool to be on the show," said Weaver, who filmed the segment at Target Field on Tuesday afternoon. "As soon as you hear Dave in your earpiece, it's a little nerve-racking, but it was fun. I had a lot of time to rehearse.

The reality TV show "Bait Car" is supposed to catch car thieves in the act. Undercover cops park a rigged car on the side of the road, conspicuously leaving the keys inside, while a television crew waits nearby for an unsuspecting passerby to take the bait and steal the car. But in one recent sting filmed in cooperation with the Los Angeles County Sheriff's Department, the lead detective on the case ended up getting busted instead....

President Obama officially launched his re-election campaign with public rallies in Columbus, Ohio, and Richmond, Virginia, on Saturday.With that launch came a re-tooled stump speech which both defended his record in office and laid out the contrast with Republican nominee Mitt Romney. The speeches in both cities were largely the same. Here's a full transcript of his remarks in Columbus, following the acknowledgement of local leaders. OBAMA: "I want to thank so many of our Neighborhood Team Leaders for being here today.  You guys will be the backbone of this campaign.  And I want the rest of you to join a team or become a leader yourself, because we are going to win this thing the old-fashioned way -- door by door, block by block, neighborhood by neighborhood.

WASHINGTON - On the first Friday of every month, at precisely 8:30 a.m., the Bureau of Labor Statistics flicks a switch and the latest clue about the U.S. economy - the jobs report - gets transmitted all over the world. And then the frenzy begins. Politicians in Washington race for the mikes to proclaim that the economy is back, or maybe falling into an abyss. Investors from Brussels to Bangkok win and lose billions. And in American factories, offices and living rooms, you can almost hear a collective groan of dismay or sigh of relief.

Solar choices Re "Standing their sacred ground," April 24 The choice is not between disturbing Native American grave sites or building clean-energy projects; it's between continuing these huge, inefficient, enormously expensive and environmentally destructive boondoggles in the desert or using solar the way it should be used: with panels on every rooftop supplying that building's energy needs. The attempt to fit solar into the portfolio of big energy companies is a doomed strategy that may be good for Southern California Edison's bottom line but is bad for the desert environment and the species that live there.

Age is just a number. But for men, that number says a lot about what's going on in their bodies. Starting at about age 30, men start producing less testosterone, the hormone that helps spark sex drive, build muscle and stoke energy, ambition and aggression. In short, it helps men feel manly. For all of the talk about "male menopause," the loss of testosterone isn't anything like the hormonal nose dive that women go through. Instead of essentially disappearing all at once, testosterone levels usually decline by about 1% every year (although they can drop more dramatically, especially if a man becomes ill)

A few years ago, in a moment I like to think of as inspired, I conceived of my next book. Read in one direction, it would consist of 30 one-page stories; flip it over and there would be 30 one-page essays on the psychology and practice of writing. Corny as it sounds, I even had a title picked out: "This Won't Take but a Minute, Honey." I pitched this project to a number of editors over the ensuing months. Aspiring writers and fans of micro-fiction would go nuts. Members of the iPhone generation would embrace it as a quick and accessible form of literature.

The future of books Re "Reading, no batteries required," Opinion, April 22 Patt Morrison's otherwise intelligent contributions to this newspaper trip up on the romantic notion that some technologies have spiritual value and others do not. Would Johannes Gutenberg's colleagues have pined away for the calligraphic works done by generations of monks? Electronic devices make reading, for some people at least, easier, in addition to offering it in a sleek package that can also claim to be accessible, tactile and beautiful.

Mind-reading robots? It's not as scary as it sounds. Researchers in Switzerland are developing a robot that can respond to human thoughts, and may one day help immobile people better interact with the external world. On Tuesday, scientists from Switzerland's Federal Institute of Technology in Lausanne marked a milestone in this research, when they demonstrated that a partially paralyzed man could control the movements of a 1-foot-tall robot from more than 62 miles away, the Associated Press reported.