Richmond

I very much enjoy Jerry Hulse's Travel Tips and especially make note of the tips for England to ensure good accommodation when visiting my home country. However, I was a bit confused to read a Reader Recommendation in Tips for Nov. 8 from Gilbert Conn, as I lived in Richmond, Surrey, for many years and never noticed the proximity of the River Wye! As Ross-on-Wye is many miles from Richmond, perhaps two Reader Recommendations had become condensed. YVONNE WARREN Brea

Construction is set to begin on the first phase of a massive housing development that is part of the city of Irvine's long-awaited Great Park project. A total of 726 single-family homes and detached condominium units are planned for Pavilion Park, which will be the first part of the Great Park Neighborhoods development. This week, eight major home builders bought land in this first offering from master developer FivePoint Communities Inc. Construction of the new homes, priced from the high $600,000 range to $1.2 million, is expected to begin this month.

Ten years ago, a spunky sprite with a 1,000-watt smile and a girl-next-door name, Mary Lou Retton, vaulted from the Los Angeles Olympics across television screens into the homes of millions of Americans who fell in love with her. Sweet 16, 4-feet-9, a red-white-and-blue, stars-and-stripes ball spinning through the air, she made an entire country cheer on Aug. 3, 1984, when she landed firmly on her feet and flung up her arms, absolutely sure of a perfect 10 that gave her the first U.S.

In his short life, former ABC television anchorman Max Robinson admitted having many problems: alcohol abuse, racial struggles, career disaster and three failed marriages. But he never publicly acknowledged having the disease that would end his life. Yet in his death at 49, Robinson had his family reveal that he had AIDS so that others in the black community would be alerted to the dangers of the disease and the need for treatment and education.

Restaurant DESIGN is as much a part of dining out in L.A. as the food. And the attention to detail doesn't stop with coordinating porcelain and flat wear, chairs and wall color, vases and design objects. Servers' uniforms have become an extension of a restaurant's identity, a way to heighten brand awareness and make the experience and environment as memorable as possible.

If you don't believe in souls or an afterlife, then a corpse is just a body - potentially a teaching tool, a source of life-saving organs, but little more. In 1829, taking such thinking to the extreme, a radical British pamphleteer named Peter Baume specified that after his death, his skeleton was to be donated for medical education or, failing that, his bones made into knife handles and buttons; his skin was to be tanned to make a chair cover, and his soft body parts used as fertilizer for roses.

Roger Grunwald's acting career has taken him to off-Broadway stages and the set of the soap opera "One Life to Live. " He certainly has reason to smile. But in all seven of his professional headshots, his lips are sealed shut. "Being in the performing arts, a crooked smile doesn't do you any good," says the middle-aged New York City actor. Most distressing was a particular tooth that protruded from his lower jaw. So about three years ago, he went to an orthodontist and got outfitted with braces.

Archaeologist Deanna Jones couldn't believe her eyes as she hunched over a shallow pit dug next to railroad tracks in front of the San Gabriel Mission. She was inside the recently excavated foundation of a long-gone adobe building that once stood in the mission's 40-acre Bishop's Garden, first cultivated in the early 1780s. As Jones scooped a trowel full of dirt from what had been the adobe floor, a silvery glint caught her attention. "It looked like a piece of scrap metal at first," said Jones, a 29-year-old Van Nuys resident who has worked four years as a professional archaeologist.