Roommate

Despite its rather tiresome and typographically unwieldy title,ABC's "Don't Trust the B - in Apartment 23" is among the least raunchy of this year's super-sized batch of female-centric comedies. It is also one of the funniest, which should make a point about the tantalizing though too often abusive relationship between shock and humor, and also the comedic value of the word "vagina," which will never be as high as the various slang terms for the word "penis. " (It may just be a syllable thing.)

Mary Killman and Maria Koroleva were synchronized swimming rivals when they began the sport, competing against each other on Northern California club teams. Not much more than a year ago, they were paired together as an American duet. Though the U.S. failed to qualify for the London Olympics as a team, a failure that shocked Killman and Koroleva, they have qualified in the Olympic duet to salvage some success from the U.S. program. And Killman, 20, of Santa Clara, Calif., and Koroleva, 22, a Russian native with U.S. citizenship now living in Concord, Calif., are so determined to be side by side in the pool that they even share an apartment bedroom.

They weren't looking to make a political statement or to be pioneers of gender liberation. Each just wanted a familiar, decent roommate rather than a stranger after their original roommates left to study abroad. That's how Pitzer College sophomores Kayla Eland, female, and Lindon Pronto, male, began sharing a room this semester on Holden Hall's second floor. They are not a couple and neither is gay. They are just compatible roommates in a new, sometimes controversial, dormitory option known as gender-neutral housing that is gaining support at some colleges in California and across the nation.

Despite its rather tiresome and typographically unwieldy title,ABC's "Don't Trust the B - in Apartment 23" is among the least raunchy of this year's super-sized batch of female-centric comedies. It is also one of the funniest, which should make a point about the tantalizing though too often abusive relationship between shock and humor, and also the comedic value of the word "vagina," which will never be as high as the various slang terms for the word "penis. " (It may just be a syllable thing.)

A small-town girl comes to the fictional University of Los Angeles to pursue her dreams of being a fashion designer and encounters a roommate who is clingy to the point of psychotic. Starring Minka Kelly as that starry-eyed newcomer and Leighton Meester as her 1,000-yard-stare nemesis, "The Roommate" is a waste all around of young, attractive actresses, Los Angeles locations and the time of anyone unlucky enough to sit through it. Without tension or suspense, the film is too gloomy and chaste to be a naughty exploitation picture but also too brainless to work as anything more real.

Question: I have rented a three-bedroom unit for two years. About eight months ago, I lost my job and could no longer pay my rent. Rather than be evicted, I found a roommate who now pays half the monthly rent. From the beginning, my roommate has written a separate check for his half of the monthly rent and I write my own check for the other half. I give both checks to the rental office, which is the place designated for payment in my rental agreement. When I took the two checks to the office last week, the new resident manager told me she would not accept the checks.

The Roommate Sony, $28.95; Blu-ray, $34.95 This magnificently awful thriller stars Leighton Meester as a mentally unstable college student who becomes obsessed with her roommate (played by Minka Kelly) and meddles in her life to an increasingly deranged degree. This is a high-camp affair, with ludicrous plot twists, histrionic performances and character motivations that set the women's movement back about 50 years. It's like that old saying: Those who don't know "Single White Female" are doomed to repeat it. Director Christian E. Christiansen attempts to explain himself in a commentary track on the DVD and Blu-ray, which also includes deleted scenes and featurettes.

Dear Amy: My two friends and I looked on Craigslist for a fourth roommate to share rent for the year at our house. We interviewed several people and settled on Jamie. Over time, it has become glaringly apparent that she must have some compulsive disorder because she does at least four loads of laundry a week. She runs the dishwasher daily, regardless of the load. Also, she keeps the thermostat at 78. We are concerned about energy costs. Jamie is extremely touchy, so how can we diplomatically but effectively broach the topic?

An Antelope Valley man who initially was arrested on suspicion of murder in the death of his roommate was released from jail Sunday after detectives determined that he may have acted in self-defense, the Los Angeles County Sheriff's Department reported. Ralph Greathouse, 63, fatally shot his 47-year-old roommate with a .22-caliber rifle during a dispute Saturday night in their desert house about 10 miles east of Llano near 233rd Street and California 18, Sheriff's Department spokeswoman Kathryn Nielsen said.

Peers can influence our behavior in positive and negative ways. A new study finds that female college freshmen who room with heavier women may gain less weight.   The study focused on 144 female college students who were randomly assigned roommates at the start of freshman year. They were asked their height and weight as well as what, if any, weight management activities they were involved with, such as being on a diet, exercising and using weight loss supplements. Researchers found that study participants who roomed with women who weighed more than average actually gained less weight during their freshman year than women who roomed with more slender gals.

In a movie as stylized as Whit Stillman's "Damsels in Distress,"decor is destiny, so it's no accident that the dorm room shared by Violet (Greta Gerwig) and her roommates at a northeastern liberal arts college prominently features the poster for Max Ophüls' maudit masterwork "Lola Montès. " Violet, an amateur self-help guru who practices her questionable theories on her unfortunate classmates, doesn't share much with Ophüls' eponymous heroine, a Scottish dancer who reinvented herself as the Spanish mistress of a Bavarian king.

The trial of a former Rutgers University student accused of cyberbullying his gay roommate -- Tyler Clementi, who later committed suicide  -- began on a dramatic note Friday as the prosecutor called the defendant's actions "mean-spirited" and aimed at humiliating Clementi by exposing his secrets to others. "He and his friend ... viewed live images of Tyler Clementi and his male guest engaging in sexual activity ... kissing with their shirts off," Julia McClure told a packed New Brunswick, N.J., courtroom as Dharun Ravi went on trial.

Opening statements could begin Wednesday in the trial of a former Rutgers University student accused of spying on his gay roommate, Tyler Clementi, who then committed suicide after learning he had been secretly filmed during an encounter with another man in his dorm room. Jury selection in 19-year-old Dharun Ravi's trial began Tuesday in New Brunswick, N.J., where Ravi faces charges of bias intimidation, in addition to invasion of privacy. Because the two bias intimidation charges are considered hate crimes, each carries a potential prison term of 10 years.  Clementi's suicide in September 2010 unveiled what prosecutors say was a plot by Ravi to use a webcam in the dorm room to capture images of Clementi in an intimate encounter with a man and to share them with other students.

The residential matchmakers at Roommates.com aren't engaged in housing discrimination when they heed their clients' preferences for whom they are willing to share their inner sanctum with, a federal appeals court ruled Thursday. "There's no place like home," the U.S. 9th Circuit Court of Appeals stated in defending the home as the most private of places and beyond the government's power to regulate. The ruling overturned a federal judge's decision two years ago that Roommates.com was facilitating discrimination and ordered the service to cease asking clients to state their gender, sexual orientation and whether or not children were among the prospective tenants.

The most effective target in UCLA's passing game the last two weeks has been Joseph Fauria , the 6-foot-8 tight end. Quarterback Kevin Prince has 27 completions in those games, with nine going to Fauria. The combination hooked up twice for touchdowns against Colorado last Saturday — the first touchdown passes Prince has thrown to Fauria since they were teammates at Encino Crespi High. "We figured it out the other day, it was our junior year," said Fauria, whose six touchdown receptions are the most by a UCLA player since Marcedes Lewis in 2005.

Looking shaken and shy, Amanda Knox returned home to Seattle on Tuesday, ending a four-year Italian ordeal that began when her roommate was brutally slain and she was imprisoned for the crime. Appearing before a madhouse of television cameras, jostling reporters and security guards at Seattle-Tacoma airport, the diminutive Knox at first hunched over in a chair, then tearfully spoke to her hometown. "I'm really overwhelmed right now. I was looking down from the airplane, and it seemed like everything wasn't real," she said, her voice quaking.

A sailor who killed his roommate, then took her body to Massachusetts and burned it on a charcoal pyre, pleaded guilty in Virginia Beach to first-degree murder. Authorities said a motive had not been determined. Jarred D. Swartzmiller, 22, faces up to life in prison when he is sentenced July 12. The charred body of fellow sailor Laura Skinner, 21, was found last May in Hatfield, Mass. Swartzmiller surrendered the following day.

The case was a media sensation from the start, with allegations of drug-fueled group sex and a principal suspect whose cherubic face proved to be an irresistible canvas to a world that saw in it images ranging from scheming vamp to innocent ingenue. For four years, that contrast hovered over the fate of Amanda Knox, a 24-year-old American exchange student in Italy, trapped in a foreign legal system and behind bars for the murder of her British roommate. Was she a killer, capable of murdering Meredith Kercher in the pursuit of sexual pleasure?

Tuesday night, two actresses use their considerable talents to freshen up a pair of shows drawn from the "tried-and-true" pile of network programming, one with much more success than the other. Zooey Deschanel joins sister Emily ("Bones") on the Fox lot, starring in Elizabeth Meriwether's "New Girl," a roommate comedy with a surprisingly satisfying twist. After an ugly breakup, Jess (Deschanel) decides she's tired of being the dorky duckling in a bevy of swans — her roommate Cece (Hannah Simone)