Santa Monica Ca

It's not surprising that with eight arms and inquisitive nature, the two-spotted octopus is pretty handy around its tank at the Santa Monica Pier Aquarium. Still, those reporting for work Thursday at the popular beachfront attraction were caught by surprise when they were greeted by water lapping around the kelp forest display, the shark and ray tank and the rocky reef exhibit.

Two Santa Monica police officers approached a woman as she knelt under a bush one sunny morning near City Hall, "looking for my dead son." Within minutes, Officers Jacob Holloway and Dan Smith had learned her name and age (Gloria Breslin, 55) and phoned her 17-year-old son (alive and well in Venice), who said his mother was a longtime methamphetamine addict.

Just about every tourist-related business in Santa Monica sees dollar signs in Cirque du Soleil's return to a beachfront parking lot near the pier this fall. Everyone, that is, except the company that runs the Pacific Park amusement center. The 2-acre park, with a freshly renovated Ferris wheel and a roller coaster, has emerged as a major draw for the pier, city officials acknowledge. But now, it's squaring off against an even more powerful draw: Cirque du Soleil.

It's the ultimate green light -- actually, a multicolored light and not just still and steady at the end of the West Coast Gatsby pier -- the light at the edge of the country, circling and shifting with a variety of signals, some ambiguous, some seasonal. For many Angelenos the Santa Monica Pier with its Ferris wheel placed near its tip is the region's real beacon of light. Now, the new $1.

Westside voters delivered a somewhat mixed message on development in Tuesday's election, leaving the fate of a hotel-and-condo project in Beverly Hills too close to call and defeating a proposed cap on commercial construction in Santa Monica. In Beverly Hills, supporters and opponents split the vote almost equally on whether to allow expansion of the Beverly Hilton complex. As of Wednesday, the anti-Measure H side had edged out the pro side by 68 votes.

When Lorrai Brown graduated from Hollywood High School, she felt ill prepared to rush into life at a four-year university. "I wanted to come to Santa Monica College first and . . . learn my basics," Brown said. Now in her second year, she hopes to transfer to USC or UCLA once she earns her two-year associate of arts degree. Tens of thousands of students like Brown have gravitated to the school, widely viewed as the crown jewel of the Los Angeles area's community colleges.

THERE IS no state-of-the-art media room, no marble spa bathroom, nor some of the other luxuries one might expect at the home of "High School Musical" creator Bill Borden and modern architect Melinda Gray. Their Santa Monica house is a simple ranch, a 100-foot-long rectangle fronted by a loggia, its seven archways formed of fat bricks salvaged from an old kiln.

Santa Monica has a message for panhandlers on the Third Street Promenade: Stand up, please. If you're going to ask for cheeseburgers or spare change -- or sell cookies (and you know who you are) -- don't do it while resting on one of the public chairs or benches. That goes for you, Mr. Greenpeace Advocate. And you too, little Miss Girl Scout. Having restricted, to some degree, where homeless people can eat and sleep, Santa Monica is zeroing in on panhandlers.

Raising the specter of rampant development and a rising tide of street-choking traffic, a group of Santa Monica residents has begun pressuring friends and neighbors to vote in November for an initiative that would limit commercial construction for 15 years. Predictably, the Residents' Initiative to Fight Traffic, or RIFT, has created a schism in the city, where the desire to maintain the area's small-town scale and charms often conflicts with the need to create jobs and spur economic gains.

The body of a popular Santa Monica High School teacher washed ashore Sunday at a Panamanian beach, three days after a wave swept him away while he waded in shallow water, his mother said. A fisherman found Joey Lutz at Playa Wizard, a beach town in the Bocas del Toro islands in northern Panama, where Lutz had been vacationing. The discovery ended the diminishing hopes of family and friends that he had survived Thursday's freak accident.