Secret Weapon

Perhaps you've asked yourself: Who is Jack? A fast-food executive whose spherical head had an inexplicable run-in with a tub of melting plastic? A clown with a thing for sirloin burgers? Dick Sittig and Patrick Adams have an answer. Jack, the Jack in the Box mascot whose head resembles an upside-down ice cream cone, is what got their business, Secret Weapon Marketing in Santa Monica, off the ground.

With all that has been said about Kris Bryant's prodigious baseball talents — the tape-measure home runs, pitches he shouldn't have been able to hit but did — he is also a scholar-athlete, a highly intelligent young man. It must run in the family. Because Grandpa was certainly no fool. From the time Bryant was 8 or so, college baseball's most feared slugger recalls his grandfather awarding him $20 for every home run. The practice allowed Bryant to accumulate quite a bundle of Jacksons before the rewards stopped during his high school years.

England's Alton Towers is set to unleash the latest salvo in its arsenal of Secret Weapon roller coasters in March 2013 with the addition of a $29-million "world's first" ride aimed squarely at thrill-seekers. PHOTOS: Secret Weapon 7 (SW7) coaster at Alton Towers The United Kingdom theme park recently submitted plans to the local planning district that show a compact track layout with numerous inversions and several subterranean sections. Coaster fans have already converted the submitted plans into highly detailed concept art and animated videos . Alton Park has released few details about the new coaster, codenamed Secret Weapon 7 or SW7 for short, other than to say the two minute and 45 second ride will feature an initial drop of 98 feet and cover more than 3,800 feet of track while topping 50 mph. The custom track layout appears to feature at least eight inversions (with as many as 11, by some accounts)

In a practice gym at the Galen Center, Dewayne Dedmon runs and dunks a basketball as if there were nothing easier in the world. He doesn't seem concerned with 15-foot jump shots either. Dedmon is 7 feet tall, and it would seem he will eventually make a living by staying close to the basket. In the same gym on a Thursday afternoon, the 7-foot-2 Omar Oraby catches a pass with sure hands, takes one step and dunks the ball. The catch, the move, the dunk happen so quickly it would seem as though nothing could stop Oraby from scoring dozens of points or grabbing dozens of rebounds.

On the eighth anniversary of the Sept. 11 terrorist attack, Steven Manfro of Valencia did his best to make a statement that life must go on. He's 16 now and living far away from New York, where he was in 2001. "I was in school," he recalled. "It was pretty traumatic, and the fact it almost killed my father made it worse." His father, Marc, was a New York police officer who became ill in the aftermath of the attack. The family moved months later to Castaic to start a new life.

Letters from NCAA Division I coaches arrive at Ruben Douglas' home two or three times a month. Phone calls from some of the same coaches are taken in Eli Essa's office on a weekly basis. None of this is unusual. Douglas is a standout basketball player for the Bell-Jeff High boys' basketball team. Essa is his coach. But what is a bit unusual is that such recruiting is taking place when Douglas is a sophomore. "I wasn't expecting to get all this attention this early," Douglas said.

What a birthday party! Loreen Gephardt, mother of candidate Gephardt, turned 80 over the weekend and met her son for what the campaign billed as a "birthday party" on the campaign trail. The "party" turned out to be a Gephardt speech about trade and farm policy in front of 135 Democrats in Watertown, S.D. Nobody sang "Happy Birthday." There were some birthday touches, however: balloons in the campaign's red, white and blue colors, and a sheet cake that was cut after the candidate left.

Philadelphia brought out its secret weapon for Wednesday night's showdown against Florida. Anatoli Semenov. Just for good measure, the Flyers also had Eric Lindros. It added up to a 4-2 victory for the Flyers, who got the winning goal from part-timer Semenov. Lindros delivered a clutch score with eight minutes left to nail down the victory at Miami. The victory evened the season series at 2-2-1.

It's not often that wives of Soviet leaders arrive from Moscow and capture the hearts of Parisians, but Raisa Maximovna Gorbachev has proved a sparkling exception. She has been pronounced "elegant" by directors of world-famous Paris fashion houses and declared to be the Kremlin's "secret weapon" in the charm campaign waged by her husband, Mikhail S. Gorbachev, during their four-day trip to France.

Behind two barbed-wire fences on the Port Hueneme naval base lies a secretive brain trust of engineers, scientists and other trouble-shooters who keep the Navy's most sophisticated weaponry prepared for war. At any time, several hundred of these Navy employees--all civilians--are scattered aboard ships throughout the globe to ferret computer glitches or other malfunctions of shipboard guns, radar, missile-guidance controls or launchers.

I am not known for my dish washing skills, which I have to admit is somewhat deliberate. When I was a kid, my mother used to turn dishwashing into a military operation. My sister and I had to don thick blue rubber gloves in order to deal with the boiling hot water. And, of course, being sisters, we'd bicker over who would do what. It was nothing like those scenes in movies - or in the TV drama “ Blue Bloods ,” for that matter, in which siblings peaceably do the dishes together, one washing, one drying, having a chat.

Somebody let the air out of USC football -- literally. A student manager has been relieved of his duties for helping to further deflate a program that once imposed its will on the opposition with broad-daylight sweeps called "Student Body Left" and "Student Body Right. " USC's secret weapon never used to be the eye needle of a tire pump. USC had non-secret weapons named Charles White, Marcus Allen, Ronnie Lott and Anthony Munoz. It was the program of "here's what we're going to do, you try to stop it. " The Trojans have gone from strong-in-the-pocket to pick-pockets.

Arizona State safety Alden Darby got a good look at Damien Thigpen — for a second. Then Thigpen swung out to the left and rocketed upfield. Darby took a step forward and spent the next few seconds in a futile chase. The 65-yard touchdown pass, on UCLA's first play of the second half Saturday, was another reminder not to blink when Thigpen is on the field. Especially if you're covering him. "A linebacker will come out on him, and I start thinking, 'Man, you are not going to win that one,' " UCLA linebacker Jordan Zumwalt said.

England's Alton Towers is set to unleash the latest salvo in its arsenal of Secret Weapon roller coasters in March 2013 with the addition of a $29-million "world's first" ride aimed squarely at thrill-seekers. PHOTOS: Secret Weapon 7 (SW7) coaster at Alton Towers The United Kingdom theme park recently submitted plans to the local planning district that show a compact track layout with numerous inversions and several subterranean sections. Coaster fans have already converted the submitted plans into highly detailed concept art and animated videos . Alton Park has released few details about the new coaster, codenamed Secret Weapon 7 or SW7 for short, other than to say the two minute and 45 second ride will feature an initial drop of 98 feet and cover more than 3,800 feet of track while topping 50 mph. The custom track layout appears to feature at least eight inversions (with as many as 11, by some accounts)

It's Pixar Animation's 25th anniversary, and the studio has kicked back and given a present to itself and its ever-expanding audience with the genially entertaining "Cars 2. " A movie that loves autos and doesn't care who knows it, "Cars 2" is so close to the heart of John Lasseter that he carved out time from being the creative czar of both Pixar and Disney animation to direct it himself, the first time Lasseter's done that since, well, the original...

The guy who plays quarterback at Wide Receiver High could be the school's greatest catch. Gardena Serra was already a small-school power before Conner Preston arrived, stocked with top-flight receivers and a quarterback who took the Cavaliers deep in the playoffs. Enter the widely unknown transfer from Palisades. "When Conner came in, he amped it up," Serra Coach Scott Altenberg said. In two years with Preston at quarterback, the Cavaliers have gone 29-0, won two Southern Section titles and are bidding for a second consecutive state championship bowl victory Saturday at the Home Depot Center.

Rueben Mayes was one of college football's best-kept secrets while playing at Washington State, but now word is getting out about him. Mayes had the biggest game of his rookie season by rushing for 172 yards and 2 touchdowns Sunday as the New Orleans Saints rolled to a 38-7 victory over the Tampa Bay Buccaneers. "Instinct is taking over now," Mayes said after the second-best rushing performance in Saints' history, behind George Rogers' record of 206.

As Forever 21 continues to rocket into the 21st century, competitors are undoubtedly trying to decode the fast-fashion chain's successful formula. Low prices? Trendy merchandise that cycles in and out of stores on a daily basis? Super-size stores modeled after the 86,000-square-foot location that recently opened in Cerritos? Forever 21 has all that, but the real secret weapon may be a couple of women who look as if they're barely out of high school. Linda Chang, 28, and her sister Esther, 23, the Ivy League-educated daughters of Forever 21's Korean American founders Don and Jin Sook Chang, seem to have the stylish eye and marketing savvy to take the $2-billion brand into the future and make it a competitor on a global level with European fast-fashion giants H&M, Mango and Zara.

On the eighth anniversary of the Sept. 11 terrorist attack, Steven Manfro of Valencia did his best to make a statement that life must go on. He's 16 now and living far away from New York, where he was in 2001. "I was in school," he recalled. "It was pretty traumatic, and the fact it almost killed my father made it worse." His father, Marc, was a New York police officer who became ill in the aftermath of the attack. The family moved months later to Castaic to start a new life.