Shrine

Amid a patchwork of Wisconsin farmland half an hour's drive northeast of Green Bay is a modest shrine with a brick chapel, a school and a flow of pilgrims speaking of profound healing power. The power is said to come from the Virgin Mary, who appeared to a Belgian immigrant 151 years ago where the shrine now stands. But all believers had to show for it were years of anecdotes ? and the canes, wheelchairs and crutches left behind in the chapel's crypt by those who claimed they had been healed.

“The Help” was the upset winner Sunday night at the Screen Actors Guild Awards, taking home trophies for Octavia Spencer, Viola Davis and for the ensemble - the equivalent of Oscar's best picture. The ensemble win for the drama about racism in the South in the early 1960s was a surprise. Many thought the honor would go to the black-and-white silent film “The Artist,” which had been on a seemingly unstoppable roll going into the show. Davis accepted on behalf of the cast just moments after she won for outstanding performance by a female actor for playing a domestic who tries to tell the world about the plight of African American servants and their white employers.

A bomb planted on a motorcycle killed five people Monday at a famed Sufi shrine in central Pakistan, the third terrorist attack at one of the country's many such shrines in four months. The latest attack occurred at the Baba Farid shrine in the town of Pakpattan in Punjab province, about 120 miles southwest of the eastern city of Lahore. A crowd had gathered about 6:20 a.m. for early prayers when the bomb exploded, said Shafiq Dogar, a Pakpattan senior administration official. "Two people parked the motorcycle near the eastern gate of the shrine, and the bomb was inside one of two milk cans on the motorcycle," Dogar said.

Bomb blasts targeting Shiite Muslim gatherings Tuesday in two Afghan cities killed at least 59 people and injured 150, a rare outbreak of sectarian violence in a country racked by 10 years of war with Taliban insurgents. A noontime blast in Kabul, the capital, involved a suicide bomber hidden among a throng of Shiite worshipers outside the Abul Fazal Abbas shrine, said Gen. Mohammed Zahir, head of criminal investigations for the Kabul police. That attack killed at least 55 people and injured 134, the Interior Ministry said.

The media are responsible for the decline in attendance at the Shrine Football Classic. When the game was in its heyday, there were feature stories for the week leading up to the game. Now readers don't even know about the game until game day. RAY DESBROW Alhambra

An investigation into whether three Mormon missionaries defaced a Catholic shrine on a butte overlooking San Luis has been dropped after Roman Catholic Bishop Arthur Tafoya urged forgiveness. Costilla County sheriff's investigator Cpl. Scott Powell said that the investigation had just gotten underway. Mormon Church officials earlier issued an apology. "I ask that we as Catholics, who believe in the forgiveness of Christ, will ourselves forgive and pray for the young men who showed such a lack of tolerance and understanding," Tafoya said.

A floating shrine packed with hundreds of worshipers sank Friday during rehearsals for a religious procession. Police said at least 141 people died. Officials were uncertain how many people were aboard the shrine, made of three barges with an altar and crucifix mounted on them. But Mayor Serafin dela Cruz estimated that about 300 people were on board. He said about 90 people were listed as missing.

It rated three paragraphs in my local paper, and I intended to transform them into an object lesson for my teenage daughter, who is closing in on driving age: A 17-year-old girl was in a coma, near death, after the car in which she was riding slammed into a truck parked on a busy street near our home. The driver, uninjured, also was 17. I gestured out my car window as we sped past the street on our way to school. "Now, somebody was not paying attention, not driving carefully," I intoned.

About a dozen homemade bombs exploded at a packed Islamic shrine in eastern Bangladesh, killing at least one man and injuring more than 50 others, police said. The explosions occurred late Friday at Akhaura, east of the capital, Dhaka, as worshipers were taking part in an annual feast, an area police chief said. The reason for the attack was unclear.

The bride was beautiful. The groom was a handsome prince. Two billion people around the world watched the wedding ceremony performed in April in Westminster Abbey. I was one of them. Even though my London flat is around the corner from the abbey, my best view was on TV. Once the big day was over, though, I was prompted to take a more up-close look at my legendary neighbor. I began at the western door, whose twin-towered facade is the postcard image of Westminster Abbey - ironic, because the towers are much newer than the rest of the gothic structure.

MUSIC Put on your saddest pair of black jeans, dye your hair dark, grab your runniest black eyeliner and cry into your morning coffee: Morrissey, the king of melancholy rock, is in town. The beloved, deep-voiced crooner and former frontman of the Smiths will bring his most practiced pout to the stage along with a host of songs off his new greatest hits collection sure to deliver the eager audience straight back to its most awkward high school years. The Shrine Auditorium, 665 W. Jefferson Blvd., L.A. 8 p.m. Sat. $45 to $79.50.

On a perfectly clear afternoon last week, Eames Demetrios, grandson of the pioneering, multitalented designers Charles and Ray Eames, met me at the house and studio in Pacific Palisades that his grandparents built for themselves in the late 1940s. The living room of the boxy, steel-framed house was empty, its contents having been carefully packed up and carted 10 miles east to the Los Angeles County Museum of Art. As part of LACMA's "Living in a Modern Way: California Design 1930-1965," a major show in the Pacific Standard Time series , the items, more than 1,800 in all, have been painstakingly reassembled inside a full-sized replica of the house.

Every Friday, Margarita Jimenez comes to see the virgin in the parking lot, where kids scream, cars honk and the air stinks of exhaust. She turns to the scene of chaos and asks: "Anyone want to pray with me?" No one responds, but she pulls out her rosary beads, bows her head and begins. She knows that in the City of Angels, others share her devotion. Catholics have long created their own sacred spaces here. They build altars in parking lots, chapels in shopping malls, grottos in back alleys and shrines in weed-choked vacant lots.

Two suicide bombers killed at least 42 people at a shrine in central Pakistan on Sunday, the latest in a series of attacks on places of worship linked to sects opposed by militants. The attack occurred at Sakhi Sarwar, a Sufi shrine in a village outside the southern Punjab city of Dera Ghazi Khan. In the past, Sufi shrines have been targeted by the Pakistani Taliban and other militant groups that regard the strain of Islam to be tantamount to heresy. More than 1,000 people had gathered at the shrine when the bombers detonated suicide vests filled with explosives.

This year in Japan, the rites of spring have transformed themselves into the rituals of sorrow. Monday's national holiday marked the vernal equinox, the start of a season enshrined in the nation's classical art and literature as a time of fragile, fleeting beauty. But at this spring's onset, Japanese find themselves gazing upon an unfathomable landscape of death and destruction wrought by earthquake and tsunami. The vernal equinox, like its autumn counterpart, is traditionally associated with reunions of kinfolk and visits to graves of ancestors.

A tobacco-chewing millionaire in khaki work clothes says he's going to make nothing less than the "Eighth Wonder of the World" rise from wind-swept hills near San Francisco. Some folks like the idea; others don't. A few think he's crazy. But it seems they're all taking him seriously.

Ra Paulette can't stop digging. For almost two years now, he has scooped, sanded, brushed and swept away a huge outcropping of sandstone in northern New Mexico, creating a magical, swirling, echoing shrine he calls Windows in the Earth. "It's a living thing. I didn't know what it was going to be when I started. It's almost like being Dr. Frankenstein," he says. The ceilings stretch more than 20 feet high, and the intricate web of small niches and rooms could make up a small house.

As I sat on a high ledge of the 734-year-old Mingalarzedi Temple, looking out over the hundreds of ancient temples around Bagan, I wondered how long it would take a visitor to see them all. Archaeologists say there once were about 5,000 temples, but earthquakes, decay and long-ago looters have destroyed more than half of them. Still, that's a lot of temples to explore in this 16-square-mile archaeological treasure trove. We visited Myanmar in February 2010 and, yes, I did feel a twinge of guilt when booking the trip.

After an incarceration stint and the brick of his rock album "Rebirth," Lil Wayne is trying to reclaim his Greatest Rapper Alive mantle with actual, you know, rapping. Some leaked singles have been well-received, and his delirious, froggy drawl hasn't lost an inch in the clink. This set celebrates his NBA devotion over All-Star weekend. Shrine Expo Center, 655 Jefferson Blvd., L.A. 8 p.m. Fri. $100.