Simple Plan

Right wing Teemu Selanne has a plan for the Ducks' final 20 games. "We have to find a killer instinct," he said. "We have to find a way to bury teams. We have to lower our goals against. We have to have a solid 60 minutes. We have to be desperate. Everybody has to play up to the level they're supposed to. We need everybody." Sounds simple. Getting it done and rallying for the third playoff berth in the franchise's seven-season history is another matter, however.

T-Mobile introduced its new no-contract Simple Choice Plan this week, with Chief Executive John Legere boldly telling users that if the service is not good, they can drop it after one month of trying it. The new plan includes unlimited talk and text and half a gigabyte of high-speed Internet data for $50 a month. Users can choose to pay an additional $10 for a total of 2.5 GB of high-speed data or $20 for unlimited high-speed usage. Adding a second line costs $30, and each line after that costs $10. Although T-Mobile says there are no contracts, users must either provide a T-Mobile-compatible smartphone or buy one from the company.

Jim Miller gathered his teammates in the Silverdome tunnel before the game and told them it was time to dominate. They did exactly that. And quickly. Miller threw two first-quarter touchdown passes as the Bears rolled to a 24-0 victory over the Detroit Lions on Sunday. "We followed our plan," said Miller, who was 17 for 30 for 252 yards, with two touchdowns and no interceptions. "On offense, defense and special teams, we can dominate like that.

Noel Mazzone, UCLA's new offensive coordinator, never got around to watching game tapes to see what quarterbacks he inherited. No reason, he said. Mazzone had only a few short meet-and-greet conversations with Kevin Prince and Brett Hundley, and even fewer with Richard Brehaut, during his first two months on the job. This is a new era around Westwood, and at first pass it has a laid-back look, right down to Mazzone's T-shirt and goatee. All he's missing is a flannel shirt and Nirvana CD. Then, with the voice of a general, Mazzone paraphrases George Patton: "A simple plan, finely executed today, is better than a perfect plan executed next week.

I have a simple plan to help keep drunks off the road. It's so simple that maybe its been overlooked. Then again, I may have just missed it. Anyway, I am 32 and have been drinking since 16. I never got really drunk until I was old enough to go into a bar. After work, some of us would go into a local bar to have a "couple of beers." There would always be other regulars in there that we knew so it was always like a party atmosphere. What made it worse was the fact that we were tired from working and usually had an empty stomach.

The Kings awoke Thursday, fresh off a 3-0 victory over the Nashville Predators, and found reason to pore over the updated NHL stats, if not frame them. They were no longer dead last in penalty killing. They were tied for last. The Kings held Nashville scoreless on six power-play attempts and moved into a tie for 29th with the Montreal Canadiens.

The Arab summit convening today in Beirut comes at a critical juncture. Either a new path to peace will be found that will stabilize the state system that has been in place for the past half a century or a serious military escalation on the Palestinian-Israeli front will throw the region into new turmoil.

The title of Scott B. Smith's page-turning novel "A Simple Plan," and the smartly condensed script he adapted for director Sam Raimi, describes the solution that a winter hiker comes up with after he and two others happen onto the carcass of a downed single-engine plane, and decide to keep a duffel bag found inside containing more than $4 million in cash. The plan's architect is Hank Mitchell (Bill Paxton), a married, underpaid accountant for a small mill in a depressed Midwestern town.

When James M. Cain published "The Postman Always Rings Twice" in 1934, a critic at the New York Herald Tribune--Franklin Pierce Adams--thought the novel so good he reprinted the first chapter in its entirety. The opening passage of "A Simple Plan" raises hopes of similar success, for while less dramatic and more conventional, it, too, briskly and forcefully locates the narrator in a particular place and time.

The gist of Gov. Jerry Brown's State of the State address — that California is recovering — is hard to absorb, given the continuing high levels of unemployment, the year-to-year multibillion-dollar shortfalls in the state budget, the shuttering of state parks, the looming cuts to schools and the dismantling of human services programs. Yet the numbers, while hardly overwhelming, show that California has slowly, tentatively, turned a corner. What now? Brown lays out a plan that is controversial yet simple: Get the rest of the way over the hump with deeper cuts and with a temporary tax increase; shift more authority for incarceration and education from Sacramento to counties and school districts; fix coming budget problems, most notably public pensions, before they actually become problems; and keep the state on the cutting edge of environmental policy, transportation leadership and statewide opportunity.

The gist of Gov. Jerry Brown's State of the State address — that California is recovering — is hard to absorb, given the continuing high levels of unemployment, the year-to-year multibillion-dollar shortfalls in the state budget, the shuttering of state parks, the looming cuts to schools and the dismantling of human services programs. Yet the numbers, while hardly overwhelming, show that California has slowly, tentatively, turned a corner. What now? Brown lays out a plan that is controversial yet simple: Get the rest of the way over the hump with deeper cuts and with a temporary tax increase; shift more authority for incarceration and education from Sacramento to counties and school districts; fix coming budget problems, most notably public pensions, before they actually become problems; and keep the state on the cutting edge of environmental policy, transportation leadership and statewide opportunity.

One and not done. That means more to USC than just the hope freshman forward DeMar DeRozan will send a stay-in-school message when the season is over. For now, getting to the NCAA tournament is the only thing on the Trojans' to-do list after a 79-75 victory over California in the Pacific 10 Conference tournament Thursday. There were times when USC's NCAA hopes seemed ready to vanish into the Staples Center rafters.

Nothing worked. His fingers felt strange. His swing felt funky. He groped, lurched and looked lost. He swung hard and just knew that this would be the hit that broke his slump. Then he watched, horrified, as another baseball smacked off his bat and curved into an infielder's glove. Since 2002, Chone Figgins has been an Angel in Anaheim. He was doing well, and he was ready. This would be his breakout season. Instead, what he got was a nightmare. First, he hurt his right hand.

You can think of the Montreal band Simple Plan as a rock 'n' roll flight simulator. It provides the sensation of the punk-pop experience without actually taking you anywhere. Nothing wrong with that, really, because Simple Plan is a training apparatus whose purpose is to offer an introduction to the rituals of the rock concert.

THE small cabin cruiser pitches and rolls in 10-foot seas as I steel my stomach for the rest of the ride. It's been more than two hours since we left San Francisco Bay and followed the coastline north. The fog, the swirling surf and the whitish escarpment of Point Reyes merge into a gray murk. Breakers and troughs had battered the boat as it worked through a snarl of sand bars and currents called the Potato Patch.

Noel Mazzone, UCLA's new offensive coordinator, never got around to watching game tapes to see what quarterbacks he inherited. No reason, he said. Mazzone had only a few short meet-and-greet conversations with Kevin Prince and Brett Hundley, and even fewer with Richard Brehaut, during his first two months on the job. This is a new era around Westwood, and at first pass it has a laid-back look, right down to Mazzone's T-shirt and goatee. All he's missing is a flannel shirt and Nirvana CD. Then, with the voice of a general, Mazzone paraphrases George Patton: "A simple plan, finely executed today, is better than a perfect plan executed next week.

The "experts" The Times enlisted for ideas on significantly reducing present and future road traffic (Opinion, April 17) omitted the simplest idea possible, namely make all urban mass transit free. This would quickly reduce the volume of cars on streets and freeways by at least 10%. The economic and health savings because of major reductions in commuting times and pollution should compensate for the less-than-half-percent increase in sales and business taxes needed to compensate for the lost fares.

The debate will rage for another year, without fresh data. The Oakland Athletics did not qualify for the playoffs this year, so the A's cannot offer an on-field rebuttal to criticism that a team cannot win in October on pitching, home runs and walks alone. The criticism comes not just from commentators, but from scouts concerned that the rise in player selection via statistical analysis could make them expendable. The St.