Sky

This woman who was loved so much, that from one lyre more mourning came than from women in mourning; that a whole world was made from mourning, where everything was present once again: forest and valley and road and village, field, river, and animal; and that around this mourning-world, just as around the other earth, a sun and a silent star-filled sky wheeled, a mourning-sky with displaced constellations--: this woman who was loved so much . . .

PHOENIX - Inside an industrial building next to Phoenix Sky Harbor International Airport, about a dozen product scouts meet daily to discuss their search for the next Garden Yeti. This is the headquarters for SkyMall, the in-flight catalog that reaches an estimated 600 million travelers a year via the seat pockets of nearly every domestic flight. The yeti is one of the catalog's all-time bestsellers - more than 10,000 statues since the magazine started 24 years ago. Could the next big hit be a foam beach pillow that can conceal two beers?

Re "Lancaster takes a long view on crime," Aug. 25 Two principles underlie a country's descent into fascism: One, if you don't have anything to hide, you shouldn't resist government invasion of your privacy; and two, the ends justify the means. With its defense of the aerial surveillance of its residents, Lancaster is following the playbook to the letter. Never mind the 4th Amendment or the history of governments abusing this sort of "protection" of their citizens. No, just sit quietly and accept your loss of freedom.

One of the most tired cliches is that so-and-so doesn't actually sell such-and-such; they sell peace of mind. Well, in this case, it's true. The question is whether there is a market for that peace of mind among airline customers. In recent months, two companies - Chicago-based Options Away ( www.optionsaway.com ) and San Francisco-based Level Skies ( www.levelskies.com ) - have begun offering the chance to lock in airfares without committing to a ticket. This sort of service has been bubbling at the industry edges in various incarnations; Kayak ( www.kayak.com )

The flashes and bright lights that were reported across Central and Southern California on Wednesday night likely were long-lasting meteor streams known as the South Taurids, according to the National Weather Service. The Taurids are known for having exceptionally bright meteors. On Wednesday night, people used Twitter to describe what resembled a meteor shower, bright lights or fireballs in the sky. Mary Slosson said she driving eastbound on the 10 Freeway when saw a "flareup" that "looked like something burning up upon entry into atmosphere" over the Culver City area.  The flash of light caused drivers to hit their brakes and swerve to catch a glimpse, Slosson said.

For days, hundreds of rescuers spanned across nine square miles on a rugged mountain east of Seattle, trudging through dense vegetation while calling Kurt Ruppert's name -- all with the hope of finding the 29-year-old sky diver alive. No response came. Authorities now say Ruppert is presumed dead -- maybe a victim of the sharp cold nights, or some kind of problem during the 6,500-foot fall from the helicopter he jumped out of on Thursday. Ruppert was wearing a special winged suit at the time that allows sky divers to glide long distances before deploying a parachute.

Butterfly in the sky I can fly twice as high ... Children of the '80s, this one is for you: The beloved kids' show "Reading Rainbow" and its host LeVar Burton are the latest PBS icons to get the remix treatment, thanks to the efforts of PBS Digital Studios and the Auto-Tune song maker John D. Boswell, a.k.a. Melody Sheep. PBS Digital Studios started its remixing project in June with its most popular (and I'd argue best) video, "Garden of Your Mind," featuring Fred Rogers (i.e., Mister Rogers)

The space rock was about 2 feet in diameter and weighed more than 100 pounds. When it hit the Earth's atmosphere last week, it shone, briefly, 20 times brighter than the moon. NASA's cameras captured the meteor as it zipped over the Southeast United States on Wednesday. In the video above, you can watch as it comes soaring through the sky and explodes in a flash of light. The steady orb of light in the left of the frame is the moon. The meteor entered the Earth's atmosphere over the Georgia-Tennessee border at 12:30 a.m. PST, and shone for about 3 seconds, said Bill Cooke of NASA's meteoroid environment office in an interview with the Los Angeles Times.  It was moving at 56,000 mph before it broke apart at an altitude of 33 miles.

Now this is a hazard worth taking a penalty stroke for. A shark fell from the sky and landed near the 12th tee at the San Juan Hills Golf Club in San Juan Capistrano on Monday. “It was just wriggling around,” Director of Club Operations Melissa McCormack told the Capistrano Dispatch . “Honestly, this is the weirdest thing that's happened here.” The shark, a two-foot long leopard shark, was discovered by an on-duty course marshal, who loaded it onto his golf cart and drove it to the clubhouse, where he put it in a bucket of water.

The most fundamental problem Los Angeles faces is that a huge number of Angelenos can't even afford to live here. Their pay is too low; their rent is too high. Last week, the real estate website Zillow released a survey commissioned by the New York Times that identified the 90 American cities where the median rent exceeded 30% of the median household income. (The 30% figure is the threshold at which rent is generally deemed unaffordable.) The survey ranked those 90 cities by the percentage of their residents' median income devoted to their median rent.

The annual Lyrid meteor shower peaks tonight, and you can watch it live online, right here. Beginning at 5 p.m. PDT, the astronomy website Slooh.com will live-stream video of the shower from one of its telescopes in North America. Each year in mid-April our planet passes through a trail of dust and debris left in the wake of comet Thatcher -- a long period comet that makes a complete orbit around the sun once every 415 years. As the Earth moves through Thatcher's debris stream, tiny bits of dust slam into our atmosphere at about 110,000 mph, creating streaks of light that shoot across the night sky. The Lyrid meteor shower is not the brightest or the biggest of the annual meteor showers, but it is one of the oldest known meteor showers.

INDIO, Calif. - In the sprawl of desert scrub brush and freeway ramps that is this industrial part of Indio, the sun burns brightly in a barren office park. Light and shadows flash off the scorched asphalt, and the landscape is a spare palette of dusty brown, faded green and gray. Inside one tucked-away structure, however, artist Phillip K. Smith III is preparing to paint the sky red. Or pink. Or green, depending. FULL COVERAGE: Coachella 2014 "Welcome to the different sides of my brain," Smith says, leading the way through his studio, which looks like an airplane hangar and is filled with elements of a light installation premiering at the Coachella Valley Music and Arts Festival.

Mars is in opposition tonight, and if you look up any time after nightfall, you can see the red planet shining brighter in the sky than it has in  6½ years.  On April 8, the clockwork of our solar system places the Earth between Mars and the sun, so that Mars is positioned directly opposite the sun in our night sky. The red planet will rise in the eastern sky just as the sun sets in the west, and it will dip below the horizon just as...

Returning to the skies at full force after being grounded by federal budget cuts, the Navy's famed Blue Angels aerial demonstration squad will be the headline act when the inaugural Los Angeles County Air Show kicks off Friday. The air show will be the squadron's first of the 2014 season after spending much of 2013 training at the Navy facility in El Centro, Calif.  The Blue Angels were forced to cancel most of their 2013 season, including dates this fall in San Diego, Ventura and San Francisco,  after  the automatic federal budget cuts known as sequestration took effect.

WASHINGTON - As international efforts to reduce greenhouse gas emissions stall, schemes to slow global warming using fantastical technologies once dismissed as a sideshow are getting serious consideration in Washington. Ships that spew salt into the air to block sunlight. Mirrored satellites designed to bounce solar rays back into space. Massive "reverse" power plants that would suck carbon from the atmosphere. These are among the ideas the National Academy of Sciences has charged a panel of some of the nation's top climate thinkers to investigate.

Re "Pentagon to soon deploy pint-sized but lethal drones," June 11 "Arms-control advocates … worry about what could happen if the drones end up in the hands of terrorists or other hostile forces. " We should worry about what could happen because they have already ended up in our hands. How long will it be before law enforcement begins deploying them at home? How long before they are hovering, unnoticed, outside our windows, with their controllers isolated from the consequences of using them by many blocks of distance and an innocent little hand-held control?

Re "Airline fees sap joy out of flying," Column, Dec. 11 It's amazing that most airlines are perennial money-losers in spite of all their gimmicks to generate more income. Last week, I looked up a round-trip fare from Orange County to Minneapolis on Southwest Airlines that left the same day. The fare was $301; a completely refundable senior fare was $352. By contrast, Bill Knauer, the 76-year-old traveler Lazarus profiled, paid $443 for his non-refundable ticket to Minneapolis on US Airways.

The make-out session during "Adore You. " The dreamy cover of OutKast's "Hey Ya!" And, of course, the pot-leaf leotard. Miley Cyrus provided so much fodder for discussion at the Honda Center stop on her Bangerz tour last week that I didn't have room in my review to address Cyrus' two openers: Sky Ferreira and Icona Pop. No great loss in the case of the latter. Though its performance of "I Love It" was characteristically exuberant, the Swedish duo made even less of an impact on the Honda's gigantic stage than it did in December at the far cozier Fonda Theatre.

It's not the apocalypse. It just looks like that. Every few weeks, bright streaks and colorful, rolling waves appear in the California sky. They can startle those unfamiliar with their source, spurring speculation of aliens or apocalyptic visions. But the secret behind the heavenly artwork is much more mundane: frozen fuel exhaust crystals -- the trails of rocket launches from Vandenberg Air Force Base - combined with nature. Vandenberg, on California's Central Coast between Lompoc and Santa Maria, has been the site of military space projects for more than half a century.