Steep

Happy Hour had drawn too quickly to a close, and my wife and I were wandering through Wailea Shopping Village, arguing over whether it was the Big Dipper or the Little Dipper up there among the thousands of stars in the Maui sky, when suddenly I saw something in a store window that took my breath away: It was the shirt Montgomery Clift wore in "From Here to Eternity." I rushed into Sgt. Leisure's Cabana just as Ann Rinker was about to shut down for the night. "A replica, of course," she said.

The discovery that real estate agent Matthew Greenberg made when he stepped inside a Mount Washington cottage will put the Los Angeles Public Library on the map. Stashed everywhere in the 948-square-foot tear-down were maps. Tens of thousands of maps. Fold-out street maps were stuffed in file cabinets, crammed into cardboard boxes, lined up on closet shelves and jammed into old dairy crates. Wall-size roll-up maps once familiar to schoolchildren were stacked in corners. Old globes were lined in rows atop bookshelves also filled with maps and atlases.

The number of violent crimes involving guns has plummeted in the last two decades, but more than half of Americans think the opposite is true, according to reports released Tuesday. Killings, assaults, robberies and other crimes involving guns have dropped since their peak in the mid-1990s, the federal Bureau of Justice Statistics reported. The rate of killings by gun has been cut nearly in half, according to another analysis of the same data by the Pew Research Center. The rate of other violent gun crimes fell even more sharply, by 75%, paralleling a broader drop in violent crimes committed with or without guns.

With a burst of shimmering confetti and streamers, Cirque du Soleil's "Iris" bade a festive "au revoir" to Los Angeles on Saturday at the Dolby Theatre. The show, which opened in 2011 and is believed to have cost close to $100 million to produce, was supposed to run for at least 10 years in Hollywood but closed much earlier than expected after it had failed to generate sufficient box-office interest. Saturday evening's final performance of "Iris" managed to achieve what the show struggled to do all along -- playing to a packed house.

"The Kriegers have not been able to successfully implement Cesar's technique." There it is in black and white for all to see, on page 299 of the Dog Whisperer's "Ultimate Episode Guide." The sad truth. Our episode (titled "Raw Cotton") first aired more than two years ago. To this day, whenever I see a rerun, I cringe at the closing scene: me, boasting about Cesar Millan's method being "idiot simple." Apparently, not simple enough for this idiot.

I often lament have left Los Angeles, my hometown, to live in San Francisco, especially now that I have a son. After Kai was born, we found ourselves making the trek up and down Interstate 5 at least once a month. On our third not-so-pleasant jaunt past the sea of cows, Kai began screaming and would not stop. Yearning for somewhere fabulous to stop so we could cuddle him without the stench of manure and diesel, we vowed to start taking the nice way. Three years later (after chalking up more than 100,000 miles)

From the veranda of his house, Bruce Gleason looks down, down, down onto a swath of the San Fernando Valley floor. Daylight is departing, and a rainy mist has furred the vista. A river of car headlamps on Van Nuys Boulevard glows more brilliantly by the moment. "The view. Each night when I come home, I'm re-charmed by it," he says. "Life is in session down there--150,000 people going about their life."

When Medicare disclosed average charges from thousands of U.S. hospitals for 100 common procedures last week, only one hospital was near the top in every category: Cedars-Sinai Medical Center in Los Angeles. Be it a cardiac stent, a hip replacement or a pacemaker, Cedars-Sinai's list prices for these routine treatments ranked among the top 5% in the country. For example, the average charge at Cedars-Sinai for gallbladder surgery with complications was $153,302 in 2011 compared with the U.S. median charge of $42,380, government data show.

In a strong expression of support for building the next generation of military jets at Palmdale's Plant 42, California's entire congressional delegation has signed a letter asking the Department of Defense to compare production costs there with costs at any other facility. The contract to build the Joint Strike Fighter could be worth up to $750 billion over 25 years and is expected to generate thousands of new jobs in the region where it is built. The Oct.

Electric bikes are slowly picking up speed. Already booming in Europe and Japan, these bike-path legal bicycles combine a normal drivetrain with an electric motor, which is usually embedded in the rear hub. You decide how much to juice your pedaling with the motor, allowing you to fly up steep hills or commute to work without huffing and puffing, then push it manually when you want a workout. There are two types of electric bikes: a "pedal-assist" that kicks in only while you are pushing the pedals, and a throttle-actuated motor that works without pedaling.