Tiffany

Who wants to have breakfast, or a bauble, at Tiffany's? Neither tourists nor traders, apparently. Luxury jewelry chain Tiffany & Co. slashed its forecast for the year, as did Kay and Jared owner Signet Jewelers. Investors were displeased, sending Tiffany's stock down 8% to $56.83 a share in midday trading in New York. Signet took a 11.5% drop to $42.28. Concerns about Greece and debt in the Eurozone as well as high silver prices and discounts from rivals have shoppers, especially Wall Street financial types, spending less at Tiffany's, the company said.

One made a spontaneous $10,000 bet on live TV. The other charged up a storm at Tiffany & Co. And now, in a season of foreclosure, unemployment and an erosion of the bedrock American certainty that the best days lie ahead, two of the incredibly rich men who are leading the GOP presidential pack are sniping over which of their personal fortunes is worthier. Seriously. Ostensibly, as they battle for the Republican presidential nomination, Mitt Romney and Newt Gingrich have been sparring over who is better-positioned to represent the country's struggling middle class.

With lines like this, just think about what Mitt Romney has saved for Thursday night's debate. With the holidays rapidly approaching and the first votes set to be cast shortly after, the former Massachusetts governor seems eager to make up ground on Newt Gingrich as soon as possible. On Wednesday that process included having the typically press-averse GOP presidential candidate sit down for a pair of Q-and-A sessions in which he lobbed some rhetorical grenades. "Zany is not what we need in a president," Romney told the New York Times.

They may have wanted breakfast at Tiffany's, but Orange County prosecutors say a Garden Grove paralegal and Cypress elementary school teacher stole the money for their spending spree in New York City. The roommates, Alexa Johzen Polar, 34, and Robin Antonella Pabello, 33, both of Garden Grove, are charged with forging a $285,000 check from the law firm where Polar works and using it to charter a private jet. They flew their friends to New York City, rented five rooms at a hotel overlooking Times Square and went on a shopping spree at Tiffany and Co. and Montblanc, authorities said.

Like one of those faster-than-light particles that's gone before you can see it, filmmaker and tech innovator Tiffany Shlain zips from the virtual to the real and back again. The Bay Area native whom Newsweek named one of the women shaping the 21st century has been into technology since she and Silicon Valley were both kids. Fifteen years ago, she founded the Webby Awards; well before Twitter, no acceptance speech could be longer than five words. She delivered more than that last year in a commencement speech at her alma mater UC Berkeley, exhorting students to embrace the quality that she claims as her own guiding light: "moxie" -- a long-ago patent medicine turned soft drink whose name has become synonymous with the human recipe for being "bold ... and a little outrageous.

Bridesmaids Universal, $29.98; Blu-ray, $34.98 One of the biggest comedy hits of the summer, "Bridesmaids" stars Kristen Wiig (who also co-wrote the film with Annie Mumolo) as a lifelong loser whose inability to do anything right threatens to ruin her best friend's wedding. Much of the talk surrounding "Bridesmaids" has been about the movie's raunchiness, and how it shows that women comedians can be as crude as their male counterparts. But what really makes the film so enjoyable is Wiig's fearlessly goofy performance, and the way Wiig, Mumolo and director Paul Feig convey the nuances of female friendships rather than reducing the characters to chick-flick stereotypes.

Every morning, Tiffany Ramsaroop wakes up to a picture of her dad. It's tacked in the middle of a bulletin board in her lavender bedroom. Vishnoo Ramsaroop died 10 years ago in the south tower of the World Trade Center. He was a maintenance worker who supported a wife and three girls on $43,000 a year. Tiffany, his oldest, was 8 when it happened. It was two years before she stopped believing he got hit in the head by debris and would stroll through the door having recovered from amnesia.

Quick Takes: 'Transformers' takes a hit The Transformers have changed shape into a slightly less powerful box-office contender in its first showings. "Transformers: Dark of the Moon," the third movie in Paramount Pictures' blockbuster robot action series, collected $13.5 million from early screenings Tuesday night. Of that total, $5.5 million was from 9 p.m. shows at about 2,700 locations with 3-D screens, and an additional $8 million came from 3-D and 2-D screenings at 3,000 theaters at or soon after midnight.

Like residents in many cities, longtime Las Vegans long for what's long gone - the days when a young Wayne Newton crooned "Danke Schoen" and dealers knew players by their first names. "It was better in the old days when the mob was still here," said Aiko Shono, a 35-year resident of Sin City. "Everyone had a job, everyone was friendly [and] people were not rude. " Over big, juicy steaks and tender lyonnaise potatoes, Shono and her dining companion, Iris Buck, sighed as they reminisced.