Tony

PHOENIX — Andre Ethier said Tuesday he does not plan to impose a deadline on negotiations on the contract extension that could keep him out of free agency. Dodgers General Manager Ned Colletti has said he would like to re-sign Ethier and has discussed the idea with Dodgers President Stan Kasten , who took office three weeks ago. Ethier said Tuesday he and his agent have not received a formal contract proposal from the Dodgers. Ethier also said he did not anticipate a point where free agency could be so close that he would put any contract talks on hold before he could test the market.

Tony Stark, alias Iron Man, is suave, brilliant, mega-rich and dripping with beautiful women. Sounds an awful lot like Elon Musk, the South African entrepreneurial wunderkind who spent his Tuesday shooting a rocket into space and making a major advance in electric vehicles. The 40-year-old served as an inspiration for the fictional genius billionaire in the "Iron Man"movies, according to director Jon Favreau. Musk even makes a cameo in one of the films.

The wait for tables is getting longer at Buck's, a popular breakfast spot for the tech elite and a weather vane for the Silicon Valley economy. Here, like everywhere else, Facebook is the talk of the town. "Charles Schwab was in the restaurant the other day, and I asked him to hook me up with some Facebook shares," said Jamis MacNiven, owner of Buck's, in the wealthy suburban enclave of Woodside. "He told me even he can't get Facebook shares. " The new tech boom officially gets underway Friday when Facebook Chief Executive Mark Zuckerberg rings Nasdaq's opening bell remotely from the company's Menlo Park, Calif., headquarters, launching the largest initial public offering of stock in Silicon Valley history.

ESPN reporter Erin Andrews is dating "Gossip Girl" actor Chace Crawford, US Weekly is reporting. Andrews and Crawford are "getting to know each other," according to the report. Chace Crawford is the brother of Candice Crawford, who married Dallas Cowboys quarterback Tony Romo in 2011. That should make sideline interviews on the Dallas Cowboys side of the field interesting for Andrews. Now some may be wondering, "What is this doing on a sports blog?"

Mr. Danza was having a bad day. The laptop acted up. Few students were ready to present their projects, and the group was restless, giggly, distracted. A few snickers erupted when the new reading assignment, the classic novel "To Kill a Mockingbird," was passed out. "Turn around. Turn around . Put your feet this way," the first-year teacher urged one of his sophomore English students, motioning to the front of the room. Last year, actor Tony Danza arrived in Philadelphia with Hollywood credentials and a long-ago college education degree but no teaching certificate.

Former British Prime Minister Tony Blair has said he would have found a justification for invading Iraq even without the now-discredited evidence that Saddam Hussein was trying to produce weapons of mass destruction. "I would still have thought it right to remove him. I mean, obviously you would have had to use and deploy different arguments about the nature of the threat," Blair told the BBC in an interview to be broadcast this morning. It was a startling admission from the onetime British leader, who was President Bush's staunchest ally in the decision to invade Iraq in 2003.

The bomb is dropped and the damage spreads. Mark McGwire admits he took steroids and family, friends and acquaintances are hit with the fallout. Also, former managers. This was going to be a fairly normal week in the off-season for Tony La Russa of the St. Louis Cardinals, McGwire's manager for all but a year and a half of his major league career. La Russa had a speech to make in Dallas early in the week for the benefit of his Animal Rescue Foundation and another for the same cause Sunday in St. Louis.

Even after winning an unprecedented six consecutive NHRA top-fuel championships, Tony Schumacher still is driving scared -- much to his rivals' chagrin. "I'm afraid to lose right now," he said Friday. "[My title streak is] going to end at some point, I just don't want it to end this year." This year starts this weekend with the 50th Winternationals at Auto Club Raceway in Pomona, the season opener for the National Hot Rod Assn.'s Full Throttle Series. The series' fastest class is top fuel -- dragsters that reach 320 mph -- and Schumacher, 40, is top fuel's preeminent driver and reigning champion.

Leonard Bernstein didn't venture often onto Broadway, but when he did, it was with a splash, especially in his gloriously melodic "West Side Story." Basing the work forthrightly on Shakespeare's "Romeo and Juliet," he had a perfect book to begin with, modernized by Arthur Laurents, with Stephen Sondheim's vivid lyrics as a capper.

Jose (Tony) Deleu, 47, a butler who claimed that he was fired by a Manhattan socialite because he had AIDS. Deleu had filed a $1.5-million discrimination lawsuit against France Scaife, wife of an heir to the Mellon family fortune and a committeewoman on the Pittsburgh AIDS Task Force. Deleu's attorney, David Spears, said the discrimination claim was recently dropped because of a loophole in the state anti-discrimination law that exempts domestics.

There's a flicker of uncertainty in Danny Burstein's friendly brown eyes as he greets a reporter backstage at the Ahmanson Theatre, as if he half-expects her to step around him on her way into the dressing room of one of his "Follies" costars. "When I heard that The Times wanted to talk to me, I said, 'Are you sure?'" he says, after being persuaded that he, and not Ron Raines, Victoria Clark, Jan Maxwell,Elaine Page,or any of the show's other big guns, is meant to be the subject of this interview.

Throughout the playoff series, Spurs point guard Tony Parker has downplayed his matchup with Clippers point guard Chris Paul. Things were no different Saturday after the Spurs' 96-86 comeback victory, as Parker reiterated that he was not focusing solely on shutting down the Clippers star. But Parker's teammate Tim Duncan did say that the tough defensive assignment makes Parker "even better. " "He couldn't find a rhythm on the offensive end, but he was playing defense really hard," Duncan said.

Washington Bureau WASHINGTON - Sen. Rand Paul, who said he wasn't sure President Obama's views on marriage "could get any gayer," was rebuked by an influential evangelical leader Sunday. Family Research Council President Tony Perkins, appearing onCBS' "Face the Nation," strongly disagreed with the Kentucky Republican's choice of words. "I don't think this is something we should joke about," Perkins said. "We are talking about individuals who feel very strongly one way or the other, and I think we should be civil, respectful, allowing all sides to have the debate....

Back when Matt Kemp was hitting the ball the way Josh Hamilton is now, Manager Don Mattingly said the day would come when the Dodgers would have to find new methods to score runs. That day has come and the Dodgers have. Kemp is hitless in the Dodgers' last three games, but the team has won each of them, the latest a 2-1 victory over the Colorado Rockies on Saturday night. The Dodgers improved to a major league-best 22-11, including 14-3 at home, and remained six games in front of the second-place San Francisco Giants in the National League West.

This is tough way to go, not that anyone around Chavez Ravine is complaining. Tim Lincecum keeps pitching very well against the Dodgers and keeps losing. That's a difficult combo to pull off, but the Giants' two-time Cy Young winner has been pulling it off with great regularity. Wednesday night at Dodger Stadium, Lincecum stumbled for one inning, and it led to a 6-2 Dodgers victory before an announced crowd of 33,993. In his last six starts against the Dodgers, Lincecum has a 2.52 ERA -- and is 0-4. Lincecum has been having issues well beyond the Dodgers this season (2-3, 5.89 ERA)

The Dodgers beat Tim Lincecum again on Wednesday night. But the 6-2 victory at Dodger Stadium was nothing like their four victories against him last season, when Clayton Kershaw repeatedly edged the two-time Cy Young Award winner in a series of stirring pitchers' duels. Lincecum's fourth-inning implosion allowed the Dodgers to overcome an uninspired start by Chad Billingsley and claim their second victory in the three-game series. Pinch-hitter Tony Gwynn Jr. capped a four-run fourth inning with a bases-clearing triple and Scott Van Slyke drove in a run in his first major league at-bat, as the Dodgers improved to 20-11, including 12-3 at home.

Thurl Ravenscroft's rich voice dipped low and deep as he began to utter what has become the trademark of his 50-year show business career. "They're g-r-r-r-eat!!!" Ravenscroft boomed as he recreated the role of Tony the Tiger, a role that the 73-year-old has performed in scores of television commercials for a cereal company for 36 years. "The Tony the Tiger commercial has been done for every English-speaking (country) in the world. . . .

The postcards keep coming for "the Professor." "Tony, Sorry I had to drop out of sight, but I had business in Utah." "Dear Professor, I'm the guy you sent to hell on the (boat) Bold Contender. Not really. It's not so bad." "Tony, Just a note to let you know I'm doing fine. I was stupid for dropping out of your class, but we all got to make a buck, right?"

Home A Novel Toni Morrison Alfred A. Knopf: 148 pp., $24 I've long admired Toni Morrison as a moral visionary, but her fiction, not so much. Of her nine novels, three - "Song of Solomon" (1977), "Beloved" (1987) and 2008's "A Mercy" - are masterpieces, yet the others, particularly the post-Nobel books "Paradise" (1997) and "Love" (2003) can be so stylized as to veer dangerously close to self-parody. Anyone who's read her in any depth may understand what I'm referring to: those stentorian rhythms, the biblical cadences, the characters who function more as archetypes than flesh-and-blood.

It's hard to fathom that Tony Bennett hasn't been here forever, smiling broadly in a tux and singing "I Left My Heart in San Francisco. " But not only was there a world before Tony Bennett, there was a Tony Bennett before Tony Bennett: Born Anthony Dominick Benedetto in Queens in 1926, he broke in the early '50s with "Because of You" and a series of elegant albums on Columbia. He struggled at times with the dominance of rock music, but he's been on an upswing since the mid-'80s. Between a popular MTV Unplugged album with guest spots for Elvis Costello andk.d.