Tours

Birds do it, bees do it, even wildebeests and zebus do it. And during the "Valentine's Day Sex Tour" at Santa Ana Zoo today, visitors will learn exactly how animals court and mate in a captive setting. Wild stuff? Well, the event is for adults only, but zoo curator Connie Sweet said she wouldn't go so far as to slap an R-rating on the tour. Call it PG-13.

Las Vegas, a city forged on gambling, booze and flesh, has been strangely reluctant -- and perhaps a little nervous -- to make money off its mob roots. Until now. On a recent drizzly night, a small, white Vegas Mob Tour bus rumbled past aging strip malls, its passengers eager to see the spots where wiseguys were killed. Thug Jerry Lisner was repeatedly shot, strangled with an electrical cord and dumped in his swimming pool on a tree-lined street named Rawhide.

A misty drizzle was falling again, beading on my bright orange rain pants and my horse's thick black mane. It was cold enough to make my nose run and my toes numb. But none of that mattered once we took off at a gallop along the muddy home stretch. Charging into the wet wind, speeding past massive hillsides and winding rivers and very startled sheep, I'd never felt as primal -- or as free.

Few therapists, even in Los Angeles, face such a difficult life choice: What music video would best goose a crowd of thousands, moments before being introduced? But life is about such hard choices and Dr. Phil and his "Get Real" 15-city national tour didn't blink Thursday evening at the Universal Amphitheatre. The nod went to Shania Twain's "Man! I Feel Like a Woman!" Good call, Dr.

The tourists sitting in the aging school bus pressed their noses to the glass, eager to catch a glimpse of the modern face of Chicago's infamous public housing projects. There wasn't much left to see. Along South State Street, tour guide Beauty Turner pointed out the empty dirt lots where the ominous concrete high-rises of the Robert Taylor Homes once stood. Down the road, she nodded toward construction crews building new brick-and-glass condominiums in the shadows of the Ida B.

South Korean pop superstar Rain blamed local concert promoter V2B Global for technical difficulties that resulted in the cancellation of his performance Saturday night at Staples Center -- the last in a string of planned U.S. shows in the singer-dancer-actor's "Rain's Coming" world tour that failed to go on as scheduled. But viewed another way, the show's last-minute cancellation can be partially attributed to a breakdown of the K-pop phenom's celebrity industrial complex.

THE burly, young marketer in the crisp white shirt rose to speak, and 20 seated passengers leaned forward to catch his every word. Grinning broadly, Alex Godoy described the house just outside the tinted window. "Every price is negotiable," he reminded his audience. Then he uttered the magic phrase: "OK, everybody, off the bus!"

"How are you, sir?" said Luciano Pavarotti to Jose Carreras. "Como s-ta?" "Too-toe benny," said Carreras. Or maybe he said, "Mule-toe benny." Pavarotti was in New York and Carreras was in Turin and I was in Chicago, and we were all on a conference call, waiting for Placido Domingo, who was in Washington, D.C. The Three Tenors have been the Backstreet Boys of opera ever since their first concert 10 years ago in Rome.

Leopold Engleitner toiled in three Nazi concentration camps for refusing to renounce his faith as a Jehovah's Witness. In the decades after the war, he tried to tell his tale but rarely found an audience. Now, at 100, he finally is reaching listeners, thanks to the efforts of an Austrian filmmaker who was taken with his story of endurance. Engleitner has toured the United States since May 1, sharing his life story to encourage others to stick by their principles.

Twenty years ago, you probably weren't interested in learning Spanish abroad. But if you were, you almost certainly went to Spain. The language was born there, after all, and college towns such as Salamanca in the north and Malaga in the south had built language training into a minor industry. On weekdays you conjugated verbs in that pesky vosotros form; on weekends you gawked at the Prado in Madrid. Thousands of Americans still do so every year. But these days, more Americans head south.