Weeds

On a sweltering morning deep in the San Gabriel Mountains, Katie VinZant donned work gloves and boots, hoisted a pickax and began bashing alien species. The 31-year-old botanist enjoys a Sunday in the Angeles National Forest as much as the next person. But when it comes to weeds that have colonized and multiplied since the 2009 Station fire, she's a terminator. Slender and trim in a T-shirt, grubby pants and tattered straw sombrero, VinZant swiped the sweat stinging her eyes.

Consider this the latest installment in the "no good deed goes unpunished" chronicles. Our story began last spring, when fashion designer Ron Finley admitted to himself that, while he's always enjoyed gardening, he didn't really know what the hay he was doing. "I'd just stick something in the ground and see what happened. " So Finley, who lives on Exposition Boulevard just west of the Crenshaw area, took a UC Cooperative Extension gardening class at the Natural History Museum.

It is time for the annual visit to the Field of Nightmares for our United States pro golfers. The British Open starts Thursday, which means links golf, which means walking along in something that resembles your neighbor's unkempt vacant lot and trying to hit a golf ball. This presumes that you can find it. The last time somebody had a good lie in the British Open was never. If you are standing with one foot in a deep hole and long weeds crawling up your pants leg — or one foot braced against a brick wall in a bunker so deep you can't see the sky — then you are playing in the British Open.

So, about Willie Nelson and that plea agreement he thought he had in Texas: A judge on Wednesday isn't playing ball, saying the country singer shouldn't get what she sees as special treatment regarding his marijuana-related arrest in El Paso last November. Talk about bumming that high. Prosecutors had agreed June 8 to reduce charges against Nelson, 78, and allow him to stay out of jail if he paid a $500 fine and $280 in court costs, with the judge expected to clear his record if he stayed out of trouble for 30 days.

While driving through an automatic carwash in 1971, George Ballas watched the whirling nylon bristles glide around the contour of his vehicle and wondered if he could adapt the technology to remove the weeds around trees in his yard. At home, he punched holes in a tin can, threaded it with wire and fishing line and bolted it to a rotating lawn edger. He called it the Weed Eater, and when he couldn't sell the concept, he founded his own company and built it into a $40-million-a-year business.

The Obama administration has identified dozens of unneeded regulations — from handling spilled milk to requiring warm-air hand dryers — that should be eliminated to save hundreds of millions of hours a year in filling out forms and, over time, billions of dollars in costs. The proposed changes, a few of which already have been enacted or are in their final stages, came in a report Thursday from a government-wide review ordered by President Obama in January to weed out overly burdensome rules and stimulate job growth.

Don't let "Paul's" R-rating fool you. In the latest comedy from those funny Brits of "Hot Fuzz" and "Shaun of the Dead," the wise guys have gone more off-center than off-color with this whimsical and surprisingly gentle road trip adventure about two friends, an obsession and an alien named Paul. After the sharp bite and harsh light of most American-style guy-based funny films today, "Paul" comes as such sweet relief. If not for a lot of F-bombs and other naughty words, this would be a family film, a sort of fractured "E.T.," with Seth Rogen never more likeable than as the bald-headed extraterrestrial who just wants to phone home (he should consider this kind of disappearing act, a la Mike Myers and Shrek, more often)

The tax-fighting saga of Joseph Diliberti ? Vietnam veteran, Rastafarian, flutist and joyful iconoclast ? is heading to a showdown: His hilly, brushy three-acre spread deep in the backcountry is set to be sold for back taxes and penalties. But like so much of the Diliberti story, there are few, if any, historical or legal precedents to suggest what will happen next. Audio slideshow: Former Marine does it his way What started out in 2004 as a $27,000 bill for weed abatement has ballooned ?

The sound of hundreds of goat hooves echoed through a small valley overlooking the ocean Saturday in the Palos Verdes Nature Preserve, surprising passerby who watched as the animals munched their way through yard after yard of invasive weeds. FOR THE RECORD: Goat grazing: An article in the March 6 Section A about the use of goats to clear invasive weeds in the Palos Verdes Nature Preserve referred to boar goats. The correct term is Boer goats. ? The 230 goats are the first step in a project to restore natural flora and fauna to a 12-acre portion of the 1,400-acre preserve that was burned in a fire in 2009.