Words

Until recently, very few people had ever heard of raspberry ketones, the aromatic compounds that give the berries their distinctive smell. Today, health food stores have trouble keeping the capsules or drops of the stuff on their shelves. Almost overnight, an obscure plant compound became the next big thing in weight loss - and all it took was a few words from Dr. Oz. In a February episode of "The Dr. Oz Show," Mehmet Oz told viewers that raspberry ketones were "the No. 1 miracle in a bottle to burn your fat. " Once Oz calls something a "miracle," it doesn't remain obscure for long.

About three years ago, producer Graham Broadbent visited the offices of Peter Rice, who was then running Fox Searchlight Pictures. Stacked near Rice's DVD player were discs of the senior citizen comedies "Cocoon" and "Cocoon: The Return. " "There have to be movies for older audiences," Rice told Broadbent. "There have to be. " Broadbent replied, "I think we may have something for you. " The movie Broadbent pitched that day was "The Best Exotic Marigold Hotel,"a comedy starring Judi Dench and Bill Nighy about a fledgling retirement home in India.

Manny Hamelburg, 68, a retired businessman, had fought prostate cancer for years. First, he tried radiation, then a drug with side effects that nearly killed him, and finally Lupron, a drug that blocks production of testosterone, the hormone that can fuel prostate cancer. The cancer disappeared. But life was miserable. Without normal levels of testosterone, Hamelburg says, he had no energy, and "zero libido for seven years. I was like a eunuch. I was chemically castrated. Sex was just hugs."

Last year, when the 2nd Circuit Court of Appeals curtailed the Federal Communications Commission's powers to punish networks for "fleeting expletives," many worried that network television would become a battlefield of exploding F-bombs and barely bleeped C-words. Turns out, all the decision, currently under review by the Supreme Court, did was unleash the "bitches. " Sure, there have been a few more "damns" and "hells" and S-words, some F-bleeps and a lot of playful word compounds beginning with "ass.

CINCINNATI - The Rev. Chris Beard is a theological conservative, make no mistake about it. He believes the Bible is the word of God. He believes the Holy Spirit speaks to him directly. He believes, as an article of faith, that abortion and same-sex marriage are wrong. Still, when a group of religious leaders in Ohio held two days of meetings in Cincinnati recently to talk about economic and racial justice, issues usually associated with the political left, there was Beard, a fourth-generation Pentecostal preacher with a disarming smile, a shaved head and a set of convictions that knock holes in the stereotypes about white evangelical Protestants.

On summer nights in the mid-1960s, while black-and-white television crackled elsewhere in his Staten Island home with news of Southern violence and Vietnam, Bobby Lasnik would stretch out in his bedroom to let the righteous soundtrack of the civil rights movement waft into his impressionable teenage soul. Tuned in to WBAI-FM, coming across the water from Manhattan, he heard baleful laments about injustice that he would carry with him for a lifetime. "Suddenly there was someone speaking a certain kind of truth to you. You'd say, 'Wow!

Want to fool merchants with a fake ID? Hack someone's text messages? Or how about tracking where your co-workers are, without their knowing it? There's an app for that. The explosion in smartphone and tablet applications that enable people to check the weather, follow their stocks and play Words With Friends has a dark side: apps that facilitate questionable if not outright illegal behavior. Apple's App Store, for example, offers Drivers License software that promises "unlimited access to realistic-looking licenses" for all 50 states.

Lamar Odom's voice on the phone frequently was barely above a whisper. The pain clearly registered in words that flowed in stops and starts as he delivered a soliloquy about death and the effect it has had on his psyche. The Lakers forward spoke deliberately and expressed how emotional it has been for him to deal with two recent deaths. Odom attended a funeral in New York on July 13 for his 24-year-old cousin, who Odom said was murdered. The next day, Odom was a passenger in an SUV in Queens when it collided with a motorcycle.

If you buy something from online auctioneer Property Room, you don't have to wonder if it was stolen. That's because it probably was. Property Room, started by a former police detective, gets its items from law enforcement property rooms nationwide. Most of its inventory of jewelry, bicycles, computers, furniture, tools, car stereos, cameras, sports equipment, portable music players and things that could best be categorized under miscellaneous -- or bizarre -- was seized from crooks.

A small wooden cabinet went up for auction on EBay. Inside were two locks of hair, one granite slab, one dried rosebud, one goblet, two wheat pennies, one candlestick and, allegedly, one "dibbuk," a kind of spirit popular in Yiddish folklore. The seller, a Missouri college student named Iosif Nietzke, described the container as a "haunted Jewish wine cabinet box" that had plagued several owners with rotten luck and a spate of bizarre paranormal stunts.

"HOJO to Don Draper: Sorry about the pool, your next stay is on us. " That's the word from Howard Johnson after the "Mad Men" character had a motel meltdown on Sunday's episode of the AMC TV series. The getaway he planned with his young bride Megan to a fictional HoJo's in upstate New York went super sour after he arrived to find the pool was closed. "We've all been there," says the hotel's statement sent Tuesday. "You plan a weekend away only to check in to your hotel and find that a much desired amenity - the hotel pool - is closed.

Robert Weil, formerly executive editor at W.W. Norton & Co., is at the helm of the company's recently revived imprint, Liveright & Co., well known for publishing great early 20th-century writers. Liveright's new editor in chief and publishing director, scheduled to appear on a panel about the nuts and bolts of publishing at this weekend's Festival of Books, talks about Norton's surprising move and other issues facing the book industry. Let's talk about how and why the Liveright imprint was revived.

In this age of Kindle and iPad and e-books, I write by hand, on little notepads, in my car. I have written in my car since I was 22 and working on my first novel. Then, the car was a broken-down pale green Fiat. I sat in the driver's seat while my then-husband worked on it in our gravel driveway, yelling at me to pump the brakes or start the engine. Now I write in my 2009 Honda CRV while waiting in the high school parking lot for my youngest, or even at the curb in front of my house - the way Raymond Carver used to - before I go inside.

Fenway Park 100,Dodger Stadium 50 The Boston Red Sox alumni took the field Friday, from Jim Rice to Carl Yastrzemski , from Johnny Pesky to Pedro Martinez , all in a graceful celebration of Fenway Park's 100th birthday. If Frank McCourt had had his way, the party never would have happened. McCourt tried to buy his hometown Red Sox in 2001, with a plan to build a new ballpark on his Boston waterfront parking lots. He had the right idea. Luke Scott of the Tampa Bay Rays took a lot of grief last week for calling Fenway "a dump.

SACRAMENTO — Politicians utter thousands of words — in speeches, debates, advertisements — but the most important may be the handful they use on the ballot to describe their day jobs. Those three or so words may never have been as critical as they are this year in California. That's especially true for candidates not as well known as, say, Jerry Brown, who ran for governor as the state's attorney general two years ago, or Arnold Schwarzenegger, whose ballot designation in the 2003 recall race was "actor/businessman.

Any day now, I expect to see a crowd of substitute teachers marching around Los Angeles Unified School District headquarters, wearing signs that say "I AM PATRENA SHANKLING" and waving lists of dumb things that substitutes have been asked to do. Shankling is the substitute teacher fired by Supt. John Deasy last fall, after he scolded her for giving 12th-grade students what he considered busywork: copying class procedures from a sheet of paper into their composition books. Since a Times profile on Deasy and my column this week on the incident, teachers have rallied to Shankling's defense, describing in emails, letters and online comments the hard life of a substitute.

Hollywood High School keeps its doors open 12 months a year to ease overcrowding. The year-round schedule allows the campus to run hundreds more students through its cramped classrooms. It also chips away at their education. Teachers skip pages of material, assign less homework and give fewer tests because their school year has been slashed by 17 days. Hundreds of pupils take the Stanford 9 exam shortly after returning from an eight-week vacation.

The Times is pleased to have Green Bay Packers wide receiver Donald Driver guest-blogging for us while he competes on " Dancing With the Stars . " Each week, Driver, a Super Bowl champion and three-time Pro Bowl player, will answer a few questions from Sports Now editor Houston Mitchell and give some insight into the competition. Here are Driver's thoughts about Week 3, which he offered via email. Q: It was an incredibly emotional night for everyone.

Everyone says there's a class war going on in the United States. If so, it is, at least so far, a war of words. It's also a war in which a principal tactic is accusing the other side of fighting a class war while denying that you're fighting one yourself. Meanwhile, everybody claims to be on the same side: the side of the people, against the aristocratic elitist snobs who … where did I park my tumbrel? In this war of words, certain words take on a special weight or meaning.

Moviegoers can't complain there's nothing to see this weekend - 18 new independent productions and three studio works arrive simultaneously in local theaters. But what may be great for consumers has the people behind these movies losing sleep, worried that the intense competition could sink everyone's chances for box-office success. Although not all of the movies will open nationally, the 21 titles represent an anomalous uptick from even the most crowded release calendars. Last Christmas, one of 2011's busiest weekends for new releases, saw just 10 films open.