Entertainment

Mix tapes are like personal soundtracks for life – scored memories (cue Vangelis' "Tears In Rain" from the "Bladerunner" soundtrack). The emotional investment in the songs' arrangement is so revealing and intimate that mix tapes qualify as one of few widely treasured budget gifts.

Mix tapes are like personal soundtracks for life – scored memories (cue Vangelis’ "Tears In Rain" from the "Bladerunner" soundtrack).

BASEBALL MLB

Jimmy Messina was a producer at CBS and Kenny Loggins was a kid with a beat up guitar in 1972. Messina had played with Buffalo Springfield and formed Poco; Loggins attended high school.

Monte McConnell gave Mayor Jim West the pickle, and got the shaft in return. When McConnell came to City Hall on April 7, he brought a jar of pickles purchased during a two-for-one sale at a supermarket near his Hillyard home. He'd heard West had adopted a city customer-service program with a pickle theme and thought the jar would make a nice ice-breaking gift.

Think strategy games, and you'll picture a PC gamer hunched over a keyboard and mouse, micromanaging the movements of thousands of units across the screen, building cities and laying waste to empires. That's a fun experience, but attempts to translate it to video-game consoles so far have been iffy at best. There's just too much precision involved in the troop management to translate well to a controller, and the comparatively low resolution of most televisions doesn't do justice to all those tiny soldiers.

Every type of film has at least one bona fide master. With zombies, it's George A. Romero. Nobody brings the walking dead to life with as much gory gusto and surprising intelligence as the infamous filmmaker who returns to his forte after a 20-year absence.

When you think of the Wu-Tang Clan, many images come to mind. A) The late phenomenon Ol' Dirty Bastard and his misadventures at the 1998 Grammy Awards.

Regal Cinemas is pulling Coeur d'Alene into the 21st century. True, with the Coeur d'Alene Resort, trendy shops, upscale restaurants and that golf course with the floating green, Coeur d'Alene entered the new millennium a while ago – long before many similarly sized cities.

It's hard to believe my nephew and niece have graduated from Lewis and Clark and Mead high schools. I remember holding them as babies, playing with them as toddlers and taking them to their first movie. How did they grow up so fast, and how has it been 20 years since I graduated from high school? As I looked at those young faces ready to face the world, I recalled some of my triumphs and tragedies from high school – undoubtedly the most awkward years of our lives.

Floater has sort of built dual – or perhaps dueling – identities for itself over the past dozen years. The Portland metal-art-trio had been pulling itself apart since its 1993 debut, "Sink." The album's dynamics were framed in a series of moodshifts that slide from aggressive to soulful and back to let compelling, storytelling lyrics take effect.

If Matt Lauer of the "Today Show" is asking Mayor Jim West "Gay? Not Gay?" on national television, it should be no surprise last week's Pride events were infused with discussion about the mayor. Spokane's gay community, however, is not asking the question that West failed to give Lauer a straight (uh huh, the pun is intended) answer to. We instead used the story to further our discussion about visibility.

Everything's a graphic novel nowadays. Batman, Superman, Johnny the Homicidal Maniac, you name it – if its monthly issues are collected into book form, someone somewhere is calling it a graphic novel.

A few days after moving to England in 1993, Shannon Brock, of Dallas, was walking along a street in London when a man approached her. That's when, while learning about her new city, Brock learned something about herself. She was an angel. At least in the eyes of one man, who on that beautiful summer evening asked:

Diamonds prove that shiny things attract attention. Ergo, hair that gleams in the sun (or anywhere else) is just as likely to draw notice. A mane with a sexy sheen also telegraphs health and well-being. But how to get there? There may or may not be truth to a serum's claim that it delivers glossy locks. So, we tried three shine products and distilled our own axiom: All that glitters most definitely is not gold. Alba Brilliant Shine Gloss Serum

The Disney-Pixar partnership has helped choke off hand-drawn animation in favor of the computer-generated variety. Even so, the two outfits have preserved traditional animation with loving translations of films from Japanese anime master Hayao Miyazaki ("Spirited Away," the 2002 Academy Award winner for feature animation).

Imagine a friendly city near a state line where the mayor refuses to resign after being caught doing something wrong. The city council, backed by the business community, delivers a unanimous no-confidence vote. But the city charter doesn't give the council removal power. So weeks drag into months as the mayor, often speaking through an attorney, insists on staying in office.

I've got red beans and rice broken down to a science. I'm convinced of that.