Month: December 2019

One hundred years ago, this is what the Rose Parade looked like: Some things have changed a bit in the last century — like fewer horse-drawn carriages — but not the most important details. Now in its 131st year, the Rose Parade will roll through Pasadena with flower-decked floats, equestrian units and marching bands to…

Calli Simmons, a 20-year-old college student from Tennessee, doesn’t know what she’ll watch after Tuesday. Her TV habits have been automatic for so long: Pull up the Netflix app, watch three or four episodes of “Friends” each day, sleep and repeat — in between school and work, of course. “It’s been a regular part of…

There’s an anecdote about Alfred Newman, the veteran film composer and longtime head of music at 20th Century Fox, when Alfred Hitchcock was questioning the realism of having a musical score in his 1944 film “Lifeboat.” “You’re in the middle of the ocean, Alfred,” Hitchcock supposedly said. “Where does the orchestra come from?” “The same…

English musician and humorist Neil Innes worked closely with two of the biggest cultural juggernauts his nation ever produced — the Beatles and Monty Python’s Flying Circus comedy troupe — yet never became a household name himself, a goal he often espoused in interviews. “I’ve been very close to people who have had all this…

“High Above the Water” may have just “come to” composer Kathryn Bostic, but she knew exactly what it meant. “I envisioned this vibrant quality and energy — I wanted the movie to end on this powerful note of joy, of celebration. The director also asked that it be something celebratory,” she said of working with…

Tesla Inc. is about to find out whether the second time is the charm for Elon Musk making bold predictions about how many cars the company can build and sell. The electric-car maker handed over the first 15 Model 3 sedans assembled at its new multibillion-dollar plant near Shanghai — its first factory outside the…

A California law that would bar job applicants and workers from having to submit to mandatory arbitration as a condition of employment was put on hold Monday by a federal judge in Sacramento little more than a day before it was set to take effect Jan. 1. U.S. District Judge Kimberly Mueller ruled that the…

NEW YORK —  An anti-robocalls measure signed into law Monday by President Trump should help reduce the torrent of unwanted calls promising lower interest rates or pretending to be the IRS, though it won’t make all such calls disappear. The new law gives authorities more enforcement powers and could speed up measures the industry is already…

SINGAPORE —  In a year in which the United States mounted an unprecedented effort to undermine China’s largest telecommunications company, Huawei made sure it got the last word. The firm announced Tuesday that its revenue surged 18% to more than $120 billion in 2019 despite a ban on U.S. exports to the company starting in May.…

Longboards aren’t just for surfers. In the mid-1800s, half a century before surfing ever came to the Golden State, longboard skiing took off among the young, athletic men in Sierra mining camps who liked to drink, gamble and carouse in their spare time. They strapped on what were called Norwegian “skates” or “snowshoes” — those…