Memo to the public-relations geniuses who wanted us to do a story because a recent Monday was National Proposal Day: We passed. We were probably too preoccupied with that day's other designation: Extraterrestrial Abductions Day.

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Frenzied celebrity photographers are on the hunt to snap the first photos of the infant daughter of Tom Cruise and Katie Holmes.

I like appliances that make statements. My boombox is a briefcase-sized Magnavox -- won by Mom for selling more Tupperware during the mid-'80s than "any man ever seen," as Willie Dixon would have said.

Each Thursday, The Flip Side brings you Get Outta the House! -- advice on what to do, see and experience.

Residents of Butte, Mont., have long been unhappy with the presence of the Berkeley Pit, a huge, putrid toxic lake filled by runoff from arsenic, cadmium, cobalt, copper, iron and zinc mines.