Verso

NPR's Joe Palca spent the summer of 2009 at The Huntington on a fellowship as science writer in residence. The result? His new book, Annoying: The Science of What Bugs Us. (And we're trying not to take this personally.)

How many of us know about huanglongbing (HLB), a.k.a. citrus greening disease? Not so many, most likely. Plant diseases can be a "so what" kind of thing. But how many of us will miss oranges, lemons, and limes if they completely disappear from our diets? I would wager quite a few.

Over the years, The Huntington's collections have lent themselves to a wide variety of research projects: scholarly books, journal articles, doctoral dissertations, films, costume design, even archeology. Now we can add something new to that list: video game design.

The haunting, soulful tone that underscores the John Frame exhibition "Three Fragments of a Lost Tale: Sculpture and Story by John Frame" is set in large part by the characters' eyes. Certainly the dark lighting has dramatic effect, and the sweep of soft violin and piano in the distant background provides a sense of melancholy.

Thursday was a green-letter day. A simple idea planted more than 10 years ago came to life when board members of the California Avocado Society welcomed Brokaw, Rodriguez, and Shepherd family members to celebrate the successful establishment of Shepherd-Brokaw Orchard, the heart of a new Huntington Avocado Collection.

Well, this is a first! Visitors to The Huntington through Monday, May 2, will get to preview two of the three works under consideration for acquisition by the Art Collectors' Council on Saturday evening.

For the 16th year, the Huntington Library Press will represent The Huntington at the Los Angeles Times Festival of Books. This year, the festival moves from its usual venue at UCLA to the USC campus, south of the 10 Freeway and north of Exposition Park and the Coliseum.

So the story goes that the upper ponds in the Japanese Garden were filled with mud many decades ago, mud carried down the canyon in flash flood waters. And the significant point has been that rather than dig out the mud, workers just let it dry and then capped it with a new concrete pond bottom. Those upper ponds are significantly shallower than the main ponds at the garden center