Dinosaur statue in San Juan Capistrano not loved by all

Down the narrow corridor that runs through one of California's oldest neighborhoods, behind the perfectly preserved 200-year-old houses, the source of a heated debate in San Juan Capistrano pokes out his leathery neck with a goofy smile.

The city resting amid south Orange County's green-covered hills is known for its tight embrace of a rich history: Hundreds of horses march through the streets each year to welcome the swallows' expected return to the mission; an old-world Spanish motif of stucco walls and terra cotta roofs includes even burger joints and banks; and on historic Los Rios Street, there are strict rules about what belongs and what doesn't.

And the 40-foot-long apatosaurus cast off by a Romanian shopping mall? A group of neighbors and historical advocates think not, and are fighting a petting zoo to evict the dinosaur statue that has gripped the city's attention for months.

"Never in a million years — or 165 million years — did I think it would turn into such a frenzy," said Carolyn Franks, the owner of Zoomars Petting Zoo, who paid $12,000 for the faux Jurassic creature to join the menagerie of floppy-haired alpacas, rabbits, horses and a couple of zebra-donkey hybrids called zedonks.

"I brought this statue in with the best of intentions," she said, noting that her recent addition of a fossil hunt had been a hit at the zoo and that she'd wanted more prehistoric fare to please her clientele. She got a Tyrannosaurus rex skull first, then found the apatosaurus — now dubbed Juan the Capistrano Dinosaur — sitting in an Anaheim warehouse.

He — or at least they think he's a he — has been at the zoo since June, but his Los Rios Street abode is notably sparse: There's none of the greenery that an herbivore like his ancestors would have munched, and the sandboxes intended for more fossil digging are bare. The placard introducing him to visitors is stamped "Pending City Approval."

Although the city's Cultural Heritage Commission gave Juan a stamp of approval in a close vote, his fate remains anything but determined, with city officials still to weigh in on the matter.

Juan's opponents say he threatens the integrity of a neighborhood listed on the National Register of Historic Places. For starters, they say, he's an eyesore. And considering that the region was probably underwater when dinosaurs roamed the Earth, no apatosaurus, T. rex or other outsized lizard would have come through San Juan Capistrano unless lost at sea. Nor did the foes take too well to Juan's arriving without previous approval or city permits.

(Even Juan's arrival is murky: Critics contend Franks sneaked him in during dark of night. She says he came by truck in half a dozen pieces on a sunny afternoon.)

"You're not putting a merry-go-round in the Vatican or a big slide in the White House," said historian Ilse Byrnes, who worked to have Los Rios added to the national registry. "It's destroying the historical integrity of the area if she gets to keep it."

Jan Siegel, a Cultural Heritage commissioner, said the Los Rios enclave — described by one business owner as "the soul of San Juan" — has been protected as a quaint, mostly residential area by the rules that Franks appears to be flouting. Proposed businesses, such as a wine and beer garden, have been kept out; businesses have to close shop by 5 p.m.; and the number of visitors who stroll the narrow street each year is regulated.

"It's a unique, fragile area, in my opinion, and it needs to be preserved in a special way," Siegel said.

Juan's opponents have no problem with the petting zoo, saying it's an example of the livestock that would have been around centuries ago (except for the zedonks). Once known as the Jones Family Minifarm, it has been on Los Rios for three decades, sitting alongside the Historical Society, a nursery that's been in business since 1970 and the Rios Adobe that dates to the 1790s.

The dinosaur, Siegel said, arrived as a "kind of slap in the face."

But supporters counter that Juan is hardly a neighborhood disturbance and his presence doesn't violate the effort to maintain the surrounding history.

"It's a statue!" said Rhonda deHaan, Cultural Heritage Commission chairwoman. "It can't be more passive than that."

She said the statue is difficult to spot from the street, camouflaged in his green-gray skin, and that trees will be planted to further obscure Juan's long, skinny neck. He's no more of a distraction, she said, than the delivery trucks or cars clogging the street that, in some places, is about as wide as a sidewalk.

On a recent afternoon, Franks, who has owned the site for eight years, stood beside her statuesque acquisition, boasting that he had become almost as much of a draw as the pony rides. She said attendance nearly doubled over the summer, and often there was a line of visitors snapping pictures of the friendly faced apatosaurus. Children, she said, gravitate to him.

"They make it sound like this Godzilla that's coming to destroy the town," she said of Juan's critics.

Moments later, though, a group of children playing a few feet from the apatosaurus shrieked. "A dinosaur! A dinosaur!"

Then the bravest of them dashed over in her red cowgirl boots and stared the creature down: "Get out of my town, you beast!"

rick.rojas@latimes.com

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Software guru McAfee wants to return to United States

GUATEMALA CITY (Reuters) – Software guru John McAfee, fighting deportation from Guatemala to Belize to face questions about the slaying of a neighbor, said on Saturday he wants to return to the United States.

“My goal is to get back to America as soon as possible,” McAfee, 67, said in a phone call to Reuters from the immigration facility where he is being held for illegally crossing the border to Guatemala with his 20-year-old girlfriend.

“I wish I could just pack my bags and go to Miami,” McAfee said. “I don’t think I fully understood the political situation. I’m an embarrassment to the Guatemalan government and I’m jeopardizing their relationship with Belize.”

The two neighboring countries in Central America are locked in a decades-long territorial dispute and voters in 2013 will decide in a referendum how to proceed.

Responding to McAfee’s remarks, a U.S. State Department spokeswoman said U.S. citizens in foreign countries are subject to local laws. Officials can only ensure they are “treated properly within this framework,” she said.

On Wednesday, Guatemalan authorities arrested McAfee in a hotel in Guatemala City where he was holed up with his Belizean girlfriend.

The former Silicon Valley millionaire is wanted for questioning by Belizean authorities, who say he is a “person of interest” in the killing of fellow American Gregory Faull, McAfee’s neighbor on the Caribbean island of Ambergris Caye.

The two had quarreled at times, including over McAfee’s unruly dogs. Authorities in Belize say he is not a prime suspect in the investigation.

Guatemala rejected McAfee’s request for asylum on Thursday. His lawyers then filed several appeals to block his deportation. They say it could take months to resolve the matter.

The software developer has been evading Belize authorities for nearly four weeks and has chronicled his life on the run in his blog, www.whoismcafee.com.

McAfee claims authorities will kill him if he turns himself in for questioning. He has denied any role in Faull’s killing and said he is being persecuted by Belize’s ruling party for refusing to pay some $ 2 million in bribes.

Belize’s prime minister has rejected this, calling McAfee paranoid and “bonkers.

BEATING HEAD AGAINST WALL

After making millions with the anti-virus software bearing his name, McAfee later lost much of his fortune. For the past four years he has lived in semi-reclusion in Belize.

He started McAfee Associates in the late 1980s but left soon after taking it public. McAfee now has no relationship with the company, which was later sold to Intel Corp.

Hours after his arrest, McAfee was rushed to a hospital for what his lawyer said were two mild heart attacks. Later he said the problem was stress. McAfee said he fainted after days of heavy smoking, poor eating and knocking his head against a wall.

He told Reuters he no longer has access to the Internet and has turned over the management of his blog to friends in Seattle, Washington. On Saturday, they began posting a series of files claiming to detail Belize’s corruption.

Residents and neighbors in Belize have said the eccentric tech entrepreneur, who is covered in tribal tattoos and kept an entourage of bodyguards and young women on the island, had appeared unstable in recent months.

Police in April raided his property in Belize on suspicion he was running a lab to make illegal narcotics. There already was a case against him for possession of illegal firearms.

McAfee says the charges are an attempt to frame him.

“People are saying I’m paranoid and crazy but it’s difficult for people to comprehend what has been happening to me,” he said. “It’s so unusual, so out of the mainstream.”

(Editing by Dave Graham and Bill Trott)

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New Whitney Houston book recalls singer’s musical magic

LOS ANGELES (Reuters) – A new book on Whitney Houston by her early producer seeks to tell the story of the rise to stardom of the pop diva who died nine months ago.

Emmy and Grammy-winning producer Narada Michael Walden, who produced many of Houston‘s early hits, like “How Will I Know” and “I Wanna Dance With Somebody,” appeared at the Grammy Museum in Los Angeles on Wednesday to discuss the book and perform some of the songs he collaborated on.

“Her death was so shocking and sudden that I wanted to create something to keep alive the beautiful aspects of her life. The media was lashing out on the addiction and ignoring her musical genius,” Walden told Reuters.

Since she drowned in a bathtub on February 11 after taking cocaine, Houston‘s music and life have generated a TV tribute with Jennifer Hudson, Usher and others, a greatest hits CD, a coffee table book of photos and a TV reality show starring family members.

Walden’s book “Whitney Houston: The Voice, the Music, the Inspiration,” co-written with Richard Buskin, describes how Walden first met the singer when she was 13 and accompanied her mother to the studio. Walden was working on a record with her mom, soul and gospel singer Cissy Houston.

Walden said he all but forgot the young pretty girl until he got a call from Arista records in 1984, while working on an Aretha Franklin record, and was told to “make the time” to work on Houston‘s debut album.

Walden said Janet Jackson‘s management turned down the chance to record “How Will I Know” and that he rewrote it to make it catchier for Houston, who with her five-octave vocal range, recorded the 1985 No.1 song in only one take.

“The first take was the keeper. Instead of laboring on it for the better part of a day or even longer, we were done in a matter of minutes,” he said, noting Houston always worked fast.

Walden, who also produced for Ray Charles, Stevie Wonder and Barbra Streisand, collaborated with Houston on “So Emotional,” “One Moment in Time” and “I’m Every Woman” from the film, “The Bodyguard.”

Walden and Houston went in different directions by the late 1990s, but he would see her at the annual pre-Grammy party hosted by her long-time mentor, record industry mogul Clive Davis.

At the 2011 Davis party, Houston sat with her daughter, Bobbi Kristina – then 17 – who exclaimed she wanted to sing and work with Walden. “But Whitney gave me a look that said ‘Slow down. I’ve been down that road….and I’m not sure I want to curse her with that’,” he said.

Walden said he would now welcome the opportunity to work with Houston‘s daughter, who has become a fixture of gossip blogs and tabloids.

“If she wants to, I’d love to produce her and keep alive the professional image of her mother and focus on the positive,” he said.

(Reporting By Susan Zeidler, editing by Jill Serjeant and Andrew Hay)

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Doping at U.S. Tracks Affects Europe’s Taste for Horse Meat

PARIS — For decades, American horses, many of them retired or damaged racehorses, have been shipped to Canada and Mexico, where it is legal to slaughter horses, and then processed and sold for consumption in Europe and beyond.

Christinne Muschi for The New York Times

A slaughterhouse in Saint-André-Avellin, Quebec, where meat is processed for sale in Europe.

Lately, however, European food safety officials have notified Mexican and Canadian slaughterhouses of a growing concern: The meat of American racehorses may be too toxic to eat safely because the horses have been injected repeatedly with drugs.

Despite the fact that racehorses make up only a fraction of the trade in horse meat, the European officials have indicated that they may nonetheless require lifetime medication records for slaughter-bound horses from Canada and Mexico, and perhaps require them to be held on feedlots or some other holding area for six months before they are slaughtered.

In October, Stephan Giguere, the general manager of a major slaughterhouse in Quebec, said he turned away truckloads of horses coming from the United States because his clients were worried about potential drug issues. Mr. Giguere said he told his buyers to stay away from horses coming from American racetracks.

“We don’t want them,” he said. “It’s too risky.”

The action is just the latest indication of the troubled state of American racing and its problems with the doping of horses. Some prominent trainers have been disciplined for using legal and illegal drugs, and horses loaded with painkillers have been breaking down in arresting numbers. Congress has called for reform, and state regulators have begun imposing stricter rules.

But for pure emotional effect, the alarm raised in the international horse-meat marketplace packs a distinctive punch.

Some 138,000 horses were sent to Canada or Mexico in 2010 alone to be turned into meat for Europe and other parts of the world, according to a Government Accountability Office report. Organizations concerned about the welfare of retired racehorses have estimated that anywhere from 10 to 15 percent of the population sent for slaughter may have performed on racetracks in the United States.

“Racehorses are walking pharmacies,” said Dr. Nicholas Dodman, a veterinarian on the faculty of Tufts University and a co-author of a 2010 article that sought to raise concerns about the health risks posed by American racehorses. He said it was reckless to want any of the drugs routinely administered to horses “in your food chain.”

Horses being shipped to Mexico and Canada are by law required to have been free of certain drugs for six months before being slaughtered, and those involved in their shipping must have affidavits proving that. But European Commission officials say the affidavits are easily falsified. As a result, American racehorses often show up in Canada within weeks — sometimes days — of their leaving the racetrack and their steady diets of drugs.

In October, the European Commission’s Directorate General for Health and Consumers found serious problems while auditing the operations of equine slaughter facilities in Mexico, where 80 percent of the horses arrive from the United States. The commission’s report said Mexican officials were not allowed to question the “authenticity or reliability of the sworn statements” about the ostensibly drug-free horses, and thus had no way of verifying whether the horses were tainted by drugs.

“The systems in place for identification, the food-chain information and in particular the affidavits concerning the nontreatment for six months with certain medical substances, both for the horses imported from the U.S. as well as for the Mexican horses, are insufficient to guarantee that standards equivalent to those provided for by E.U. legislation are applied,” the report said.

The authorities in the United States and Canada acknowledge that oversight of the slaughter business is lax. On July 9, the United States Food and Drug Administration sent a warning letter to an Ohio feedlot operator who sells horses for slaughter. The operator, Ronald Andio, was reprimanded for selling a drug-tainted thoroughbred horse to a Canadian slaughterhouse.

The Canadian Food Inspection Agency had tested the carcass of the horse the previous August and found the anti-inflammatory drug phenylbutazone in the muscle and kidney tissues. It also discovered clenbuterol, a widely abused medication for breathing problems that can build muscle by mimicking anabolic steroids.

Because horses are not a traditional food source in the United States, the Food and Drug Administration does not require human food safety information as it considers what drugs can be used legally on horses. Patricia El-Hinnawy, a spokeswoman for the agency, said agency-approved drugs intended for use in horses carried the warning “Do not use in horses intended for human consumption.”

She also said the case against Mr. Andio remained open.

“On the warning letter, the case remains open and no further information can be provided at this time,” Ms. El-Hinnawy said.

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Supreme Court to rule on Prop. 8 ban on gay marriage

WASHINGTON — The Supreme Court set the stage Friday for a historic decision on gay rights, announcing it would hear appeals of rulings striking down California's Proposition 8 and the federal law denying benefits for legally married same-sex couples.

The court could decide in the Proposition 8 case whether the Constitution's promise of equal treatment gives gays and lesbians a right to marry. But the justices also left themselves the option to rule narrowly or even to duck a decision.

In 2008, California voters approved the measure limiting marriage to a man and a woman. Last year, the U.S. 9th Circuit Court of Appeals said the proposition had illegally taken away a right to marry that gays had won in the state courts.

MAP: How gay marriage has progressed in the U.S.

This 9th Circuit decision, though limited to California, was the first by federal judges to reject a state's marriage law.

Ted Olson and David Boies, two nationally prominent attorneys who launched the legal attack on Proposition 8, served notice they would seek a broad ruling national in scope at a time when public opinion has turned in favor of gay marriage rights.

"We are going to address all the issues, focused on the fundamental constitutional right to marry of all citizens," Olson said Friday.

"We ought to have marriage equality as a constitutional right everywhere," Boies added.

Q&A: Prop. 8, gay marriage and the Supreme Court

They maintained they were not concerned that the decision to hear the case puts in jeopardy their court victory for California gays who wish to marry. If the justices had simply turned down the appeal, gay marriage would have once again been legal in the state.

John Eastman, a California law professor and chairman of the National Organization for Marriage, which supports traditional marriage, saw the court's announcement as a sign that Proposition 8 would be upheld. If so, gay marriage would remain illegal in California, barring another voter initiative.

"It's a strong signal that the justices are concerned with the rogue rulings that have come out of San Francisco. We believe the U.S. Supreme Court will overturn this exercise in judicial activism," said Eastman, a former clerk to Justice Clarence Thomas.

TIMELINE: Gay marriage since 2000

In a second case, the justices will review the constitutionality of the Defense of Marriage Act and its provision denying federal benefits to same-sex couples who are legally married. Judges in New York, New England states and California have ruled this law denies gays and lesbians the equal protection of the laws.

The court agreed to hear the case of Edith Windsor, an 83-year-old widow who was given a $363,000 tax bill by the Internal Revenue Service after her female spouse died in 2009. The two had lived together for 44 years and were married in Canada in 2007. The U.S. government said Windsor did not qualify as a "surviving spouse" under the federal law. A married heterosexual couple would not have had to pay any tax.

A ruling on this issue could affect more than 100,000 gays and lesbians who are married in the United States.

The justices will have at least four options before them in the California case.

First, they could reverse the 9th Circuit and uphold Prop. 8, thereby making clear that the definition of marriage will be left to the discretion of each state and its voters. The defenders of Prop. 8 argue that federal courts should allow this divisive social issue to be resolved over time by voters and state legislatures.

A second possibility would be for the justices to agree with Olson and Boies and rule broadly that denying gays and lesbians the fundamental right to marry violates the Constitution. This would be a historic pronouncement, akin to the 1967 ruling in Loving vs. Virginia, which struck down the laws against interracial marriages.

A third option would be to follow the approach set by the 9th Circuit and strike down Proposition 8 in a way that limits the ruling to California.

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New iPad mini orders will be delivered in time for Christmas

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Viral rapper PSY apologizes for anti-US protests

South Korean rapper and Internet sensation PSY is apologizing to Americans for participating in anti-U.S. protests several years ago.

Park Jae-sang, who performs as PSY, issued a statement Friday after reports surfaced that he had participated in concerts protesting the U.S. military presence in South Korea during the early stages of the Iraq war.

At a 2004 concert, the “Gangnam Style” rapper performs a song with lyrics about killing “Yankees” who have been torturing Iraqi captives and their families “slowly and painfully.” In another protest, he smashed a model of a U.S. tank on stage.

“While I’m grateful for the freedom to express one’s self, I’ve learned there are limits to what language is appropriate and I’m deeply sorry for how these lyrics could be interpreted,” he wrote in the statement. “I will forever be sorry for any pain I have caused by those words.”

The 34-year-old rapper says the protests were part of a “deeply emotional” reaction to the war and the death of two Korean school girls, who were killed when a U.S. military vehicle hit them as they walked alongside the road. He noted antiwar sentiment was high around the world at the time.

PSY attended college in the U.S. and says he understands the sacrifices U.S. military members have made to protect South Korea and other nations. He has recently performed in front of servicemen and women.

“And I hope they and all Americans can accept my apology,” he wrote. “While it’s important that we express our opinions, I deeply regret the inflammatory and inappropriate language I used to do so. In my music, I try to give people a release, a reason to smile. I have learned that thru music, our universal language we can all come together as a culture of humanity and I hope that you will accept my apology.”

His participation in the protests was no secret in South Korea, where the U.S. has had a large military presence since the Korean War, but was not generally known in America until recent news reports.

PSY did not write “Dear American,” a song by The N.E.X.T., but he does perform it. The song exhorts the listener to kill the Yankees who are torturing Iraqi captives, their superiors who ordered the torture and their families. At one point he raps: “Kill their daughters, mothers, daughters-in-law, and fathers/Kill them all slowly and painfully.”

PSY launched to international acclaim based on the viral nature of his “Gangnam Style” video. It became YouTube’s most watched video, making him a millionaire who freely crossed cultural boundaries around the world. Much of that success has happened in the U.S., where the rapper has managed to weave himself into pop culture.

He recently appeared on the American Music Awards, dancing alongside MC Hammer in a melding of memorable dance moves that book-end the last two decades. And the Internet is awash with copycat versions of the song. Even former Republican Sen. Alan Simpson, the 81-year-old co-chairman of President Barack Obama‘s deficit commission, got in on the fun, recently using the song in a video to urge young Americans to avoid credit card debt.

It remains to be seen how PSY’s American fans will react. Obama, the father of two pop music fans, wasn’t letting the news change his plans, though.

Earlier Friday, the White House confirmed Obama and his family will attend a Dec. 21 charity concert where PSY is among the performers. A spokesman says it’s customary for the president to attend the “Christmas in Washington” concert, which will be broadcast on TNT. The White House has no role in choosing performers for the event, which benefits the National Children’s Medical Center.

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The New Old Age Blog: A Son Lost, a Mother Found

My friend Yvonne was already at the front door when I woke, so at first I didn’t realize that my mother was missing.

It was less than a week after my son Spencer died. Since that day, a constant stream of friends had been coming and going, bringing casseroles and soup, love, support and chatter. Mom hated it.

My 94-year-old mother, who has vascular dementia, has been living in my home in upstate New York for the past few years. Like many with dementia, mom is courteous but, underneath, irascible. Pride defines her, especially pride in her Phi Beta Kappa intellect. She hates to be confronted with how she has become, as she calls it, “stupid.”

The parade of strangers confused her. She had to be polite, field solicitous questions, endure mundane comments. She could not remember what was going on or why people were there. It must have been stressful and annoying.

That night, like every night since the state troopers brought the news, I woke hourly, tumbling in panic. As if it were not too late to save my son. Mom knew something was wrong, but she could not remember what. As I overslept that morning, she must have decided enough was enough. She was going home.

In a cold sky, the sun blazed over tall pines. As I opened the door, the dogs raced out to greet Yvonne and her two housecleaners. Yvonne often brags about her cleaning duo. They were her gift to me. They were going to clean my house before the funeral reception, which was scheduled for later that week. This was a very big gift because, like my mother before me, I am a very bad housekeeper.

Mom’s door was shut. I cautioned the housecleaners to avoid her room as I showed them around. Yvonne went to the kitchen to listen to the 37 unheard messages on my answering machine; the housecleaners went out to their van to get their instruments of dirt removal.

I ducked into Mom’s room to warn her about the upcoming noise. The bed was unmade; the floor was littered with crumpled tissues; the room was empty.

Normally, I would have freaked out right then. I knew Mom was not in the house, because I had just shown the whole house to the cleaners. Although Mom doesn’t wander like some dementia patients, she does on occasion run away. But I could not muster a shred of anxiety.

“Yvonne,” I called, “did you see my mother outside?”

Yvonne popped her head into the living room, eyebrows raised.“Outside? No!” She was alarmed. “Is she missing?”

“Yeah,” I said wearily, “I’ll look.” I stepped out onto the front porch, tightening the belt of my bathrobe and turning up the collar. Maybe she had walked off into the woods. The dogs danced around my legs, wanting breakfast.

I had no space left in my body to care. Either we would find her, or we would not. Either she was alive, or she was not. My child was gone. How could I care about anything ever again?

Then I saw my car was missing. My mouth fell open and my eyeballs rolled up to the right, gazing blindly at the abandoned bird’s nest on top of the porch light: What had I done with the keys?

Mom likes to run away in the car when she is angry. She used to do it a lot when my father was still alive — every time they fought. Since Mom took off in my car almost a year ago, after we had had a fight, I’d kept the keys hidden. Except for this week; this week, I had forgotten.

I was reverting to old habits. I had left the doors unlocked and the keys in the cupholder next to the driver’s seat. Exactly like Mom used to do.

“Uh-oh,” I said aloud. Mom was still capable of driving, even though she did not know where she was going. I just really, really hoped that she didn’t hurt anybody on the road. I pulled out my cellphone, about to call the police.

“Celia!” Yvonne shouted from the kitchen. She hurried up behind me, excited. “They found your mother. There are two messages on your machine.”

At that very moment, Mom was holed up at the College Diner in New Paltz, a 20-minute drive over the mountain, through the fields, left over the Wallkill River and away down Main Street.

Yvonne called the diner. They promised to keep the car keys until someone arrived. By that time, Yvonne had to go to work. She drove my friend Elizabeth to the diner, and Elizabeth drove Mom home in my car.

Half an hour later, they walked in the front door. Mom’s cheeks were rouged by the chill air and her eyes sparkled, her white hair riffing with static electricity. “Hello, hello,” she sang out. “Here we are.” She was wearing the flannel nightgown and robe I had dressed her in the night before. It was covered by her oversized purple parka, and her bare feet were shoved into sneakers.

I started laughing as soon as I saw her. I couldn’t help it. Elizabeth and Mom started laughing too. “You had a big adventure,” I said, hugging them both. “How are you?”

“I’m just marvelous,” said my mother. Mom always feels great after doing something rakish. We settled her on the sofa with her feet on the ottoman. By the time I got her blanket tucked in around her shoulders, she had fallen asleep.

Elizabeth couldn’t stop laughing as she described the scene. “Your mother was holding court in this big booth. She was sitting there in her nightgown and her parka, talking to everybody, with this plate of toast and coffee and, like, three of the staff hovering around her.”

The waitress said Mom seemed “a little disoriented” when she got there. Mom said she was meeting a friend for breakfast, but since she was wearing a nightgown and didn’t know whom she was meeting or where she lived, the staff thought there might be a problem. They convinced Mom to let them look in the glove compartment of the car, where they found my name and number.

It was then that I realized I was laughing – something I’d thought I would never be able to do again. “Elizabeth, Elizabeth, I’m laughing,” I said.

“Ha, ha, ha,” laughed Elizabeth, holding her belly.

“Ha, ha, ha,” I laughed, rolling on the floor.

And she who gave me life, who had suffered the death of my child and the extinction of her own intellect, snoozed on: oblivious, jubilant, still herself, still mine.

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Your Money: Deciding How to Slice Your Charitable Pie

Each year at this time, out of some combination of generosity and procrastination, millions of Americans rush to make donations to the causes and institutions important to them.

It is a beautiful thing, but it is also something of a scramble. The solicitations pile up. The holiday to-do list is already long. There are last-minute tax moves to make. And somewhere along the way, people find a few minutes to make a series of hasty decisions and dash off a bunch of checks.

This year, I was determined that my family would be a bit more deliberate. We already automatically give modest amounts each month, via credit card, to institutions and causes that we have a personal connection to and educational or religious institutions that shaped us or shape us still.

But I wanted us to have a true charitable asset allocation — an actual pie chart so that we could be more deliberate about how we split things up. We also had a goal of giving more to people who are lacking in basic needs.

Our historical pie chart shows us to be a lot like other Americans, with a heavy tilt toward houses of worship and secondary or higher education. According to the annual Giving USA study of how Americans give, just 8 percent of donations go to international organizations, and not all of them work on basic issues like hunger and health.

Any serious discussion of this issue ought to include a careful consideration of “The Life You Can Save,” a brief and provocative book by Peter Singer, a Princeton University professor of bioethics. To lead a truly ethical life, he writes, we should be doing much more to help poor people in faraway places. Our money can go farther there, too, giving us more bang for our charitable buck.

It is hard to argue that there is anything more important than saving one additional child’s life. But where does that leave those of us who still have a strong affinity for causes and places closer to home?

EDUCATION Many of us would not be where we are were it not for the educational institutions that picked up the bill when we could not pay full freight. To my mind, that creates not just a debt of gratitude but a running tab that I hope to clear long before I die.

Mr. Singer sees no need for people like me to repay in full, though. “I think it’s open to you to say that the marginal difference my dollar can make to an organization that already has a large endowment is not as great as one given to an organization that helps people who have almost nothing,” he said.

Even some fund-raising professionals were willing to absolve me here. “If you think about what motivates the people who fund scholarships, their intention is not necessarily for you to pay it back,” said Melissa A. Berman, the president and chief executive of Rockefeller Philanthropy Advisors. “The intention is for you to have a set of opportunities and to fulfill your potential without any strings attached.”

Strings or no, it would simply feel selfish not to give generously in this category. The one excuse Mr. Singer was willing to allow me was this one: The only way to justify giving something to educational institutions that are relatively well off (or to pay the $50,000-plus in costs for universities like his) is if they produce people and knowledge that will help solve the world’s problems.

It is hard to prove conclusively that any one institution has or will make a measurable difference. And what does he give to Princeton? “Not one cent,” he said, adding that he believes that he has talked many alumni into giving less than they might have otherwise.

HOUSES OF WORSHIP Many religious communities depend on their members for much or all of their annual budget. They would not exist but for our (still tax-deductible, for now) donations.

Mr. Singer, who is an atheist, doesn’t have much patience for this. “Maybe they could scale down a bit,” he said. “They don’t need such a comfortable place to worship while other people don’t have shelter from the elements.”

But many communities have inherited ornate buildings, which can feel like both blessings and curses from God when they start falling to pieces. Letting them rot isn’t really an option. Once they’re fixed up, however, Mr. Singer does offer a nod to the fact that people who pray there tend also to give a bit more to charity than non-God-fearing types.

If you offer financial support to your own house of worship, at the very least you have a duty to make sure that your religious community is making fellow members aware of the need to help people who have much less than you do.

CULTURAL INSTITUTIONS Here, Mr. Singer is perhaps at his most blunt. “Philanthropy for the arts or for cultural activities is, in a world like this one, morally dubious,” he writes in his book.

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An actor despairs in Tinseltown

Seth Burnham sat in a dim corner of Kaldi Coffee & Tea, clutching a mug as he tried to conjure some confidence.

Being here in L.A., I'm giving it everything, he thought.

But after three years of living in Los Angeles, he hadn't had a single role he could be proud of. In a cable TV comedy, he played Percy the Carjacker, a dimwit blown to shreds by an air hose. For an independent film, he had been the best friend of a beautiful woman — a role the script called Small Gay Man.

Hollywood is one big lottery. You have to play it if you want a career in movies or TV....You have to be here. You have to believe.

Sometimes that was tough. Take STARmeter, the entertainment insider's website that measures the popularity of Hollywood actors.

"I was No. 80,000," Burnham said, "for a while."

Frustrated and fatigued, he would retire to this worn, cave-like cafe in Atwater Village.

He had found his surrogate Los Angeles family here, a group of a dozen or so who eased his loneliness and shared his Hollywood ambition: Amy, the animator who had worked on "South Park," Nicholas, whose latest film was well received at the Sundance Film Festival, and Amad, a rising African American actor who worried about being typecast in criminal roles.

They stayed for hours, talking, typing, hunched hard over laptops, nursing lattes. They were actors, writers and directors; stragglers, success stories and hard-luck cases like Burnham.

Many days, he sat in a torn leather chair reading through newspapers and memorizing scripts. He seemed swallowed in the furniture — brown-haired, bearded, not much more than 5 feet tall, with worry lines marching from the corners of his eyes.

Time was against him. Asked his age back in February, Burnham paused. "Mid 30s-ish, early 40s-ish," he said.

Outside of the cafe, he had few Los Angeles friends. His wife, a medical student, moved to St. Louis last year for a residency, but he stayed here. They decided that if she was going to devote herself fully to her dream, then he would too.

But how much more rejection could he handle? And was the unrelenting struggle worth more to him than his marriage?

::

Since his college days in the early 1990s, the acting quest had taken Burnham to several cities. He lived in San Francisco and London, where he trained at a drama school in the classical English style and started a theater company. He lived in Portland, Ore., and Seattle, where he got good reviews for his role in a modern adaptation of Chekhov's "The Seagull."

Everywhere he put down roots he found a place like Kaldi. "The anti-Starbucks," he said. "Just my style."

In Los Angeles, he developed a cafe routine. Each morning, he awoke in his cramped apartment, fed kibbles to his cats, threw on his sneakers and walked across Glendale Boulevard.

He drank two iced coffees a day, no more. He couldn't afford more, not when he didn't have a job — he had to be free for auditions. He relied on credit cards and his wife's salary to pay his bills.

Burnham didn't want fame; he wanted to simply be a journeyman, a working actor, appreciated for his skill, making roughly the same yearly salary as a union electrician.

He sat in the cafe for entire mornings and sometimes entire days. "Wrestling demons," he said.

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