Lauded architect Raphael Soriano's 1939 'Gogol House,' located in the Franklin Hills area of Los Feliz, is on the market. The three bedroom, three bath home is one of only twelve standing and intact structures built by Soriano, making it a precious piece of Los Angeles architectural history. Soriano helped to define the mid-century modern style while building dozens of homes in LA during the 1930s, '40s, and '50s, according to the Society of Architectural Historians. While wildfires, earthquakes, demolitions, and unfortunate renovations have either destroyed or marred many of the architect's works, his legacy remains. Soriano studied under famous architects Richard Neutra and Rudolph Schindler, and eventually taught at USC. In 1961 he became a Fellow of the American Institute of Architects. He was an early advocate of the use of modular prefabricated steel and aluminum structures in residential design, and capitalized on Southern California's booming postwar steel and aerospace industries, reports The Architectural Estates.

The Gogol House, built for surgeon Louis J. Gogol and his wife, has been termed "the purest example of Soriano's early work," according to Deasy/Penner & Partners, who is listing the property. The 2,779 square-foot house features a 2,000 square-foot rooftop deck. This sleek example of mid-century LA architecture is priced at $1,195,000.

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If there is a goddess of animals, it's my mother. She has such a reputation for helping animals in despair that people are constantly bringing her homeless cats, injured birds, rejected baby raccoons, all sorts of needy animals. She takes them into her country house and nurses them back to health. One morning when Mom went to get the mail, she found a dog tied to the mailbox with a note that said, "Please take care of me." Of course she took him in. Mom treats all animals like this.

In the winter, when the field mice get tired of the cold, they move inside. Naturally, the mice choose a warm, provisionally abundant place to live in: the kitchen. They find the cabinets most pleasant. As all country-house dwellers know, you must curb the mice problem before it gets out of hand. The kitchen mice spread the word to all their friends, and soon enough you've got the whole forest living in your kitchen cabinets. But, Mom has prohibited the use of traditional spring-loaded mousetraps. Instead, she uses live traps, baited with Brie cheese. She apologizes profusely to each one as she catches him. When the mouse is finished dining on the cheese, Mom takes the cage and puts it into the Cadillac and the mouse gets his luxury, chauffeured trip five miles down the road to a farmer's field. Once Mom sets the mouse free, she drives back home to catch the next one.

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Some revolutions start with a whimper barely noticed. On April 25, 1953, a short paper written by two relatively obscure scientists was published in the British journal Nature. That article by James Watson and Francis Crick described the double helical structure of DNA. The authors famously ended their paper with the classically understated conclusion that the structure they elucidated "suggests a possible copying mechanism for the genetic material." The quest to understand DNA's structure was a bit messy, and some would say achieved with dirty play; but no matter the process, with that article a revolution was born, one that still reverberates today.

We may look back 50 years hence and draw a similar conclusion about a brief news article published in the April 2011 issue of Science, the American counterpart to Nature. The short review mentions a presentation given at this year's American Chemical Society annual meeting in which chemist Daniel Nocera explains the results of his team's research over the past three years. (The paper describing this latest work has not yet been published; the team is in the process of patenting their discovery). What Nocera and his team did, barely noticed, was create an "artificial leaf" that could revolutionize our quest for renewable energy much as the Watson and Crick paper revolutionized the field of biology.

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As an aging beauty, well, aging anyway, I am forever on the prowl for amazing moisturizers. My mother taught me at an early age to slather on the moisturizer. She was a Ponds Cold Cream and Helena Rubinstein addict. I guess my tendency for addictions comes from her. I have spent the last 30 years going from one moisturizer to another, since Helena Rubinstein went out of business, and left to my own devices. Until last year, I had been using Queen Helene Grape Seed Extract Skin Firming Cream, until that was taken off the market. I snapped up every last jar of Queen Helene from remote retailers and have been nervous about running out, not having found a replacement. Until now.

I was recently in Beverly Hills and ducked into a weird little, dark store that turned out to be Mickey Fine's Annex on Bedford. Mickey Fine is the pharmacist to the stars and who knew he had an annex, or needed one. Anyway, I asked for their best moisturizer and they handed me Egyptian Magic. This on the very day that the Egyptians rid Hosni Mubarak of his duties. I thought surely the Egyptians had magic all around them. After all, they had Cleopatra in their arsenal of fierceness. And any money bet that Mickey Fine fills all of Elizabeth Taylor's prescriptions.

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