Hybrid

SEPTA will spend $171 million on 245 new buses, under a plan sent to the SEPTA board Thursday. Most of the buses are to be built with hybrid electric-diesel engines, though 85 are set to be cheaper diesel-powered buses. Hybrid buses are more fuel-efficient and less polluting but cost about 34 percent more than diesel buses. If the SEPTA board approves next Thursday, the contract will be awarded to NOVA Bus, a Canadian subsidiary of Swedish manufacturer Volvo Bus Corp. The buses are to be built in NOVA's Plattsburgh, N.Y., plant.

2004 Chevrolet Silverado and GMC Sierra (available to the public in the fall) Ford Escape (late summer) 2005 Saturn Vue Dodge Ram pickup 2006 Chevrolet Equinox Mercedes S-class 2007 Chevrolet Tahoe GMC Yukon Source: U.S. Department of Energy

The border between the United States and Mexico is sufficiently permeable to have produced its own distinctive hybrid culture. Glass artists Einar and Jamex de la Torre, while not of the border zone, are perfect representatives of that culture. The brothers are natives of Guadalajara who moved to Southern California as adolescents. Now they produce art that is truly bicultural in the way it thoroughly homogenizes Mexican and American source material. Their small exhibition at Snyderman Gallery indicates that they look at their native and adopted cultures skeptically.

There were many sides to Joseph Kassab - a skilled surgeon, a Wallingford community activist, an Army Reserve major and an area horticulturist, registered by the National Arboretum as the discoverer of a hybrid holly, 'Doctor Kassab.' Dr. Kassab, 82, died Wednesday at his Wallingford home, the same house where he had cared for the gardens since he was a child. "He was a very caring surgeon and loved his trees," said his wife of 38 years, Emma Elizabeth Smith Kassab. Born in the city of Chester, Dr. Kassab graduated in 1930 from Lafayette College and, in 1934, from Hahnemann Medical College.

Mayor Rendell emerged from a huddle with the board members of the Pennsylvania Convention Center Authority yesterday and said the center would be run by "a hybrid" of public employees and private companies. Rendell and City Council President John F. Street met for more than an hour in City Hall with the nine-member board and the top staff of the convention center, in a meeting closed to the public. The board then briefly convened a public meeting to award the $54 million bid on the Reading Terminal train shed to Dick Enterprises, of Pittsburgh.

It's a cross between Waiting for Godot, Cabaret and Towering Inferno. It's "Cocktail in the Sky," a hard-to-peg but explosively funny dance-theater hybrid. This collaboration between choreographer Melanie Stewart and the Scottish-based Benchtours theater company bowed at Temple Center City's Stage III on Friday, sharing the bill with Darla Stanley's "Blood Carved. " Surprisingly, there was a coherent story here, emerging in pieces from under the strange goings-on: Five disparate characters find themselves in an elevator, bound for the highest cocktail lounge ever built.

It all started inauspiciously enough a decade ago when Taylor-Made introduced the Rescue club, a funny-looking sort of half fairway wood, half long iron. As the name implies, the Rescue was designed to be easy to hit and versatile, a club that recreational golfers use to get themselves out of trouble their other clubs had gotten them into. Ten years later, the Rescue - generically dubbed a "hybrid" club by the dozen or more manufacturers who have their own variations - is no longer a fad but the fastest-growing category of club in the game.

From time immemorial, if not sooner, women have wondered whether all men are pigs. Modern science has muddied the waters - can you cross a pig with a man? Is that redundant? And what do you call something that's part pig, or some other species, and part man? What would you call a guy who dated such a creature? Would the word "pig" even suffice? All these questions, and more, are explored in the zestily disturbing sci-fi/horror/monster mash-up "Splice. " It's a new-age Frankenstein about two married scientists (their names are Clive and Elsa, taken from the actors in "Frankenstein" movies)

Take away the laptops at the sound console and the camera phones, and the Mars Volta's 2 1/2-hour show of heavy rock transcendence at the Electric Factory on Sunday was an authentic, mind-expanding happening straight out of the original psychedelic ballroom in the late '60s. (The band plays a second sold-out show there tonight.) The band, expanded to seven pieces for the live performance, turned the Santana-on-steroids opener "Drunkship of Lanterns" into a half-hour opus that spewed discordant sax skronk, and its 35-minute finale, "Cassandra Gemini," made King Crimson's pioneering prog-rock absurdity "Court of the Crimson King" seem tame.

The Nutter administration has won a significant concession on city pensions in an arbitration proceeding with the city's 2,000 prison guards. The neutral arbitrator in the case, Richard Kasher, ruled late last week that new hires in the bargaining unit may be forced to join a hybrid pension plan, created by the city to hold down costs. The hybrid plan provides a limited defined benefit for city employees, no more than 25 percent of the worker's final average salary, supplemented by an investment plan, similar to a 401(k)

The Nutter administration has won a significant concession on city pensions in an arbitration proceeding with the city's 2,000 prison guards. The neutral arbitrator in the case, Richard Kasher, ruled late last week that new hires in the bargaining unit may be forced to join a hybrid pension plan, created by the city to hold down costs. The hybrid plan provides a limited defined benefit for city employees, no more than 25 percent of the worker's final average salary, supplemented by an investment plan, similar to a 401(k)

SEPTA will spend $171 million on 245 new buses, under a plan sent to the SEPTA board Thursday. Most of the buses are to be built with hybrid electric-diesel engines, though 85 are set to be cheaper diesel-powered buses. Hybrid buses are more fuel-efficient and less polluting but cost about 34 percent more than diesel buses. If the SEPTA board approves next Thursday, the contract will be awarded to NOVA Bus, a Canadian subsidiary of Swedish manufacturer Volvo Bus Corp. The buses are to be built in NOVA's Plattsburgh, N.Y., plant.

ART BID IT UP Support InLiquid, an Internet hub showcasing the region's galleries and artists, by attending its 12th annual fundraiser and silent auction. As always, art of all media - paintings, photos, clayware and more - will be displayed. The silent auction includes work from over 150 artists, including photographer Judy Gelles' "Boss" (a woman sneering into the camera wearing a feminine pink head scarf) and Darla Jackson's sculpture "It Started at a Young Age" (a bunny-crow hybrid)

Freshly minted green cars. Groundbreaking automobiles like the 2013 Ford Fusion. Indoor demonstration rides in Toyota hybrids. The dashing new Porsche 911. These are among the innovative sights that will vie for the hearts and minds of the 250,000 car-crazed and perfectly normal people expected to attend the Philadelphia Auto Show that opens Saturday at the Convention Center. The annual extravaganza will feature hundreds of new cars and trucks, including more than a dozen soon-to-be-released vehicles on display for the first time in this region.

The auto industry is being reminded once again that if you build it, they will come - but not necessarily in the numbers the marketing department had hoped for. Given the avalanche of new hybrids and electrics making their debuts on the auto-show circuit - and you'll see several of them when the Philadelphia Auto Show opens its nine-day run Saturday - you'd think electrified-vehicle sales were going into orbit. But - thanks to the fact that gas is less than $4 a gallon and hybrid and electric cars are significantly more costly than their conventional counterparts - they definitely are not. The sales of these cars, like the price of gas, declined in 2011.

In the first episode of "This Is Not Your Uncle's Buick Regal," presented during the 2011 model year, we were introduced to the base version of this very European midsize sports sedan, and its turbocharged sibling. This fall, Buick has added two more variants on this stylish and satisfying theme: an even more powerful and athletic turbocharged model, the 270-horsepower Regal GS, and the mild hybrid I'm reporting on today: the Regal equipped with e-Assist. It's called a "mild" hybrid because the small, 15-horsepower electric motor isn't powerful enough to motivate the car by itself.

By George Ball Last summer, I discovered a profound contradiction deep in the fertile soil of community gardening. First lady Michelle Obama has boldly proclaimed that the urban poor are at serious risk of deprivation of fresh produce. "Food deserts" stretch from border to border in the poor and underprivileged sections of every major American city. One of the ways she proposed to solve this problem is to expand the size and number of community gardens. However, there is also a stylish movement in contemporary gardening toward old-fashioned or "heirloom" vegetables that were popular in our grandparents' day. In community gardens everywhere, I see tall, rangy, low-yielding and romantically named heirloom varieties made popular by environmental activists.

SEPTA will get $15 million for new hybrid buses, the Federal Transit Administration said Monday. The money will be added to existing state and local funds to provide $78 million for 55 articulated 60-foot diesel-electric hybrid buses, SEPTA spokesman Andrew Busch said. The new buses, to be delivered next year, will bring to 527 the number of hybrid buses in SEPTA's 1,400-bus fleet. - Paul Nussbaum