Painting

Max Galuppo is the big man on canvas . Or at least he appears to be. The Temple student is getting national TV notice for bearing an uncanny resemblance to an armed aristocrat in a 16th-century Italian painting found at the Philadelphia Museum of Art. ABC News found the likeness remarkable enough to contact Galuppo and his girlfriend, Nikkie Curtis, after she posted a photo, now seen by thousands, on Reddit.com. Wolf Blitzer's CNN show also set up an interview. Thursday morning, it's ABC again, with Max and Nikki in a live segment on Good Morning, America from the Arms & Armor section, according to museum spokeswoman Gigi Lamm.

It's dark, dreary, and occasionally damp. Spiders lurk. Stinkbugs lie dead in the corners. And on the shelves: Ugh. Old cans of paint, their labels obscured by drips, their lids encrusted with clumped hues of yellow, green, and ecru. That's how one corner of my basement looks. And perhaps yours, too. It's evidence of my un-eco paint past. You could color those sins by the numbers. But while my old cans have been drying - one, it turned out, was more than a decade old - the paint industry has been progressing, growing ever greener.

WASHINGTON - The economic downturn is pressing more employers to reduce pension benefits, and is significantly delaying when people launch their careers, darkening the already bleak picture young workers face in saving for retirement. Corporations have been slashing pensions for decades, but such cuts are common now in the public sector, where retirement benefits were traditionally much better. In both cases, employers frequently reach for the same tool - preserve benefits for current employees but make severe cuts for new ones.

It was an unfortunate incident, but one that propelled artist Michelle Ortiz into a career as a muralist dedicated to social change: Ortiz was a teenager, one of the few Latinas in her private high school. Fresh from art class, she went to the school store to look for a gift for her sister. The teacher in charge told her to stop handling the goods. "She told me, 'Don't touch that because your hands are dirty,' " Ortiz recalled of the conversation in 1996. Ortiz looked at her hands, puzzled.

PITTSBURGH - Whoever used spray paint to mar the political banners in the window of the anti-Obama office in Pittsburgh's Squirrel Hill neighborhood early Saturday maybe thought it was a clever idea, but he shouldn't be too surprised if police come knocking at his door. That's because the incident, in which anti-Obama messages were transformed into pro-Obama comments with the help of some red spray paint, was caught on video. A grainy surveillance video from the center's storefront at Murray and Forward Avenues shows a man walking up at 3:47 a.m. Saturday, spray painting the windows, and then calmly walking away.

Make no mistake about it, David Dietz enjoys being a landlord. He tries to be a good one, often showing up within minutes of a call from a tenant at any of six units in Northeast Philadelphia or the two in Atlantic City when a toilet clogs or a sink drips, changing a room color from his standard neutral or white to potato-chip yellow or Medici blue. These days, however, Dietz finds himself a bit, well, confused, as he puts it. The reason for his confusion, apparently shared by many small landlords in Philadelphia, is city Ordinance 1000-11A, effective two months from Sunday.

The garden's "off-season" used to be a time to rest and daydream about next year's triumphs, but for professional gardeners and many an amateur, that's the fantasy now. "The off-season used to be a nice time to decompress, but I'm actually busier then. It's more restful to go out and weed," says Joe Henderson, one of six full-time horticulturists at Chanticleer, the public garden in Wayne, who are expected to take on a creative project every winter. This keeps everyone "focused and busy," to put it mildly, and allows for "time to dream about future designs," according to Chanticleer's executive director R. William Thomas.

Some perspective is warranted in Opera Company of Philadelphia's new production of Puccini's La Boheme before contemplating even a note of the music: By employing numerous masterpiece paintings from the time of the opera's composition in 1896, the production, which opened Friday at the Academy of Music, has prompted complicated reactions. Are the paintings, altered by digital wizardry, being ill-used? Overall, the production - which will be shown free on Independence Mall on Saturday evening - is an absolute success, full of fine singing and acting and eye-filling stage direction in this romanticized slice of life of struggling artists in late 19th-century Paris.

When Joe Girandola took a job apprenticing as a stone carver in Italy back in 1989, he learned quite quickly that this romantic career move had a painful downside: It was blisteringly hard work, and gloves only made the blisters worse. Quickly, though, Girandola devised a solution. He wrapped his hands each morning in "gloves" made of duct tape, shipped by the case from his parents in the United States. Soon, the tape became even more interesting to him than the stone he was sculpting.

If the painting is a still life, it won't stay still long - as it morphs beyond its usual frame while on the Academy of Music stage. Opera Company of Philadelphia's latest outing with Puccini's La Boheme , opening Friday, may well be a night at the opera and an afternoon at the museum - specifically, the Barnes Foundation and the Philadelphia Museum of Art - rolled into one. The staging concept devised by Italian director Davide Livermore utilizes...