Love

Facebook was supposed to soar. Instead, it plunged. After the social network's stock fizzled on Friday in its long-awaited debut, its stock fell 11 percent on Monday, even as the rest of the stock market rallied. The downward spiral has left some people sitting on big losses, and others scratching their heads. After all, nothing fundamental has changed at Facebook in the days since the much-hyped company came to the stock market — Facebook still has more than 900 million users, its 28-year-old founder Mark Zuckerberg controls the company, and it is still one of the few...

It was 28 years ago, in May 1984, that Melrose christened its baseball field, named for its benefactor, Richard Morelli. Dr. Morelli was then an obstetrician/gynecologist in Melrose. He had three children who went through the high school, including his son, Frank, a catcher on the 1984 team. The elder Morelli also launched the Melrose Rams to play Intercity League games on the sparkling new field. But weather and a quarter-century of play took their toll. The field had fallen into disrepair.

Mitt Romney is on a charm offensive. He took reporters' questions after a campaign rally Thursday instead of keeping them at bay. He brought them warm chocolate chip cookies for the flight from Jacksonville to Palm Beach, Fla. After he got off the plane, he walked over to show reporters a picture of his 5-year-old grandson, Parker. It was "wild hair day" at school and the grandfather of 18 had to share what had just come into his iPad. "You know how he did that? With Elmer's Glue and egg whites.

Myles Kennedy plays David Coverdale to Slash's Jimmy Page on "Apocalyptic Love," the second studio "solo" album from the top-hatted guitar hero. Just as Coverdale-Page was a Led Zeppelin doppelganger, this pairing of Kennedy and Slash bears unmistakable resemblance to Guns N' Roses. Kennedy, from Alter Bridge, has the sort of pinched, perturbed tone Axl Rose blended with Slash's guitar work when the two were in GN'R. Not many could slip a smoky blues-rock solo into a galloping punk-ish tune, but Slash pulls it off on "One Last Thrill.

NEWTON - Dan Kennedy will graduate from Boston College on Monday, summa cum laude, Phi Beta Kappa, and the recipient of the school's most prestigious prize, the Edward H. Finnegan Award. Winners of the Finnegan, given to the student who best exemplifies the BC motto, "ever to excel," tend to go big - top grad schools, Wall Street, overseas fellowships. Kennedy is planning to give away his computer, recycle his Blackberry, and move to a modest communal house in St. Paul, Minn.

Barney Frank is in love. This is not exactly news — he's getting married in July — but it's still striking, the way a congressman who has cultivated a reputation for prickliness can be so publicly, sweetly sentimental. "It's funny," Frank said last week, musing about his relationship with his fiance, Jim Ready. "I used to listen to these songs about love and . . . they didn't mean anything to me. I would almost be kind of annoyed by them, you know — it's like I was left out. The whole thing takes on a meaning it didn't have.

He cannot remember what was in the contest jar - balls or jellybeans or other objects - but Celtics guard Ray Allen clearly recalls the prize he received as a first-grader at his Oklahoma elementary school. "I won three books," Allen said with a smile. "I remember I felt so proud that I won those three books, those books were mine. " Allen traces his love of reading to that moment, and it continues today, as he uses the pleasures of a good book to ease the boredom of long road trips or soothe a particularly bad loss.

Repairs to the aging Sagamore Bridge during the spring have slowed traffic leaving Cape Cod to a crawl most nights and backed it up for miles on Sundays, culminating in a Mother's Day morass when the stalled line of cars stretched past multiple exits on Route 6 and triggered all-day gridlock on nearby Route 6A. "Whoever conceived of this plan should be fired," said Anne Kilguss, a Boston social worker and psychotherapist with a second home in...

Q. I am a 48-year-old married woman. I love my husband and believe he loves me, too. "Frank" used to be very affectionate and also quite interested in sex. Now I am lucky to get a kiss on the cheek at bedtime. We haven't had sex in over a year. His doctor gave him samples of Viagra; they have been in a drawer for months. Frank says sex is not important to him anymore, but it is to me. I am so tired of all the jokes about women "having a headache. " I feel like the joke is on me. I do not want to leave him or have an affair.

There's sun, sand and sex in Cannes Film Festival entry "Paradise: Love" — and they add up to a grim and unsettling holiday movie. Austrian director Ulrich Seidl's film depicts middle-aged European women at a Kenyan holiday resort seeking romance with young local men. It had its gala premiere Friday in Cannes, where it is one of 22 films competing for the Palme d'Or. The movie stars Margarethe Tiesel as a 50-year-old Austrian whose search for love turns increasingly predatory.

By Jonathan Simmons, Guest Columnist One of the great things about Hubway , Boston's bicycle sharing program, is that it allows all sorts of people to go out for a ride. Until last year, Love Nickerson never considered herself to be a cyclist. Sure, she knew how to ride a bike, but she didn't own one. For Love, the challenges of maintaining, storing, and securing a bicycle were more than she cared to manage. When Love first learned about Hubway she was thrilled.

An artist who was setting up an illuminated "I Love New York"-themed public art display in Brooklyn was arrested after the wired contraption was mistaken for an explosive device. Takeshi Miyakawa, a visual artist and furniture designer, was arrested Saturday after placing the installation in two separate areas of the same New York City neighborhood. His lawyer and employer both called the arrest a misunderstanding. The first apparatus was found Friday morning after a caller reported a suspicious package to police.

For every Francophile there are a few Francophobes; and for every hundred of these, there is one Franco-failure. Someone who tried shoving off for Paris in search of the café life only to discover the coffee is, by and large, atrocious, the croissants quite stale, and while the city is beautiful, it is impermeable to love. It doesn't need you. In fact you get the sense as a visitor that, like a host putting away the dinner party china, it would rather you leave. Rosecrans Baldwin was one of these unlucky souls.

When the orphan arrived, Daphne Sheldrick felt her heart sink: "She was the smallest elephant I had ever seen — still covered in the soft fuzz of elephant infancy, her tiny trunk tinged with pink, toenails of pale yellow — soft and brand new. " Gauging the color and softness of the baby's ears, it was clear she was under 3 weeks old. Sheldrick was experienced at saving all kinds of animal babies, elephants in particular. They came in droves from the 1970s onward, as ivory poachers shot, hacked, and maimed their way across Kenya.

Both boos and applause greeted Cristian Mungiu's latest film at Cannes — and that's fine with him. The Romanian director won the film festival's top prize in 2007 with abortion drama "4 Months, 3 Weeks and 2 Days," but he's had a more mixed reception this time around. "Beyond the Hills," in which love and faith collide with fateful inevitability, was inspired by the true 2005 case of a young woman who died during an attempted exorcism at a remote monastery. Some Cannes viewers failed to warm to the 2 ½-hour film's wintry setting and deliberate pace, or wished for more...

Eternity is in love with the productions of time. William Blake WWW.REFLECTIONFORTHEDAY.COM. Collected by Tom Fitzpatrick. All rights reserved.

Cape Cod's most desirable landscaper is a married man. Dennis resident and former "Bachelorette" contestant Chris Lambton married his longtime love Peyton Wright (a former contestant on "The Bachelor") at the Wild Dunes Resort in Charleston, S.C., on Saturday. Lambton will be back in Boston later this week to promote his new HGTV show, "Going Yard. "

With his carefully tended hair, tight trousers and perfect harmonies, Robin Gibb, along with his brothers Maurice and Barry, defined the disco era. As part of the Bee Gees — short for the Brothers Gibb — they created dance floor classics like "Stayin Alive," ''Jive Talkin'," and "Night Fever" that can still get crowds onto a dance floor. The catchy songs, with their falsetto vocals and relentless beat, are familiar pop culture mainstays. There are more than 6,000 cover versions of the Bee Gees hits, and they are still heard on dance floors...

There's sun, sand and sex in Cannes Film Festival entry "Paradise: Love" — and they add up to a grim and unsettling holiday movie. Austrian director Ulrich Seidl's film depicts middle-aged European women at a Kenyan holiday resort seeking romance with young local men. It had its gala premiere Friday in Cannes, where it is one of 22 films competing for the Palme d'Or. The movie stars Margarethe Tiesel as a 50-year-old Austrian whose search for love turns increasingly predatory.

The three "American Idol" finalists earned nearly uniform votes of confidence Wednesday from the show's judges. Now it's the audience tally that will determine which two compete for glory in next week's finale. If the night had a teacher's pet, it was Joshua Ledet, 20, who delivered what Randy Jackson, Jennifer Lopez and Steven Tyler deemed flawless performances. Each contestant performed three songs: One picked by the judges, one by producer-mentor Jimmy Iovine, and one chosen by the singers themselves.