When you decide to hold a pie contest at a prominent art museum, it's hard to ignore all the inspiration around you. And so it happened that last year the Los Angeles County Museum of Art hosted our station KCRW's 3rd Annual Good Food Pie Contest. When we realized that an impressive show of more than 700 Tim Burton works would be up, we immediately had a new category.

What would the Olympics look like if they were carried out not by the best exemplars of athletic prowess that the world has to offer, but rather by pudgy 30-somethings playing skee-ball and having underwater breath-holding contests? Pretty pathetic, of course — but combine the self-serious grandeur of Olympics coverage with those half-ass athletes, and you've got the comic foundation for Jay and Mark Duplass' The Do-Deca-Pentathlon.

Both factions in Oliver Stone's new movie refer to each other, not without reason, as "savages." But this drug-war thriller is not nearly so feral as such previous Stone rampages as U-Turn and Natural Born Killers. Occasionally, it even seems righteous.

Kev, the man at the center of Last Ride, has a very particular skill set: He can lift wallets, steal cars and survive in the Australian bush, sleeping under the stars and dining on fresh wild rabbit. Taking care of his 10-year-old son, however, comes less naturally to him.

There's a stretch of beach in the small Jamaican fishing village of Treasure Beach where booths sell poetry books right alongside jerk chicken, and local villagers mix with international literati. On a weekend in late May, some 2,000 people sit entranced as author and poet Fred D'Aguiar reads them his work from a bamboo lectern.

Near the back of the North YMCA in Columbus, Ohio, several men and women line up on a row of beat-up platforms. They take turns practicing the two lifts that make up Olympic weightlifting; the "Snatch," and the "Clean and Jerk."

The goal? To hoist large amounts of weight from the floor into an overhead position.

Among the lifters here is 5-foot-8 inch, 350-pound Holley Mangold. She is the epitome of power, in appearance, attitude and athletic ability.