Ham

Consider lunch. Perhaps a nice ham sandwich. A slice of a knife neatly halves the ham and its two bread slices. But what if you slip? Oops, the ham now rests folded under a flipped plate, with one slice of bread on the floor and the other stuck to the ceiling. Here’s some solace: geometry ensures that a single straight cut, perhaps using a room-sized machete, can still perfectly bisect all three pieces of your tumbled lunch, leaving exactly half of the ham and half of each slice of bread on either side of the cut. That’s…

Darvin Ham got his chance early Friday night to make a statement. Two hours later, it was the Lakers’ turn.Facing what could be called a midseason crisis, the Lakers needed to approach Friday with the kind of attention and force the moment demanded, a chance to end a losing streak before hosting the red-hot Clippers on Sunday.But instead of failing to meet the moment with effort, the Lakers, in some ways just as they did against the Miami Heat on Wednesday, failed to meet the moment with competency, replacing…

There are plenty of ingredients required to create a recipe for cinematic greatness, but in the case of John Woo’s undisputed action classic Face/Off, ham and cheese were the only two key components required to craft one of the genre’s best-ever blockbusters. Nicolas Cage and John Travolta may have appeared in their fair share of character-driven dramas, but each of the stars knew exactly how to pitch their performances when it came to the ludicrous battle of wits between Sean Archer and Castor Troy, especially when they…

Hey everyone, it’s Dan Woike, beat writer for the L.A. Times, and welcome back to the Lakers’ newsletter, where you can win some good insight and listen to a great song even if the Lakers can’t seem to scare up a victory. This week, let’s try to deconstruct this team’s mindset 10 games into the season, when things got dicey again after its eighth loss. This, in part, was why the Lakers hired Darvin Ham. No truth was too tough, no topic too toxic to address, no star too big to coach. Yet here in Utah after another loss…

LAS VEGAS —  Darvin Ham wanted to see a lineup, the one that plenty of NBA folks feel could be one of the team’s best.Anthony Davis would start Wednesday’s game against the Suns in Las Vegas at center, the type of small-ball group that should allow the Lakers to fly around on both ends of the court.Ham wanted to go with LeBron James, Russell Westbrook, Patrick Beverley, Austin Reaves and Davis.But to see it, he’s going to have to wait.Davis was a late scratch because of lower back tightness. A team spokesperson said it…

No butterflies. No pregame photos on the court. No extra moments of reflection on the drive to the arena.Just work.“It’s game day,” Darvin Ham said before his first game as coach of the Lakers, projecting the calm, confidence and control that helped him land the job this offseason.If Ham wasn’t in the mood for sentimentality, new Sacramento Kings coach Mike Brown cooked up some, offering a few stanzas when asked whether there was any poetry in the season starting with a matchup between the two men.After all, it was Brown,…

Ham the juvenile chimp with trainers at Cape Canaveral, Florida, on January 31, 1961.Photo: NASAHam the chimpanzee is famous for being the first great ape in space, earning this distinction on January 31, 1961. A key goal of this NASA Mercury-Redstone mission was to determine if animals could perform tasks in space. To that end, Ham, who was only 2 years old when the training began, was taught to move levers, both to receive awards in the form of banana pellets and to avoid punishment in the form of electric shocks to his…