If you worried that Ingmar Bergman’s death had brought an end to the Nordic angst-filled view of life, you should hurry over to Scandinavia House, where—hurrah!—you’ll find plenty of vigorous brooding. In the building’s quiet gallery, tucked away on the third floor, 40 works by last year’s four finalists for Finland’s prestigious Ars Fennica prize present the region’s most famous cultural exports: repressed desires, mystical urges, hidden demons, fleeting pleasure, and those beautifully bleak landscapes.

Things get off to a bracing start with the drawings and paintings of Elina Merenmies, darkest in both theme and palette of the four artists. Anguish, it seems, drives every brushstroke. In several smaller works, trees finely inked in black sinuously grow outward to express a kind of desperate yearning, the branches dividing into increasingly delicate filaments and spreading across the paper like neurons.

Ask the PCWA for water conservation rewards

Water costs are on the rise and the Placer County Water Agency can do more to empower customers to avoid future costs through economic incentives.

Residents of Auburn have recently been faced with the increasing costs of water, both on the supply side (PCWA) and the wastewater disposal side (city of Auburn). While these cost increases may have shocked many, the inescapable fact is these costs primarily reflect what we, the customers, demand — sufficient quantity and quality of water supplied to our homes and sufficient capacity of our sewage treatment plant to treat wastewater flows. Objecting to proposed cost increases is too late in the game to avoid increased costs. Changing what we, the customers, demand is the more effective way of heading off the future shock of water costs.

District 52 Republicans Vie to Replace Krusee

With the decision of State Rep. Mike Krusee, R-Round Rock, not to run for a ninth term, the Williamson Co. Republican Party is facing something it has not had in District 52 since 2000 – a contested primary, one with four potential successors to the outgoing incumbent. The winner will face a Democrat and a Libertarian in November.

In 2006, Krusee scraped by with a thin majority of only 50.44%, beating out Democrat Karen Felthauser (44.2%) and Libertarian Lillian Simmons (5.3%). The district, which covers the southern end of the county, has changed since he first took office in 1992. "They spent 20 years as a bedroom community," said Krusee, but with much of Round Rock now built out and Hutto expanding rapidly, areas like Taylor may soon be targeted by developers. "The challenge for the future is transforming into a more mature urban community," said Krusee, adding he believes he has done "a good job" in helping guide that change.

Bob Ford: Villanova confident after UConn win

Perhaps that is all that happened yesterday, and the final sorting at the Big East tournament in two weeks will shuffle out the Wildcats in quick fashion. Playing small - depending entirely on defense and jump shots - is a long walk through the valley of death, even if you fear no evil. But it's a lot better to have someone like Connecticut's 7-foot-3 Hasheem Thabeet walking beside you.

That's reaching a long way back, almost before Rollie Massimino invented the game, and it could still happen.