Wednesday’s column is about a Diamond Bar home where the lawn has been torn out and the back, side and front yards transformed into a garden. You can find out more, including seeing the event schedule, at The Growing Home website and at the Institute of Urban Ecology website. Above, Rishi Kumar looks for peppers in one of the backyard gardens.

Can you believe we haven’t done one of these guess-the-location photos since April 2012? (In that one I was marveling that we hadn’t done one since August 2011. I’ve gotta step it up.)

Reader Bob Terry contributes the above photo, and thankfully he told me where it is because I wouldn’t have known. Can you identify the location of this piece of public art? Submit your guess in the comment field below. The correct answer will appear here tomorrow.

* Why wait? Linda Bissonnette and Ramona both have it right, as do Xavier Torres and Kimberly Serdinsky LaHue on FB. Their comments, aside from the location, include “ugly” and “very gaudy.” Tough crowd.

There’s a billboard along the 10 Freeway in Ontario that I’ve been seeing on my drive into work, touting Ron White, who’ll be performing at Pechanga, and my question has been, who is Ron White? Is he a singer? A comedian?

This happens to all of us, of course, but in my case, I’m in tune enough that I generally know the names of people on billboards, or can guess from the name or context what they do, what type of music it is, whatever. But “Ron White,” with a photo of a fifty-something white man with a small smile? Could be a country singer.

Since I follow music very closely and didn’t recognize his name, though, my guess was he wasn’t a singer but rather a comic, which turns out to be the case, now that I’ve looked it up. According to his Wikipedia page, “White toured with Jeff Foxworthy, Bill Engvall and Larry the Cable Guy as part of the Blue Collar Comedy Tour.” Those guys I’ve heard of — although they have more memorable names — which makes me wonder if White is the Jose Carreras of the bunch. (You know, the third tenor, after Placido Domingo and Luciano Pavarotti.)

Still, on my next drive into work, I’ll know who Ron White is — and so will you, if you see one of those billboards.

Sunday’s column has items about Inland Valley mentions in the New Yorker magazine, in the Financial Times and on “Late Nights With Jimmy Fallon,” as well as few cultural items of note, including the Oscars.

Oh, and in the *groan* category, the Ontario library movies listed in loving detail in the column will screen each Thursday — a little detail I, er, forgot to include. That omission certainly jumped out at me as I read the newspaper over breakfast this morning, although it slipped right past me (and my editor) on the computer screen last week. Sigh.

They say 1 in 3 Americans watched the Super Bowl, but that means 2 in 3 didn’t. I had hoped to do something big but decided I wasn’t up for an L.A. adventure and took it easy in La Verne and Claremont: a late lunch outside at The Habit, some work on my laptop out on the Panera patio and then to Coffee Bean to read. (I started “The Hunger Games” and raced through the first third.)

If you avoided the Super Bowl, what did you do?

Sunday’s column compiles the best-known visits by Richard Nixon to the Inland Valley over two decades, followed by news of a charitable act at ONT and a few short items of note.

To start the new year right, I made an attempt (in the brief time before deadline Monday) to go through some of the paper on my desk to troll for items. Wednesday’s column is the result.

Hope it’s a good one for everyone who deserves it — which certainly encompasses everyone reading this blog.

Any wishes, resolutions or goals you would care to share?

As I write this, I’m still mulling what I’d like to accomplish in 2013, but professionally, one goal is to get around to some column topics, especially of a historical nature, that have been on my “wishlist” (or on my desk) for a long time. Of course my job involves following what’s new, but I want to keep an eye on the big picture and tackle a few more perennials.

What were the 10 strangest local news stories of 2012? My Sunday column counts ‘em down.

Let’s say the Mayans were right and the world ends Friday. What plans do you have between now and then?