Mr. Alf was an influential Brazilian songwriter, pianist and singer whose delicately swinging music was a precursor to the bossa nova.

There's a comfort-food theme to recent statistics from allrecipes.com, which bills itself as the Internet's No. 1 food and cooking site, with 1.6 billion visits last year. The top 10 requested recipes were banana bread followed by lasagna, easy sugar cookies, pancakes, slow-cooker pot roast, rolled sugar cookies, crepes, carrot cake, zucchini bread and chicken pot pie.