Features

Graduation means tons of things to do but what’s one of the easier things to get out of the way? Senior pictures.

You’ll need them for your graduation announcements, not to mention replacing your outdated Facebook profile picture, but the shoot is relatively simple to plan and you’ll have fun doing it.

The senior picture process can be broken down into three steps: choosing a photographer, planning the shoot and doing the shoot.

WEST POINT — One West Point family’s hobby is so uncommon, the three kids are the only ones at their respective schools who participate in the sport, known as junior dragster racing.

The Casteel children — Kestra, 16, Tristyn, 13, and Trevyn, 10 — all compete in the sport that became popular in the early 1990s. It allows boys and girls, beginning at age 8, to race on the 1⁄8-mile track in a junior dragster vehicle, a scaled down version of a top fuel dragster, with its long, narrow frame, caged-in seating area, and large back tires and small front tires to maximize acceleration and speed.

If Mom and Dad don’t know if they’re having a boy or a girl, certified nurse midwife Christy Francis doesn’t want to know, either.

“Sometimes if they’re having a surprise, it helps me to be surprised ... because I don’t want to accidentally slip,” says Francis, who offers routine ultrasounds for mothers throughout their pregnancies at Ogden Nurse Midwives in South Ogden.

Extra care is needed on ultrasounds, Francis says, in order to avoid scrolling over “something” that reveals the sex, or to avoid reacting to seeing that something.

“You hope they don’t see any different look on your face,” she says.

Adds ultrasound technician Kathy Field: “If you slip and tell them, it’s like ruining Christmas, you know what I mean?”

If you’re younger than, say, 70, you might have noticed The Rolling Stones are back on tour.

It happens every three or four years. The self-described “World’s Greatest Rock ’n’ Roll Band” long ago figured out that’s about the right interval for being able to fire up a giant front-end loader, drive it through various American cities and scoop up fans’ big-cash money.

The extra-special one-time-only selling point this time around: The surviving Stones are celebrating the group’s 50th anniversary … which actually was in 2012.

The four principal band members are in their late 60s and early 70s. And while time has been on their side, the age-related jokes are brutal. On the Internet I’ve already seen spoof set lists including “(I Can’t Get No) Circulation,” “Help Me Up,” “It’s Only Dulcolax But I Like It” and “Let’s Take a Nap Together.”

Last weekend, NBC confirmed that “Saturday Night Live” long-timer Seth Meyers will take over as host of the network’s “Late Night” next year, when Jimmy Fallon takes “The Tonight Show” from Jay Leno.

With the announcement, the network hoped to encourage chatter about late-night TV — which NBC still dominates — rather than prime time, where the network has collapsed whenever Sunday football and “The Voice” take breathers.

In prime time, NBC has decided to give a James Spader action thriller the coveted post-“Voice” time slot. NBC also hopes that family comedies starring Sean Hayes, Mike O’Malley and Michael J. Fox can resuscitate its Thursday nights — and hopes Dracula and Blackbeard can revive its Fridays — but hasn’t made up its mind about keeping Donald Trump or Hannibal Lecter.

LOS ANGELES — Fox Broadcasting has unveiled nine prime-time programs for the 2013-2014 season, shaking up a schedule that has fallen into second place among key viewers after once dominating the ratings.

Five new comedies and four dramas will join the schedule, Kevin Reilly, chairman of entertainment for Fox, said in a statement. The Los Angeles-based network and other broadcasters are showing their new lineups to advertisers this week in an annual event known as the “upfronts.”

NEW YORK — Harvard symbologist Robert Langdon is back.

Dan Brown’s latest thriller, the Dante-inspired “Inferno,” puts Langdon in a hospital bed with no memory of how he wound up there. Still, the clever professor is the only one who can figure out the doomsday puzzle, the first macabre piece of which is sewn into his bloody tweed jacket.

Langdon appeared in “The Da Vinci Code,” the literary phenomenon that sold 81 million copies in 51 languages.