BETTER SKIES: If you wonder how heavy...

BETTER SKIES: If you wonder how heavy Monday night’s storm got, Santa Ana Mayor Daniel H. Young says it was the first time you could hear from inside the council chambers the rain hitting against City Hall. And with good timing: The council was adopting updated flood plain maps. . . . But you can spend the rest of the week drying out. Today should bring lots of sunshine, with the winds calming and temperatures climbing into the upper 60s. Thursday will bring back more clouds, but no rain, with temperatures even reaching the low 70s.

OUTCALLS ONLY: State officials have been critical of recruiters at Trends 2000, a business expo in Anaheim this week, who hoped to lure California businesses into relocating in their states. Some considered the timing insensitive, in light of last month’s Northridge earthquake. New Mexico has responded: It’s ceasing all recruitment calls here. . . . But its recruiters will take calls. And since the quake, they say, weekly inquiries from California have almost doubled.

TWO BY TWO? Steven Spielberg’s Holocaust movie “Schindler’s List” is expected to lead the pack when the Oscar nominations are announced today. But it was almost “Schindler’s Ark.” . . . . Thomas Keneally, the UC Irvine writing teacher who wrote the 1982 book the movie is based on, wanted to call it “Schindler’s Ark,” but his U.S. publishers talked him out of it. . . . “They said it implied Noah’s Ark,” he says. Actually, he had in mind the biblical Ark of the Covenant. Keneally got his way outside the U.S. The British version, selling worldwide, is entitled “Schindler’s Ark.”

PRIORITIES: Taking a break from a grueling murder case, Superior Court Judge Francisco P. Briseno Tuesday invited eighth graders from Huntington Beach’s Talbert Middle School into his lawbook-lined chambers. He encouraged the youths to aspire to careers as bailiffs, stenographers and even lawyers or judges. . . . So what were their first questions? “Have you read all those books?” “Was that a real jail cell?” “Can we visit the morgue?”