Star boarders at GreyhoundFirst Southwest Airlines, the...

Star boarders at Greyhound

First Southwest Airlines, the Greyhound of the skies, went A-list earlier this month, with priority boarding for customers who pay a few more dollars. Now Greyhound is going A-list. By plunking down $5 extra at ticket counters, you can choose your seat and board the bus before other passengers on about a dozen popular routes, including Los Angeles to Las Vegas. Although you can buy tickets on the Greyhound website, www.greyhound.com, you can’t buy priority seating that way. Instead, you must go to the ticket counter at the bus terminal anytime from 30 days to 45 minutes before departure and pay the extra $5 fee. It’s all part of a major revamp by Greyhound, which has spent $60 million to upgrade its terminals and buses.

-- Jane Engle

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San Diego pop

San Diego’s rockin’ hard these days with the opening this month of the Hard Rock Hotel, above, in the Gaslamp Quarter. The 12-story property has 420 guest rooms, a rooftop pool and, for dining and snacking, a Nobu restaurant and a Pinkberry yogurt outlet. Rooms are mod, with halo-lighted beds and other electronic amenities. The hotel is near Petco Park and across from the San Diego Convention Center. Room rates run from $295 for studios to $5,000 for the rock-star suites. Info: (866) 751-7625, www.hardrockhotelsd.com.

-- Vani Rangachar

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A CD saver

We know that CDs and DVDs probably will go the way of the dodo, but until we’re totally digital, we’ll have to contend with the discs. Which scratch. Easily. And sometimes irreparably. So it is for the careful and the careless that d_skin has been introduced. This thin protector snaps on the shiny side of the disc, which will play even through the clear covering. In a small sampling of discs, I found that it didn’t affect the playback. They’re not cheap -- they retail for $12.99 for five -- but they’re cheaper than having to re-buy, say, a Windows Vista disc. Info: www.norazza.com. Available in retail stores and at Amazon.com.

-- Catharine Hamm

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Strokes of genius

Using daubs of colorful paint and broad, feathered strokes, Pierre-Auguste Renoir blurred the line between the physical and emotional worlds and cemented his place in history as a great French Impressionist. Now art buffs can explore his landscapes in a single-venue show now through Jan. 6 at the Philadelphia Museum of Art. The 61-piece display (including “The Skiff,” above) is on loan from private and public collections and includes 14 works never shown in the U.S. Tickets to the exhibition, the only scheduled stop in the U.S., are $24, with discounts for seniors, students and youth. Info: (215) 763-8100, www.philamuseum.org.

-- Josef Molnar

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Mystical tour

Martin Gray, the photographer and anthropologist behind “Sacred Earth: Places of Peace and Power,” has spent more than 20 years shooting hundreds of sacred sites around the world; he created SacredSites.com to share his work; and now he’s given us this 276-page coffee-table tome. Many of the hundreds of its color images are arresting and inspiring, although not every reader will be ready to swallow all the high-flown, semi-scientific prose about how these places differ from the rest of workaday Earth. Instead, I could have used more information about how and when he made some of these striking pictures, but there’s none of that. Ah well. It should be enough, I suppose, to see these places and to learn a little about them. The cover shot, which shows a seaside volcano under slanting sunbeams, was shot at Maui’s Haleakala crater. Info: $35; Sterling Publishing, www.sterling publishing.com.

-- Christopher Reynolds