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LOS ANGELES (AP) — When Mayor Eric Garcetti declared it "a big f—-ing day" for LA, he brought 19,000 hockey fans to their feet, lit up the Twitterverse in delight and, oh yeah, left some folks scratching their heads, wondering just what the f—- the normally soft-spoken elected official was thinking.

Having shed his pinstriped suit of choice for a hockey jersey Monday, Garcetti stepped in front of the TV cameras and a full house at Staples Center, where the Los Angeles Kings had won hockey's Stanley Cup championship just three days before.

"There are two rules in politics," Garcetti told those celebrating the victory. "They say never ever be pictured with a drink in your hand. And never ever swear.

Then he added dramatically: "But this is a big f—-ing day. Way to go, guys."

Within minutes, Garcetti's remarks were trending on Twitter and appearing uncensored on YouTube, just as Fox Sports West was apologizing for letting them get on the air.

"He said that?" Thomas Hollihan, an expert on political discourse, civil society and contemporary rhetorical criticism at the University of Southern California, asked incredulously.

This was, after all, not some drunken musician accepting an award somewhere. Nor was it a celebrity caught up in a silly dispute captured by the cameras for TMZ. This was the mayor of the nation's second-largest city, gleefully shouting it to the masses.

"When you're an elected official, people have a higher expectation for your speech, your conduct and context than they would if you're an entertainer," said Hollihan.

He added he hoped Garcetti, whose public persona is normally about as mild as his city's weather, wasn't trying to boost his hipness cred.

Although the F-word's shock value is declining, Hollihan said, it's never smart for a politician to toss it around in public, even in front of a crowd of screaming hockey fans.

"The little old ladies in the valley are going to hear this too," he said, referring to the city's more conservative San Fernando Valley, where Garcetti grew up before moving to the hipper Silver Lake area. "As are the church people in neighborhoods where they are not hockey fans, but they care a lot about conduct and character."

But where putting the word out over the airwaves once would have prompted a federal investigation, that's not so much the case anymore.

When David Ortiz of the Boston Red Sox let it slip last year during a televised event honoring first-responders to the Boston Marathon bombings, the chairman of the Federal Communications Commission himself Tweeted that it was no big deal.

"David Ortiz spoke from the heart at today's Red Sox game. I stand with Big Papi and the people of Boston," said Julius Genachowski

And when, thanks to a bank of TV microphones, the world heard Vice President Joe Biden's whisper to President Barack Obama, "This is a big f—-ing deal," as Obama was about to sign the Affordable Health Care Act, the slip was quickly forgotten.

Of course Biden didn't mean for anyone but Obama to hear him. And Ortiz said afterward he got caught up in the moment and never meant to say what he said.

But the mayor's official Twitter account did repeat much of what he said — with the hashtag BFD.

Appearing on "Jimmy Kimmel Live" later Monday, Garcetti got a loud round of cheers when Kimmel told him "I enjoyed your performance at the rally today."

Garcetti replied, "I got a little ahead of myself. But you've got to remember, we didn't win at lawn bowling, we won in hockey."

The mayor added, "Kids out there do not say what your mayor said today."

NORWALK, Conn. (AP) — Paul Simon and his wife Edie Brickell are due back in a Connecticut court for a hearing in the couple's disorderly conduct case.

The hearing is set for Tuesday morning. A police report says the 48-year-old Brickell and the 72-year-old Simon became physical with each other during an April 26 argument inside a cottage on their property in New Canaan.

Brickell told police that he shoved her and that she slapped him. The report says that Simon suffered a superficial cut to his ear, and that Brickell, who smelled of alcohol, had a bruise on her wrist.

Both said in court April 28 that they did not consider the other a threat, and no protective order was issued.

The singers were married in 1992. They have three children.

The daily lowdown on books, publishing, and the occasional author behaving badly.

The U.S. Department of Labor says it is looking into the deaths of two temporary workers in incidents at Amazon warehouses since December 2013. One man was crushed after being caught in a conveyor system at a warehouse in Avenel, N.J., and another died June 1 at a facility in Carlisle, Pa. The Department of Labor cited Amazon contractor Genco and four temporary staffing agencies in connection with the 2013 accident. Amazon was not cited, though a news release quotes the head of the Avenel area office for the Occupational Safety and Health Administration as saying: "Temporary staffing agencies and host employers are jointly responsible for the safety and health of temporary employees. These employers must assess the work site to ensure that workers are adequately protected from potential hazards." Amazon did not immediately respond to a request for comment.

In an interview about The 13 Clocks, by James Thurber, Neil Gaiman tells The Wall Street Journal that reading novels can feel like work if you're a novelist: "You can see the joints. It's like a professional magician going to a magic show. You may admire the speed with which something's done, you may admire the variation on the way that you've seen it done, you may admire the brilliant new approach, but you are not going to worry that the poor woman is going to get cut in half. But every now again you get lucky and you run into a book that can just put you back in the audience."

The Ugandan writer Jennifer Nansubuga Makumbi has won the 5,000 (about $8,500) Commonwealth Short Story Prize for "Let's Tell This Story Properly," about a woman who finds out about her husband's secret life after he dies. "Kayita died in the bathroom with his pants down. He was forty-five years old and should have pulled up his pants before he collapsed. The more shame because it was Easter. Who dies naked on Easter?" (You can read the whole story over at Granta.)

Notable Books Coming Out This Week:

The magic of the Harry Potter books had less to do with magic, and more to do with world creation. It was all in the details: enchanted castles, lovely-sounding Latinate spells that put chewing gum up people's noses or expelled their entrails, historical wizards named Uric the Oddball and Barnabas the Barmy, Wendelin the Weird and Emeric the Evil, bubblegum that makes the chewer levitate and chocolate frogs that hopped. Potter author J.K. Rowling, writing under the name Robert Galbraith, brings her talent for world creation to The Silkworm, which is set in chilly, misty world of a London private detective, and mingles themes from both classic detective novels and gruesome Jacobean revenge tragedy. In the book, author Owen Quine is found murdered and gutted in the precise manner he described in his unpublished novel, and detective Cormoran Strike (rumpled, misanthropic, brooding) must use the sinister book to find the killer.

Jennifer Weiner's All Fall Down features Allison Weiss, a stressed-out blogger with a prescription pill habit and a serious case of denial. She survives for a while in her world of plastic-y suburban wealth and Lululemon yoga gear before she ends up in rehab, and thence to sobriety, salvation and a new pet puppy. But, like Allison, the novel is stretched too thin — the writing often feels perfunctory or clichd, and though there is much talk of trial and suffering, Allison's inevitable redemption feels slightly cheap. Weiner's heroine is so unbearably snobbish that, at the end, one can't help but think she deserved a little more hardship than she got.

MANAUS, Brazil (AP) — Light plays off the Solimoes River, duplicating the verdant canopy of the Amazon rainforest on the water's surface.

The landscape that glides by the Almirante Barbosa is breathtaking, but almost no one aboard the boat pays attention. Nearly all the passengers doze in dozens of hammocks strung from the boat's rafters, lulled to sleep by the rocking motion, the motor's chugging, and the tropical swelter.

Boats like the Almirante Barbosa are the lifeline of Brazil's Amazon region, carrying passengers and staple goods ranging from rice to diapers to remote riverside villages inaccessible any other way.

They're also a great way for World Cup fans in the remote Amazon city of Manaus to make a quick jungle escape between matches.

The lumbering wooden vessels are slow going — the Almirante Barbosa chugs at some 20 kilometers (12 miles) an hour — and trips can stretch out for days or even weeks.

While most tourists opt for speedboats for their jungle journeys, a riverboat day trip can give even World Cup visitors on a tight schedule a taste of authentic Amazonian life.

Carved out of the heart of the world's largest forest where the onyx waters of the Rio Negro and milky tea-hued Solimoes meet to form the immense Amazon, Manaus is host to four matches, including the game between Cameroon and Croatia on Wednesday.

Dozens of boats set sail from Manaus daily for destinations such as Belem, about 1,300 kilometers (800 miles) to the east, or to Sao Gabriel da Cachoiera, 860 kilometers (530 miles) to the west, along the Rio Negro's headwaters near Brazil's border with Colombia.

Around the port, hustlers with loudspeakers announce their vessels' destinations and the various stops they will make along the way. Laborers wearing hats that look like Turkish fezzes jostle up and down the docks with giant loads atop their heads, the hats' flat surfaces helping balance impressive loads — sacks of beans and sugar, giant bunches of bananas, six-packs of beer.

Manacapuru, about 79 kilometers (49 miles) up the Solimoes from Manaus, is among the best destinations for an easy day trip — and a ticket that's just $11. There's not much to see in the town itself, but the six-hour voyage is stunning. Plus, Manacapuru is among a few destinations easily accessible by car, and a $65 cab ride gets day-trippers back to the city in an hour.

Potential travelers would be wise to board well ahead of the scheduled departure and bring a hammock. Stalls in Manaus' Adolpho Lisboa market in front of the port, and a row of shops behind the market, have hammocks for every budget, from $5 to $100-plus.

Travelers without hammocks will have a hard time finding a place to sit on the boat, and competition for on-board real estate can be fierce. On the often-overcrowded vessels, hammocks are hung from the overhead wooden beams and stacked two- or even three-high bunk bed-style, with adults on the lower levels and kids above.

Food is included in the ticket price, but gastronomical variety is not: Every day, there's bread and coffee for breakfast, followed by chicken, rice and white noodles for lunch and dinner. The only other food available is fare like cookies and chips at the boat's snack bar.

As dusk falls, the collective midday stupor lifts and the passengers gather at the railings to watch the sunset play on the water and the floating houses, bars and general stores of the riverside communities slip past. The men sip on cold beers as the women gossip and chase after toddlers. Fussing babies are breast-fed and rocked back to sleep by the gentle back and forth of the ship.

"I've been making this trip every two months for three years, and I have the choice: take a speedboat that gets me to where I'm going in four hours, or spend 18 hours on a riverboat," said Marina Vieira, a 28-year-old biologist conducting field research in a remote community up the Solimoes. "I always, always take the riverboat."

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Jenny Barchfield on Twitter: www.twitter.com/jennybarchfield