After Corbu

Inexplicably, the electricity is out at my apartment building while the rest of the block continues their powered-up lives.  This leaves me to deploy candles and pirate a wireless connection for entertainment from my only battery-operable device.  I wonder if I could run my fridge off my laptop battery if I had to?  If nothing […]

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Also: Hollywood Forever is, unsurprisingly, a prime grave hunting (not to be confused with grave digging) spot, and the Hollywood Underground website can give you directions to various famous remains.  Note that, in general, I don’t understand the appeal of looking at a piece of marble that has  a famous guitarist under it, but the […]

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Photo by Xispas. Thanks!
Today is the awesome Dias de los Muertos at Hollywood Forever Cemetery,and if you’re in LA, you really should go. Families line the pathways with altars to dead loved ones packed with pictures, favorite foodstuffs, stuffed animals, etc. (It’s something of a mindfuck regarding the ways we’re remembered after we’re […]

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From the people that brought you the Rodney King Experience….the LAPD Blog!  It combines reporting on the best in crime from around Los Angeles with recruiting. Of course, the latter bit might work better if it was juxtaposed with officer shooting reports.
It’s actually a kind of depressing read; I don’t recommend it.

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From the Bad Futurist Pantheon: The End of Tall Buildings
Not that they don’t make a convincing case, but if anything we have entered an accelerated period of tower construction since 9/11. Even in LA, home of the earthquake, we’re racing up as fast as we can. An example of the wonderful city of […]

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Ohhhh, pretty shiny things!
Mostly this Flickr group is definitive proof that no matter how garish the building, it will look cool as a 3-point perspective. I mean, check this out:

Photo by syd delicious. Thanks!
A pretty boring box made compelling and dramatic by perspective (though that column capital is sweet detailing). Which is […]

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This comes from an anonymously witness too lazy to find a bigger blog:
Tom Labonge, my LA city council member and sometime “Mayor of Griffith Park” threatened to close down Griffith Observatory earlier today during a somewhat violent confrontation with observatory staff.
The conflict started when Labonge brought a child cancer victim and their family to the […]

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To my liberal friend who won’t let the thought experiment of a Ron Paul presidency go:
Ron Paul, on the other hand, has no shot. No natural constituency capable of carrying him through the Republican primaries. No unexpected polling strength in an early primary state. And wait till his views on such weighty matters as abolishing […]

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As someone who rocks a beard, and has had bedroom-related insecurities about said beard, April Smear’s LAist anti-beard screed hit a soft spot. Until I realized the porn industry was the cause of my discomfort, then I just got mad:
Also, if I’m expected to have a trimmed or shaved puss, a guy can at […]

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I couldn’t get video’s to embed properly, so I updated to the new version of Wordpress, hoping that would help. This crashed the site, because the new version doesn’t like advanced cache plugins. Of course. A simple thing to fix…if you know what you’re doing.
Anyway, post-update the site seems to be running […]

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Photo by Vincent Cobb. Thanks!
What happens when you combine the evil of plastic bags with the evil of union-busting? No sun. So:

Play Nice.

Use No More Plastic Bags; Go Reusable instead.

Read this LAist Rant. Particularly this part:
“I always had them in my car trunk with good intentions. Though, for years, I would forget […]

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It just came to my attention that their is an island of plastic twice the size of Texas floating through the Pacific.
…?
Good takes this opportunity to point out that we use too many plastic bags.  A legitimate point (really, if war-time patriotism meant anything, wouldn’t it mean lowering one’s consumption of useless petroleum products?), but […]

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Salto Mortale with Santa Ana explanations that wax poetic.

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Spending most of my time around engineers, I forget that certain things aren’t common knowledge.  For example, I recently had to explain that buildings are not designed to survive earthquakes.  Rather, they are designed to not kill people during earthquakes, then afterwards we’ll knock em down and rebuild.
Engineers make this sound noble: “We’re in the […]

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bike in a madressa by tigrejones. Thanks!
Sometimes, I just want to be riding a bike through the souks of Marakesh.

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I have been to Disneyland three times.
First, as a child, an experience I do not remember. I am told I sat down in the parking lot and declared I was going to die if I had to walk any farther. My hatred for parking lots started early.
Second, as a teenager to participate in […]

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