Designate your driver early no matter where you are in LA, not just in Arcadia.  Let the kiss you get be on the cheeks not the one you plant on the car in front of you.  Direct from the APOA website the warning for tonight:

Members of the Arcadia Police Department will be conducting a DUI Checkpoint at a location within the City of Arcadia during the evening or St. Patrick’s Day, Wednesday, March 17, 2010, between 8:00 pm to 2:00 am. St. Patrick’s Day will undoubtedly see many celebrations and the Arcadia Police Department reminds you to party responsibly; don’t drink & drive! If you have been drinking and don’t have a designated driver, consider the use of Jan’s Towing and their free “Tipsy Tow” program. Jan’s will tow your vehicle and offer you a ride home in the local service area for free.

Last week your intrepid LA Metblogs crew met at Crash Space for a strategic planning session to develop a range of content generation initiatives to be implemented over the coming months. This meeting rapidly degenerated into a series of juvenile toilet jokes and graphic descriptions of horror movie torture sequences. Yes, yes: This is your Metblogs team hard at work.

But a few good ideas came out of the mess, like spring crocuses blooming from a heap of dog poo. And we thought our readers would like to hear about them. Thus we present the meeting minutes. Like an idea? Have an idea of your own? Let us know in the comments. We welcome your input. We may not run with all these ideas, but if any of them get a good response, we’ll be more likely to explore it.

8 PM. The group gathers. Cherry pie from Ralph’s bakery and fruit punch from Ralph’s juice aisle are served. Bristlebots are played with.

8:12 PM. First Star Wars reference. My notes are unclear on the joke itself, though it was probably a veiled sex pun. Likely candidates include “This little one’s not worth the effort” and “Aim for the exhaust port, just below the main port.”

8:16 PM: First real idea of the night: A series on movies in which Los Angeles is a character — similar to the our Songs About LA series. Ideally, these would be posts about films in which LA is an indelible part of the story, like Gotham City to a Batman movie. Look for this coming up.

8:32 PM. Idea: Another movie-themed series that explores local “forgotten” movie locations. The examples we came up with were… Read more

So, there was an earthquake this morning. It woke me up but didn’t get me out of bed. Apparently it woke a lot of other people up too; the tweetosphere was abuzz with hashmarks in front of the word “earthquake.” My favorite tweet? From @mattngyuyenn, simply: “Who farted?”

The deets: 4.4, hit at 4:04 AM (numerologists take note), epicenter was Pico Rivera-ish. Looking around the web, it seems like nobody was hurt. Here are the data from the United States Geological Survey.

The upshot: Not too severe, but half the city, having felt the earthquake, looked at their alarm clocks and said, “ah, the hell with it, I’ll just get up,” will get really, really tired at around 2:00 in the afternoon today. So be aware of this if you’re driving or near heavy equipment at that time.

I recently decided I can never fully trust people who don’t like pizza.

Seriously. If we are ever having a conversation, and at some point during this conversation you claim not to like pizza, I will look askance on any subsequent statements you make. Because you’re either a posing contrarian — in which j’accuse, dammit! — or your life experiences are so woefully extrinsic to my own that they cast a light of uncertainty onto all of our future interactions. Pizza is a pleasant constant, like sunshine or morning tumescence. If you don’t like it, there’s a good chance you’re part of the scouting vanguard of an impending alien invasion, and there are some things about humans you just can’t mimic. Nice try, you Cylon bastard.

I’m much more forgiving of people who don’t like good pizza, which is why I still have friends. I know guys from Cincinnati who think pizza should never flop over when you pick it up from the plate. I have friends from central Pennsylvania who think Pizza Hut is an acceptable option. I even have a native Texan friend who eats pizza by scraping the toppings off the crust with a fork. Whatever. Opinions differ.
Read more

Sea Monster Slides!

There are few things that I love more than a giant cement sea monster (those few things include giant cement dinosaurs, giant plaster donuts, and that’s about it).  And that is why I made the pilgrimage to San Gabriel this weekend, to Vincent Lugo Park, home of La Laguna de San Gabriel, better known as the Monster Park.  Metblogs covered the Monster Park a few years ago, when it was at risk of demolition, but it’s still standing, in no small part due to the fantastic work of the Friends of La Laguna, who were recently recognized by the LA Conservancy for their preservation efforts.  And god bless the Friends of La Laguna, because this place is basically amazing, and every child deserves the chance to play on a giant cement octopus.  The Monster Park is such a wonderful place – it’s such a departure from the sterile, unimaginative playground designs that you see everywhere.  I think that everyone should do themselves a favor and find a small child to take to La Laguna (please ask the small child’s parents for permission first).

Opening Day in 1965 - Courtesy of Friends of La Laguna

I also love this park because of its wacky, mid-century aesthetic.  The colors, the curving lines of the statues, and the unselfconscious whimiscalness remind me of the kind of mid-to-late-sixties animation you’d see in psychedelic movies like Yellow Submarine.  The park is the work of Mexican-American artist Benjamin Dominguez, who built several parks in and around California in the 1950s and 1960s.  The Monster Park is his last work, completed as he was turning 70, and I think that it stands as a testament that public art can be beautiful, and fun, and interactive.  And really, really awesome.

My first ride on the shortest railway in the world, also known as Angel’s Flight, was certainly memorable for that reason alone, but made even moreso because of who I happened to share the tiny trip with. Back then, long before the city got the level of bike culture it has today, I was prone to getting on my bike and going places just for the hell of it. And in this case on the morning of Saturday, March 24, 1996, I set out from where I was living in Encino and pedaled across the valley to the L.A. River downstream first for a double-dipped helping of lamb sammich goodnesh at Philippe’s, followed by a casual cruise to explore other places such as Union Station, Olvera Street, Pershing Square, Central Library, as well as the famed funicular that had only been rededicated about a month earlier that year.

Eventually I found myself atop Bunker Hill, doing my best to avoid and placate the bike-bothered security guards first at the Music Center and then at California Plaza where I locked up and paid the 25-cent fair for the downhill trip on the funicular that would connect me to a meander through Grand Central Market.

Upon boarding I found myself standing behind a gentleman in a blindingly white leather blazer, and it didn’t take long to recognize him to be actor Nicolas Cage. Having been in the same high school drama class until he dropped out to go make “Valley Girl” and get his career launched, I toyed with the idea of asking if he remembered me and what brought him downtown, but instead I kept my yap snapped because I already knew the answer to the first question, and the the answer to the second dawned on me. He was probably on lunch between rehearsals for a little show called the 68th Academy Awards airing the next day from the Dorothy Chandler Pavilion, during which he would end up being presented with the best actor Oscar for “Leaving Las Vegas.”

Read more

OMG I have to run into Rite Aid real quick for my ointment

We like to post pictures here on Metblogs of the automotively challenged. Drivers who cannot park between the lines. We refer to them, affectionately, as Parking Tards.

But, friends, today we have something very special. A tard that overshoots the space completely, landing on the sidewalk.

Sherman Oaks. Riverside & Fulton.

Bravo.

Another angle of awesomeness after the jump.

Read more

This past Saturday the annual Fargo Street Hill Climb took place, organized by the Los Angeles Wheelmen. On a personal note, I’ve tried multiple years to make it up the 33% grade of what’s one of the steepest streets in the city/state/country/hemisphere/world/galaxy/universe, only to get psyched out staring up from the bottom of the massive frozen concrete-coated tsunami and miserably failing mid-way every time (here’s handlebar cam video of my 2006 attempt). On another personal note, my eyes went wide when I cracked open today’s paper. I’ve never seen the unique event get such mega-play in the LA Times, not only with a front page photo, but a story on its inside LATeXTRA section as well.

It’s enough to make me vow to try again next year.

Venice has always had a history of being the shady part of the west side. This isn’t news to anyone who lives there and honestly it’s that grit that attracted many of them there in the first place. But there’s a difference between a neighborhood that is a little rougher around the edges and one where you don’t feel safe in your own home. Due to an extremely cut back police force covering the area and a growing homeless population, increasingly, the latter is exactly how Venice residents are describing the situation.

You may think I’m over hyping things but if anything I’m playing them down. For four weeks now residents have been organizing a letter writing campaign where they are literally begging the Mayor, Councilman Rosendhal and many at the LAPD to please protect them. On Friday local site Yo Venice posted an open letter from a resident named Steve who was threatened by a homeless man at his own house:

…This man was trying to sleep behind our gate at our front door. I heard him trying to no open our front door to get inside our home. I was holding my baby. I confronted him to get off my properly and he then threatened to kill me… looked at my baby and told me he would kill her too. He claimed that the house was his. He took a swing at me as I stepped back away from my properly. He kicked our gate over and over as hard as he could…

Steve called 911 and after 45 minutes the police eventually showed up – which is actually an improvement. You might recall Tara posted on Metblogs in December about coming home and finding a homeless person blocking her entrance to her house. Her call to the police for help resulted in no officers ever coming by – even though this was only a few weeks after a Venice resident, pregnant with twins, was raped and murdered in her own home by a transient who just happened to pick her out.

With no one to protect them and a situation that is seemingly getting worse, if the LAPD and local politicians don’t do something to help soon they shouldn’t act surprised when residents are forced to take protecting their own and their family’s safety into their own hands. This situation can only get worse or better, which is it going to be?

Los Angeles is only the 27th Craziest City in America.

L.A. – Where people plaster the sides of historic buildings with pictures of the Mad Hatter, and chase Twittering food through city streets.

The Daily Beast ranked the nation’s 57 largest metropolitan areas based on “psychiatrists per capita, stress, eccentricity and drinking levels.”

#27, Los Angeles

Psychiatrists per capita: 28
Stress: 22
Eccentricity: 5
Drinking: 53

Colorful Character: Candace Frazee and Steve Lubanski have transformed their home into a Bunny Museum, a shrine to over 23,000 bunny collectibles that include bunny-themed furniture, light fixtures, kitchenware, toiletries, books, and games.

Apparently, Cincinnati is #1 when it comes to crazy.

This proves my theory that all of those people that I see mumbling and stumbling on the streets of L.A. are actors from Ohio.

Photo from jek in the box’s photostream

Just what we need in the land of uber water using St Augustine lawns, a homeowner that rips it out and puts in native and Mediterranean type plants that thrive in our wet winter dry summer climate.  Good thing they don’t live in Orange or Glendale where those sorts of actions are frowned upon and a homeowner could be sued by the city.  (In fairness the dude in Glendale put in fake astroturf but the intent was the same…no lawn watering in a drought).

I like this yard, socially responsible yet has the look and feel of a cottage garden.

Long live individuality and the space free of an HOA!

Pic by me and get’s bigger with a click.

A subway station? Here? Such a debate would have been absurd at a sleepy little corner like Wilshire & Crenshaw.

The year was 1934.

Photo from the USC Digital Library

When I was a Pop Warner-sized punk back in the early-mid ’70s my mom was dating a guy named Jim who was with ABC Wide World of Sports in some capacity and thus he knew a guy named Carroll Rosenbloom who happened to be the owner of a professional football team you may have read about in the history books that used to live and play here (what a concept) called the Los Angeles Rams, which was my fave team, of course, and pretty much as beloved as the Dodgers, up until Rosenbloom drowned in 1979 and his wife Georgia wasted little time and tears moving them to Anaheim the next year after the team triumphed through  a strange season to come pretty damn close to winning the 1980 Super Bowl. But that’s another story.

Anyway. One day my mom comes home from work and hands me a pamphlet promoting something called the “Olsen Brothers All-Sports Camp” taking place for a couple weeks that summer in a faraway place called Logan, Utah. On the front is a picture of Merlin Olsen and his brother Phil in their Rams uniforms, the two having played side by side in 1971 and ‘72.

“Jim says if you’d like to go, he’ll pay for it,” she said.

I indicating my willingness by jumping up and down screaming joyfully, so too young to have any clue that Jim’s generosity was not only providing a vacation for me from them, but also a vacation for them from me.

And so it was that I flew first class to Utah with Rosenbloom’s son Chip and Rams General Manager Don Klosterman’s son (whose first name I can’t remember) Kurt (thanks for the reminder DK!), and I came to stand eyeballs-to-kneecaps with some of the sports gods of my youth: Jack Youngblood, Harold Jackson, Jack Snow, Jack Reynolds (lotta Jacks going on, eh?). But I worshiped none more than Merlin lordhavemercy Olsen, who was my biggest hero, literally and figuratively.

Read more

No, this little lady I came across this morning isn’t tagging the traffic light pole at the corner of Jefferson and Mesmer in the Del Rey/Playa Vista cusp of the city. Rather she’s de-tagging. I watched for the time it took my red light to turn green as she meticulously scraped off with her keys the mostly illegible bright orange script hastily scrawled there by some blighter who probably had no idea that sometimes what’s thrown up must come down. Bravo.