How sweet is this?  On Monday, LA DOT started a public beta for receiving live tracking information of your friendly neighborhood DASH service.  If you go to http://dtdash.com on your computer or phone, LADOT has provided four equally convenient ways for you to get your bus information:  1) you can live track your downtown DASH using Google Maps; 2) for the minimalists, you can simply use drop down menus to plug in your route and stop to get expected arrival times; 3) for those of us without Internet-equipped phones, call (213) 785-3858 and navigate the phone menu to hear arrival information; and 4) for those of us who don’t like talking to machines, but don’t mind texting one, figure out your stop number, and send a text to dtdash[stop number] to 414111.

Now, if we can get this set up for the MTA, that would be awesome.

This friendly gasoline machine has been dispensing sage advice for over ten years now.

I used to work at the nearby mall–there’s an afterschool art-education program there, and I used to teach art to kids there. Whenever I could, I’d go here for gasoline. You can find it at the corner of Woodman and Riverside Drive in Sherman Oaks (map).

It’s not the cheapest gas in town, but it’s clearly the most articulate.

Read the rest of its sagacious advice after the jump…

(more…)

Just noticed this while looking something up. I know there are a few people who tend to disagree with this, but now that Google is making this official OMG WTF?

Pedestrians are not as plentiful in Los Angeles as cars, alas. So most likely if you saw this, it was on the intertubes and not at a crosswalk.

Total Crisis Panic Button has been installed (at crosswalks) all over Los Angeles by Jason Eppink, a New York-based mutimedia artist. He’s even included a Google map to assist in locating them.

And if you hate those huge video billboards as much as I do, his treatment in 2007 of the smaller street-level version might compel you to take similar action, thanks to this how-to video.

Eppink’s other projects can been seen at his site, Senseless Venn Diagrams.

Via Urban Prankster

Where you should not be tomorrow - click to biggify

I think it’s pretty much a given that, unless you’re Will or anyone else who won a ticket to Michael Jackson’s memorial service downtown tomorrow morning, you ought to absolutely, completely, totally, and definitively avoid going downtown at all costs tomorrow.  If you still need convincing, the LAPD reports that it will barricade the Staples Center and the Nokia Theater within a large perimeter bounded by Olympic, Flower, Pico and Blaine.  The MTA plans to detour over 20 bus lines that serve the downtown area; the big list is over here.  For those of you still hoping to get tickets, eBay is purportedly removing profit-seeking scalpers listing their winnings, though for a cool $10 plus shipping, you can buy a photo of MJ plus an email informing someone that they did not win the raffle.  Geesh, everyone’s out to make a buck these days.

It feels like I’m spending my life at the library nowadays. There are surely many far worse fates. The LA Central Library’s ALOUD series of free lectures continues to attract me back, with an ever fascinating array of guests.  Last week, I had seen Walter Kirn speak on his book Lost in the Meritocracy: The Undereducation of an Overachiever.  That was an enjoyable program, and Kirn is extremely personable; but for this post, I will comment on last night’s talk with Tamim Ansary, who was presented and interviewed by Amir Hussain (a co-presentation of ALOUD and The Center for Global Understanding).  The title of Ansary’s book matches his talk: Destiny Disrupted: A History of the World Through Islamic Eyes.

Of all the talks I have heard at ALOUD, I found Ansary to be the most engaged and fascinating speaker to date. (more…)

No good deed goes unpunished was the case when the Los Angeles Times initially unveiled their interactive map of LA neighborhoods a few months ago. Much bickering about neighborhood boundaries ensued, and so nearly 100 border revisions have been made, along with the addition of a lot more information about neighborhood demographics covering topics like personal income, education, ethnicity and, interestingly, marriage statistics.

For example, Silver Lake has among the highest numbers of unmarried males and females in the city. I’m guessing this may be an indication of the prevailing sexual orientation of area residents, long known as a gay bastion. It led me to wonder if sexual orientation was a demographic included in the map (although such data is not officially collected,) would marriage statistics fluctuate accordingly once same-sex marriage is legalized (again.)

Anyway, LAT assures us the map will continue to be a work in progress as they go on collecting information and reader comments.

It’s that time again! I understand the LA Marathon is a world-class athletic event offering us humans the possibility to excel and revel in our physicality, but for me, the LA Marathon means one thing: road closures.

This year’s route begins in downtown, heading south on Fig, and jogs around Exposition Park; proceeds west on Exposition Blvd. to jog south through Leimert Park; heads up to Rodeo ROAD via Martin Luther King Jr. Blvd; north on Crenshaw to Venice; then zigzags up La Cienega to Pico, executing a u-turn via San Vicente to Wilshire & 6th Street, heading east again through the Tar Pits area & Hancock Park; meanders around in Hancock Park/K-Town a little bit before heading to Olympic, pointed east; and then returns to its starting point downtown.

Plan your routes accordingly. The map is here.

Photo by mil8 via Creative Commons.

The Flapper

I was walking at night, near my home, in what the LA Times apparently calls “Mid-City,” and found myself strangely transported by the spirits of the stucco and Spanish-style 1920s houses on these nice blocks. It is this architecture that feels most “Los Angeles” to me, though admittedly perhaps largely simply as an artifact of where I have lived during my fairly brief sojourn here.  Accompanied by my dearest native informant, thoughts started to swirl in my mind, about the people whom these houses first saw, and what in turn these people saw, and how they would see this neighborhood now.

My quandry, in this case, was mostly technological, if you can perhaps extend “technology” to encompass that part of it that concerns the social and political organization and regimentation of people themselves.  Michel Foucault is always relatively dear in my thoughts.  Grabbing an average American, but not necessarily an Angeleno per se, from 1925, what would he or she think of 2009 Los Angeles? … (more…)

Today’s NY Times recounted medical marijuana dispensary owners in Los Angeles greeting this week’s announcement by the new US Attorney General, Eric H. Holder Jr., that the Justice Dept. has no plans to prosecute the pot dispensaries if they are running their businesses legally according to state law in CA.

The back-and-forth about CA’s ballot initiative process in the comments section of my previous post notwithstanding, I’m assuming a good deal of our readers are happy about the 1996 passage of Prop 215, which legalized the use of marijuana for medical purposes. Twelve other states have similar laws. In my view, it’s a backdoor way to begin decriminalizing pot, which has been long overdue.

Other countries have made marijuana legal and have not become unhinged as a result– although I will concede the point that, as a nation, the US seems pretty unhinged already, even when it’s stone-cold sober. Maybe a little pot now and then would take the edge off of the likes of hedge fund managers and financial analysts, mellow them out a bit and make them realize there’s more to life than making money. I’m not holding my breath, but I will be inhaling. (Groovy LA pot map after the clickoris.) (more…)