#8: With gay marriages will come gay divorces. Does our country need more divorces? Didn’t think so.

#7: Brad Pitt said he wouldn’t get married until marriage is available to everyone, meaning gays. Do gay men or straight woman want Pitt off the market? Didn’t think so.

#6: If being gay becomes more mainstream, there will be less need of closets. Do you really want closet manufacturers to be laid off? Didn’t think so.

#5: Gay marriage would apply pressure on more men to “commit.” Really, fellow men, do you want to encorage this sort of behavior? Didn’t think so.

#4: Married same sex couples will stop referring to themselves as cryptic “partners” and instead as “spouses.” Do you hate mysteries? Didn’t think so.

#3: The further mainstreaming of gay marriage will result in more movies like, “I Now Pronounce You Chuck & Larry.” Do you hate America? Didn’t think so.

#2: Under Governor Mitt Romney, Massachusetts made gay marriage legal. Do you liberals want to be like Mitt Romney? Didn’t think so.

#1: More weddings, gay or otherwise = more wedding showers and wedding gifts. Do you really want to spend more time browsing wedding registeries at Pottery Barn for anything affordable besides something called a soup tureen? Didn’t think so.

The parking lot behind B&B Hardware on the West side is relatively small, considering how popular the store is.  The availability of spots is usually very tight.  That didn’t dissuade the woman with the bling bling jeans and the yellow Porsche Cayman S with custom exterior work from taking up two spaces.  Her car isn’t just straddling the yellow line, it’s absolutely making love to it.

Tardness, meet yellow, after the jump

flyer about tonight's meeting

Do you hate those obnoxious digital billboards as much as I do?

Seeing them on Sunset Boulevard is kind of Bladerunner and okay, but seeing them pop up in neighborhoods is really disgusting to me.

And after being hammered daily with all this Flex Your Power/Reduce Your Carbon Footprint bullshit, am I the only one who’s outraged by this vulgar and wasteful new trend? You tell me to leave the bathroom light off when I pee but you’re running a million candle-power billboard 24/7?

Residents of Silver Lake MAY have the chance to get rid of the eyesore on Silver Lake Blvd. by attending a City Council meeting TONIGHT at 7pm at the Michetorena School on Sunset. Sorry for the short notice but I only just now saw the flyer.

You can also call or email Eric Garcetti’s office (323-957-4500), not that I have any idea how much good that will do.

Please do what you can though - this digital billboard trend needs to be stopped.

Just got another email, which I’m copy-and-pasting here. This is a follow-up to my previous update to my original post about the last art deco gas station in Silver Lake about to meet the wrecking ball.

We managed to get Tom LaBonge to throw this issue back to the Cultural Heritage Commission, which is good. But it also means there’s more to do. If we fail they will build a four-story office building on this tiny corner!

Can you show up at a meeting at City Hall on Thursday? THEY NEED TO SEE BODIES or they will rule against us!

For parking please e-mail anna.numez@lacity.org . Give her the make, plate # of the car the name of the driver and the time you will arrive. So far only one person has called. Please do this!

Here’s the email I got:
(more…)

The impressive lineup at AFI's Night at the Movies

If you were waiting til midnight tonight to try and get tickets to AFI’s Night at the Movies, you may be too late. While the official on sale date, promoted by both AFI and the Arclight, is September 17th, a special AFI member only link has been making the rounds, and is now on the Arclight’s homepage, allowing tickets to be purchased by anyone.

Alas, the screening of “The Jerk” introduced live by Steve Martin has already sold out. The rest of the evenings shows are likely to soon follow, including appearance by Sean Connery before “The Man Who Would Be King,” Jodie Foster ahead of “The Silence of the Lambs,” and Keanu Reeves giving a “whoa” in person before “The Matrix.”

After discovering that tickets were already on sale, and even already being scalped on CraigsList for $100 each, I contacted the Arclight, where a manager told me that AFI Members were able to buy tickets a day early, but insisted tickets wouldn’t be available to the general public until tomorrow. After I pointed him to the link on their site (under “AFI members”) where anyone, including the general public could purchase tickets, and that the “AFI members only link”  was being sent around the internet, he pointed out this was entirely an AFI event, and Arclight was merely the venue. (more…)

Ok, gird your loins for snark. Fall Fashion Week is coming, and while looking around online for info I ran into this–excerpted below–which, okay, okay, is for last year–but I just couldn’t resist posting their portrait of the “fashion forward Angeleno.” Get this: “…the beautiful Angeleno cannot live without her sage green YSL bag and eco-friendly denim while jumping into her hybrid.”

Does this mean I’m marked for death without my sage green YSL bag? Boy howdy, am I bummed I’m not one of the beautiful people right now. Where’s MY hybrid?! Will they march me to the city limits if I don’t have a hybrid–perhaps even “in shades of lime, mint and Kelly green, reflecting the palette of an environmentally friendly spring season”–by fall? I, too, wish to “run errands in grey and purple wool oversized sweaters”! I want to “look no further than this season’s feminine looks to seal the perfect evening outfit to celebrate spring at celebrity and fashionista favorite hotspot, Hyde.” I know I want to “celebrate spring” at a celebutante bar, definitely. Can’t *I* “drive to the trendy shops of Robertson Boulevard, ready to pick up spring season essentials”? Essentials? I thought essentials were toilet paper, soap and DSL. OMG, color me SOOOO last season!!! [claps hands to cheeks, aghast] How could I be so…so…UNFASHIONABLE?! The horror!!!

This breezy bulls**t marketing blurbage is so awesome in all the wrong ways, I keep trying to dig up this fall’s version of the same thing, but alas, the current Fall Fashion Week website offers no gems as brilliant as this. Click thru for the full version in all its vapid glory.

(more…)

I approached this one all wrong. Totally got off on the wrong foot. Put the dickhead on the defensive from the get-go. As diplomatic and reasoning and calm as I was with the asshat in the Mustang August 21, I wasn’t with this bald-headed jackass who barreled by me around 40 mph with hardly a foot clearance between my left elbow and his peppy little dark blue Scion hatchback. Way to use all 78 108 horsepower there El Douchey. And was that really Britney Spears blasting on your stereo as you went by? Oddly fitting.

Certainly there are some out there in the Metblogosphere who, either for the sake of argument or simply because of their unwavering “cyclists suck” bias, will find it too easy to hold me entirely at fault in this matter because of the stop sign I didn’t full observe a couple miles back, or maybe… let’s see: because I was illegally traveling slower than the flow of the four-wheeled traffic. Yeah, that’s the ticket. Literally! With such a legit citable offense they will claim the moral high ground and trumpet: “You are none to judge when you yourself are legally no better than the poor motorist who crowded you and your stoopid bike!” Then there are others who will offer paternal counsel, urging me to calm the hell down, quit trying to change things that can’t be (even though I’m not trying to), and instead be even more diligent and cautious (because apparently I am not enough already). But all that rebop is just bucketseat sanctimony and choir preaching.

Like I said at the top. I blew this one right out of the gate. My bad. Instead of rolling up and attempting to respectfully engage the driver in a constructive dialogue as I’d done so well a couple weeks ago, I pulled alongside his ride after catching him at the red he got stuck racing up to at Pico on La Brea and I said over the blaring four-speaker soundtrack to his life “Did you get some kinda thrill passing by me so fast and so close!?”

(more…)

Talk about a trainwreck.

Last night as I was running out the door, I caught a snippet of the MacNeil-Lehrer News Hour on PBS. It was a point-counterpoint discussion between Steve Wasserman, the former editor of the now-axed LAT Book Review, and Kassia Krozser, the founder & editor of booksquare.com, a book review site & publishing industry hub that, FWIW, I’d never heard of.*

The segment was intended to discuss the elimination of the LAT Book Review from the Sunday paper. Tribune loose cannon Sam Zell deep-sixed the little insert, which was one of the few sections of the paper I read anymore (and for which I had the privelege of penning two book reviews). Wasserman called the elimination of the review a “philistine blunder,” while Krozser seemed to have been brought in to defend the Internet, which to my mind is a separate issue from whether the paper Review should have been cut or not.

Throughout the segment, I found myself whipsawed over which interviewee I detested more… (more…)

Saturday evening after the premiere of “The Red Canvas” at the Laemmle in Old Town Pas we joined a lot of the people in the bar at Gordon Biersch.   The bar was full and as we had early events Sunday our party decided to wind down and get some dessert before heading home.

There were  a couple of empty tables next to the hostess stand in the restaurant and my neighbor Bill inquired if it was possible to get some dessert before trekking home.  No problems and we were seated just before 10:30PM and told a waiter would be with us shortly and given menus.  Mmm….the Warm Apple Bread Pudding looked good.

We kept making eye contact with the waiter and he’d look away.  We were 10 feet from the hostess station.  We watched the hostess shuffle paper and add the odd extra person to the wait list. 10 minutes go by and Bill asks if we can have a waiter soon, “no problem” says the hostess.  Another 10 minutes go by…same Q&A.  Another 10 Minutes go by…same Q&A.  Thirty minutes into it our drinks are dry and still no waiter.  We decide to head home shortly after 11PM.

On the way out I stopped by the hostess and told her the service stinks and I can’t believe nothing happened.  The corker was when a waitress chimed in to defend. I just love it when service staff argue and defend rather than attempt to save an unhappy customer.  The details after the jump.

(more…)

‘Cause I’m running out of other reasons for why they didn’t serve me the last time I went there.  Tito’s, located at the corner of Washington Place and Sepulveda Blvd. in Culver City, is regarded as having some of the best fast Mexican food in Los Angeles.  I have gone there a bunch of times.  The tacos are pretty good and pretty cheap.

Read what happened at Tito’s