On November 14, 15 and 16, locals will have the opportunity to check out Nissan’s first ever zero-emissions electric car, the LEAF. This will be the first public unveiling of the LEAF in North America. You can check it out this weekend at the following locations:

Nissan's New Electric Car Debuts in LA this Weekend

November 14, 2009 10am – 9pm
Third Street Promenade
1351 3rd Street Promenade
Santa Monica, CA

November 15, 2009 11am – 8pm
Americana at Brand
233 S. Brand Blvd.
Glendale, CA

November 16, 2009 9am – 5pm
University Southern California
3501 Trousdale Parkway
Los Angeles, CA

According to Nissan, the LEAF handles and accelerates like a V6 and has a top speed of up to 90mph. It will have an average range of 100 miles per charge and the battery will charge in 4-8 hours on a 220V home charging unit. At quick-charge stations, it will charge to 80% in about 26 minutes. Although Nissan has not released exact information on pricing, they say that they are “targeting a price in the range of other typical family sedans.” The LEAF will be on the road in some states in 2010, with mass-production beginning in 2012.

To attend one of the unveiling events this weekend, register on their website here.

LA Times has unveiled their new  eEdition, “a reproduction of the print edition– online” for $12.99 per month.  Considering that I just got a year of 7-day home delivery of the actual print edition for $75, or $6.25 per month, and they are offering print subscribers the online subscription at no extra cost, I’m wondering what the strategery is here.

Access to its archives is one thing LAT is offering as part of the deal, and they are also touting that it’s available at 5:30 AM everyday, unlike the online edition, which is available the preceding midnight, contains much more news and, um, it’s free– for now.

I guess this is a first step (and trial balloon) for the online paid subscription model we’ve been hearing about from other newpapers in dire straits– which means the vast majority of them.

As a side note, PBS.org is streaming Inventing LA, the recent doc about the Chandlers and the LA Times. Worth a look.

Watch the Derby Dolls from the comfort of your own Intertube.

Tonight at 6:30, the Los Angeles Derby Dolls are taking the excitement of high-speed all-female banked track roller derby out of the Doll Factory in Historic Filipinotown and bringing it live to the entire planet via the World Wide Web.

Varsity Brawlers (the pretty team) will take on Tough Cookies (last year’s champs) in a full-length exhibition game streamed live to your very own home, office, or car (if you’re on your laptop, parked down the street stealing WiFi.)

Now how much would you pay? But wait! There’s more!…

Have you seen the trailer for Drew Barrymore’s directorial debut, “Whip It?” I can’t wait to see it when it’s released this weekend. Barrymore, Ellen Page (”Juno,”) Juliette Lewis (”Old School,”) and other stars from the movie will be at the event for a post-bout Q&A. I’m told you can submit your questions online, too. There will also be a live half-time concert by Landon Pigg.

All for the low, low price of…FREE. That’s right! All you have to do is log in to www.derbydolls.tv at 6:30pm and it will all stream right out of the internets and into your eyeballs and ear holes.

I’m kind of excited about this, so there’s even more. Click the link and follow me… (more…)

Apart from my other jobs, I moonlight as a wonk.  In particular, for the last 6 years or so, I’ve been involved with a group called the Open Voting Consortium, much of that on its board and as its CTO. With that hat on, I am enormously excited that Los Angeles County is likely to get much better voting systems in the relatively near future.

Let me give the brief plug: we want to make sure that no one has to vote on proprietary DRE voting machines (or ever does voluntarily, for that matter).  There are two glaring flaws in these systems: the source code is secret (so-called trade secrets), and both accidental flaws and deliberate vote tampering is both possible and has likely happened; a voter has no means to inspect the recorded vote before casting it (other than a machine telling them, “trust us, we’ll put the right electrons somewhere”).  (more…)

It feels like deja vu all over again.  If Time Warner Cable (Roadrunner) is your ISP, and you have been having spotty Internet service all week, it’s not simply that Mercury is in retrograde.  I have been having “server not found” problems all week, and called TWC tonight.  They said they are having an L.A.-area-wide problem.  They didn’t know if it’s hackers this time.  I demanded credit for my lack of service, and they transferred me to another department (accounts or billing) .  They then issued me a $15 credit for multiple days without full service.  I thought that was a generous offering, since it represents at least 10 days of service.

Of course, that still doesn’t solve the service problem.  In the meantime, don’t forget to save your blog posts and other online writings in progress, early and often.

(Travis, sorry for stepping on your post so soon, but I thought that, if others are being driven nuts by this problem like I am, they would want to know about this asap tonight.  And if I wait, who knows if I would be able to publish it at all?)

With an About the Author bio that says, “If you don’t like what you just read here you can just get out of my country. Now how about that smart-alack. Follow me on twitters,” Christwire is such dry parody it almost passes for the real thing– a right-wing,  Bible-quoting site seeking to save America from The Gays and other “weirdos.”

And they are loving the fires here in California:

The lands were soaked with the combustible sins of perversions and marinated in the flammable juices of homosexuality! God is angry and his great power cannot be contained! …Fire falls upon California and great pillars of smoke shoots from his nostrils!

The holy pillars of smoke from his nostrils are filling up the lands of California! They are the harbingers of doom for the homosexual gay fornicators of Satan!

If you doubt this is satire (which is easy to do because Christwire has real ads for things like Ann Coulter books and a dating service called Christian Mingle,) a recent post called If You’re a Fantastic Pro-Family Republican, Does One or Two Same-Sex Encounters Really Make You Gay? asks, “If you have a great record fighting against the gays, doesn’t it cross out a few moments humping a younger man against the wall of some hotel room?”

Tom Colicchio

“The idea that religious leaders are continuing to shape state law is just wrong.”

Remember last fall’s boycott of El Coyote restaurant in West Hollywood by supporters of same-sex marriage after it was learned an owner had donated money to the campaign to pass Prop 8?

El Coyote had a sizable gay clientele on Thursday nights, the unofficial “gay night” at the restaurant, which packed the place. That all changed in the aftermath of Prop 8’s passing when the owner’s name appeared on donor lists that were available online and publicized by some media outlets.

Demonstrators appeared in front of the restaurant, business fell off on Thursdays, the pilloried owner did herself no favors when she tried to explain herself, saying if she had a chance to do it all over again, she would do the same thing, citing her religious convictions.

Such a mess for such a mediocre restaurant.

Enter Tom Colicchio, Bravo TV’s Top Chef lead judge and owner of Craft, his first venture into the  Los Angeles restaurant world, located in Century City. (more…)

As Jerry Seinfeld would say, “who are the wizards who thought this one up?”  Yesterday, notices were posted at my apartment complex indicating that, this Saturday night/Sunday morning starting at midnight, Southern California Edison plans to shut off power in my neighborhood to perform “routine maintenance.”  The posted message on my building owner’s letterhead, which may or may not have been from SCE talking points, states that “in an effort to minimize inconvenience, the testing will be done during night time hours, when the majority of our residents will be sleeping.”

Oh really?  Asleep on a Saturday night at midnight?  I can (and did) assure my building complex’s manager that the majority of us certainly will not be asleep.  Rather, many of us will be engaged in a variety of activities (use your imagination) for which we will want to use our stereos, televisions, lights, or other electrical appliances.  (more…)

Julie Phineas of Lezgetreal recently came face-to-face with homophobia at the FedEx Kinkos (now renamed FedEx Office) on Hawthorne Blvd. in Torrance.

As she tried to access The Gay Ad Network site, a gay and lesbian advertising network, on the store’s self-serve computers, the computer prompted her for a password because it was considered an “adult” site.

Phineas met resistance when she asked an employee for assistance.

The clerk at the counter made degrading statements about what I was trying to view once I told her I was trying to print out a document from The Gay Ad Network.

She told me that I “would not be able to look at that stuff here”… She issued me a refund for the time I was connected to their self service computer, and while she did she felt it necessary to mention that “other customers would be offended” if I were allowed to view “site’s like that”.

I asked her who I could contact to change the filters. There was a sign on the wall with contact information and I asked her if I should contact the store directly or the number on the wall. She told me “Oh, they don’t have time for stuff like that” and waved off my question with her hand. (more…)

"I’m a blogosphere virgin. I don’t read blogs. Blogs feel like they’re a dime a bushel. They’re endless. Like cockroaches..."

Out, gay-as-a-picnic-basket, proud, loud, blog-challenged and, by all accounts, liberal director Todd Holland inadvertently got sucked on to the Hollywood Liberal Shit List last week. However, the move looks to be temporary in light of his good-natured and at times bitchy response, in addition to being nominated this year for a directing Emmy for 30 Rock, the sitcom starring über-liberals Alec Baldwin and Tina Fey. His placement on the HLSL was further complicated by the fact that he got legally married to his partner last year before Proposition 8 was passed.

How it happened: At a panel discussion about gay Hollywood, Holland answered a question about whether he would advise gay actors in Hollywood to come out. Leave it to some nasty bloggers to take his response and “twist or warp” his words into anti-gay remarks.

The panel discussion took place at Outfest, the Los Angeles gay film festival held each July at The Directors Guild (a.k.a. Hollywood Liberal World Headquarters.)

So now the LA Times, LA Weekly and those spiteful, overly-sensitive gay blogs manned by (to use Holland’s word) “cockroaches” are tripping over themselves as he trips over himself to clarify and over-explain what he really meant or really meant to say– or more likely wishes he hadn’t said at all in the first place.

A condensed version of what played out… (more…)