Matt Schrader spent a few months talking to people about the street cleaning policy in LA – both the people who are in charge of it and the people effected by it. Turns out you are much more likely to get a ticket then you are to actually have your street swept.

If you get a ticket for parking in a no-parking-because-of-street-sweeping zone, and they don’t ever bother to sweet the street, should that ticket be void?

A crystal clear case of driver vs biker road rage?  Last year, city prosecutors filed criminal charges against physician Christopher Thompson for deliberately braking hard in front of two cyclists on a narrow stretch of Mandeville Canyon.  After a three-week trial, the jurors came back with convictions in hand: Dr. Thompson was found guilty of, among other charges, assault with a deadly weapon and mayhem.  According to the prosecutors:

… Thompson stopped his car after passing the two cyclists and shouting at them to ride single-file. One cyclist ran face-first into the rear windshield of the doctor’s red Infiniti, breaking his front teeth and nose, and leaving his face scarred. The other was sent hurtling to the sidewalk and suffered a separated shoulder.

Thompson told the response officer that the cyclists flipped him off, so he hit the brakes “to teach them a lesson.”  Thompson’s version is decidedly more benign: he says he pulled over to take a photo of the riders and thought he had left them enough room to get around his car.  Which one sounds more likely?

Two lessons spring to mind.  First, statements you make after an accident can be used for and against you in court, so talk to anyone at your emotionally-charged peril.  And second, don’t effing use your car as a weapon to “teach” someone a lesson.  No apples for you.

Photo courtesy frequent commentator waltarrrrr via the Metblogs Flickr pool.

It’s Wizard-of-Oz windy out there. Debris is flying through the air, and traffic lights are out all over town. Take that stretch of Corbin near my office in Chatsworth, for instance: no working traffic lights there. No sirree. What does LAFD tell us? What you already know, I’m sure:

With the possibility of downed power lines causing local power outages, drivers should use extreme caution when approaching darkened traffic signals. Whether driving on a main thoroughfare or a side street, motorists should treat all non-functioning traffic signals as a four way stop.

Pretty simple right? Sadly no. What would be a minor inconvenience in most cities is a mini-death-race-2000 in the Valley. If only anyone here knew how to treat a four-way stop, but they don’t. There are two possible approaches in the San Fernando Valley: 1.Muscle your way through with speed and aggression, or 2.Sit timidly at the light for far too long until the people behind you honk at you.

Seriously, at all five of the intersections with blackened traffic signals that I passed through tonight, anarchy reigned. The nearest thing I could figure is that Valley drivers only know how to deal with a traffic signal that is out when there is a white-gloved cop to wave cars through. Barring that, they just pretend there is a cop there and somewhat randomly drive through in spurts under the safety-in-numbers theory of traffic. So, in the interests of my own personal well being as well as the safety of all of my fellow Angelenos, I offer you the rules of the road. Please read if you are uncertain. This has been a public service announcement.

Oh, man.  I had all these plans to leave the Westside to meet a few folks and try out CorkBar’s Test Kitchen Tuesdays special (tonight’s $2 test kitchen plate: braised oxtail with parsley risotto) and then I came across this.  The LA Times helpfully warns us that the convergence of normal rush hour traffic, the Lakers’ season opener at Staples Center, and the premiere of the Michael Jackson movie This Is It at LA Live likely will result in a nightmare for anyone headed in the general vicinity of downtown tonight.  Shucks.  To CorkBar, I’ll have to say what I’ve been saying to people more and more often lately: maybe next week.  Maybe.

No idea when this was taken, or if there was any followup, but the video at Shabooty.com is insane nonetheless. A few kids on what appears to be an LA subway train are teasing a large woman (referred to in the video title as a crackhead hooker) for about five minutes, who seems to be egging them on. A little over halfway through this clip, she pulls what is assumed to be pepperspray from her purse and sprays it at one of the kid’s eyes.

(unable to embed here – click here to watch)

LA Weekly had a cheeky article a few years back titled “The Evidence Room: Five Signs You’re Gentrifying.” At the time, the primary target of gentrification was Los Feliz, Silver Lake, and Echo Park.  I don’t think there’s a gelato parlor downtown yet, but clearly, for better or worse, downtown is being “revitalized” faster than you can say “doggie day care.”  Enter Gary Phillips, a community activist turned mystery and comic book writer who will debut the first three pages of his webcomic, Bicycle Cop Dave, next week on October 28 on Four Story.  Bicycle Cop Dave will follow LAPD officer David Richter as he patrols downtown LA and “encounters interesting characters from a lawyer smoking crack in a port-a-potty to a one-armed prophet in a Skid Row bar with his wooden tablet of odd commandments.”  Phillips also promises upside down bodies below the Sixth Street bridge, an inevitable Big Bad Developer villain, and at least a comment or two about the displacement of the poor as result of old gentrifying politics finding a new battleground downtown.  The story will unfold over the course of several weeks, as new pages will be published every other Wednesday until the entire comic is online.  I’m hoping he’ll stray away from hyper liberal tendencies to simply demonize gentrification without providing a more weighty critique; in any case, the comic is worth a bookmark and hopefully some good discussion.

(UPDATE 10.22): I just have to drop this in at the top how deeply touched I am by the outpouring of kind words and appreciation. I’m still amazed that things played out as they did — and so successfully. As some of you know I fancy myself something of an amateur one-man Random Animal Assistance League (be it at my house, near downtown or in the wilds of South Los Angeles), but never in my craziest dreams did I think it would include such a scenario. Each and every one of you who took the time to comment blew me away and made my day, so from the bottom of my heart: Thank You!

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The first grown-up book I ever read cover to cover was “Jonathan Livingston Seagull,” which is about gulls as much as another cherished book of mine, “Watership Down” is about rabbits, but when you’re a snot-nosed 9-year-old kid still moving his lips as he reads Richard Bach’s anthropomorphic allegory was just what a wide-eyed punk needed to ever-romanticize the sea birds. Even to this day as a wide-eyed old dude whenever I see a flock of the feathered fiends I’ll pick one out to be my own personal JLS.

Well one picked me out yesterday while I stopped on my bike ride to work along Ballona Creek at Centinela to feed some old bread destined for the dumpster to the birds there. Except it had a big problem in the form of a nasty three-pronged fishhook embedded in its mouth, which prevented it from enjoing the tasty bread bits, closing its beak… or perhaps even living for much longer:

I go into deathless elaboration on the ensuing rescue mission here, accompanied by some long unedited video clips that I’ve embedded after the jump. But if you’re in need of a little bit of a happyendingness or just want to hear a grown man weep, check ‘em out.

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As the holiday season approaches and your calendar begins to overflow with festive party invites, we at Metblogs urge you to act responsibly, especially when it comes to alcohol consumption.

Our motto is: If you’re going to be making a merry mess of yourself all over town, please do us all a favor and go home with a stranger.

OK, maybe that’s not an official Metblogs motto, but it should be. The thing is, there are many alternatives to drinking and driving. You can take the Metro, call a taxi, hire a limo, appoint a designated driver, call a sober friend, call Alcoholics Anonymous. Still, with all of these options, so many of us will choose to get behind the wheel of our own car and drive home after a night of boozing. I am not proud to admit how many times I have done this in the past.

According to Y Drive, “The main reason people drink and drive is that they don’t want to leave their cars behind.”

That’s why Y Drive came up with an innovative and affordable service that eliminates this factor altogether. When you call Y Drive, a professional driver will come to you on a folding scooter. For a flat fee of $38, the (more…)

Oh we love our fast cars here in LA.  This near pristine Cobra 427 was spotted at Kaiser Pasadena during the lunch hour today.  Nice to see the old car being used, and on the streets no less instead of restricted to the odd track event or horrors…trailered to car shows.

The Cobra 427 was Carrol Shelby’s effort to get an A/C Cobra homologated for racing and have something that could beat the Corvette of the era. (Homologation is the process of producing enough cars for road use so they can be used as a “stock” road car for track use).   Though he missed getting homologation completed in time for the 1965 racing season, it was eventually was and became a terror of the race tracks even into the 1970’s by private racing teams.

A couple of more pics after the jump. (more…)

TMZ, I love you.  I never thought I’d say that.  But that was my reaction after being pointed by the Los Angeles Times Local section online to these photos at TMZ.com purportedly catching First Lady Maria Shriver Schwarzenegger in the act.  No, not an adulterous sex romp, but rather, two cell phone-in-hand chatting sessions while driving, at least one of which reportedly takes place in Los Angeles.  Yeah, it was her husband Arnold who signed  the law that Maria clearly appears to be breaking.

I can’t wait for Maria’s top five excuses:

5.  I was stopped at a red light.
4.  I was stopped in traffic.
3.  The pics are Photoshop phonies.
2.  It wasn’t me, it was Mariel Hemingway (top photo).
1.  It wasn’t me, it was Amy Irving (bottom photo).

This once, I hope a TMZ celebrity story makes front page news and stays there.  Maybe it will save some lives.