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- Tuesday, October 28
- MadProfessah's Voting Guide For Angelenos (2)
- Wednesday, October 22
- “Muslim/Arab Coverage in News & Entertainment: Effects on the 2008 Election?" (0)
- Tuesday, October 21
- Next BREATHE LA "Green" Salon is this Thursday. RSVP Today! (0)
- Monday, October 20
- 10/22 PBI Panel on "Immigrants, Race Relations and the 2008 Elections" (0)
- Tuesday, October 14
- Coro Centers Across America Celebrate 66 Years of “Training Tomorrow’s Leaders” (0)
- Monday, October 13
- Los Angeles artist paints John McCain and Sarah Palin as Batman characters (0)
- Thursday, October 09
- Comedian Paul Rodriguez Headlines to Benefit Foster Care Kids (0)
- 2nd Annual Latinos, Faith, Culture & HIV Conference Tomorrow at the CA Endowment (1)
- BREATHE LA Salon: “Sinful Behavior: Is Pollution the 8th Deadly Sin?” (0)
- Press Club Panel Discussion: “Can a Free Press Exist in Putin’s Russia? (0)
Older articles
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 Topic: ENVIRONMENTThe new items published under this topic are as follows.
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Posted by: EdwardHeadington
on Thursday, February 12, 2009
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The Converging Storms Action Network presents the The Power of Community: How Cuba Survived Peak Oil in Pasadena on Saturday, January 17th, 7:00 PM.
Climate change and peak oil challenge us to to change how we live in ways that are hard to imagine. How will we respond, and what systems are possible to help us adapt to radically changing conditions? One powerful model we can learn from is Cuba.
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Posted by: lapostcarbon
on Thursday, January 08, 2009
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Posted by: EdwardHeadington
on Monday, November 17, 2008
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Posted by: EdwardHeadington
on Tuesday, October 21, 2008
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Posted by: EdwardHeadington
on Thursday, October 09, 2008
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Posted by: EdwardHeadington
on Tuesday, September 16, 2008
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Posted by: EdwardHeadington
on Monday, September 08, 2008
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Thousands of articles appeared within hours of the July 28th Chino Hills quake. Hundreds of those articles cited the quake's proximity to the San Onofre Nuclear Plant. Hundreds also cited the loss of cell phone availability. Had the quake resulted in damage to the nuclear facility emergency planning would have been seriously hampered.
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Posted by: Rochelle
on Wednesday, July 30, 2008
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On July 2, Angelenos overcame the City-planned divides between rich and poor, cultural differences, and even broke through language barriers in the fight to restore the South Central Farm. When the developer proposed a diesel-spewing warehouse distribution center for the site, Farmers and Farm supporters threw a wrench in the cogs of City Hall and won a round in the fight to force Horowitz to do an Environmental Impact Report: they forced a twenty-one day delay for more public comments, and gained a glimmer of hope to restore the Farm. The fight between the people and developers' grip on City Hall could be decided by this Wednesday, July 23, 2008, the new deadline for public comments and the second hearing, a week or two later on the tenth floor of City Hall, in front of a small advisory board.
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Posted by: LeslieR
on Monday, July 21, 2008
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As a result of the July 2 hearing, there is a 21 day extension (till July 23rd, 2008) on comments that can be submitted to the Advisory Agency of the Planning Commission. They will render a decision in 5-6 weeks.
Please consider what YOU can commit to doing to help this effort. Then email the SCFs (southcentralfarmers@southcentralfarmers.com) and let others know.
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Posted by: Xochitl
on Monday, July 21, 2008
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PLEASE VISIT www.southcentralfarmers.com for all active links in this Press Release. Thank you.
Action Alert/Media Advisory
Contact : Tezozomoc
800-249-5240
tezo@southcentralfarmers.com
First it was a trash incinerator, and the community fought it!
Now, it's a 10 acre low-wage diesel-soot 24 hour polluting warehouse and we must fight it!
Construction of a warehouse facility and distribution center with approximately 643,000 square feet of warehouse and ancillary support space in a 46-foot high, two-story structure on a 10.04 acres site (437,196 square feet after dedication) in the M2-2 Zone. The project includes subterranean parking of approximately 114,399 square feet for 306 cars. Parking for another 39 cars would be provided at grade level for a total of 345 parking spaces.
"Economic inequality has been and remains deeply ingrained in Los Angeles.2 The disparity in income between rich and poor continues to widen with a dramatic increase in low-wage workers and the steady rise in the poverty rate. Not surprisingly, economic inequities coincide with racial and ethnic divisions, leaving African Americans and Latinos disproportionately over represented at the bottom of the economic ladder. Therefore, while many residents bask in the well celebrated Los Angeles charms, others, the poor of Los Angeles, survive in impoverished inner-urban neighborhoods, the very same neighborhoods that exploded into violence on April 29, 1992." -- Paul Ong, "Poverty and Employment Issues in the Inner Urban Core"
We need your help!
You can support the struggle to stop the warehouse by doing at least one of the following things.
1.
Becoming a "Supporting Member" of the South Central Farmers Health and Education Fund so we can write a letter to the Planning Department from an organization with members.
I want to become a "Supporting Member"
2.
Join us for a *FREE* Movie Screening of Scott Kennedy's "The Garden" (see below)
June 21, 2008, @ 1:00 pm at 10887 Lindbrook Dr, Los Angeles, CA 90024
3.
Send an email petition to the City Planning department opposing the warehouse and demanding a full EIR and public hearings.
Petition
4.
Join us Monday Night @ 7:00 pm at the SCF Center located 1702 e. 41st St, Los Angeles, CA 90058 (800) 249-5240 for a meeting to discuss shutting down the warehouse.
5.
Join us on July 2nd, 2008 for a Rally in front of City Hall for the Hearing By: Deputy Advisory Agency,Date: July 2, 2008, Time: 10:OO AM ,Place: Los Angeles City Hall, 200 North Spring Street, Room 1020, Los Angeles, CA 9001 2
Items: VTT-6 1482/ENV-2008-799-MND/Negative Mitigation Plan
6.
Check our Website for the latest www.southcentralfarmers.com
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Posted by: Xochitl
on Saturday, June 21, 2008
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Posted by: Rochelle.Becker
on Wednesday, June 11, 2008
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Earth Day 2008 is just around the corner on April 22 and to celebrate, raise funds and awareness Music for Relief and Unite the United are launching the ROCK, ROLL & RECYCLE EARTH DAY AUCTION.
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Posted by: MusicForRelief
on Thursday, April 17, 2008
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Posted by: danbloom
on Saturday, March 08, 2008
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www.waterthemovie.com
Laemmle's Sunset 5 West Hollywood, CA - April 18th
This film is about water, the most amazing yet least studied substance. From times immemorial, scientists, philosophers and theologians tried to understand its explicit and implicit properties, which are phenomenal, beyond the common physical laws of nature.
Witness recent, breathtaking discoveries by researchers worldwide from Russia, Kazakhstan, Switzerland, Israel, the USA, Britain, Austria, Japan, Argentina, China and Tibet.
The arguments expound upon unexpected and challenging assumptions enlightening many years of research to open humankind to new horizons, such as the applications of structured water in agriculture, or the use of water in treatment for the most serious diseases and more.
The Geography of the film spans the globe. The implications go beyond the solar system, suggesting that water has the ability to convey messages faster than light, perhaps linking water with the absolute. Water is so unique, and so profound, its miraculous properties are still awaiting to be discovered.
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Posted by: SkyLimit
on Friday, March 07, 2008
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On Saturday, March 1st, 7:00 PM, join L.A. Post Carbon and C.I.C.L.E. (Cyclists Inciting Change through Live Exchange) for a screening of 'What a Way to Go: Life at the End of Empire'.
What a Way to Go is a disturbing, compassionate, sometimes humorous personal essay about coming to grips with climate change, resource crises, environmental meltdown and the demise of the American lifestyle. Bring some food and drink to share and stay for the discussion after the film screening. The event takes place at the Armory Center for the Arts in Pasadena at 145 N Raymond Ave - very close to the Memorial Park metro station. $5 suggested donation. For more information, call 714-906-8686, or visit LAPostCarbon.org.
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Posted by: lapostcarbon
on Thursday, February 07, 2008
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For Immediate Release
December 6, 2007
CONTACT: Virginia Kimball, Volunteer, California Wildfire Community Recovery Initiative; 626/585-8082; VSKimball@aol.com
The following has been adapted from the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration/United States Geological Survery(NOAA/USGS) Demonstration Flash-Flood and Debris-Flow Early-Warning System and the USGS Landslide Hazards Program in hopes of conveying practical advice to people at risk of harm from debris flows.
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Posted by: EdwardHeadington
on Thursday, December 06, 2007
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Free screening of Sharkwater - a new documentary that is part Michael Moore, part Jacques Cousteau. Many are calling it the Inconvenient Truth of the sea.
When: Monday, October 29, at 7:30pm
Where: AMC Southbay Galleria 16 located at 1815 Hawthorne Blvd, Redondo Beach
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Posted by: sharkwater
on Tuesday, October 23, 2007
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An organization from Western North Carolina, Appalachian Voices, will be touring the West coast from Oct. 26th- Nov 11th educating communities about an extreme form of strip mining called Mountain Top Removal (MTR). In this form of mining the tops of mountains are literally blown off with explosives in order for coal to be extracted from the mountains core. As appalling as this sounds, it is a regular practice by the coal companies throughout the Appalachian States. Once this is done the biodiverse ecosystems that thrived in the mountain forests can never regenerate. The remaining sludge from the explosions is also routinely dumped into the valleys, contaminating waterways. Local communities suffer tremendously from constant blasting, increased flooding, floating coal dust and resulting illness, among other things. It is critical that the world know the severity of this injustice. It is not only an environmental disaster, but it is also killing beautiful mountain cultures. If you know of anywhere in your community that would welcome us in speaking or other potential media outlets please let me know. You can get back to me via e mail or feel free to call me anytime! Your help would be greatly appreciated by the land, people and culture of Appalachia.
Peace and Blessings,
Anna Dow
(828) 301-6614
always_adventuring@hotmail.com
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Posted by: ADow
on Monday, October 15, 2007
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WSJ's Douglas Belkin wrote a fascinating piece on the Northwest Passage. Although I post this from balmy Burbank, I can almost feel the cold of old as folks like John Cabot and others tried to traverse the 3,200-mile formerly inhospitable passge.
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Posted by: EdwardHeadington
on Saturday, September 15, 2007
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Heal the Bay’s annual report card on the polluted-water beaches in California is out and LA is home to 7 of the 10 most polluted beaches in the state. Long Beach won the booby prize for having the most polluted beach in the state of California.
How is this allowed to continue year after year? You don’t have to be an environmentalist to get worked up about this--- at some point it’s going to become an economic issue so even if hugging trees isn’t your thing, you have to get pissed off about the potential for this to seriously ding Los Angeles’s reputation as a tourist destination.
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Posted by: Unregistered
on Thursday, May 24, 2007
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What do you get when you cross animal rights activists with a powerhouse law firm that has a reputation for playing hardball with anyone who stands in the way of one of its Fortune 500 clients? Until today, I would have said the answer was “a no-holds-barred, bare-knuckled fight to the death”… but then I read the press release for next week’s Town Hall-Los Angeles event.
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Posted by: Ryan_Knoll
on Wednesday, May 23, 2007
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Cool volunteer project going on June 2nd - $25 and you get to help numerous LA locations. It's an annual event where thousands of volunteers meet at California Plaza, get transported out by bus to schools, neighborhoods and landmarks to improve conditions at these places.
The project is in its 15th year and there are a ton of corporate sponsors.
The sites include:
Franklyn Canyon Park
Los Angeles River Center and gardens
TreePeople Park
Prairie Place
Western Elementary School
Drew Middle School
Bethune Middle School and Celerity Nascent Centre
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Posted by: munkyfonkey
on Tuesday, May 22, 2007
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Great event for those who want to help the environment:
The 4th Annual Alternative Building Materials & Design Expo (AltBuild) returns this year for two days. It's the largest and most cohesive green-building Expo in Southern California, presented by the City of Santa Monica.
It will take place on May 18-19 at Santa Monica Air Center (Barker Hangar) in Santa Monica, CA. The show is FREE to the public, and features hands-on workshops and key educational speakers and noted exhibitors within the “Green” community. With over 140 exhibitors, the Expo has become a much-anticipated event that brings together the general public and members of the building community, including architects, designers, retail buyers, government representatives – all with the uniform motivation to learn about and promote green building technologies and practices. The show historically attracts attendees from across CA and the Western region, and also from across the U.S.
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Posted by: Rosette
on Monday, May 14, 2007
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As Antonio’s much ballyhooed “Million Trees LA” program continues to creep along, LA’s smaller neighbor to the northeast, Pasadena, continues to rack up awards for its “urban forestry.”
While LA and Pasadena have both been designated by the National Arbor Day Foundation as “Tree City USA,” a fairly easy designation to achieve, Pasadena was just one of 19 cities in California to win the prestigious “Tree City USA Growth Award, an honor it has received for six consecutive years.
The Pasadena Public Works Department cares for more than 85,000 trees within its city limits (60,000 on streets and 25,000in city parks. In 2006, it added six acres of oak woodland to the city’s protected open space.
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Posted by: Ryan_Knoll
on Monday, May 14, 2007
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Posted by: Ryan_Knoll
on Tuesday, May 01, 2007
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Posted by: Ryan_Knoll
on Monday, February 12, 2007
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Imagine your neighborhood treeless! Imagine a school playground paved over with asphalt and no spot of shade for a child to rest under!
Although the first notion may be exaggerated, the second isn’t. Many of the schools in the Los Angeles Unified School District are virtually treeless.
In collaboration with Planet Green and TreePeople I created a solution that you can put into action today ...
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Posted by: Renee_vanStaveren
on Friday, January 26, 2007
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(image via CNN) |
Some guy dumped five ounces of mercury onto the platform at the Pershing Square MTA station three days before Christmas, triggering a HAZMAT cleanup and ensuing paroxysm of finger-pointing, name-calling and self-flagellation among the Homeland Security and MTA brass.
As anyone who's busted a thermometer or goofed around mercury in high school chemistry class can tell you, the liquid-metal neurotoxin won't actually hurt you unless you're dumb enough to swallow it or rub it into your skin ...
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Posted by: Mack_Reed
on Thursday, January 18, 2007
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 It's the elephant in the room.
A day after the 13th anniversary of the 6.6 Northridge Earthquake, I have to confess, my earthquake preps consist of a few 5-gal jugs of water stored in the highest point possible in our hillside house, a stash of batteries and hand-crank flashlights, some canned food and a couple of drills with the kids.
The city government? Some 36,667 L.A. city employees including LAFD blogger Brian Humphrey, went through an earthquake drill complete with duck, cover and hold action.
Humphrey then grilled his contacts:
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Posted by: Mack_Reed
on Thursday, January 18, 2007
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 I've been wondering about dogs lately. More specifically, I wonder how far the leash laws laid out in Los Angeles municipal code extend up the fire roads that dog-walkers in the city like to frequent.
I was out on my usual Thursday dawn ride up Commonwealth to the top this morning and on the way down ran into a cyclist's quandary:
Four dogs, out with their masters, off the leash and spread out all over the fire road before me. I ran through my usual dog-hazard escalation routine in my mind as I approached ...
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Posted by: Mack_Reed
on Thursday, January 04, 2007
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 Maybe stronger drug regimens, better treatment and lower fatality rates have blunted L.A.'s fear of AIDS. But it's still killing people, and still pushing activists and doctors to fight harder against its spread.
LACityBeat points us to a new venture by porn- star- turned- clinician Sharon Mitchell, who runs the Valley-based Adult Industry Medical Health Care Foundation.
Long a beacon of intelligence and sober thinking in L.A.'s madhouse porn industry (the foundation handled the infection "outbreak" two and a half years ago with extraordinary grace), Mitchell has just launched SxCheck.com. The site provides speedy referrals to testing sites, thoroughly anonymous results notification by email and followup counseling to people who test positive ...
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Posted by: Mack_Reed
on Thursday, December 14, 2006
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Echo Park |
I've grown really fond of biking through Griffith Park, paddle-boating on Echo Park Lake and coaching soccer at the city's Silver Lake Recreation Center, but I can't claim to know how all of L.A.'s parks can be made better - beyond making them safer and cleaner.
If you have brilliant ideas (or just need to gripe about busted playground equipment, scraggly grass or horror-show bathrooms), then L.A. City Nerd points out a series of public hearings over the next few weeks that you might want to attend:
The City Parks and Rec Department actually wants your input on ways to improve the city's parks and rec centers - of which it has more than a few ...
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Posted by: Mack_Reed
on Tuesday, December 05, 2006
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UPDATE BELOW
Gov. Schwarzenegger flew down from Sacto to shill for green technology at what he called "the Los Angeles Cah Show."
Autoblog has the video of his speech touting the glories of the BMW Hydrogen 7, Mercedes-Benz E320 Bluetec diesel (which burns low-sulfur fuel), the flex-fuel Chevy Tahoe, the Honda FCX fuel cell concept and the Tesla Roadster, which he pronounced, "hot."
Meanwhile, Autoblog reports that bikini'd and board-shorts'd protesters from Global Exchange, Rainforest Action Network, Ruckus Society and Code Pink crashed GM CEO Rick Wagoner's keynote address Wednesday (video here of a protester and a partisan haggling over why GM killed the EV-1 electric car) ...
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Posted by: Mack_Reed
on Thursday, November 30, 2006
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 You'll want to bookmark this link and click it just before 7:30 a.m. Tuesday morning:
Researchers at SUNY Buffalo have built a full-sized, 2-story, plywood and stucco house on top of a gigantic machine that will simulate a 6.7-magnitude earthquake tomorrow morning. You should be able to watch the exterior results on the page above, or go inside the house for the big shake with these interior cameras.
The idea is to develop stronger home designs by studying realtime earthquake effects in a lab setting as they're happening, rather than studying debris after a major quake to guess what may or may not have already happened ...
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Posted by: Mack_Reed
on Monday, November 13, 2006
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 Iconoclasm is the national sport. It's probably why we all skim the Hollywood gossip rags at the grocery checkstand even though we'd never buy them.
Occasionally, you get showered with fragments from a solid, smashing blow:
TMZ rips into a list of celebrities who piously tout their devotion to Priuses and electric cars - and then blow huge reeking gouts of exhaust pollutants into the air from the engines of their private jets ...
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Posted by: Mack_Reed
on Wednesday, October 25, 2006
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 If you've wondered what's to become of the big empty lot near Chinatown where people hung out making noise, art and whoopee at last year's NotACornfield installation, you can take a look at the possibilities on Saturday:
Calparks.org will hold a public workshop on designs by the three finalists in the competition for the contract to landscape the cornfields into a new Los Angeles Historic Park.
The finalists are:
Here are the details on the showing, which starts 9:30 a.m. on Saturday:
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Posted by: Mack_Reed
on Thursday, October 12, 2006
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(image via AP |
Next time your boss asks why you have a bucket of worm-infested trash next to your desk, you can tell him you're reducing office waste and helping the environment!
Well, at least that's why they're doing it on the 10th floor of the L.A. Department of Public Works building, according to this AP story.
Apparently the California Integrated Waste Management Board wants us all to bring worms to work as one of its 10 ways to reduce office waste. That's right - keep a bucket of worms by your desk and feed them your apple cores, sandwich scraps and other green waste ...
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Posted by: Mack_Reed
on Wednesday, October 11, 2006
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Sell that Boeing stock. You might as well give up on dreaming of that little McMansion in the KB Homes Runkle Canyon development in the Simi Hills, too.
An environmental study has concluded that the notorious 1959 meltdown of a sodium nuclear reactor right about here could have caused up to 1,800 cases of cancer.
As far as I'm concerned, this is proof that further independent studies are needed, since this contradicts at least one mid-90s Rocketdyne-driven study and numerous declarations by the company that there was no connection between cancer and the meltdown ...
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Posted by: Mack_Reed
on Friday, October 06, 2006
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 The Los Angeles Gay and Lesbian Center kicked past common wisdom to the curb late last week by launching a billboard campaign insisting that HIV/AIDS is "a gay disease."
The Center has always practiced an outspoken brand of outreach and awareness, from its ongoing sponsorship of the California AIDS Rides and successor AIDS Life/Cycle events to numerous ongoing counseling, health-awareness and aid programs.
This campaign shoots down the long-held belief that AIDS awareness should be directed at everyone, in part to avoid any stigma it brings to the gay community, and it's pissing some people off ...
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Posted by: Mack_Reed
on Monday, October 02, 2006
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 Dude. You know Attorney General Bill Lockyer? Like, the top prosecutor for all of California?
He just, like, totally sued the six biggest automakers? Says their cars are, like, pumping greenhouse gases into the sweet California air?
We can blame, like, Nissan and Ford and General Motors and Honda and Toyota and The Chrysler Group for, like selling us our cars, dude - and we get off, like scott-free for choosing to buy bigass SUVs and 10-cylinder Vipers and monster trucks that we all drive solo?
That's sooo rad. Maybe we can, sue those guys for causing, like, mushy little swells at Surfrider?
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Posted by: Mack_Reed
on Wednesday, September 20, 2006
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 News today has sort of an environmental tinge: You could get hit by a falling palm, a flaming spatula, a massive online lawsuit or a juicy bit of inside L.A. info if you turn the wrong way:
... And 3,249 Tang Empties
To me, the truly weird part of this story is not that there are 100,000 bits of trash including gloves, spatulas and bolts floating in Earth orbit, but that there's an entire research foundation in Los Angeles with funding to study and track 'em.
The Center for Orbital and Reentry Debris Studies warns that this crap " can kill astronauts, puncture satellites or at the very least scratch up expensive space shuttle windows," according to CBS News. Here's a Quicktime animation of what it sort of looks like ...
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Posted by: Mack_Reed
on Thursday, September 14, 2006
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(image via Vellocet.com) |
Unable to poison or starve its runaway squirrel population to death, city of Santa Monica has now contracted bounty hunters for a fee of $3,900 a week, plus $5.50 per dead squirrel, CityBeat reports.
The stated reason? Plague. Another possible justification? Erosion of the ritzy palisades realty.
As expected, the animal-protection types are all over it, with the Humane Society calling the justification "ludicrous" ...
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Posted by: Mack_Reed
on Wednesday, September 13, 2006
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 Five years after 9/11 and all the major media are taking stock. The Times has been doing a good job at pointing out how paranoid, edgy and entirely less safe we've become in the Bush administration's alleged "war on terrorism."
It's no surprise, but consistently nerve-wracking to be reminded by the Times that the Ports of Los Angeles and Long Beach are still sitting ducks for terrorism.
Security inspectors are using marginally-effective radiation scanners and barely able to close-inspect 6% of the 7 million 40-foot-long cargo containers that blow through the port each year ...
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Posted by: Mack_Reed
on Monday, September 11, 2006
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You gotta love this story: A former park supervisor who cut down ficus trees and myoporum shrubs in the Ballona Wetlands - in a personal jihad against "non-native plants" - is awaiting trial now for misdemeanor charges of "injuring vegetation." Each count could bring jail time and thousands of dollars in fines.
"Trimming and landscaping isn't done without authorization from government agencies," said Frank Mateljan of the city attorney's office ...
"I love the wetlands and I care about the endangered species that live there, the plants and animals," van de Hoek said.
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Posted by: Mack_Reed
on Thursday, September 07, 2006
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 At times - most times, in fact - the growth and evolution of Los Angeles seems too sprawlingly huge to master, manage or even steer. Our endemic problems - traffic, pollution, hunger, homelessness, realty price-bloat - defy our attempts at control.
Well, maybe we're going at it all wrong - thinking of L.A. as one huge city rather than a "regional city" with numerous centers, networks and opportunities for intelligent growth.
In this thoroughly engrossing article at the sustainability blog Worldchanging, planning student Justus Stewart suggests that L.A. could get a better grip on its problems - particularly transportation - with more innovation in planning ...
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Posted by: Mack_Reed
on Thursday, September 07, 2006
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Posted by: Mack_Reed
on Thursday, August 24, 2006
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 The impending release of Bad Day L.A. has everyone pondering L.A.'s fate.
Los Angeles has always had this dystopian tinge - in history as in pop culture - where our own socio-racial imbalances spur riots and riot parody movies, we suffer disasters and disaster movies, and we endure/enjoy gleeful nonsense like Escape from L.A..
L.A. City Nerd wonders aloud about the Worst Day in Los Angeles history - as if it's easy to pick out even one. He suggests October 24, 1871 (the Chinatown Massacre), August 11, 1965 (the Watts Riots), April 29, 1992 (the post-Rodney King verdict riots) ...
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Posted by: Mack_Reed
on Wednesday, August 23, 2006
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 OK, I understand that we live in a major city (#2 in the US) and that we have air traffic overhead.
But does some pea-brained pilot really need to buzz the Hollywood Bowl in the Goodyear Blimp during the Beethoven Coriolan Overture? Most probably, it was the Spirit of America, close enough that I could have hit it with a BB gun, had I the foresight to bring one along.
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Posted by: JAmussen
on Friday, August 18, 2006
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Maybe it's the heat. Or the humidity. Or the delirium that sets in after bolting fans to the ceilings of myhouse after spending years proclaiming "We don't need AC more than 3 to 4 days a year, so let's save the money!" Unfortunately, this year those four days are Monday, Wednesday, Saturday and Sunday.
But whatever the cause, I had a trainwreck of thoughts today. They collided with loud, screeching smash in my heat-addled mind and I'm not sure how to clean up the mess ...
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Posted by: LeeWatters
on Thursday, July 27, 2006
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Hey, laptop owners: Josh Strike at LAist has a horror story to share about getting his beloved Powerbook yanked from under his nose by a tatted-up thief. I was sitting at Starbucks in South Pas today, working on my laptop, talking to a client, when the door burst open behind me and a guy reached over, grabbed my computer, and took off running.
I jumped up without thinking. Before I closed the cell phone I was screaming "stop motherfucker, motherfuckin thief!" running hell-for-metal in my Spanish boots after this guy in Nikes as he sprinted down the block into a residential neighborhood. It's a good read, and an even better object lesson for the writing-at-Starbucks brigade ...
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Posted by: Mack_Reed
on Wednesday, July 26, 2006
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 It's a noble crusade: Mayor Antonio Villaraigosa wants us all to help the city plant a million trees, echoing the successful early-80s million-tree campaign by Tree People.
The rationale is interesting: the campaign claims you can save 30% on summer cooling costs by planting four trees around your house; 1 million trees could also remove 2.24 million pounds of pollutants from the air each year, capture 1.925 billion gallons of stormwater runoff and generally help everyone breathe easier and spend more. (Tree People cites the stat that a single tree can absorb as much carbon as is produced by a car driven 26,000 miles) ...
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Posted by: Mack_Reed
on Tuesday, July 25, 2006
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Posted by: Mack_Reed
on Sunday, July 23, 2006
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To anyone who's strolled downtown at lunchtime and enjoyed the mingled aromas of sauteed garlic and evaporated piss, the idea of focusing city planning on the "pedestrian experience" should be a no-duh slam dunk. So it's very encouraging to hear it coming from L.A.'s top planning official.
L.A. Downtown News just ran a fascinating interview with Gail Goldberg.
Outlining her "city of villages" ideas for Los Angeles and describing a recent day-long foot-tour of downtown, Goldberg comes off sounding more like a savvy, street-level citizen than a cosseted bureaucrat - and that's good ...
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Posted by: Mack_Reed
on Sunday, July 16, 2006
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I wanted to see fireworks last night. I love looking at fireworks, but I hate dealing with the traffic brouhahas that result afterwards. For years, my favorite spot to view fireworks was from the top of the Angeles Crest Highway, until other people thought of the same thing, and now getting down ACH takes hours.
I recently acquired a bicycle and have been exploring LA's vast bike path system (large PDF file.) It occurred to me that we could bicycle down the Class 1 Ballona Creek Bike Path and it would take us to the south side of the Marina del Rey channel, where we'd have a perfect view of the Marina del Rey fireworks without getting stuck in traffic. The bike path follows Ballona Creek to the ocean before crossing a bike/pedestrian-only bridge over Ballona Creek and connecting with the South Bay Bike Path ...
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Posted by: Kathryn_Hill
on Wednesday, July 05, 2006
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Today's fever dream ... |
Afternoons here in Silver Lake are getting ugly. Working in my (voluntarily) un-AC'd office for a few hours in the afternoon is like trying to write inside an oven while wearing a sopping-wet wool overcoat and a thick black snowboard beanie.
The summer's only just begun: It's gonna be hot for a while. Maybe not quite stupid-dangerous-hot like it was yesterday, but the National Weather Service has temps inland in L.A. topping 100 for the next week ...
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Posted by: Mack_Reed
on Friday, June 30, 2006
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 Do we need a color-coded Eathquake Alert System?
The Journal Nature is publishing an article which claims that the southern end of the San Andreas Fault, burdened by over 250 years with no significant pressure-relieving earthquakes, is going to blow. Big time. And soon ...
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Posted by: JAmussen
on Wednesday, June 21, 2006
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 Ah, the Tiki Ti.
(image by Michelle Whiting via Critiki |
Man, I don't know what it is about puff pieces by apparent out-of-towners that gets my goat, but here's another:
MSNBC offers a day-long itinerary called 24 hour Layover in Los Angeles that A) represents about 16 hours in Los Angeles, B) focuses obsessively on Hollywood; and C) completely ignores the huge timesuck of getting from one place to the next.
Here's Pauline Frommer's list - and my rebuttal ...
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Posted by: Mack_Reed
on Monday, June 05, 2006
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Posted by: Mack_Reed
on Monday, June 05, 2006
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 Google's new in-house mashup Summer of Green puts eco-friendly projects in L.A. and other cities onto the Google map API.
On the surface, it's pretty fun stuff, including map pointers and little promo videos on Tree People's efforts to green the L.A. County park in Coldwater Canyon, the Audubon Center in South Pasadena and the Ambrose Hotel in Santa Monica, which features composting and organic mattresses ...
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Posted by: Mack_Reed
on Wednesday, May 31, 2006
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 I had a panicky dad moment last night on hearing news of the human-to-human bird flu infections in Indonesia. Totally took off sprinting through the Web on an info-hunt, like a starving cheetah on meth.
If you're a childless, healthy Angeleno, you may not get my angst. Flu, schmu. Got kids? Then come, freak out with me:
Here's an animation of how fast infection would spread if it began with oh, say, 10 sick people on a plane landing at LAX. Why panic? Well, let's see. Maybe because the World Health Organization says that 218 cases have been reported so far - 124 of them fatal ...
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Posted by: Mack_Reed
on Thursday, May 25, 2006
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 L.A. County beaches need a hip new slogan. How about: "L.A. County - Now You're Swimming with Filth!"
We have the worst-polluted beaches in California, according to HealtheBay's newest annual report card.
Interestingly, we scored the worst out of all California counties because our county recently became the most conscientious - testing ocean water near creek mouths and storm drains where people like to play ...
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Posted by: Mack_Reed
on Thursday, May 25, 2006
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 Admit it: You don't think much about the crap floating in Santa Monica Bay - much less the crap in the sand.
But it's there - quite literally - according to a UCLA environmental report due out today. Even with clean ocean water, harmful bacteria can linger in the sand for up to a week, the study's gonna say.
Of course, some of the data's from 2003 and, if you've been paying attention, this is all pretty much (sadly) old news anyway...
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Posted by: Mack_Reed
on Tuesday, May 23, 2006
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Spectrographic topography = spacecraft porn. Gold foil = satellite crack.
There's something intoxicating and illicit about being close to equipment that's helping us understand the planets, the stars and the comets - and costing millions of your own tax dollars.
We checked out Jet Propulsion Laboratories' Open House and got a high dose of both on the one weekend a year when NASA invites you in to ogle their latest space-exploration hardware, software and wetware. Like the T-shirt says - As a matter of fact, yes, they are rocket scientists ...
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Posted by: Mack_Reed
on Sunday, May 21, 2006
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 It was just over a year ago that David Geffen relented and opened the gates next to his Malibu home, allowing public access to the beach beyond.
Now the battle for access to public land has moved to a higher plane: the Santa Monica Mountains.
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Posted by: JAmussen
on Wednesday, May 10, 2006
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UPDATE BELOW
This is more an FYI than a warning for L.A. at this point, since no giant waves have been spotted.
But an 8.0 earthquake hit the south Pacific seabed near Tonga, Samoa and Fiji causing the National Weather Service to issue a tsunami warning for Fiji, New Zealand and Hawaii.
The AP sez ...
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Posted by: Mack_Reed
on Wednesday, May 03, 2006
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 The L.A. River's a mess. It always is this time of year.
Winter and spring rains wash all the trash and crap we've been flinging into our the streets and parking lots down into Mother Ditch, and leave the banks and foliage festooned with trash (see right).
Next weekend, come on out and give the beloved old drainage canal (and wildlife habitat) a hand: The 17th Annual Great Los Angeles River Cleanup or La Gran Limpieza runs from 9 a.m. to noon on both Friday, May 5 and Saturday, May 6 ...
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Posted by: Mack_Reed
on Friday, April 28, 2006
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Like me, LosAngelesCityNerd and SeanBonner have graffiti on the brain this week.
Sean points out that sticker crews take pains to discourage you from scraping their stuff down.
And LosAngelesCityNerd just posted a 5-point plan to fight graffiti that takes into account "permitted" street art.
Here are his proposals and my thoughts on 'em:
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Posted by: Mack_Reed
on Thursday, April 27, 2006
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Posted by: Mack_Reed
on Thursday, April 27, 2006
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20 years ago today the world awoke to a nuclear nightmare. A lethal chain of events at the Chernobyl Nuclear Plant resulted in a radioactive fire that eventually left 17 ghost villages within 19 miles of the facility. Four hundred times more radioactivity than Hiroshima bomb was released and traveled around the world. The fallout drove a third of a million people permanently from their homes. And as devastating as Katrina was last year, it pales in comparison to this tragedy.
Why should this be of concern to Los Angeles? The radioactive plume from Chernobyl was first acknowledged in Sweden, hundreds of miles from Ukraine. It had been two days since the accident and the Soviet government had yet to tell their people. Los Angeles County sits less than 50 miles from the San Onofre Nuclear Generating Station and approximately 150 miles from Diablo Canyon Nuclear Plant. Los Angeles is also on the proposed transport route for both nuclear plants to Yucca Mountain, should it ever open.
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Posted by: Rochelle.Becker
on Wednesday, April 26, 2006
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Proving that some architecture is still sacred - even in this shallow, raze-and-rebuild town - Mayor Antonio Villaraigosa announced plans to head to Dallas next week to push the NFL to park a football team in a newly redesigned Coliseum.
The Daily News says the plan is to woo an NFL team into the football-hungry city with promise of building it a state-of-the-art, 65,000 seat sports-cathedral - all shoehorned in between the repeating-arch peristyles of the original Olympic coliseum. LAObserved has some of the gory details ...
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Posted by: Mack_Reed
on Tuesday, April 25, 2006
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 Bring outcher deeead ...
Oh, never mind." |
With the news that a single case of the once-deadly bubonic plague has popped up in Los Angeles, people are, um, panicking.
Brian Humphrey at the invaluable LAFD News and Information blog has links to the straight dope: It's an ugly, nasty, sometimes fatal disease that can be treated successfully with modern antibiotics. That's cured, folks.
We can now all stop running around in the streets screaming, and return to the safety of our homes.
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Posted by: Mack_Reed
on Wednesday, April 19, 2006
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 There's been a lot of excited chatter about plans to rebuild the L.A. river, perhaps tear down some of its concrete for parklands and give it back to the herons and all.
But the design team and L.A. Department of Public Works haven't exactly been tearing up the planning tables to rush things forward to the construction phase. This is probably a good thing, considering the delicacy and enormity of the job.
Seven plan meetings have been held since October, a series of public review sessions are slated for June, and the final plan is due in 2007 reports Architectural Record News ...
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Posted by: Mack_Reed
on Wednesday, April 12, 2006
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Now here's a hot news item. If you haven't been outside any time in the last few decades you might find it interesting to know that New York and Los Angeles are touting the winning title for being some of the most toxic places on earth to live.
Duh! Are any of us surprised? All you have to do is get on any of the freeways at any time of the day to see why ...
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Posted by: Jacqui_Brown
on Wednesday, March 22, 2006
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Damn, Hollywood, pick up after yourself!
The Angry CyclistTM just got back from his morning ride, and he's pissed: A film crew that took over Vista del Valle Drive at the top of Griffith Park for a night shoot decided to leave behind five huge bags of craft services trash. (Map)
Do the words hungry coyotes mean anything to you geniuses?
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Posted by: Mack_Reed
on Tuesday, March 21, 2006
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Diet time for Nutkin
(image via Vellocet.com) |
Last summer, I noted that People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals was angrily protesting Santa Monica's plan to control its ground squirrel population with poison.
PETA was none too pleased with the plan at the time, but probably will feel a little better about this news:
Now, the city plans to starve the squirrels to death instead ...
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Posted by: Mack_Reed
on Monday, March 20, 2006
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Whoa. Welcome to what Douglas Adams once jokingly imagined as the Total Perspective Vortex ...
A couple of UCLA astronomers just reported they've discovered a star cluster at the center of the Milky Way shaped like a double-helix.
Being as that's the general shape of the very fabric of human identity - the DNA strand - you have to wonder: Are we incredibly, infinitesimally teeny-tiny? Or is someone else out there in the universe staggeringly immense?
Brain hurts. Pulled a ganglion. Must go lie down.
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Posted by: Mack_Reed
on Wednesday, March 15, 2006
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Mmm. Tasty. |
I biked up the L.A. River path at dawn this morning and got to wondering: How toxic can it really be?
Plants and trees thrive in the stretch near Griffith Park. I often see ducks, geese, coots and the occasional hopelessly lost cormorant or heron fishing in the shallows. This morning, swallows swooped like dogfighting jets in tight arcs over its surface, hoovering up river bugs that live in the water 24/7 - with no apparent ill effect.
The L.A. Times' Steve Hymon put a couple of goldfish into a bowlful of L.A. River water March 6, and claimed last night they were still alive ...
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Posted by: Mack_Reed
on Tuesday, March 14, 2006
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 Heads up, cyclists: The L.A. Treasure Hunt (scheduled for Sunday 3/12) has been postponed to Sunday, April 2 due to threatening weather.
Here's the message from organizer Sean Carlson:
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Posted by: Mack_Reed
on Saturday, March 11, 2006
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 Well, the rains finally arrived midafternoon, hammered in the early evening, and tapered off to a steady hosing action near midnight.
The LAFD's Brian Humphrey posts a dozen helpful links on the always-excellent LAFD News & Information blog to help you cope with everything from pumping out your basement to surviving Tuesday morning's commute.
If you're in the latter category, you might want to check out the city, county and state road closures or at the very least, check the NOAA weather radio forecasts ...
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Posted by: Mack_Reed
on Monday, February 27, 2006
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Why do I have the sneaking suspicion that if terrorists are at work in Los Angeles, their next big strike won't look anything like these?
- The El Monte Metrolink station was shut down while the bomb squad sent a robot in to poke at suspicious packages.
- The Long Beach Airport terminal was evacuated for 90 minutes after some joker in baggy clothes had the temerity to run away from the TSA as they tried to search him.
- And you were all worried about the United Arab Emirates taking over the Port of Los Angeles? Fully one third of the shipping companies there are already foreign-owned ...
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Posted by: Mack_Reed
on Monday, February 27, 2006
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Posted by: Mack_Reed
on Monday, February 27, 2006
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 Sure, we all know Los Angeles and the rest of the planet will be left to the rats and roaches once mankind finishes killing itself.
But it doesn't ease the blow to have NBC-TV4 inform us that SoCal's rat population is booming thanks to a food-supply bump following last year's heavy rains.
Okay, so there are no actual statistics in the TV report to back this up, just this queasy-making lead-in, and a vaguely threatening observation from a Terminix guy (who was probably glad to plug his business) ...
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Posted by: Mack_Reed
on Wednesday, February 22, 2006
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Put down those AAs... back away from the trashcan... and nobody gets hurt.
Tonight at midnight, it becomes illegal to trash a whole bunch of electronics stuff -- including batteries. For those of us with kids, this is gonna be a real PITA. We go through enough AAs to power a third-world country (and, yes, I've tried recyclable, but it just isn't worth the effort when Costco will sell me a gazillion batteries for less than the charger costs. The people who bitch about buying fresh batteries are the same folks without kids who haven't had the opportunity to drink the recyclable diaper kool-aid 8-) -- in a figurative sense, not a literal one!)
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Posted by: LeeWatters
on Tuesday, February 07, 2006
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Yyyikes: Los Angeles may be suffering an outbreak of Hepatitis A - a fourfold increase in two years, reports CBS2/KCAL9's David Goldstein.
Hot spots include downtown restaurants like Cafe Pinot on Fifth Street and La Golondrina on Olvera Street, says the CBS report, in a rare display of capital-J-journalism that seems to have beaten the mainstream newspapers.
Me, I'm staying away from the salad bars and getting more fanatical about washing my hands. I like my liver just as it is ...
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Posted by: Mack_Reed
on Wednesday, February 01, 2006
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Gung hai fat choy, fellow Angelenos: One-quarter to one-third of the crap we breathe (organic compounds, airborne particulates, carbon monoxide) is imported from China, according to a New York Times article that Xeni just spotted.
What can we do to persuade China to clean up its industries? Boycott Chinese products? Hard to do - just check the labels on most of what you've worn in the past year and you'd probably wind up naked.
Hope they flunk their environmental review for the 2008 Olympics in Beijing? Cold consolation, since it would put hundreds of American athletes (and thousands across the world) out of luck for all those multimillion-dollar deals for endorsing pricey European-labeled, Chinese-made shoes and jogging bras ...
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Posted by: Mack_Reed
on Tuesday, January 31, 2006
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 The state of California has decided that second-hand smoke should be categorized as a pollutant along the lines of diesel exhaust, benzene and arsenic. Who knew the hipsters along Sunset Plaza were doing so much to destroy the environment? Besides driving Hummers alone, of course.
I believe cigarettes are dangerous, chemical-laden cancer missiles for the addicted smoker. And I find cigarette smoke ungodly annoying. And in the interest of full disclosure, I enjoy a good cigar now and then (but NEVER around kids or other people. Cigars are organic, not addictive, not pumped up with ammonia like ciggies, and I am aware of the relatively minor risks of my little vice). But that's not what this is about.
The state, Rob Reiner and every other group or individual who ring the "sky-is-falling" warning bell about second-hand smoke need to be honest about the so-called science behind second-hand smoke studies. And they're not ...
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Posted by: LeeWatters
on Friday, January 27, 2006
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 We've been going about this moving thing all wrong. We rushed to move to Silver Lake in time to get the kids into school in January, and we only just finished sprucing up our old house in West L.A. in time to get it on the market last weekend - and now we're carrying two mortgages with the hope of selling fast before we go completely broke.
Maybe we shoulda just found an empty lot and thrown up a snappy, drum-tight little Kithaus or three.
Made in Van Nuys, it's a modernist 16x16' studio/bedroom/bath unit that Steven says goes for around $59,500 - minus the cost of wiring and plumbing.
Here in Van Nuys suggests some other uses ...
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Posted by: Mack_Reed
on Wednesday, January 25, 2006
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 Could a nuclear accident really happen in California?
Last Sunday's episode of "West Wing" about a radioactive release from a fictional California nuclear plant was a frightening scenario, but not outside the realm of possibility. California's operating nuclear plants are located on eroding and earthquake active coastal bluffs. Since 9/11/01, the administration has warned U.S. citizens that nuclear power plants are at risk of terrorist attacks ...
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Posted by: Rochelle.Becker
on Tuesday, January 24, 2006
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Well, there goes their Heal the Bay report card.
The monstrous sewage spill that sullied the surf line from Manhattan Beach to RPV Estates yesterday hasn't shown up yet on the water quality reports for the L.A. County coast.
But I think it's safe to assume that 2 million gallons of raw sewage on South Bay's beaches will cause more than a few scuffles in the morning lineups at Surfrider, Venice and Malibu as the surf community wisely stays the hell off the local water ...
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Posted by: Mack_Reed
on Monday, January 16, 2006
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 This morning, two little slices of hell brought to you by Ryan at Los Anjealous and - by extension - me.
Ryan dragged himself to Insomnia Cafe for some joe, and walked out with a wicked case of stinkeye ...
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Posted by: Mack_Reed
on Tuesday, January 10, 2006
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 Wipe that smirk off your face and sit down, Los Angeles, you're in big trouble.
I just saw your annual report card from the Southern California Assn. of Governments, and it's plastered with "D's." And an "F" for Traffic? What's the meaning of this?
You've got a lot of work to do next year if you want to bring your grades up - and I sincerely hope you do.
Let's review the 2005 State of the Region report:
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Posted by: Mack_Reed
on Friday, January 06, 2006
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I've got water on the brain this morning.
Never mind the torrential blast that overwhelmed our gutters yesterday and dumped water into our son's bedroom window, or the mud the DirecTV installers left all over our rugs - or even the way Bob Eubanks Edwards left Stephanie Edwards in the pissing rain.
I'm talking about the miserable quality of L.A. drinking water - it's so bad that apparently even the LADWP would rather drink Sparkletts than its own water ...
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Posted by: Mack_Reed
on Tuesday, January 03, 2006
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L.A. needs another 405, 10,110, 105 and a Beltway with the eastern semicircle between the 110 and the 710. The new highways could be elevated above the current ones or carved out of new lanes ...
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Posted by: NorrisMcDonald
on Friday, December 23, 2005
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 You ever wonder how all that trash you sort into your blue cans gets parsed into bulk paper, metal and glass for recycling?
An article in a local newspaper explains what happens to local newspapers once they're recycled - they get fed into an assembly-line-like filtering system - half man, half machine - that sorts the valuable reusables from the worthless trash:
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Posted by: Mack_Reed
on Sunday, December 04, 2005
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 Attention, Westsiders: Flex your thumbs and index fingers now - one-two, one-two, one-two.
You'll be giving them a workout starting next year, when you'll have to dial the code 310 before all phone numbers in the 310 area code, even when you are in that area code, thanks to the new 424 overlay being forced upon us by the glut of new cellphones.
Just got a cheerful little black-and-yellow flyer about it in the mail from Sprint, saying that the plan - which was kicking around for about 10 years before being implemented last August - goes into voluntary effect on New Year's Eve and full effect on 07/26/06 ...
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Posted by: Mack_Reed
on Monday, November 28, 2005
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Among warehouses, in an industrial sector of South Central L.A. lies a 14 acre oasis: a working farm where local Latino community members grow corn, cactus, and cilantro. This piece of property has been the subject of a oft-intense dispute between the community, the city, and a developer Ralph Horowitz.
As I reported recently in Los Angeles City Beat, the community members are preparing to be thrown off the property by police, following the rejection of their appeal by the California Appeals Court. The property is being turned over to Horowitz, who reached a deal with the city to buy it for $5 million, the same price the city paid him 20 years ago when they took it from him in an eminent domain decision. Horowitz says he plans to put a warehouse on the property.
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Posted by: dabendschein
on Tuesday, November 22, 2005
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Here's a head-smackingly scary statistic: Los Angeles gays and lesbians are colossally heavy smokers.
More than 30% of lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgender (LGBT) Angelenos smoke tobacco - nearly double the 15,4% rate in the general population, according to a state health survey.
The gay smoking rate is so heavy the L.A. County Health Dept. is running anti-smoking ads in LA-area LGBT publications, launching quit-smoking clinics via LastDragLA.com, and sending street teams out to gay nightspots all over town next month to try smacking coffin nails out of addicts' mouths ...
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Posted by: Mack_Reed
on Friday, October 28, 2005
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 Environmentalists who have been exhorting us all to "save Ballona" can rejoice today:
A state appeals court overturned a lower court's approval of work to mitigate explosive methane lurking beneath Playa Vista and pave the way for future development of one of the last big chunks of wild land left in urban L.A.
According to a press release from a coalition of Playa Vista foes, here's what went down after four years of litigation:
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Posted by: Mack_Reed
on Wednesday, October 26, 2005
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 Well, this explains it, just in time for Halloween: Energy vampires are sapping my vitality, robbing my life of drive, sucking the spring from my step and the joie from my vivre.
UCLA psychiatrist Dr. Judith Orloff's new book, "Positive Energy" says there are nine kinds of energy vampires, ranging from "unintentional energy sappers" to "constant talkers" ...
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Posted by: Mack_Reed
on Tuesday, October 25, 2005
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Posted by: Mack_Reed
on Saturday, October 22, 2005
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 LA.Comfidential boosts Angelenos' connectivity this morning with a list of free wireless hotspots.
It's cool, and useful and it got the rust-seized gears behind my low, thick forehead spinning: How many other hotspots in L.A. can we tap without wardriving every single neighborhood with a signal-sniffer?
Until ex-Mayor Jim Hahn's blue-ribbon committee on wireless coughs up some results, we're left to our own, uh, devices.
Here are a few more L.A. hotspot lists on the Web you may want to store in your laptop:
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Posted by: Mack_Reed
on Wednesday, October 19, 2005
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By Walter Moore - www.MooreIsBetter.com
If you hate trees -- and who doesn't? -- you're going to love City Hall's new "master plan" for Griffith Park. The plan only cost $400,000 of your money, and it's full of great ideas, such as: tearing down existing parking structures, and rebuilding them a short distance away; chopping down decades-old trees because they are not "native;" and building, building, building.
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Posted by: WalterMoore
on Tuesday, October 11, 2005
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Whew. Things seem to be calming down a bit on the Topanga Fire:
The winds are dying and firefighters have contained things by 20% with more than 20,000 acres burned, the Times reports.
I don't know about you, but the air sucks even in west L.A. - I can't imagine what it's like directly under the smoke pall. The image at right comes from NASA's Global Fire Maps, one of a few places offering interesting perspectives on the fire ...
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Posted by: Mack_Reed
on Friday, September 30, 2005
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Okay - with 16,000 acres burning and burnt around Southern California, we can say with confidence, it's not just the heat, it's the stupidity.
Fire season brings out the sick-bastards, the spinny-eyeball pyromaniacs who flick incendiary devices into parched brush just to see how big "their" fire can get before it makes other people homeless or dead.
The fire in the Santa Susannas hasn't killed anyone yet, but it's already forced 450 people out of their houses, burned at least 16,000 acres, destroyed at least two houses, injured a fire captain, put 3,000 firefighters in harm's way, stalled freeways, filled offices as far as Glendale with burnt-brush stench - and it's only 5% contained, says the LAFD Blog ...
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Posted by: Mack_Reed
on Thursday, September 29, 2005
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Posted by: Mack_Reed
on Thursday, September 22, 2005
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Posted by: Mack_Reed
on Tuesday, September 20, 2005
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 Imagine an 8.0 quake on the San Andreas Fault, and then put yourself in the shoes of any Hurricane Katrina victim staying in Los Angeles today.
In this morning's Daily News, Dennis McCarthy unspools a moving profile of evacuees staying at the Dream Center shelter in Glendale.
Families are trying to make their peace with having lost everything - homes, clothes, belongings, jobs - and focus on what's left that matters: each other and the future ...
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Posted by: Mack_Reed
on Monday, September 12, 2005
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In today's L.A. Times there is an article on restoring the Los Angeles River(Planning for a Greener L.A. River - registration required). In October, the city will be holding the first of 18 public meetings on the river's future, after which the city will draw up a 20 year plan for the river's restoration.
As I started reading the article the first thing I thought was that it was about time. It's easy to forget that this miles long, concrete bed is actually a river, not a sewer. Imagine the banks reborn with trees and parks. If Los Angeles lacks anything (besides, you know, enough police, good public transportation and a workable school system) it's greenery.
And then I ran across this line:
"One key item up for discussion: whether it's possible to remove portions of the river's concrete lining, installed beginning in the 1930s to keep low-lying areas from being inundated during winter storms."
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Posted by: S_Blackmoore
on Monday, September 12, 2005
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Back to nature:Moonrise over the L.A. River |
We've all dreamed of Los Angeles long ago, before men spoiled the land to turn it into the crazy-quilt temple of culture it's begun today, but until now, no one's done much about it.
Now there's a move afoot to restore the L.A. River to its natural state - due to begin shortly with the announcement of 18 public meetings on the plan.
I say let's do it - but carefully ...
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Posted by: Mack_Reed
on Monday, September 12, 2005
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Mother and child in Houston Astrodome. Image via BoingBoing |
Whatever we're all doing for the good people of the Gulf Coast right now, it's not enough. Thousands of survivors will never go home, never see some of their loved ones again.
Thousands more will return in weeks or months to a neighborhoods that must be leveled and burned by authorities due to the utter ruin of their homes. If they're lucky, they'll live in new houses thrown up by Habitat for Humanity, but at the very least, they'll have to face a crippled job market and a community scrambled nearly beyond repair.
Remember - It could have been an 8.0 earthquake on the San Andreas. It could have been us. Here's how you can help:
The Dream Center rehab in Echo Park is hosting evacuees. Click "Donate" for cash contributions, or see their "List of needs" link to help supply them with things like clothes, luggage, computers, stamps and store gift cards.
Crystal Method, Simply Jeff, Oscure, Robotronik and Ooah are holding a dance benefit tonight at Mor Bar in Santa Monica. ( blogging.la) ...
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Posted by: Mack_Reed
on Thursday, September 08, 2005
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 UPDATED BELOW
Admit it: Homeless people are invisible to you.
You walk around downtown, pretending that that man is not standing in his underwear, talking to himself and shaking a cupful of change at you. You come down the Pico offramp of the 405 South and ignore the agitated, bearded dude with the spinny eyeballs capering about like a chimp in front of your passenger window with his hand out. Because if you didn't, you might have to acknowledge that they are human beings whose problems you couldn't begin to solve.
So maybe it will surprise you to learn that homeless kids still have to go to school and Hollywood clubgoers routinely kick homeless people at closing time ...
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Posted by: Mack_Reed
on Tuesday, August 30, 2005
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 There, but for the grace of God ...
Katrina slammed into New Orleans and the rest of southern Louisiana this morning. So far, the levee holding back the sea from Lake Pontchartrain has held, according to blogging.la's sister site, Metroblogging New Orleans, which has turned into a pretty useful info-hub on storm damage.
Here are the latest damage reports from Joe B., who has been on top of all the details, from the rolling tally of power outages to a hurricane scientist's pronouncement that Katrina hitting N.O is an "absolutely worst-case scenario":
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Posted by: Mack_Reed
on Monday, August 29, 2005
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 It's confirmed. We're doomed. Five lesser fault lines running under greater L.A. could give us a good 5-6.0-magnitude earthquake, the Daily News reports.
The fact that several other L.A. blogs also remark in similarly negative terms that we're doomed is proof of two things: - We're only as doomed as we think we are; and
- Late August is the slowest news week this side of Christmas.
As to point (1) - the Daily News actually puts it into perspective. The short version - DON'T PANIC:
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Posted by: Mack_Reed
on Wednesday, August 24, 2005
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 Is this the name of the vile little beast that's been shredding my lungs for the past 10 days?
You might get it, too, if you're not careful about washing your hands and letting people cough near you in the next few weeks. The germ bus is making a grand tour of L.A.'s schools, airports and other public places.
My 5-year-old son brought a little something home from school first - it seemed like a little cold, until he kept leaking green stuff beyond 5 days, and he developed this nasty, bubbly cough. By the time we got him to the doctor a day and a half later, he had walking pneumonia. "Yeah, there's a lot of it going around," the pediatrician said, without naming it, as he wrote a prescription for antibiotics.
Four days later, my son's improving, and I'm saying "aaahhh" with a chunk of wood in my mouth, and coughing hard for my doctor ...
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Posted by: Mack_Reed
on Monday, August 08, 2005
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PETA's got my back, yo. Whut? WHUT?! |
I know I shouldn't make fun. Really I shouldn't.
But PETA has run out of causes, and is now protesting Santa Monica's squirrel control program.
Yes, People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals (not to be confused with People Eating Tasty Animals) are pressuring Mayor Pam O'Connor to order the immediate removal of poisoned bait left for squirrels at Palisades Park ...
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Posted by: Mack_Reed
on Wednesday, July 27, 2005
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I wake up at 10 in the morning,
remember I don't have any milk
for cereal, grab some change
in my little change box,
then head to the liquor store,
which is next door to my studio ...
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Posted by: DavidMarkDannov
on Wednesday, July 06, 2005
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It occurred to me last night that the air was looking crappy as we drove home from our respective fireworks shows. Seeing as how there seems to be fewer fireworks vendors (from driving around the San Gabriel Valley, where I grew up) but more, larger-scale fireworks shows all over the southland, I wonder if the air quality is actually much worse than usual? ...
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Posted by: MrsPowells
on Tuesday, July 05, 2005
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The fourth of July has passed again.
I’ve been living in Los Angeles for three years now, and I still find it difficult to remember what month it is most of the time. The fourth of July is a good way of reminding me that we are in the middle of summer. If it weren’t for the fourth, I might be thinking that we’re getting close to Thanksgiving or Christmas - I better get my shopping done! ...
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Posted by: racheloliva
on Tuesday, July 05, 2005
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What goes up in smoke all over the West from June to October is wasted energy. If we had infrastructure to harvest it and turn it into fuel for electrical generation and/or transportation, it wouldn't be ruining our air quality and losing lives and property. We'd also be a considerable ways down the road to energy independence ...
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Posted by: DaveM
on Friday, July 01, 2005
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 If you want to get to know the real sensuality of Los Angeles, to embrace it au naturel, then tour it at night by bicycle. You see, hear and smell things you'd never notice from the safety of your car, and you get close to the organic soul of the city, the land beneath all the commerce and development and distractions.
By the near-full moon, eight or nine of us hopped into the saddle last night and cruised up Vermont into Griffith Park, then down the back side to the L.A. River and home through Silver Lake.
Biking L.A. at night is an intimate romance with the streetscape. The smell of frying onions, the splash of tires through puddles from a carwash, the visceral WHOMP of passing boomcars ...
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Posted by: Mack_Reed
on Friday, June 24, 2005
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Is the electricity powering this computer right now worth the lives of a few birds?
How about the lives of dozens, perhaps hundreds of raptors, songbirds and even protected species?
The LADWPs plan to build Pine Tree Wind Farm 12 miles north of Mojave has been hit with a lawsuit filed by the L.A. and Kerncrest chapters of the Audubon Society, which argue that birds migrating through there will be macerated by the blades of 80 1.5-megawatt windmills ...
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Posted by: Mack_Reed
on Wednesday, June 22, 2005
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 UPDATES BELOW
I'm in the 9th floor of an office tower in the Marina, and got a pretty good roll and bump out of that one: A 5.3-magnitude4.9-magnitude quake 2.3 miles northeast of Yucaipa at 1:53 p.m., according to the USGS. (Update: Revised down to a 4.9).
The live mapis worth looking at, since it shows the quake's proximity to the other quake and aftershocks they had down in Anza on Sunday.
Between these and the 7.0 off the northern coast on Tuesday, it's shaping up to an interesting year ...
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Posted by: Mack_Reed
on Thursday, June 16, 2005
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 Maybe you missed the little Anza-centered earthquake Sunday morning. Maybe you stared at your tube (whichever one) in ignorant bliss last night as a 7.0 quake hit the ocean floor off the coast of northern California.
If so, you probably missed hearing that the West Coast and Alaska Tsunami Warning Network issued a tsunami warning for the entire west coast of the United States.
Do you live near the water in L.A.? Have you calculated how high the water would come? ...
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Posted by: Mack_Reed
on Wednesday, June 15, 2005
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 As any suburban Angeleno mourning over a missing cat will tell you, we don't really own our land - we're just borrowing it from the coyotes and the chapparal.
Here's a visually gripping reminder - a photo album of a Malibu gas station right on PCH <a href="http://www.flaregroup.com/malibugas/malibugas.htm"completely overgrown with brush after being closed just a few years ago.
Proof is provided by Igor Knezevic, a 3-D CGI artist who usually specializes in glossy cityscapes and alien lifeforms ...
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Posted by: Mack_Reed
on Tuesday, June 14, 2005
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I no longer make my living in the hi-tech world so getting on an airplane is a welcome break from 24/7 accessibility. I am at LAX not because of yet another business trip, but for personal reasons. But whatever reason I fly and whether out of Burbank, Long Beach, Palm Springs, John Wayne, or Ontario, not only does my seat have to be in the upright position, I have to turn my cell phone and Blackberry off and no Internet access. But that could all change soon. Yesterday, United Airlines, the world's second-largest carrier, received regulatory approval to install wireless Internet access to its fleet in a partnership with Verizon.
The FAA will let United install the cabin equipment necessary to provide wireless Internet connection for passengers and crew members on U.S. domestic flights. United is the first domestic airline to get FAA approval that allows passengers to surf the Internet wirelessly while in flight.
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Posted by: celia
on Tuesday, June 07, 2005
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 It's that time of year again: just as you're waxing your new board, buying a new cooler and crash-dieting to fit into last year's swimsuit, the Surfrider Foundation comes up with its annual buzz-kill for enjoying the beach.
Surfrider's latest national State of the Beach Report (2004) includes these unpleasant facts about California's waters in its "Bad and the Rad" executive summary: - Every day, 37 ocean outfalls in California discharge over 1.5 billion gallons of sewage containing about 120 million tons of mass solids (sewage sludge).
- Over half (52%) of Californians believe the quality of the ocean along the state’s shoreline has deteriorated in the past two decades, and 45% say ocean conditions are likely to worsen over the next 20 years.
- There were 5,384 beach closing/advisory days during 2003 in California. Water testing has detected human adenoviruses, fecal coliform, and other disease-causing bacteria, pesticides, herbicides, and heavy metals.
On the other hand, there's the "rad" news:
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Posted by: Mack_Reed
on Sunday, June 05, 2005
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It's almost a kilometer across, it's moving very fast, and it could smash Earth with the force of a 6-gigaton bomb.
On the other hand, it probably won't, says NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena, which is tracking 70 such asteroids, comets and other spaceborne megaliths that could hit Earth.
Comet Catalina 2005 JQ5 - just added to JPL's list of potential collision threats - has a 1 in 300,000 chance of rearranging the face of our home planet before June 11, 2085.
Sleep tight.
(Spotted at Sploid)
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Posted by: Mack_Reed
on Wednesday, June 01, 2005
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 Here's a frightening little study: Chemicals in L.A.'s environment are causing boys to be born with undersized penises.
The Times reports that hormone-mimicking phthalates - found in plastics and beauty products - can "feminize male babies in the womb," as seen in studies of the genitals of male babies and toddlers born in Los Angeles and two other cities.
Put aside the obvious gags about L.A. agents needing to smoke giant Macanudos and drive huge, throbbing sports cars - this is actually a significant report:
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Posted by: Mack_Reed
on Friday, May 27, 2005
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 For Sale: Luxury estates. Magnificent views of the Simi Hills. Property may or may not contain carcinogenic chemicals, heavy metals or radioactive isotopes.
Without checking the soil, without testing a single beaker of groundwater for carcinogens or radioactive particles, a bunch of heedless developers are about to break ground for 147 new luxury houses on the frighteningly polluted hills surrounding Rocketdyne's Santa Susanna Field Lab.
SSFL developed the rocket engines that put the U.S. flag on the moon within 9 years of JFK's call to action, but it also has a deep, toxic history as a chronic polluter of the most dangerous kind. The city of Los Angeles is actually suing Rocketdyne parent Boeing Corp. over allegedly poor cleanup of the poisons left over from decades of rocket testing and nuclear research that included a partial reactor meltdown in 1959 ...
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Posted by: Mack_Reed
on Monday, May 23, 2005
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Last week was a noisy one until around Wednesday morning. But here are a few things that went away quietly:
The politics of the mayoral election; good riddance to the noise, prevarication, insinuendo and lies - and I'm just talking about the blogging! (*rimshot*)
No, Mayor-elect Antonio Villaraigosa is quietly marking the days before his July 1 coronation by assembling a kitchen cabinet of sorts, a collection of backers to whom the Times refers as " local politicians, businessmen, longtime loyalists and community leaders, many of whom felt frozen out of city government by the Hahn administration."
If the Times story is any indication, advice will be coming from ex room-mate and onetime opponent Bob "No, really, BigIdeas4LA.com will be updated any day now" Hertzberg, and may also come from a host of Villaraigosa campaign supporters including U.S. Rep. Maxine Waters, ex-Laker and current entrepreneur Magic Johnson and even fellow councilman/former LAPD Chief Bernard Parks, whom Villaraigosa beat handily in the March primary ...
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Posted by: Mack_Reed
on Sunday, May 22, 2005
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This is just so felicitous, pleasing and (deep breath) cool:
Two red-tailed hawks are building a nest in the steel art-deco frou-frou high atop the Mann Village movie theater in Westwood. (WestLAOnline alerted us to a Daily Bruin story) ...
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Posted by: mack_reed
on Saturday, May 07, 2005
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Furnace Creek campground, chockablock with RVs |
(Okay, it's not exactly an L.A. topic, but this is my blog and I do have intimate knowledge of the subject, so ...)
Death Valley's sudden wildflower bloom has turned it into the ninth circle of camping hell, infested with hordes of idiot looky-loos getting into fistfights at the gas pumps and long lines at the overflowing crappers, to hear the L.A. Times tell it.
I'm here to tell ya, that just ain't so.
As sometimes happens when it covers the environment, the Times inflated notes on randomly insignificant human behavior in a 3,000-square-mile wilderness into a bonafide crisis. (Home-page headline: "NATURE'S DISPLAY TURNS UGLY") We visited the Valley last week for four days, and while it was staggeringly serene and gorgeous - so long as you didn't accidentally run over the tripod-toting flower-lovers who kept flitting across the road every few hundred yards - it was not hell ...
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Posted by: mack_reed
on Wednesday, March 30, 2005
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Gooood morning, north Valley.
You know that little cleanup that Rocketdyne and the U.S. Department of Energy were supposed to be handling under the watchful eye of the U.S. EPA?
The carcinogenic rocket fuel chemicals, radioactive residue and other toxic gook that's been seeping through groundwater beneath Rocketdyne's Santa Susanna Field Lab and making people sick - allegedly with cancer - since the late 1950s? Y'know, that stuff they were going to be removing before letting people buy and use the land?
It's not happening the way it should, according to a new report released last night by Daniel Hirsch, president of a nuclear-watchdog group called Committee to Bridge the Gap ...
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Posted by: mack_reed
on Thursday, March 10, 2005
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Cheer up! The National Weather Service says this huge storm just off Santa Barbara is headed our way! |
That El Niño kid's a pisser, ain't he? Comes over every seven years or so and juuuust wrecks the place.
Look at this mess: Houses tumbling downhill, people killed in mudslides, traffic jams, freeways flooded, multimillion-dollar water damage. You'd think either he'd have learned some manners or we'd have figured out a way to calm him down. Rain's sheeting off the windows here, cars are c-r-a-w-l-i-n-g down the freeways in the distance - and it's not. Going. To. Stop. Oh, except when the sun comes out.
Of course, in between these tauntingly glorious bands of sunshine will come more stomping big thunderstorms through Wednesday UPDATE: Looks now (Thurs. p.m.) like showers Mon. and Tues..
Record-breaking rains, the newsfeeds say. Here's the Times' take:
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Posted by: mack_reed
on Tuesday, February 22, 2005
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 “Everybody talks about the weather, but no one ever does anything about it.â€
-- Mark Twain
How hard has it been raining in Los Angeles?
Harder than last time. Five to 7 inches in five hours in the Valley. Hailstorms, flooding, mudslides. It was raining whales and bull elephants.
Hard enough to <a href="http://www.latimes.com/news/local/la-me-rain19feb19,1,3128387.story?coll=la-headlines-california"">cave in the roof of Virgin Megastore: About 3:30 p.m. Friday, employees at the Virgin Megastore in the 800 block of North San Fernando Boulevard heard a section of the roof beginning to crack. The store was evacuated, and about 10 people were still inside when a 20-foot section of the ceiling caved in about 10 minutes later. Officials estimated the damage at $100,000 ...
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Posted by: mack_reed
on Saturday, February 19, 2005
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 Let the paranoia resume: the first case of West Nile virus in a human for the year has been reported somewhere in east L.A. County - county health officials won't say where.
Yes, somewhere in eastern L.A. County, some old man has been suffering "fevers and altered consciousness," according to this very vague AP report on the even vaguer warning from L.A. County Department of Health Services ...
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Posted by: mack_reed
on Tuesday, February 08, 2005
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 Here's an interesting omission: The L.A. Times' Peter Pae writes today that Boeing is about to dump the Rocketdyne unit - but barely mentions the costly swamp of poison and litigation still roiling around the venerable Santa Susana Field Lab.
Boeing is near a deal with United Technologies Corp. (owner of Pratt & Whitney and other aerospace, defense and electronics firms) says the Times story, on a bounce from the original Wall Street Journal piece.
The only whisper of nearly a dozen open lawsuits involving hundreds of plaintiffs who allege they suffered cancer and lost loved ones to the heavy metals, radioactivity and carcinogenic solvents permeating the ground water in and around SSFL from years of rocket and nuclear reactor tests is this:
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Posted by: mack_reed
on Wednesday, February 02, 2005
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 Quick memo to all you diehard surfers: Stay the hell out of the water.
Heal the Bay says that 77 beaches are closed in SoCal due to a storm-borne runoff stew of solvents, radiator fluid, trash and sewage from flooded plants.
Some beaches to particularly stay the hell away from:
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Posted by: mack_reed
on Thursday, January 13, 2005
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 Whenever the hammering shitstorm on our rooves lets up just a whit and goes back to merely raining kittens and puppies, let's take stock:
The second heavy wash cycle in three weeks has managed to kill a homeless guy in an Elysian Park mudslide, a driver on PCH and a Darwin Award nominee who was trying to wade across a creek near Ojai while wired to shore. It's shut down the 5, sent a 2-story house tumbling down the Hollywood Hills with a family inside (they lived), and dumped more than a foot of rain on town (one third of Seattle's annual bath) and two feet on the mountains.
Both the LAFD and Mayor Jim Hahn are putting out helpful little press releases reinforcing the head-smackingly obvious: stay the hell away from creeks, flood channels and downed power lines ...
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Posted by: mack_reed
on Sunday, January 09, 2005
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This is old news, perhaps, but a story with broad implications for L.A.'s wireless Web users:
Verizon claims to have significantly expanded its BroadbandAccess wireless service in greater Los Angeles, providing speeds of 300kbps and 500kbps over some 4,400 square miles.
A Verizon flack gloats that "wireless consumers are no longer restrained by the limitations of technologies that anchor them to wireless 'hot spots' inside hotel lobbies and coffee shops to get high Internet access speeds ... That's because BroadbandAccess is about miles of coverage, not square feet ..."
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Posted by: mack_reed
on Monday, January 03, 2005
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 Jonah at LABlogs is taking credit for warming us up today, and turns this week's questions to life outdoors.
Man, this subject is a heart-stomper. I spend so damn much time hunched over a keyboard or running errands, I hardly ever get outdoors enough. Look, I'm all pale and weak (cough, cough). My answers follow:
1. Favorite outdoor shopping area?
2. Favorite outdoor dining patio?
3. Favorite outdoor mode of transport (bike/walk/skate/run...)?
4. Favorite outdoor lounging spot (park/beach/yard...)?
5. Favorite outdoor scene in LA (pretend you are taking a picture, set it up)?
6. Favorite outdoor hike (urban or mountain)?
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Posted by: mack_reed
on Friday, December 10, 2004
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 If Jim Hahn wanted the $11-billion LAX expansion plan to be his legacy, he'll likely get his wish: It'll live on in the courts.
The City Council approved the Environmental Impact Report - a crucial step - hours after the Board of Supervisors voted to sue Los Angeles to stop it.
The vote included the "Community Benefits Agreement" - a $500-million payoff to "a coalition of 22 environmental, religious and labor groups and the Inglewood and Lennox school districts that would alleviate noise, air pollution and traffic impacts, and provide jobs for airport-area residents," the Times reports. I'd be curious to see the details of any plan that can "alleviate" noise and pollution from planes carrying 78 million passengers a year ...
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Posted by: mack_reed
on Wednesday, December 08, 2004
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 Jonah's feeling a little chilly at LABlogs, and asks how we're weathering the cold snap. Here are his questions and my answers:
1. Do you own a winter jacket?
2. Do you like the winter mountain sports? Skiing, boarding, sledding, snowshoe, etc...
3. Big Bear, Mammoth or other?
4. Favorite hot drink?
5. Heater setting?
6. At night, more blankets, more pajamas, more heater are all of the above?
7. Do you go out and enjoy the cold or bundle up and stay inside?
8. Cold temps. Stay for a while or bring back the 70s? ...
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Posted by: mack_reed
on Friday, December 03, 2004
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 This is something like a free-needles program being run by a heroin dealer:
The L.A. Department of Water and Power is giving away free shade trees to anyone who takes an online or DVD tutorial on tree care.
Apparently the "Trees for a Green L.A." program has been going on since 2002, and the DWP has given away 30,000 trees, including more than 13,000 in the San Fernando Valley, but since past tutorials were in-person, the online/multimedia offering is the new wrinkle ...
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Posted by: mack_reed
on Sunday, November 28, 2004
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 Flip on the tap and ask yourself: Where's this water come from?
Most Angelenos live thoughtlessly in a mirage, a desert that's been terraformed into a green belt by audacious waterworks that sucked the Owens Valley dry after architect William Mulholland's famous 1913 benediction, "There it is. Take it."
The Lake Project is photographer David Maisel's staggering visual account of what 91 years of us "taking it" have done. His aerial photos make Owens Lake look like an alien planet, pulsing red and purple with chemicals like cadmium, sulfur, arsenic and nickel that have built up as the water subsided ...
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Posted by: mack_reed
on Wednesday, November 10, 2004
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UPDATE BELOW
Attention joggers, dancers, firefighters, children, old people and anybody else who, uh, likes oxygen:
With the end of the "smog season" on Halloween (it starts May 1, according to AQMD averages), comes the good news that air in L.A. is the cleanest it's been in 25 years thanks largely to a June Gloom that extended into July and last month's biblical downpours.
On the other hand, it's still the worst in the nation thanks to certain smoke-belching boors out there - and you know who you are. Damn ozone levels are screwing up our averages, says the South Coast AQMD ...
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Posted by: mack_reed
on Friday, November 05, 2004
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 UPDATE BELOW
Be careful out there in L.A. today. I'm forecasting mood swings, bad driving, heavy drinking and general irritability over the way the presidential election's turninged out:
L.A. County never caught the national case of schizophrenia regarding the presidential race. We believed pretty solidly in John Kerry, and voted 63% to 36% to have him replace President Bush.
But with Kerry's concession said to be writing his concession speech at this hour, the majority of Angelenos are already feeling cheated by countrymen who apparently decided that Bush's ineffectual "war on terror", the gay marriage issue and other ill-defined "moral values" trumped the violation of their civil rights, massive screwage of environmental protection laws and, finally, being lied to as if they were children, having their sons and fathers killed and spending billions-with-a-B on this disastrous, flagrant sham of a war in Iraq ...
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Posted by: mack_reed
on Wednesday, November 03, 2004
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Posted by: mack_reed
on Saturday, October 30, 2004
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 If you live here long enough, you'll feel a little one, and worry about The Big One. Some part of my brain still cringes from the day in 1994 when my bed in Sherman Oaks threw me on the floor, the fridge barfed up a stew of food and broken glass, and half the houses in the neighborhood fell to pieces.
afsheen poses today's LA Insight questions about earthquakes over at LABlogs. My answers follow:1) What sort of earthquake preparations do most people have?
2) Have you ever lived though a big quake?
3) Which ones?
4) Does anybody really have earthquake insurance?
5) Do you?
6) How bad would things have to get for my apartment to come crashing into the ground?
7) If I don't anchor the bookcases to the wall, are they really going to fall over and kill me in my sleep?
8) Are you fearful, anticipating, or indifferent to coming quakes?
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Posted by: mack_reed
on Friday, October 22, 2004
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Posted by: mack_reed
on Thursday, October 21, 2004
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 Well, it's all over but the lawsuits: The City Council rolled over, wagged its tail and licked the face of Mayor James Hahn's $11-billion LAX expansion plan.
By a 12-3 vote, the council approved a 10-year plan to "move runways, build new terminals, install people movers and construct a central check-in facility,"as the Times reports.
Hahn promised that the fifth-busiest airport on the planet will be pumping $64 billion a year into the regional economy. This'll go a long way toward paying back the $130 million L.A. taxpayers have spent studying the plan over the past 10 years - although the Times did not quote Hahn on the damage it will do to the nerves of 405 commuters, the eardrums of glidepath dwellers or the lungs of several million Angelenos (give or take) who haven't really had much of a say in the matter ...
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Posted by: mack_reed
on Wednesday, October 20, 2004
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LABlogs poses another Los Angeles Insight questionnaire on leaving L.A. My replies follow.
1. When you can only get out of LA for a weekend, where do you like to go?
2. Where do you stay when you go there? (lodging and/or region)
3. Where do you go on vacation to get as far out of the LA lifestyle?
4. For longer vacations, 1-2 weeks, where have you been that you would go back to?
5. Where do you dream of going, but haven't been?
6. Where have you been on vacation where you thought "I could settle here"?
7. What place in Los Angeles makes you feel like you're already on vacation?
8. Where in Los Angeles would you warn tourists to stay away from, even though a lot of them end up there?
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Posted by: mack_reed
on Friday, September 24, 2004
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 Back in L.A.'s go-go dot-com days when I was managing content for the now-defunct LAinsider.com, live web cams were all the rage.
I guess the hope was that people would keep clicking onto your cam in the hopes they'd see someone or something fantastic. Amazingly, even when the ad market failed in 2001, the stock market lost faith and everyone without a sound business plan imploded (DEN, anyone?), a lot of these cams survived.
Here's a handful of mute web-eyes still focused on L.A., just from my bookmarks. Maybe you know of others:
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Posted by: mack_reed
on Wednesday, September 22, 2004
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From a strange perch, I have seen Hollywood Boulevard, and it is coming back.
Well, at least it looks that way from the rarified air of The Highlands, the up-above-the-rabble rooftop nightclub at the Hollywood and Highlands complex. I went to a cast-and-crew screening at the Chinese last night for Shark Tale (even if someone close to me hadn't worked on it, I'd still give it a thumbs-up).
As we sipped drinks and snacked on artful canapes there beneath the white reproduction Babylonian-elephant columns lifted from DW Griffith's Intolerance, I had two thoughts :
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Posted by: mack_reed
on Tuesday, September 21, 2004
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 This is not a punchline or a lone-wacko profile or an 80s new-wave music trivia clue (answer: Missing Persons). This is a strong recommendation:
Go check out WalkingInLA.com - post-production engineer Neil Hopper's combination photoblog / walking tour / visual love sonnet to street-level Los Angeles. I found him in this morning's paper, but you may already know him anyway.
Hopper's a sort of avatar for that thought that creeps up your scalp when you're riding shotgun on a long cruise home along downtown streets: what would it be like to have to walk this far? No, what would it feel like?
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Posted by: mack_reed
on Thursday, September 16, 2004
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 As the heat and humidity cause rampant stupidity on the freeways and all around town, LAPDWife poses this week's timely Los Angeles Insight questions at LABlogs.com. My answers follow.
1. What is your favorite beach to cool off on? When do you go to beat the crowds?
2. If not the beach, where is your favorite cooling-off spot outdoors? indoors?
3. Where is your favorite spot for ice cream/sorbet/gelato?
4. What is your favorite flavor?
5. Stuck at home? What are you making in your blender?
6. Got any original concoctions you want to share?
7. Favorite winter-themed video or book?
8. What was your favorite water-themed activity as a kid?
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Posted by: mack_reed
on Friday, September 10, 2004
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Oh, well. Sept. 5 came and went, and still no shattering magnitude 6.4 earthquake.
UCLA geophysicist Vladimir Keilis-Borok predicted a big one some time in the summer, but his time window ended on Sunday not with a rumble, but a hush.
The 83-year-old quake-watcher and his team had been right twice before, predicting a 6.5 quake in San Simeon last December, and an 8.1 on Hokkaido in September ...
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Posted by: mack_reed
on Monday, September 06, 2004
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 At long last acknowledging the real owners of L.A.'s wildlands, the City Council has voted to cut back on trapping wild animals that pose no threat.
Maybe now we can see an end to those interminable, melodramatic Channel 13 (or 2, 4, 5, 7, 9 or 11) news reports of hapless coyotes, cougars and the occasional bear wandering through the McMansion streets where they used to hunt - only to be treed, darted, netted, doped up, probed, dragged into a truck, tagged, and ( if they're lucky) released a few days later (shaky, hung-over and out of shape) - in some godforsaken canyon nowhere near their customary turf.
This is a good thing:
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Posted by: mack_reed
on Tuesday, August 24, 2004
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Jonah over at LABlogs launched a nifty, existentialist meme today that has some of L.A.'s busier bloggers responding. He wants answers to these questions:
1. How long have you lived in Los Angeles?
2. Were you born here?
3. How long did you plan on staying here originally?
4. How long do you plan on staying here now?
5. What keeps you here?
6. What makes you want to leave?
7. What is your biggest suprise about living here?
8. What is your biggest disappointment about living here?
"Shave and a Haircut! No toon can resist!" - I had to answer:
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Posted by: mack_reed
on Friday, August 06, 2004
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 As reported in the Times today, the dreaded West Nile virus killed a Fullerton man late last month - a fact revealed only just this week by L.A. County health officials.
The CDC says 9,862 people have contracted the virus, which then killed 264 of them. In L.A. County, only nine people have caught it so far - one being the unidentified Fullerton victim.
Here's a summary of how the county's West Nile Task Force is trying to stop it, and what you can do ...
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Posted by: mack_reed
on Friday, July 23, 2004
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 If you live near Rocketdyne, you know the score: The booming, blazing nighttime rocket engine tests are only the most obvious evidence that extremely heavy equipment and dangerous chemicals are in use there on a regular basis. You may know more than one person with cancer. You may have cancer.
If you don't know about it, then know this: the nation's premier testing facility for rockets and - in its heyday, nuclear energy and other toxic power sources - was built on a once-remote mountaintop between Simi Valley and Northridge. Civilization grew up around it. And, before anyone knew much about carcinogens measured in parts per billion, people were inhaling, drinking and bathing in them - and getting horribly sick.
This week, L.A. City Beat's harrowing cover story on Rocketdyne lifts some of the veil that the company has long held in place, and reveals some of the goriest details of L.A.,'s own "Two Mile Island" ...
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Posted by: mack_reed
on Thursday, July 22, 2004
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 This is slick, and useful: You can track the Foothill Fire, the Crown Fire, and pretty much every other major wildfire in California with GeoMAC Wildfire Viewer, an online fire-mapping tool from the U.S. Geological Survey. (Spotted at LABlogs)
From a reporter's standpoint, it's a huge boon. Instead of stomping around in heavy boots looking for the fire's edges with a gimme cap on your head and a damp rag over your nose while firefighters in Scott Air-Paks and full-on Nomex are fleeing sensibly upwind, you can sit in a desk chair and follow firefighting crews working to stop the massive Crown Fire's advance toward Acton ...
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Posted by: mack_reed
on Wednesday, July 21, 2004
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 Chew on this bit of serendipity while massaging your mouse in your airconditioned home or wifi-powered coffeehouse:
On the day that Enron chairman and alleged felon Ken Lay turned himself in to the FBI to deny charges that he led his company on a smash-and-grab arbitrage run through California's energy market, repeatedly leaving us all in the dark four years ago, LADWP is getting kudos for pushing us toward alternate power sources ...
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Posted by: mack_reed
on Thursday, July 08, 2004
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 With this shameless mash note, I'm taking a brief holiday hiatus:
Dear JPL, you wild, risky souls, you: You have given us unworthy earthlings, and Angelenos in particular, a window to the universe. The sheer gall it takes to fling a 6-ton observatory the size of a school bus 934 million miles into space for a four-year journey to the solar system's most come-hither planet, and then nudge it through rings of space debris thousands of miles across with just a kiss of retro-rocket fire - god, it's staggering ...
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Posted by: mack_reed
on Friday, July 02, 2004
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 The vast, sucking money pit once known as the Belmont Learning Center seems to have overcome its tallest hurdle: The Los Angeles school board approved plans to scrape the industrial toxins off the East L.A. site and ready it for construction.
Belmont is the most expensive school ever built in California - $175 million to date - and not a single student has entered its doors. A good $111 million more will go toward mopping up after the lousy location-scouting job done by LAUSD, which somehow decided it would be okay to build a 2,300-seat high school on top of an earthquake fault, and 1,000 capped oil wells that are permeating the soil with methane and hydrogen sulfide ...
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Posted by: mack_reed
on Thursday, June 24, 2004
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Picture this: On Sept. 11, 2001, Islamic extremists backed by Osama Bin Laden hijack not four, but 10 jetliners.
They smash into power plants, the Pentagon, the World Trade Center and other targets of opportunity - including the Library Tower. (Spotted at AP via NBC4) ...
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Posted by: mack_reed
on Wednesday, June 16, 2004
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Ah, the smell of raw sewage, the crunch of trash underfoot. Must be summertime in SoCal once again.
If Heal the Bay's just-released annual Beach Report Card is to be believed, we should all stay the hell off of certain beaches: Excessive pollution (face it, they're *all* polluted somehow) has earned the infamous "Beach Bummer" award for these 10 strands of putrid sand:
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Posted by: mack_reed
on Thursday, May 27, 2004
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It was only a matter of time. A third porn star tested positive for HIV, apparently after working in a film with HIV-positive actor Darren James. (Spotted first at blogging.la).
The Czech emigre performing as "Jessica Dee" doubtless won't be the last in this latest, most public string of HIV infections. The question is, what is the rest of Los Angeles going to do about it?
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Posted by: mack_reed
on Thursday, April 29, 2004
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Looking for a place to enjoy a relaxing weekend walk? Try the Ballona Wetlands exercise / observation path. Parking runs along the south side of Jefferson Blvd., just west of Lincoln. Take a look at these pictures from a recent visit ...
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Posted by: Marc_Salvatierra
on Sunday, April 25, 2004
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Okay - maybe he's just the scientific equivalent of the wild-eyed geezer roaming Broadway with a "The End Is Nigh" sign - and maybe he's right.
UCLA geophysicist Vladimir Kellis-Borok and his research team have gone out on a limb that's notably devoid of their colleagues, to predict that a 6.4-magnitude earthquake will hit Southern California by Sept. 5. Mark your calendars.
The scary thing is, they've been right twice before ...
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Posted by: mack_reed
on Friday, April 16, 2004
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Clink. Clank. CLUNK! So ends another early morning’s sleep as a scavenger raids the recycling bins in the alley along my house.
After rifling and rustling through the bottles and cans, he drops them mercilessly onto one another in a cacophonous clutter. The noise is all the louder because, with the spring heat building, I have been leaving my window open more and more.
So nowadays, instead of waking to the gentle jingling of my alarm or the mellow meows of my cat – the sound of glass bonking on glass and metal raking against metal frequently jars me into a VERY cranky consciousness, as the scavenger makes his way slowly … and ever more loudly up the alley. It’s like waking up with a hangover without ever having taken a drink …
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Posted by: Marc_Salvatierra
on Tuesday, March 30, 2004
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Did you enjoy that little heat wave last week? Luxurious, wasn't it. Visions of Jeff Spiccoli's righteous rays and "tasty little waves." Another fairly balmy weekend's on the way, if you can believe anything posted at Weather.com.
Now - reality check: Here's a list of polluted beaches to stay the hell away from, according to Heal the Bay's Weekly Report Card on water quality:
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Posted by: mack_reed
on Wednesday, March 17, 2004
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Jolly green and white, the Fuji blimp drones across sharp blue sky just above where the Angel Moroni's gilded trumpet points east to Utah.
They don't match, these two - the shiny Mormon Temple cake-topper in Westwood and the plump airship. But they are part of Los Angeles, so you look and mutter, "hunh." And the thought arises - are they each a different Los Angeles?
Either side of you, traffic rushes along Big and Little Santa Monica Boulevards. Before you curves a virgin ribbon of creamy black asphalt - the construction zone that will unite them into one massive roadway. For the single, haunting hour it takes you to roll from one end to the other on eight neoprene wheels, you are almost completely alone.
This is one Los Angeles - a place between the others, a place not yet made or decided on its identity. And you can skate it.
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Posted by: mack_reed
on Sunday, January 25, 2004
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Hellacious winds last night. Unbelievable, entire-tree-whacking-the-side-of-the-house gusts that knocked out the power just as I was starting to write this.
What is it about wind in Los Angeles that makes it so distinctly nasty and fear-inducing - and that brings out the weird events?
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Posted by: mack_reed
on Thursday, February 20, 2003
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