Dateline>City of Angels

How green does your garden grow? That’s the question asked by my Atlanta writer pal Hilda Brucker in her Greener Good piece, appearing in this month’s Continental Airlines inflight magazine.

Based on interviews with experienced botanical and landscape experts, Hilda notes the growing recognition that the average home’s lawn and garden have a greater impact on the environment than most people realize. Excessive irrigation, chemical treatments, fertilizers and pesticides from an estimated 30 million acres of lawns in the U.S. can contribute significantly to contaminated storm runoff, which the EPA has flagged as a “major source of water pollution nationwide.”

Hilda’s piece makes a strong case for an “ideal yard” sporting “a sustainable landscape of plants that thrive under local conditions without requiring copious amounts of chemicals, coddling, or irrigation.”

Now this is one “green cause” I can get behind… [Read more...]

Google up web videos with the keyword Los Angeles and what do you get? Mostly a lot of junk. But search hard enough and you’ll also find a few gems. Welcome to Dateline>City of Angel’s new Friday Flix feature, where I offer my picks for some of the most interesting (or unusual) web videos referencing key words or themes shared with this blog.

This week: A well-produced historical-cultural tour of Echo Park by the Echo Park Film Center entitled Echo Park Then and Now — an especially fitting debut clip for Friday Flix, since Echo Park happens to be my hood. Roll ‘em!

Ready for another brief tour of L.A.’s haunting past?

Off the beaten track, in the City of Industry, you’ll find a small but significant cemetery, known simply as El Campo Santo. Part of the six-acre Workman Temple Homestead Historical Park, the graveyard dates to 1855, and is the L.A. area’s first private burial ground. Originally, it was meant to hold the Workman, Rowland and Temple families along with their ranch workers, but through a twist of fate also became the final resting place of Pio Pico, California’s last Mexican governor, and his wife Maria Ygnacia.

As if visiting the graves of these notable Californios isn’t thrilling enough for die-hard history buffs, the site also boasts the last remaining example of decorative cast-iron fencing common to this region’s 19th Century bone yards — and perhaps a few other buried mysteries as well. [Read more...]

What’s five times dirtier than a toilet seat? Your computer keyboard, says one British microbiologist who, for whatever reason, was sufficiently curious about the issue to study it.

According to the Daily Mail, he found the average keyboard to be a veritable petri dish of harmful bacteria ranging from e.coli to the even scarier-sounding staphylococcus aureus. I’ve linked to the story, but germaphobes and hypochondriacs beware: the details can literally turn your stomach.

OK, true confession time: Crazy as it sounds, I’ve always compulsively swabbed mine down each week with a Q-tip and rubbing alcohol. Not because I’m afraid of the heebie-jeebies, but simply because I’m such a neat-knick that I can’t stand the sight of greasy fingerprints on all those little designer-white Mac keys.

Who would’ve guessed I was on the leading edge of the next emerging health craze?

For Cinco de Mayo happy houring, there’s nothing more satisfying than an icy Margarita complete with salt! But where can you find the best? Certainly everyone has an opinion, but the following are my personal Top 3 Favorite L.A. Margarita Establishments, today and all year round…

No. 1: El Conquistador Restaurant, Silver Lake. Don’t let the heavy syrup fool you. These Margaritas have a bite. Even better, the place is pure Silver Lake the way it used to be before the hipster invasion: Offbeat, casual and neighborhoody, straight, gay and Latino, where singles and families, young and old, bohemians and urban professionals happily mingle. (Yes, there’s even a few celebrity sightings every now and then…) [Read more...]

Am I paranoid? Is it my suspicious nature? A twinge of guilt for favoring the SoCal car culture over alternative locomotion? Or is it all just a bizarre coincidence?

I could swear a “rival guerrilla faction” is surreptitiously chiding my recent post on the trials and tribulations of taking public transportation to the Central Library. You be the judge… Here’s the post about my MTA jaunt. Now here’s his.

Hmmmn. If I’m right, it’s nice to know that occasional covert recons of this website are still among the Militant’s guilty pleasures. If on the other hand I’m wrong… Well… It’s a pity. Strange as it sounds, I’d miss the nagging feeling that he’s lurking here between Dodger games.

Up to now, most local bloggers have approached the draining of Silver Lake from two predictable angles:

(1) The ugly, gaping asphalt crater left behind now that the water’s gone, and

(2) The ongoing controversy between water officials and Silver Lake residents over whether or not the lake should be permanently covered.

Donna Barstow at Griffith Park Interrupted, however, asks a more cogent question: What if the area has another fire like the recent Griffith Park Blaze? Or worse, a major earthquake that knocks out city hydrants?

The answers to her ongoing investigations are definite causes for concern. Read them here and here.

Except for a few rare sightings of her and her famous pink Corvette buzzing up and down the Westside, I thought pseudo billboard icon Angelyne was a pop cultural relic of the past. You know: A has-been. Washed up. A cliche like any other. But according to Curbed L.A., she may yet have some residual cache in Hollywood. Amazing but true: Not only does she have an ongoing need for office space, but she still gets fan mail requesting autographed photos….

Take that, you nasty spybots! At least for the time being, this blog is finally “hacker free.” That’s right — I was finally able to remove all those malicious referral URLs from my code, while adding a few extra security measures to make future violations more difficult. Best of all, the site’s old permalinks seem to be working once again. Wahoo! In the process, I’ve also added the Karma2 filter for WordPress to my comment approval feature. Now your comments should appear instantly (after they’ve been filtered for legitimacy). If you encounter any difficulty posting your comment, please e-mail me direct at “admin [at] mimlay.com” (translating that address into the usual e-mail format with the @ sign, of course). Thanks, everyone, for your patience the past few days as I’ve been working to keep this blog online.