Dateline>City of Angels

This week I had an appointment with some musty old manuscripts in the Rare Books Dept. of the Los Angeles Central Library, located downtown at 5th and Flower. Unlike some respected fellow bloggers who enjoy using mass transit to buzz about the metro area, I’ve always been an unrepentant disciple of Southern California’s automotive cult.

The one exception was a few years ago when I took the daily Metro to a PR job in Orange County. I never could get used to it. All day long, simply knowing my car was 50 miles away in my garage produced roughly the same jitters smokers experience when going cold turkey.

But with my last field trip to the Central Library about a month ago racking up a fairly hefty parking tab, I decided it was time to face my irrational anxieties and give the MTA another try. After all, that’s what any socially conscious Angeleno is expected to do nowadays, right?

Noble intentions notwithstanding, doing my part for a better L.A. turned out to be quite an adventure in true grit. Rather than recount the entire escapade in minute detail, let me simply present the highlights in plus and minus form, starting with the latter…

Read more

Last night I devoted a little free time to the ol’ blog roll to the right. You’ll find a number of new additions, especially in the Historical/Cultural department. The plan is to add many more links and headers in the coming days, as well as arranging them in a more logical order. (That is, once I can figure out the code.) Anyway, if you haven’t clicked on these sites lately, you might want to take the time to visit a few. Even I’d forgotten how interesting so many of them are…