Dateline>City of Angels

Dateline>City of Angels would like to take this opportunity to wish readers a Happy Halloween and announce a special treat: Before dusk descends and the little costumed urchins hit the streets, I’ll be posting this site’s very first Podcast Report. (Be sure to check back here shortly!)

Technologically challenged as I am, this podcast was a long time in development — from originally interviewing my subject, to setting up a home podcast studio and learning to properly work the equipment, to mixing down the final recording to MP3 format. Unfortunately, the project got placed on the back burner again and again. Now, with Halloween in the air, it seems the ideal time to post the item. Special thanks to my interviewee for all his help and patience in creating the first of what I hope will be a long series of similar features…

In the Meantime…

… While waiting for the podcast debut, why not review this site’s archive of ghost-related posts? Just click on the City of Ghosts category in sidebar to the right.

… Got spooks in your attic? Maybe it’s time to clean house. But before you do, be forewarned: Just like selecting the right scouring agents for grease and grime, you’ll want to choose the right “supernatural cleaning” technique for your home. The New York Times takes a look at the most proven methods…

… For the skeptical-minded, Scientific American examines the influence that electromagnetic fields (EMF) might have on the brains of those who experience phantasms. I find the article especially interesting because a spike in an EMF meter will often alert professional ghost hunters to the “presence” of an entity. Turns out, they may simply be measuring the invisible forces that play tricks on our minds…

… Not sure if Creepy L.A. has fallen under the spell of EM waves, but this week the blog takes a tour of several popular Hollywood haunts with Antebellum Gallery owner Rick Castro, who “sees ghosts all the time…”

… Doing some last-minute looking for a truly scary Halloween experience? The Hauntworld website offers a nationwide locator for haunted attractions near you…

… Speaking of last-minute, if you haven’t yet carved your Jack-O-Lantern, here’s a great resource to hone your design before taking a knife to your gourd.

Did Venus Flytraps captivate you as a child?

Carnivorous plants may not have been the fascination of every kid on the block, but I was admittedly geeky enough to have a whole terrarium of them.

I could try to justify my offbeat hobby by claiming it was educational, but the truth is it was just plain cool to watch the plants devour every hapless insect that wandered across their jaws. It was like having my own Little Shop of Horrors full of Audreys, albeit on a miniature, self-contained scale.

Sadly, it now appears future generations of schoolchildren may end up deprived of all that good, clean, macabre fun.

According to an Associated Press report, the Venus Flytrap’s sole native habitat — a 100-mile ring of Carolinian bogs and wetlands — is rapidly being decimated by logging, urbanization, fire suppression and poachers.

With nearly 80 percent of its wild populations facing almost certain extinction, “the little plant is more vulnerable than ever,” warns the article. Worse, “the people who could protect it seem focused on other problems.”

Do the dead need to tone for the afterlife? Apparently so, if you can believe the security cams at the Anytime Fitness center in Overland Park, Kan. Sometime, somehow, in the late hours when the building was otherwise vacant, someone or something tripped the motion-sensitive cameras into action. When staff later inspected the surveillance footage it revealed a spooky white “orb” making the machine circuit…

And in Other News…

… Cityhood for East L.A.? That’s the question posed by today’s New York Times. Known as an “epicenter of Latino culture,” East L.A. is not actually part of the City of Angels at all, but rather a 7.4-square-mile swath of unincorporated county land. According to the NYT piece, a growing number of residents want to change that…

… Griffith Park’s Monumental Battle: Meanwhile, in incorporated Los Angeles, the future of Griffith Park as a historical-cultural monument is still tenuous at City Hall, despite the recent thumbs up from the Cultural Heritage Commission. L.A. Weekly’s David Ferrell explains why the proposal may yet face an uphill fight…

… Just in Time for Halloween: The Corpus Christi College in Cambridge has unveiled what has to be the world’s ugliest clock. Not only does the so-called Chronophage tick and tock erratically, it’s meant to remind gazers that their moments on this mortal earth are quickly being devoured.

Militant Angeleno “sort of” covers this weekend’s Sunset Junction Street Fair, an event your humble blogger also stopped going to about two years ago.

There’s little I can add to the Militant’s post — his observations are dead-on. Sunset Junction used to be a fun event with an edge: An unpretentious celebration in which rag-tag bohemians, resident gang bangers, hardcore leather daddies and other diverse locals all mingled joyously and harmoniously in the dog days of summer. A true neighborhood experience, admission was free and the food, beers and booth trinkets were cheap.

Nowadays, most daddies you spot are the stroller-pushing Silver Lake Dad variety, while the “bohemians” are all hipster wannabes. (Oh for those good ol’ days….)

L.A. Metblogger Jason Burns has the perfect recommendation for the new downtown streetcars proposed by the Bringing Back Broadway initiative: Make them vintage, à la San Francisco’s famous trolleys and cable cars.

Burns makes an eloquent case for such vehicles in his full post, a snippet of which reads:

While the very notion of a new streetcar line in Downtown Los Angeles should excite all of us, L.A. would be missing a monumental opportunity by installing a modern streetcar line that pays no homage to our fair city’s past.

Here, here! This idea is one downtown initiative that Dateline>City of Angels can really get behind — as long as the underlying mechanicals are up to date. We wouldn’t want the trolley line doing to tourists what  Sinai and Olivet did in 2001.

Talk about art imitating life! When Echo Park’s famous lotus flowers mysteriously vanished from the lake this year, a local photographer came up with a quaint solution: replace them with pictures. Which also promptly began (gasp!) disappearing. Honestly, neighbors, what did you think would happen?

And in Other News…

… I may have been too hasty recently in branding East Coast transplants as a bunch of whiners. Here’s one who actually has found good things to say about his newly adopted City of Angels.

… Meanwhile, the OC’s Coast magazine has been caught red-handed mimicking (perhaps parodying?) an Easterner publication. Did Coast’s editors think New York is so far away that such blatant copy-catting would go unnoticed?

… Don’t you just love celebrities continually reinforcing La La Land stereotypes? This time it’s Anne Hathaway, star of the new Get Smart movie, placing herself into the gentle, guiding hands of a “psychic masseuse.” Still, she insists she’s just your typical girl next door in every other way.

… I can’t stand Starbucks coffee. And I especially can’t stomach the chain’s snooty baristas who inevitably respond to requests for a simple “small coffee” with a smug, “We don’t have small, medium or large. We have tall, vente and grande.” Apparently I’m not not alone in my disdain. Turns out a whole lot of people are expressing glee in the company’s brewing financial woes.

… Looking for unusual summer vacation destinations that save on gas? Consider Nevada, where you can take advantage of this rather novel pump promotion, courtesy the Shady Lady Ranch, which is offering $50 toward your next fill-up.

… Of course, many are opting to stay at home, fix up the garden, and maybe even add that new deck they’ve been contemplating for summer entertaining. Not a bad idea, as long as you don’t wake the dead…

Well, the blog (and the world) survived the weekend as Dateline>City of Angels began some remodeling to update its look and feel. For now, most of the work is taking place in the background, so regular visitors will notice only minor changes.

• First off, I’ve added a detailed archive page that supports expanded views of post titles, dates and comment stats. (Take a browse… Even I’d forgotten some of the interesting stuff that’s been filed away and lost to time.)

• Regular visitors will also notice a new “Tag Index” to the right. Bloggers like to use tags in different ways, but here the plan is to complement my Categories. Think of the Categories as big file drawers and the tags as flags to help zero in on specific types of content within those drawers. As the week goes forward, I’ll be refining and expanding the index while adding visible tag coding to posts.

• The blogroll will also soon relocate from the sidebar to a page of its own. This will leave the right column looking a little barren in the short term, but will free it up for new items to be added down the line.

All these changes are the first steps in making Dateline>City of Angels content and navigation more accessible (and intelligible) from the homepage. This in turn will support new features and a broader redesign planned for later this year. In the meantime, thanks for your patience with any quirks and annoyances that pop up during the “construction phase.”