From the category archives:

Odds and Ends

BlogoBuzz: The Halloween Edition

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 [...]

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Photo Op: La Purísima Basks in the Late-Day Sun

For me, a visit to this mission is always like a trip back in time.
Off the beaten track just outside Lompoc, La Purísima was founded in 1787 as the 11th of California’s 21 missions. It moved to its current site in 1812 after a huge quake destroyed the first complex, four miles away.
Now a California [...]

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BlogoBuzz: Urbanization, Poachers Eat Away at Venus Flytrap

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 [...]

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BlogoBuzz: Ghosts in the Weight Machines?

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 [...]

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Introducing “Cryptic Sights”

As promised last week, Dateline>City of Angels is introducing several special treats for the Halloween season. The first is “Cryptic Sights,” a series of visits to noteworthy tombs and markers throughout the Southland.
Ranging from the famous to the obsure to the just plain bizarre, you’ll find the first one, below, dealing with the rather strange [...]

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Friday Flix: Boozing It Up in the Face of Certain Death

Talk about dumb! Not much more to say about this party crowd, except that sadly we’ll probably be reading about them in the post-hurricane missing-person reports.

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D’oh! Simpsons Behind Bars

You never know what — or who — you’ll run into at the local rummage shop. While out practicing night shots along La Brea, I also stumbled across Homer, Marge and Bart jailed among the shabby chic of this floodlit corner vintage yard.
Hopefully someone will spring them soon and give them a good home. Of [...]

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More Proof That Skunks and Dogs Don’t Mix

“Uhh ohh, who got skunked?” asked the clerk behind the CVS counter. She seemed incredibly astute and chipper for someone working the graveyard shift.
“Does it really smell that bad?” I responded, sniffing the front of my shirt.
“No, it’s what you’re buying,” she explained. “All of that peroxide, baking soda and eye wash. You’re like the [...]

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Street Scene: Labor Day Night at Pink’s

What better way to enjoy the waning summer than a late-night outing to Pink’s?
Probably the most popular hot dog spot in all Southern California, Pink’s has plied its trade near the La Brea and Melrose intersection since 1939, drawing huge crowds for its world-famous chili dogs well into the wee hours.
Of course, waiting in lines [...]

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Pop Quiz: Mission San Gabriel of the Earthquakes

Today’s pop quiz is dedicated to Mission San Gabriel, which celebrates its 237th annual fiesta tomorrow through Sunday. Founded Sept. 8, 1771, it was fourth in California’s chain of 21 missions, and among the most prosperous. It can also be called L.A.’s Mother Church, since the pobladores set out from here to found the City [...]

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More BlogoBuzz: Deconstructing Sunset Junction

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, [...]

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BlogoBuzz: A Streetcar We’d Desire

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 [...]

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Surprise! Bigfoot “Discovery” Just One Big Scam

You’d think Sasquatch investigator Tom Biscardi would’ve seen this one coming. Certainly the warning signs were all there.
First, the two men who claimed to have discovered the over-seven-foot carcass in northern Georgia this past July couldn’t stick to a coherent story as to how they bagged it in the wilds, dragged it out, and iced [...]

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Flashback: The Great Griffith Park Fire of 1933

As this past weekend has again reminded us, fires have long been the scourge of Griffith Park. Devastating as the 2007-2008 fire seasons have been, however, the worst disaster in the park’s history remains the Great Fire of 1933, seen in this vintage AP photo sent by a Dateline>City of Angels reader.
Like the recent spate [...]

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Big Billboard for a Tiny Lost Dog

Posters and fliers in search of lost pets are a common sight in any neighborhood, but this is the first time I’ve seen a fullsize billboard.
This one overlooks the corner of Sunset and Alvarado in Echo Park and seeks the return of Hedkayce, a 10-pound mixed breed who vanished from her front yard in the [...]

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Fillmore: Southern California’s Newest “Hotspot”

Believe it or not, right now, the “hottest” spot in Southern California is someplace outside Fillmore in Ventura County, but unless you’re a thermogeologist, it’s probably no place you’d want to visit.
Experts are reportedly still baffled over the “thermal anomaly” that caused ground temperatures on a small patch of terrain to soar to more than [...]

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Busy Week, Slow Blog While I’m “Styling and Performing”

Just the usual housekeeping note to advise readers that posts here will remain sporadic as I focus on a looming deadline for the automotive trade magazine, Styling and Performance.
The article, due this week, is on the emerging Chinese automotive market and the opportunities to be found there for American makers of aftermarket parts. It’s a [...]

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Friday Flix: Anticipating “The Big One”

If this past week’s 5.4 Chino Hills quake rattled your nerves, you’d best brace yourself for The Big One that experts say has a better than 99 percent chance of striking California by 2038. To help prepare you, here’s an 8-minute excerpt from a PBS documentary focusing on the San Andreas Fault and highlighting a [...]

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Photo Op: Just Another Neon Night

My amateur quest for interesting neon scenes recently led me to Echo Park’s House of Spirits liquor store. Always hopping on weekends, the thriving business caters to an extremely “eclectic” crowd ranging from the area’s Old Guard to retro-hipsters, gentrifiers and prerequisite vagrants. Yet despite its unruly appearance and traffic patterns, the store is surprisingly [...]

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Monday Scribblings: Write On, Ms. Rebecca!

Congrats to writing pal and fellow blogger Rebecca J. Lacko, author of the weblog Motherhood, Marriage and Other Wild Rides.
Loathe as most bloggers may be to admit it, blogging is a passion, not a profession. The vast majority of us pound our prose out in relative obscurity. If we’re lucky, we’ll manage to attract a [...]

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