Posts tagged as:

Oddities

Weekend Matinee: Old Town Pasadena “Haunt”

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This has got to be some type of Halloween gimmick or hoax. During California’s Mission Era, meticulous records were kept by both civil and Church authorities documenting every phase of a mission’s founding, from site surveys to actual construction. If there had been a mission chapel in the area of Old Town Pasadena, there [...]

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Detail Shot: Finnish Lines in Pasadena

Angeleno Sights

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Porch scene at the Finnish Folk Art Museum on the Pasadena Museum of History grounds. Once a Swiss-chalet style garage, the building was originally designed in 1910 as part of the Wigmore Estate. In 1949, a Finnish consul moved the structure to what was then the Finnish consulate and refurbished it as a sauna and [...]

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Summer Reruns: Cryptic SoCal Edition

span class=”drop_cap”>Like many history buffs, I find old cemeteries profoundly educational. Walking among the plots, statuary and epitaphs, you never know who (or what) you’ll stumble upon. But this being Southern California, some of the burials can get exceptionally bizarre. Here are some of the more interesting graveyard posts Dateline>City of Angels has run over [...]

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Weekend Matinee: Buzzing Suicide Bridge

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More Pathe Newsreel footage from the Silent Era. This time a plane buzzes Pasadena’s Colorado Street (aka “Suicide”) Bridge. Just imagine anyone trying that stunt today.

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How Now, Plastic Cow?

Life in Angel City

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Once upon a time in SoCal history there were, as one author put it, “Cattle on a Thousand Hills.” Nowadays the most any of us suburbanites ever see is a plastic bovine like this one standing outside Rigo’s drive-up market in Monrovia.
I was pondering this fact outloud as I snapped this picture, when I swear [...]

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Face From the Past: The Ever-Notorious Judge William G. Dryden

Names and Faces

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Melodramatic as they might be, modern courtroom TV reality shows wouldn’t hold a candle to the legal antics of 19th Century Los Angeles. Throughout the mid- to late 1800s, the town’s circus-like court system produced a parade of offbeat trials filled with colorful characters and preposterous verdicts. But for sheer entertainment value, there was probably [...]

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Errant Cannonball Kills SoCal Woman

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Some DIY hobbies are just too insane to pursue — like building a homemade canon, for one. Yet that’s exactly what a pair of San Diego County men recently did, firing it off with predictably disastrous results. (Call it the shot heard ’round the Twin Lakes Resort mobile home park.) At least one of the [...]

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Spain Makes Federal Case Out of Sunken Treasure

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Treasure hunters be advised: finders aren’t always keepers.
At least that was the verdict of a U.S. judge in the case of a centuries-old sunken treasure discovered off the coast of Spain. The cache of coins is worth an estimated half billion dollars, but the U.S.-based salvage company that hauled them up from the briny deep [...]

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Photo Op: Colma Monuments

On my recent holiday jaunt to San Francisco, I was fortunate enough to visit the nearby city of Colma. Founded in 1924 and billed as the “City of Souls,” Colma has a unique history — it’s basically San Francisco’s necropolis, boasting 16 crowded cemeteries within its approximately 2-square-mile jurisdiction.
In 1900, San Francisco outlawed burials within [...]

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Those Devilish Santa Ana Winds

Whether summery hot or wintry tepid like the ones shown above that are currently ravaging Pasadena and the Greater Los Angeles area, Southern California’s fiendish Santa Ana winds are the stuff of legends.
In his story Red Wind, Raymond Chandler described them as “those hot dry [winds] that come down through the mountain [...]

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If You’ve Ever Wondered How an Urban Legend Gets Started…

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Here at Dateline>City of Angels we love to dissect and examine historic ghostlore and other longstanding urban legends. However, it’s not very often that we get to see a real, living example of an oddball tale taking root. Yet here you have it, a Hollywood Hills mansion on its way to being known as “cursed.”
Perched [...]

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Caution: Never, Never Wake the Dead!

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Not to beat a dead horse, but having unearthed numerous pioneer skeletons at the abandoned Placita churchyard, LA Plaza officials might want to think twice before messing with the spot any further. Construction crews assembling an amusement ride in Britain have apparently disturbed a similar old cemetery, resulting in menacing visits by a headless monk.
Here [...]

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Grave Controversy Continues at La Plaza

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Novena candles glow gently in the courtyard of Los Angeles’ Old Plaza Church. They seem a fitting enough symbol, given news a little over a week ago that construction crews working on a new LA Plaza de Cultura y Arte recently unearthed numerous remains of our city’s founding families.
The ensuing chaos has become a slapstick [...]

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L.A. Coroner’s Little Shop of Horrors Now a Dying Business

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Considering how death rates trend upward during the holiday season, this macabre December 25 New York Times article profiling the L.A. Coroner’s Skeletons in the Closet store is oddly timely. (Still, it probably would’ve been better timed before Christmas to help last-minute shoppers needing gift ideas for those hard-to-please people on their lists.)
Ever on the [...]

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Moon to Glow Yuletide Red This Monday Night

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While it won’t compare much with the Star of Bethlehem some 2000 years ago, the heavens are nonetheless aligning to deliver us Left Coasters our own special astronomical phenomenon just in time for Christmas.
According to a NASA alert, a holiday lunar eclipse will begin Monday, Dec. 20 at 10:33 p.m. PST, taking a “dark-red bite” [...]

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Stowed Baby Mummies Spark Film-Noir-Like LAPD Investigation

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Sometimes it’s best not to snoop through somebody else’s old, abandoned luggage. Still, you can just picture the scenario as it unfolded Tuesday afternoon…
Rummaging down in the basement of an aging Westlake Neighborhood apartment building, the rental manager and a friend find three rustic steamer trunks. The discovery naturally piques the female pair’s curiosity. Do [...]

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Check It Out: The Haunting of America

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From time to time your humble blogger likes to share some of his library finds with Dateline>City of Angels visitors. This week I finished The Haunting of America, a fascinating look at our nation’s ongoing obsession with the paranormal, from the Salem Witch Trials to Harry Houdini’s attempts to unmask modern Spiritualism.
It’s a strangely perfect [...]

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Corpse Flower Creates Big Stink at Huntington

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This past weekend, crowds lined up at the Huntington Botanical Gardens in San Marino, wanting to catch a glimpse of a flower known both for its humongous size (6 to 10 feet tall!) and its stench. The plant producing this startling, malodorous bloom is known by botanists as Amorphophallus titanum and by laypeople as the [...]

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SoCal Kitsch: Pink Panther Muffler Man

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Muffler sculptures are a staple of auto garages everywhere, but thanks to our Car Culture, they’re especially ubiquitous here in Southern California.
As an art form, more often than not they lack imagination, frequently resembling uninspired robots or clunky mechanical aliens. When you come across one that’s truly whimsical — like this Pink Panther near the [...]

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Aliens Implicated in Mysterious Cattle Slaughter

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While the rest of us were carving up our turkeys for the holiday, it appears someone — or something — in southern Colorado was engaging in an otherworldly animal carving ritual of their own.
According to this Associated Press story, “a creepy string of calf mutilations” has left local ranchers and sheriff’s officials “mystified:”
“Four calves were [...]

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