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Blogobuzz: Celebrity Deaths and More

Odds and Ends
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Today is Friday, and you know what that means! Time for another wrap-up of some interesting items culled from the blogosphere this past week. Today’s selection includes the deaths of two famous Angelenos, mugshots (just for fun), and a pair of posts relating to Southland art. Enjoy!

They say celebrity deaths always come in threes. Award-winning [...]

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RIP for Famous Puppetry Theater?

Life in Angel City
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Unfortunately, it may indeed be curtains for Echo Park’s world-renown Bob Baker Marionette Theater. Built in 1953, the old cinder-block building at First Street and Glendale Blvd. is considered by many to be America’s longest-running puppet theater, and was declared a Los Angeles historic-cultural landmark in 2009. Nevertheless, the theater has been floundering since 2008, [...]

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Wishing You a Peaceful Memorial Day

Odds and Ends
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More than any other national holiday, Memorial Day offers us Americans an opportunity to solemnly remember and honor those who paid the ultimate price for our liberties. Hopefully, we will all take at least one small moment to think about the countless U.S. service men and women who have given their lives in duty, and [...]

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Errant Cannonball Kills SoCal Woman

Odds and Ends
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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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Can Haunted Los Encinos SHP Be Saved?

Cryptic L.A.
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That’s the question raised by this March 2 Los Angeles Daily News article. (Well, the article doesn’t actually mention the “haunted” angle, but we’ll get to that below.)
It would be a shame if budget cuts force Los Encinos State Historic Park to close. For those lucky enough to stumble across it, the place offers a [...]

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Spain Makes Federal Case Out of Sunken Treasure

Odds and Ends
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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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Leap Day Oddities

Odds and Ends
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For me, Leap Day just means one more day in February to get things done and work on my writing. (Kind of like a free deadline extension.) Apparently for others, however, Leap Day is a very big deal.
Check out the Seattle Post Intelligencer’s pictorial review of “10 weird and awesome things about Leap Day.” Methinks [...]

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North Hollywood Shootout, 15 Years Later

Odds and Ends
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Today marks the 15th anniversary of the famous 1997 North Hollywood Shootout in which two armor-clad bank robbers with assault rifles held off hundreds of outgunned LAPD officers. The gun battle lasted nearly 45 minutes, with the robbers firing off more than 1,000 armor-piercing bullets and police unleashing more than 750 rounds. Ultimately, the LAPD [...]

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Pasadena’s Windy Malady Lingers On

Life in Angel City
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The aftermath of Wednesday night’s Santa Anas lingers on in Pasadena, which was hit hard by the blusters. This morning I came across the above scene at the intersection of Foothill Blvd. and Altadena Drive: Cleanup from a triple-car collision caused in part by a pair of non-functioning signals that were both snapped in two [...]

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Those Devilish Santa Ana Winds

Odds and Ends
Devil

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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Toxic Flora: Dayhiking Amid the Poison Oak

Life in Angel City
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The upside to the February and March rains we get here in the Southland is that our dry chaparral suddenly springs to life, making hillside hikes all the more enjoyable once the sun comes out. The downside is that same breathtaking chaparral along the trail includes lots of poison oak.
Western poison oak (Toxicodendron diversilobum) [...]

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Caution: Never, Never Wake the Dead!

Cryptic L.A.
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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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Bearing Christmas Greetings

Life in Angel City
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Decorated for the holiday season, this Santa Bear guards the Ferndell entrance to Griffith Park. Someone has apparently taken it upon himself to ensure the statue is always dressed appropriately for every occasion. A few weeks ago the bear was wearing a winter sweater. During the summer he’s bare (bear?) naked.
The bear was a gift [...]

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Moon to Glow Yuletide Red This Monday Night

Odds and Ends
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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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Sorry, These AREN’T the 12 Days of Christmas

Odds and Ends
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Everyone has a pet holiday peeve. Mine is the ongoing misconception that the song The Twelve Days of Christmas is a countdown to December 25.
Gritting my teeth in L.A. freeway traffic this morning, I heard this popular mistake repeated again and again by local radio ads, newspeople, and rock stations announcing the start of their [...]

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L.A. Auto Show a Trip Down Memory Lane

Life in Angel City
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Unless you’re totally pedestrian, you probably know the L.A. Auto Show has made its yearly return to the Los Angeles Convention Center, running Nov. 19-28. I’m headed that way tomorrow, filled with anticipation. It’s always hard to say which I enjoy most — seeing the exciting new automotive technologies and concept cars or bumping into [...]

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More Trash Talk From Victorian Los Angeles

Reading Room
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Ever eager to view our region’s current events through the prism of its off-the-wall history, Friday’s garbage post (below) got me thinking: How did Angelenos handle their refuse problems, say, a century or so ago?
As you might expect, the answer isn’t very pretty.
Ralph Shaffer, history professor emeritus at Cal Poly, Pomona, has written an interesting [...]

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Get Ready to Pay Through the Nose for Dumping Your “Illegal” Trash

Life in Angel City
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Fines for dumping illegal garbage in Los Angeles have skyrocketed drastically, thanks to a new city ordinance. Yet, strangely, officials waited weeks to launch their public awareness campaign for the new regulations, which actually took effect last month.
Aimed primarily at businesses, the law allows trashy offenders to be charged “administrative” fines of $500, $750 and [...]

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Stowed Baby Mummies Spark Film-Noir-Like LAPD Investigation

Cryptic L.A.
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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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Corpse Flower Creates Big Stink at Huntington

Cryptic L.A.
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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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