Siel, the Green LA Girl wrote a feature for Treehugger on The 100 Mile Diet. This is actually a great article for anyone wanting to practice “geotarianism” (the practice of eating locally grown and produced sustainable foods). Descriptions of farmers’ market products, as well as goods from the Co-Op in Santa Monica were really insightful and helpful – I’d never think to check and see if my locally produced tofu was also made with California grown soybeans. Only thing I’d think to add onto that would be some oranges and loquats from a project like Fallen Fruit.

The geotarian revolution is coming – MoJo covered it last spring, in an article called No Bar Code. A revolution against corporate agriculture may be in the makings. Now that Whole Foods is so mainstream, the logical next step seems to be in that direction, to not only buy organic, but to buy organic foods from the immediate area, foods which required less fossil fuels to get from the field to the grocery store display.
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The LA Times asked a bunch of Angelenos what is LA’s biggest problem for 2007 and blogging.la’s own co-founder Sean Bonner shares his leftist opinion.

The city’s glaring lack of left-turn lanes and left-turn signals shows a blatant directionist bias toward people turning right. This oppression has a trickle-down effect: People are so ashamed of their need to turn left that they hide it until the very last second, sometimes not putting on their blinker until they are at the stoplight.

What do you think?

I got an email from reader Mike, who’d read this post of mine and wanted to alert me to his new blog, LA Can’t Drive, which documents crappy drivers.

Go check it out! I love the idiocy and asshole meters.

He takes submissions of driver idiocy, too:

Share your photos! Email photos you or someone else in your car has taken to lacantdrive@gmail.com. Remember, to take photos only when it is completely safe to do so. Ideally, have a passenger take the photo for you.

Photos must be in JPEG format and ideally 640 x 480 pixel size. Also include a small blurb of the incident. I have the right to edit or reject all submissions.

Tuesdays are New Release Days when it comes to music, movies, and (sometimes) videogames. But if you’ve grown accustomed to buying your sweet audiovisual software at the Sacramento-based Tower Records, you’re going to have to find a new place to shop, as last Friday was the final day its brick-and-mortar stores were open for business (a “last hurrah” for its employees was held last Monday @ The Viper Room):

Starting in October 2006, all Tower Records stores in the United States prior to liquidation held “going out of business” sales before final shutdown on the night of Friday, December 22, 2006. …

Tower Records entered bankruptcy for the first time in 2004. Factors cited were the heavy debt incurred during its aggressive expansion in the 1990s, growing competition from mass discounters, and internet piracy. Its policy of selling most Compact Disc (CD) based music recordings at list price also proved detrimental. …

On August 20, 2006, Tower Records filed Chapter 11 bankruptcy for the second time in order to facilitate a purchase of the company prior to the holiday shopping season.

A friend went to Tower’s landmark Sunset store last Monday, and he said the mood was rather somber inside. He reported that not only were the fixtures and wall art onsale, but any remaining product that was marked at 80-90% off were being scooped up by opportunists hoping to flip it elsewhere.

The last time I was there was for Fiona Apple (MySpace)’s in-store appearance to promote Extraordinary Machine last October, which shows you how often I went there to buy music.

More after the jump.
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I just noticed that Netflix has a Local Favorites feature – and in my case it shows the local favorites for Los Angeles, CA. As of today, the LA favorites include “Sorry, Haters”, “Bubble”, “Mi Vida Loca”, “LA Story”, “Wassup Rockers” and “The Cutting Edge: The Magic of Movie Editing”.

The last four are not unexpected since they take place in Los Angeles, or are involved with movie magic. But I am just curious as to what section of the population in Los Angeles is renting “Sorry, Haters” to the point where it occupies the number one spot. I am not saying that it shouldn’t, I am just wondering who these people are and how they are able to wield such power of the city’s Netflix favorites list.

Today is the first day of whale watching season. Of course no one told the whales that. Even though our training trip for the Cabrillo Marine Aquarium’s whale watch naturalists didn’t spot any migrating Gray Whales, there was lots to see on the Voyager out of Redondo Sportfishing. The weather was wonderfully calm with low swells and glassy calm water. The scant but persistent clouds were a little bit of a downer, making the water look inky-black most of the time, but then again, I liked the slippery look of the surface.

The first cow/calf pair was spotted on December 20th by the census! The total number of whales spotted since the beginning of the season is 37 (36 southbound, one strange fellow going north).

Fin Whales may still be in the area, but possibly a bit further out in the channel.

My personal sightings for the day were:

At least a dozen different small groups of feeding Short-Beaked Common Dolphins. One group was only a hundred yards or so from the Redondo Beach breakwater.

Sea Lions a-go-go – I think I saw more sea lions out on the water than I ever have before. Some were rafting and throwing their fins up in the air to thermo-regulate, others were hopping out of the water (and causing some mis-identifications as they’re easily taken for dolphins at a distance when they do that).

Lots and lots of birds: Sooty Shearwaters, Brown Pelicans (many in breeding plumage), Heerman’s Gulls, California Gulls, Western Gulls & a Rhinoceros Auklet (okay, it was pointed out to me, I’m not sure I could identify that one on my own).

Previous Offshore Reports: 12/13/2006 & 12/6/2006 . More photos here.

Brooks is done, and threatening to just close up shop. In a post today he says:

I know I’ve threatened this before… a few times. :-) , but I think it’s time to close this place down. I was really optimistic when we first started, but it’s really just turned into me deleting spam comments every day and looking at the last post for a month before trying to find something just to keep the place looking like it’s not dead. The reality is, that it really died a long time ago. So, with that in mind, would anyone like a set of keys to the place?

If no one steps up he says he’ll probably turn comments off and leave the site online for people to check out the archives, it just won’t be active going forward. I’m not sure how that relates to the larger multi city photobloggers network but this post seems to be specifically talking about LA.

I always relish this week between Christmas and New Years. It’s a rare LA moment when you can hop on the freeway and not run into traffic. The neighborhood is as quiet as a mouse. It’s even easy to get tickets to te 8pm show at the Arclight. All my friends have time for long leisurely lunches.
It’s as if there is a mass exodus to another planet! I love it!

So, my son outgrew his infant car seat. It was the carrier type, which is designed to be rear-facing and installs ridiculously easily. But even though it’s supposedly good up to one year, my seven-month-old is too big for his. My in-laws gave us a convertible seat for Christmas. It will get him to his first birthday rear-facing and then switch to forward-facing.

It is damn near impossible to figure out how to install the damn thing.

My husband managed to follow the poorly-written and even more poorly-illustrated instructions for threading the straps through the seat itself, with a tremendous amount of naughty language along the way, but when he attached the seat to the car it didn’t seem right. Not wanting the baby to ride in an improperly-installed seat, we did the natural thing: called the fire department.

No, really! I called our local station, #29, and the Captain invited me to come by so they could check it for me. They tightened the LATCH straps and showed me how to do it myself. I got there just in time — literally seconds after they were finished they had to run off to a fire.

I love my fire station! They were friendly and have a beautiful dalmatian. And most important, I am certain that my son will be safe in the car.

What does a place that costs 10 dollars a night in LA look like? Pat is trying to find out. He’s putting together a site documenting Hostels in major cities around the world and is starting in LA. He’s already covered a bunch in Greater Los Angeles as well as a handful right in Hollywood (image is of Orbit Hostel on Melrose). These places offer dorm room accommodations for under $25 a night, and if that isn’t your thing many include private rooms for much cheaper than neighboring hotels. He’ll be updating the site with other cities going forward so if you live in LA and don’t need a place to stay here, but are traveling and looking for a deal somewhere else Pat might have your solution on Twizi.com.

Ack! Looks like I flaked on listing the posts with the most active comment threads from last week, I guess there was something else going on this weekend which distracted me. Anyway, without wasting anymore time, here they are:

• Vote now for L.A.’s Grinch of the Year by David Markland
• I HATE YOU TIME WARNER by heathervescent
• Loving the Wind by heathervescent
• How to Survive Your First Day of Jury Duty by David Markland
• Super King kicks Gelson’s dick in the dirt by Ruth666

The Man and I had our traditional holiday a few days early in Pittsburgh and arrived back home to balmy SoCal last night and wondered what we’d do on Christmas Day. We decided to go to Griffith Park for a little walk. What we didn’t expect was that we could get up to Griffith Observatory.

Of course it’s not open, and if it were we’d need reservations. But we figured we’d just go to the park and take a hike up the hill or something. Lo and behold we came through the tunnel and parked right there and walked up to the Observatory. Of course it was not just closed, but the whole grounds were fenced off (it didn’t used to be that way).
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The car was bouncy and I was slow on the draw, so no pics (unless someone else has some), but this morning about 1030 I saw probably 30-40 people dressed in red with Santa hats, milling about in Griffith Park.

Most were in a bunch but some were still at cars and such.

No way of knowing if they were coming or going -

Was it Santa Con 2006?

It’s a simple thing, really. To create a nuclear explosion you fire neutrons at closely packed atoms with heavy nuclei, such as uranium or plutonium isotopes. When hit by a neutron these heavy nuclei then break apart into lighter nuclei, in turn generating more neutrons which bombard other nuclei, creating a chain reaction. Kablammo.

Not so simple? Try getting tickets for the 1:55 p.m. screening today of “A Night at the Museum” via the Arclight’s website. After the fourth try navigating (twice on a Mac and twice on a PC, three times with Firefox and once with IE… and a partridge in a pear tree), through interminably slow-loading pages full of timed-outs and and where our credit card may or may not have been charged twice (plus listening to the hollow unanswered ringing of thir customer service line), the wife and I are giving up and instead heading down to the uncharted seas of the Flagship Theaters on Hoover near USC and taking our chances waiting in line for its 2:05 p.m. show and doing that whole unreserved seating thing.

Sorry for the Christmas Day humbuggery but this is easily the fifth time in my Arclight-loving history that I’ve fought with the Arclight’s glacially paced and ceaselessly sludged-up website and lost money, sanity and/or hair.

Post-Show Update (4:41 p.m.): Visual evidence of our “Hmmm… where to sit?” quandary taken 10 minutes prior to the start of $6 matinee at the Flagship’s theater, and a one-sentence film review after the jump.
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