Nearly 800 people have signed up for the Los Angeles Snuggie Pub Crawl (date still to be determined). I’m a HUGE fan of participating in mindless, ridiculous activities like this, so of course I signed up right away.

Proof: MissRFTC doing mindless, ridiculous things at SantaCon 2008. (Photo courtesy of Colin Young-Wolff, Los Angeles Times)

However, this seemingly pointless event, which is centered around the latest trend in dorkpop consumerism, the Snuggie, second only to the ShamWow in popularity, is not completely vacuous after all. The SnuggiePubCrawl.com team is donating proceeds from the event to the AC-Orphanage in Arusha, Tanzania. AC-Orphanage rescues orphans from the streets of Tanzania whose parents have been victims of HIV and TB. Your donations will go directly to providing food, clean water, clothing and schooling for these children.

So even if you don’t want to bar hop around Los Angeles in a Snuggie, you can still go online and donate to this worthy endeavor. Visit their web site for more info: http://www.snuggiepubcrawl.com/Locations/LA/.

In the meantime, leave a comment here if you want to join me for the Los Angeles Snuggie Pub Crawl. Whenever it is. Soon it’s going to be too warm in Los Angeles to Snuggie. Are you thinking what I’m thinking? Aw yeah! ShamWoW Pub Crawl!

I LOVE good puns.  LOVE.  I was at Wahoo’s Fish Tacos with work colleagues last week, and someone said a gem.  To fully appreciate this jewel, you have to understand Wahoo’s interior decor: the joint is plastered indiscriminately with stickers, as if that little girl you knew in first grade who coated her three-ring binder with Hello Kitty stickers grew up and actually found a way to make money off of her talent.  At Wahoo’s, my colleague took a long look around and said “Sticker shock.”  If we hadn’t already paid for our lunches, I would have bought him his burrito.  The pun was that good.

Now, the pun that is the subject here is a totally different story.  As with all puns, context is important.   For this pun, you need to know: 1) my office building is located in something called Watt Plaza; and 2) Watt Plaza is undergoing a lot of unnecessary construction.  Ready?

“WATT”‘s going on?”?  For whatever reason, the eyeballs make it to the back of the head a little faster here than they did with “sticker shock.”  When a pun is good, it’s great; when it’s not, it’s painful.  Oof.

Are you, or have you ever been, a dork?

The Southern California chapter of Dorkbot, a group that describes itself as “people doing strange things with electricity, mostly in Los Angeles,” is doing it’s semi-monthly meeting thingy at Machine Project on Sunday, March 8, at 1:00 pm.

And since you’re a dork, you’ve probably already set your digital watches to adjust to Daylight Savings, right?

For its meeting, Dorkbot will present Dan Goods, who, as a “Visual Strategist” at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Lab, might just have the world’s coolest gig. In his job, Goods helps creatively communicate complex cellestial concepts both to the general public and to his science and engineering colleagues. He’s also a fine artist and the curator of Data + Art: Science and Art in the Age of Information, currently on view at the Pasadena Museum of California Art.

Also appearing at Dorkbot will be Eric Gradman and Brent Bushnell of Mindshare Labs, a group dedicated to “helping people play with themselves, and others,” who will present Artfall, a dynamic physical simulation by drawing on a whiteboard. And Brian O’Connor will show us what happens when you hook up a Chumby to an Arduino.

Say what? Look, they call it Dorkbot for a reason.

Image: No, Los Angeles, that is not Dorkbot. Photo by culturalelite.

During a walk to the bank through the Noho Arts District yesterday I passed a tiny little shop selling those super fancy cupcakes.  I’ve heard of this trend of gourmet cupcakes cropping up across the country and in various parts of Los Angeles but I had yet to stumble upon such a place in the flesh.  So, yes, I’m a little late to the phenomenon (I have yet to ever eat a Crispy Kreme Doughnut too), one that has been covered quite a bit here on LA Metblogs.  With all that in mind, this is mostly for everyone else out there like me who hasn’t spent the last few years becoming a cupcake aficionado.

I’m not remotely cheap in nature and will put down quite a bit of cash for certain items.  Cupcakes have a very iconic place in my mind but as a kid’s treat or something you bake for family events.  The idea of spending $3.50 for a baked good I used to sell for 50 cents at school fundraisers seems nuts.  I can go into any grocery store in town and buy six cupcakes for just a little more money.  But curiosity (and an excuse to spoil my boyfriend) got the better of me.  I entered Cupcake Central NoHo and began my journey into a new world.

The girls working in the little shop were incredibly kind, attentive and charming.  The cupcakes themselves were larger than anything my mom would bake and topped with sinful assortments of confectionery.  I was drawn instantly to the chocolate monster daring me to shove it in my face but I was there for someone else and ended up with a lemon cupcake.  The lovely girls packaged it carefully in a special cupcake box made to keep it stable during travel and not sliding about, smudging the sides with precious frosting.  I hadn’t even tasted it yet and I was already impressed.

So, is a $3.50 cupcake good?  Hell yeah!  It tasted homemade with fresh ingredients rather than mass produced generic sweetness.  It was also large enough to share between two people.  In an instant, I understood the madness.  I have a bad feeling I will be unable to resist more visits when I’m walking around the Arts District.

If you’d like to check them out yourself, they are located at 5227 Lankershim Blvd in North Hollywood.  Be sure to get there before all the good flavors sell out.  While it’s a relatively new shop the word is spreading fast.

Los Angeles is marked more than most cities, maybe more than any other city, by a locality of style. I’m not sure what happens if these locals drive (or walk!) between neighborhoods, but it seems that one can nearly pinpoint the block you are at just by looking at the outfits of pedestrians and passers-by. But then, it goes beyond garments, actually, pose and posture–most certainly facial expression–likewise modulates by quarter mile, fashinistas wired like pigeons with an internal magnetic GPS organ.

It would be interesting, I think, to try photographing people on blocks, and testing readers’ recognition of areas this way. The photos should not give away much of architecture, but I think we’d get surprisingly good success. For some future post, I hope.

Recently, an old friend came to Southern California, including the Los Angeles area, from Northern Illinois, for business and some R&R.  Here are the impressions that he relayed to me:

–The weather is “gorgeous.”  Yuh, that’s a big reason why I moved here.  I did not want to tell him that these are among the coldest days and nights we’ve had this season. 

–The vanilla shakes at Bob’s Big Boy in Temecula are “great.”  However, the shrimp stir fry with said vanilla shake, “not so good.”

–The women are “thin” and “beautiful.”  Yuh, see response re: weather.

Click for more impressions

Spotted in West Covina...the cause ribbon has done jumped the shark.

Grabbed with the trusty phone cam.   Sad and funny to see how the cause ribbon jumped the shark, much worse than the “save the ta-ta’s“.

Listen up all you Chandler aficionados, noir novelists, and dark lyricists, there’s a new literary magazine in town (inasmuch as an online periodical can be “in town”), and they are soliciting material for their next issue on noir LA.

Chaparral, which will focus on work from and/or about Southern California, was just announced last week. This inaugural issue features poetry by Amy Gerstler, Douglas Kearney, Dorothy Barresi, Victoria Chang and more. Chaparral will be collaborating with Street Poets for a benefit reading in late May or early June. (Check the Chaparral website for details.)

Following the break is the announcement I got about the upcoming issue:

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Until a few months ago, I rented some office space outside my home, in a building with a half dozen small suites in the Fairfax District.  One evening, going into work (for I am a night owl, and my brain starts doing its best around midnight), I found an unfolded pocket knife laying unsafely on the exterior metal back-stairs to the building…

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Tender Greens in Culver City is one of my all time favorite places to eat. I’m currently on a short job in CC and have been twice this week, with plans to go back again at least once next week. They mainly serve gorgeous fresh salads but you can get chicken, steak and ahi sandwiches as well. The way the place is set up, you watch them prepare your food and I noticed the people putting the salads together work hard to make the food look beautiful on your plate.

Pictured here is the Happy Vegan — a combo of four scoops of various salads: hummus, cous cous, beet/quinoa and faro, plus a large pile of greens. The soup is fresh tomato with a squirt of basil oil and croutons. Oh so yummalicious and I’m not one who’s big on tomato soup.

I started following them on twitter and found out that they are going to be opening in WeHo very very soon (within a few weeks). Hooray! Eating great food that’s good for you has never been so easy.

Culver City location:
9523 Culver Blvd., Culver City
WeHo to come:
8759 Santa Monica Blvd.

Tender Greens
Twitter = @TenderGreens

They knew bike culture before the phrase existed.They knew how to properly spell the word “riders.”

They were members of the Los Angeles Bicycle Club.

The year was 1887.

Photo from the USC Digital Archive

Man of his Time

Spring Forward time is here.

Set your clocks one hour ahead before you go to bed on Saturday, lamenting that lost hour while you consider moving to Hawaii or Arizona to avoid this whole clock changing situation. Maybe you’ll want to shake your fist at someone for that lost hour. Shake your fist at William Willett, who conceived of and tirelessly advocated for it.

For reasons I’m too ashamed to tell anyone outside of the deepest most inner circle of my friends, I can no longer show my face at my former hair salon and therefore must reluctantly begin the tiresome process of finding a new home for my hair. Silver Lake may be brimming with totally tantalizing eats, mega hip bars and the best in indie fashion, but one thing that seems to be lacking in my neighborhood is a wide selection of high quality, cutting edge hair salons.

Perhaps hair is the one area where the west side has us beat.

Having walked and scooted by Sugar Hair Salon in Silver Lake dozens of times, I randomly chose this beacon in blue and white as the first stop on my quest for maximum coiffage.

Adriana Rodriguez, co-owner of Sugar, greeted me and immediately began assessing my poorly shaped locks, which had become shamefully sloppy from mad neglect. While we discussed my hair preferences, my eyes were drawn to a giant wall of paintings and other media across the salon.

Adriana explained that the wall is part of a collection called, “100″ featuring 100 square feet of art, by 100 Los Angeles-based artists, all for under $100. How rad is that? Apparently, I missed the opening in late February, but the pieces will be on display in the salon through May 24, 2009. Read the rest of this entry →

Like zillions of other humanoids, I’m a coffee addict.  And I’m fussy about my beans….not just any coffee will do.  For maximum happiness,  it must be a perfectly pulled Espresso culled from a rich organic roast, preferably with a smooth finish. If I’m opting for a Latte…. I want a good creamy foam and a sweet design on top.  I could bore you with my preferences, or just move to Italy, but instead I’m gonna tell you where I found the perfect cup.

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Round up your dead and useless electronics, lithium ions that no longer hold a charge, even gunky old paint and bring it down to the E-waste and Hazardous waste round up in the SGV.  The round up is set to run from 9AM to 3PM at the Park and Ride Lot in Monrovia which located at Myrtle Avenue and Pomona, 1 1/2 blocks south of the 210 Freeway.

The full list of items you can bring is on the Monrovia City Web.  This is for your personal household items, not for businesses.  This is a joint venture with the LA County Project Pollution Prevention and open to all LA County residents.

Details.  March 7, 2009 9AM-3PM, Monrovia Park and Ride (Myrtle and Pomona Ave) Monrovia CA.  Enter the lot from Pomona Avenue.   Map link Here.