This weekend, the LA 3-D Club (Stereo Club of Southern California) is hosting the 8th Annual LA 3-D Movie Festival at the Downtown Independent Theater. The festivities begin at 1pm on Saturday with two blocks of short film competitions, followed by an evening feature screening. On Sunday, you can attend free 3-D demos and presentations and see local student 3-D films. The festival wraps up with an award ceremony and screening, followed by a rooftop reception.

If you buy a pass to the festival, you could be the lucky winner of a FujiFilm FinePix REAL 3D W3 digital camera. A Festival Pass is $30 and gets you into all screenings and events during the weekend and enters you into a drawing to be held at the awards ceremony on Sunday night.

Come out and support a great local organization, a fantastic independent theater and see some amazing indie 3-D films and music videos from all over the world.

The 8th Annual LA 3-D Movie Festival
May 14th and 15th, 2011
Downtown Independent Theater
251 S. Main Street, Los Angeles 90012

Eagle Rock Blvd. at Ave. 35

Pow!
An explosion, ultraviolet
The jacarandas bloom and bang
one after the other like popcorn,
like fireworks on a fuse—
Summer sinks down on LA
pushing the shattered past to the edges,
glass confetti fanning the street.

Eagle Rock Blvd. at Ave. 35

Like a lot of Angelenos with extremely tenuous connections to the entertainment industry, I spend a lot of time in coffee shops. As a result I’ve learned a lot of things. Like the fact that Starbucks coffee tastes more or less like an armpit no matter what you do to it. Or the fact that male-to-female transgendered folks sometimes have to shave their nether regions in coffeeshop bathrooms. I sympathize, ladies, I do. But you could at least flush after.

But the nice thing about frequenting the coffeeshops of LA is finding the best drinks. Sabor y Cultura at 5625 Hollywood Blvd (Facebook, Yelp, Citysearch) has two of these: The iced chai latte and the red velvet latte.

Still life with iced chai.

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This, possibly, is a quote from children’s book author Dallas Clayton, though I have no idea whether it was he who took the time to print this up and  stick it on a lamppost at Sunset and Edgecliffe.  Personally, I prefer my curbside adages to be slightly shorter, but hey, free advice is free advice.

Actually, its more like two-and-a-half days as the parade doesn’t start until 7PM on Thursday, but the next two days will be busy in Old Town Monrovia.  We’re celebrating our 125th birthday and all are welcome to attend…its a folksy-homey-small-towny kind of event.  All the information you could want is on the city web HERE, with a special section for the 3.5 mile “Fountain to the Falls Walk/Run” HERE.  Map of center of Old Town HERE.  Seriously, it is all a lot of fun, especially if you have kids, I certainly will be around for most of it. Read the rest of this entry →

Step aside Chelsea Handler, there’s a new IT girl on the street and her name is Hilary Winston.  Formerly head writer of the Emmy®-award-winning “My Name is Earl“, and currently a writer/producer on “Community“, the incredibly funny & talented Ms. Winston wrote a book.  Well.  Wrote a book in response to her boyfriend writing a book…

What? Who are these people who have enough time in their lives to have a full job, AND write a retaliatory book to the book their boyfriend wrote about them?  Oh, no sorry, you’re still confused about the whole “book being written in retaliation to a book” part.

Let’s start from the beginning.  Hilary, having just gotten out of a semi-serious relationship, and putting the piece of her life back together gets sucker-punched when she wanders into a bookstore to find that her Ex has written a novel.  A novel about their relationship.  One in which she’s referenced throughout as the “fat-assed girlfriend.”  True story.

From the ashes was born a phoenix. A hilarious book of a phoenix with, albeit one with  a broken vagina.

You know what?  Hilary could do a much better job making sense of the absurdity that is her life… and wouldn’t you know it, you’re in luck!  She’s doing a book signing on THURSDAY MAY 19th at the Grove Barnes & Noble, where you can ask her any and all of the questions you have about her fat ass, broken vagina, bikini waxes & community paintball.

Hilary Winston Book Signing
Thursday May 19, 2011 7:00 PM
Barnes & Noble @ The Grove at Farmers Market
189 Grove Drive Suite K 30
Los Angeles, CA 90036
http://hilarywinston.com/home/

And you can buy the book HERE.  Perfect for that book club you’ve always been meaning to start…

Buster is our 10-year-old Russian tortoise. All that you wanted to know about her and her meal this morning but didn’t really care to learn can be found after the jump. Or you can just enjoy the diversion that is the above video (though I’d recommend going full-screen to capture the nomnom’ing chelonian in all her sped-up glory.

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The most important person in the lot.

Ever see that guy parked perfectly straddling the line between two parking spots? If you’ve been reading this blog for much time at all, I suspect you have. Our own Matt Mason pondered whether a guy still in his car who drove off after being photographed constituted a parking d’bag (a more PC term). Read the rest of this entry →

Crazy tree fire outside my Hollywood apartment

To increase awareness of our services, the Los Angeles Fire Department designates the second Saturday of May as Fire Service Recognition Day. This year, the focus is on Emergency Preparedness:
“Your Safety is Our Mission”
Neighborhood Firefighters are using this year’s Open House as a timely opportunity to help you be prepared for disaster.

They encourage your to bring your cameras although no word on if you can shoot your own calendar while visiting. All the stations are open to the public but the stations below will have something a little more special planned with demonstrations and enhanced displays.

• Fire Station 88 5101 North Sepulveda Blvd Sherman Oaks
• Ports O’Call Village San Pedro
• Fire Station 86 4305 Vineland Ave Studio City *Pancake Breakfast from 8:00AM to Noon
• Fire Station 56 2759 Rowena Ave Silver Lake
• Fire Station 27 & adjacent LAFD Museum 1327 North Cole Ave Hollywood *Pancake Breakfast from 8:30AM to 1:00PM
• Fire Station 34 3661 7th Ave Jefferson Park
• Fire Station 69 15045 Sunset Blvd Pacific Palisades
• Fire Station 65 1525 East 103rd St Watts

If you can’t make it on Saturday there are a few Stations that will be open on Sunday, May 15, 2011 from 10:00 AM to 4:00 PM.

• Fire Station 102 13200 Burbank Blvd Valley Glen
• Fire Station 58 1556 South Robertson Blvd Pico/Robertson
• Fire Station 61 5821 West 3rd St Fairfax District

So Saturday, we did venture out to Unique LA, as we commented that we might. My friend Roberta said Monstertrocity was her favorite booth, and it was certainly among mine.

I remember when Kat was selling wares off her bike in front of Bazaar Bizarre and I loved her stuff then and I do now. If you missed it, fear not, Unique LA is adding a summer show so you can go buy cool monster stuff or all kinds of other wonderful things. More pictures from the show after the break. Read the rest of this entry →

“Hey Boss, want to buy a home theater?” That’s what the man behind the wheel of the white van parked in my local West Side shopping center asked me the other day. I smiled and said “no”, remembering the old days back in the DC area where one or more of these white vans would cruise around my local shopping center, selling speakers.  It was always a white van.

I remember the speaker guys back then saying that their products were “extra inventory”.  At the time, I had also read that, in additional to their questionable provenance, the speakers were really crappy, and would break after a bit of regular use.

Nowadays, we have online retailers competing with brick-and-mortar stores, we have Amazon, we have near-instant research ability to find a good home theater in a box for a reasonable price, possibly with no sales tax.  From our phone.

The white van, however, looks pretty much the same.

Among the reasons you don’t want to get sent home from work early on a Monday morning are that someone packed a suitcase, brought it to the back entrance of your office building, sat down on it, and proceeded to put a bullet in his head something like 50 feet from your desk.

That’s what just happened to my friend who sent me this picture from his office building in Downey. People at his work speculated that it was a disgruntled ex-employee [update: there are indications he most likely was not], but there’s no real information. [Further update: this definitely wasn't a disgruntled employee incident, and the address of the building has been redacted due to a request by the occupant.] I’m using the occasion to remind the rest of you that there are resources available should you feel desperate enough to contemplate suicide. You can call the National Suicide Prevention lifeline: 800-273-8255 or use LA Counties’ Department of Mental Health site to find a provider near you. Regardless of your insurance status, if you walk into the emergency room of any hospital and tell them that you want to kill yourself, you will get treatment. However limited our public health options may be, they are preferable to the “permanent solution to a temporary problem” that is suicide. Hang in there, people. Whatever you’re dealing with, it will eventually change, and killing yourself will break the hearts of the people who love you.

I saw this on the LAFD blog and I just had to share it with you all because it’s damn heartwarming. It seems a hawk got tangled in some fishing line or nylon thread of some kind too high up for animal control or anyone else to be able to reach it, so the LAFD came to the rescue. It’s like the badass version of getting a cat out of a tree. Go LAFD. Thanks for being so awesome.

I feel like Downey is probably one of the unsung corners of Los Angeles county.  It is chock full of modest awesomeness:  there are those apartment buildings that used to belong to the Carpenters; there’s the world’s oldest McDonald’s (please note that I am not advocating eating at the world’s oldest McDonald’s – but it’s worth a stop for the retro signage and for the surprisingly humble and ramshackle McDonald’s museum that’s attached for it); there’s the absolutely gorgeous, restored, award-winning Bob’s Big Boy; and there’s Porto’s, where all your Cuban baked good-related dreams can come true.  And, at 7420 Florence Avenue, there is Amapola Market, where all of my jello-related dreams recently came true.

Still life with tulips, robot, jello

Amapola is a Mexican grocery store and deli, and they have an amazing deli counter full of delicious carnitas and tamales, and a bakery that makes scrumptious pan dulce.  But, given my personal predilection for food that a) is kind of weird and b) looks like it comes from outer space,  I am most drawn to their absolutely beautiful jello molds, which are sparkling, jewel-like creations that put the jellied salads of 1950s housewives to shame.  Just look at this!  This is not just dessert.  This, my friends, is art.  Also, this was only $9.95, which, frankly, is an extremely small price to pay for the amount of joy it brought into my life.  They will also take special orders, making it easy to coordinate the colors of one’s jello mold with the colors of one’s outfit.

There are two more Amapola locations, in Compton and in Paramount, but I haven’t been so I don’t know if they also do jello.  If you’ve been to either, feel free to report in in the comments!

If you’ve ever driven over Topanga Canyon you have probably seen this little guy. He’s the mascot of Topanga Hauling. Don’t really get it myself but it takes all sorts. That little pig always puts a smile on my face though when I’m driving home.