This weekend: vegan beer and pancakes and booze.  Hello, summer.

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As you may already have heard, the 405 freeway will be shut down between the 10 and the 101 on July 16 and 17.  The MTA is so excited about this closure that it has given us a fabulous “I-405: Countdown to the Closure” clock that tells us exactly how many days, hours, minutes, and seconds we have until Carmageddon 2011.  When you’re not watching the seconds of your life flipping past your very eyes, check out the information on the closure, alternate routes, and general advice from officials to just stay away from the Westside (as if you needed a reason) (oh, snap) during that weekend.

Everyone, pat your great selves on the backs: I just found out over the weekend that our “5 Worst Trader Joe’s Parking Lots” post won LA Weekly‘s “Best Comment Thread” Web Award last week.  Over one hundred comments registered on the post, with most of you sharing your war stories, parking tips, and suggestions for alternate stores with better parking.  For all of you pissed off Angelenos who had enough of these damned parking lots and chimed in, thanks.  And great job.

This weekend: the gays.  Many gays.  We are coming to get you, in other words.

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People often complain that Los Angeles is an ugly city with no character, which is not really true, unless you’ve had the grave misfortune at seeing the city from the monstrosity that is the Hollywood and Highland structure.  To see LA, you really have to dig in and look.  And that’s exactly what Kevin McCollister, aka East of West LA, does, one photo at a time.

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Donuts at Randy's

Happy National Donut Day, everyone!!  This weekend, there’s a beer garden pop-up; sluts marching proudly; and, for those of you not in the Bay Area for the start of the AIDS/Life Cycle event, a biking adventure along the LA River.

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This weekend: Memorial Day!  Translation: free day for most of us, a day of mourning for far too many of us.  Hello, summer.

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I don’t watch TMZ, because Weho Daily is my TMZ.

Weho Daily reads like a cross between an old gossip rag and a PTA newsletter.  And I love it.  It’s not too serious, it doesn’t take itself too seriously, it doesn’t claim to be any more than it is, or any less.  It is, to me, one of the best examples of a neighborhood blog: it reports pertinent and not-pertinent news with a tone and sense of humor that embodies its surroundings perfectly, and all of its coverage is useful for everyone reading.  The serious stuff (the stories in the Crime and Safety section are no joke) is balanced with the scandalous stuff (“Chris Brown, New WeHo Resident, Becomes Violent in NYC”) and, balancing all of the above, is the unique, only-in-West-Hollywood stuff (“Is That a Rabbit in Your Pocket? Why Yes, Yes It Is”, summed up thusly: “drunk male in camouflage harassing passersby, has a baby rabbit in pocket”).

The only thing that might be better than the site is its Twitter account.  Whomever runs that account pays fantastic attention to various police scanners and is a mad genius.  Just when I’ve had enough of people tweeting about yet another problem I don’t care about, @WehoDaily tweets something like this: Read the rest of this entry →

This weekend: art walks, graveyard film screenings, and outdoor food fests.  In other words, it’s almost summer.

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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.

Driving down Sunset today (I got the Sad Foot, by the way, and indeed:), I saw that Uncle Jer’s, that little shop of curiousities and knicknacks and randomness across the street from the Vista Theater, was having an “End of an Era” sale.  I got home and checked: yup, sadly, Uncle Jer’s will be closing after 10 years.  Owners Rob and Cassandra simply say they want to spend more time with their two young sons and so it was time to move on.  There is a storewide 20% clearance sale from now until they close their doors at the end of the month.  They plan to have some sort of online presence after they close the shop, but those are tentative for now.

Sorry to see this little shop go – it was always such a delightful way to kill some time before catching a movie across the street.  Oh, sad foot.

Photo courtesy Lush Bunny and used under a Creative Commons license.

So many things to celebrate this weekend: local design, lesbians, comic books, trains, your mother.  Better get a move on.

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Salon has a great piece today about the urban lore behind the rotating Happy Foot/Sad Foot sign on Sunset in Echo Park.  For future reference, if you’re driving the street and see the happy foot side, you’re in for a great day; if you see the sad foot side, you should stay in bed.  The sign has inspired several writers, including Jonathan Lethem and David Foster Wallace, to incorporate this symbol of chance and fate into their novels:

The Happy Foot/Sad Foot sign became better known to readers outside the Los Angeles area when it appeared in Jonathan Lethem’s 2007 novel, “You Don’t Love Me Yet.” In that book, the main character, a musician named Lucinda, can see the sign from the window of her apartment: “The two images presented not so much a one-or-the-other choice as an eternal marriage of opposites, the emblem of some ancient foot-based philosophical system. This was Lucinda’s oracle: one glance to pick out the sad or happy foot, and a coin was flipped, to legislate any decision she’d delegated to the foot god.”

The article tracks down a few other pop culture references, which I found fascinating.  You probably don’t want to let a sign play footsies with your fate (ha ha), but it is a fun thing to watch out for when you’re headed down Sunset.

Photo courtesy rachelkramerbussel and used under a Creative Commons license.

The point is, it would be great if we knew where our food comes from, and how it got onto our plate.

Oh dear piggies.  Tasted quite delicious.  Cochon 555′s inaugural Los Angeles event on Sunday feasted and feted all things pork, with five heritage pigs prepared head to curly tail by five fine chefs in a friendly competition dedicated to educating the (monied) public about sustainable farming practices and the wonders of the resulting pork.  Ah, if only industrialized factory farming could fall out of favor!  In the end, Mozza’s Chad Colby won with his assorted cold and hot porky plates won, sending the other four chefs up the swiney river.  Eater LA has a nice recap of what went on in the judging room.

For those who missed the sold-out event, there will be an All-Star competition on July 24th at The Cosmopolitan in Las Vegas, with ten chefs and four “star butchers” (because I guess that’s a thing now) who, between the 14 of them, will prepare 14 different heritage breed pigs.  Tickets are available now ($150 general admission/$200 VIP).  If there was ever a time to show a client a great time on your boss’s dime, this would be it.  Most people I talked to at the event on Sunday completely thought it was worth the price of admission, if that kind of money is a drop in the bucket for you; these are, after all, high quality ingredients prepared by pretty great chefs.  One day, young grasshopper, McDonald’s will demand that all its meat come from farms that sustainably and humanely raise its animals and, on that day, things will change and quality meat will be accessible to most.  For our sake, though, I hope events like this convince the public before McDonald’s does.

More photos from the event after the jump.

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Hat tip to LA Weekly for this one: tickets to the Tim Burton exhibit at LACMA just went on sale. The exhibit runs from May 29 through October 31, but heads up, people: Tim Burton will be at LACMA on Saturday, May 28 to sign copies of the exhibit catalogue and his book, Art of Tim Burton.  To get a feel for the exhibit, check out Burton’s nifty website here.

General admission tickets are $20 and, if the avalanche of people at a similar MoMA exhibit is any indication, this one will be crowded.  Good luck trying to see past all the Goth kids.

Photo of LACMA by pink_fish13 via the Blogging LA Flickr pool.