AltCon, the famous Los Angeles comic convention, turned nine this week. Hundreds of fans and vendors turned out for the event, which featured the unveiling of a rare comic by wealthy creator Miles Sklar.

What’s that? You haven’t heard of Sklar or AltCon? That’s not surprising, because they only exist within the televised world of NUMB3Rs, on CBS.
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“I think there is a handful of people who hate America. Unfortunately for them, a lot of them are losing their homes in a forest fire today.”

– Glenn Beck, The Glenn Beck Program

I took my son out to dinner in Pasadena tonight, and came across this parking genius:

Note the bonus points for parking an SUV across two compact spaces. As a driver of a compact car, I salute the asshole who made me look for a space while he took up two of them.

Now, this isn’t your average, every day parking ‘tard story. This one gets even better . . .
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This weekend is your last chance to visit the Los Angeles County Fair until it comes back around next year, and unless you’re having elective surgery on Saturday, you should really make an effort to get out there and see it.

My wife and I went to the fair a couple weeks ago, and we had an absolute blast. While there’s certainly deep fried everything on a stick and lots of crazy carnival rides, there are a lot of other great reasons to make the drive to Pomona, including the opportunity to make The Shocker, in pink wax, out of your own hand.
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I’ve been a fan of Jonathan Coulton ever since I heard First of May. He popped up onto many people’s radars when he did an acoustic version of Baby Got Back as part of his Thing A Week project, and recently lapped his own popularity with RE: Your Brains.

I saw JC (as we who love his music like to call him) at PAX last month, and have eagerly anticipated his show tomorrow night in Hollywood.

If you like They Might Be Giants, or Weird Al, or music that’s awesome, you should come out to this show, because it’s going to rock out with its cock out.

He’s playing at the Paul Gleason Theater at 8:30, so now you know, and can use this knowledge to defeat Cobra. After you rock out.

As if it’s not bad enough to be suffering through the heatwave from hell, 60,000 of our fellow Angelenos are currently doing it without the benefit of electricity.

According to KNBC:

About 26,000 Los Angeles Department of Water and Power customers remained without service around the city, said Kim Hughes of LADWP.

Outside the city, outages affected some 33,700 customers served by Southern California Edison, according to the utility.

My friend Ryan is among them, and he’s been without power for sixteen hours. That’s just plain wrong, goddammit. We’re still living in the future, right? Get with the program, DWP!

If you’re reading this, you probably have power and it’s not an issue. But if you know someone who could be in trouble if they get overheated, like the elderly, small children, or bitchy bloggers, you can call 877-435-7021 to find out the location of your nearest cooling center.

Remember that giant clusterfuck at LAX that stranded about 117000 people? It turns out the whole damn thing was caused by one faulty NIC on one desktop computer.

The card, which allows computers to connect to a local area network, experienced a partial failure that started about 12:50 p.m. Saturday, slowing down the system, said Jennifer Connors, a chief in the office of field operations for the Customs and Border Protection agency.

As data overloaded the system, a domino effect occurred with other computer network cards, eventually causing a total system failure a little after 2 p.m.

Connors added that there was no evidence that this was linked to terrorism, which I suppose is informative, but annoys the hell out of me; from now on, whenever I stub my toe or show up late for a meeting, I’ll be sure to point out that it wasn’t terrorist-related, because we apparently have to do that for everything in the world now.

(via boingboing)

If you’ve been outside at all today, you may know that it’s hot in Los Angeles. It’s damn hot. It’s so damn hot, we should expect the obligatory “Hey! You can fry an egg on the sidewalk in Encino!” news story sometime in the next three days.

So consider this your friendly reminder to take care of yourself during the massive heat we’re supposed to get in the near future:

• Stay hydrated. Contrary to popular misconception, you can get dehydrated before you get thirsty. Sadly, beer doesn’t count as hydration, even shitty American race car beer.
• If you have elderly neighbors, you should check in on them while it’s still eleventy brazillion degrees out. If you’re lucky, you’ll get to hear some stories about WWII and some of that weird grandma candy.
• If you have children, keep them hydrated and out of the sun for extended periods of time. No, you can not give your children beer or grandma candy to keep them cool.
• Try not to run big appliances like washers and dishwashers during the heat of the day, because everyone else in the city will be running their air conditioners, and blackouts are bad, mmmkay?
• Did I mention stay hydrated? That’s really important.

Be careful out there, and stay classy, Los Angeles.

I met my friend Kevin Small when we were in writing workshops together at ACME several years ago. We did a critically acclaimed sketch show shortly after, called Crouching Tiger, Hidden Sunday Show. It was so well received by audiences and critics alike, it ran for months past its scheduled closing. I was so impressed with Kevin’s writing and acting, I asked him to be one of the founding members of my Sci-Fi sketch comedy troupe, Earnest Borg 9.

We’ve done a lot of shows at ACME together, including ACME: A Day in the Life, ACME Love Machine, and a bunch of episodes of ACME This Week, so I hope you’ll all trust me when I say: Kevin Small is a funny motherfucker.

Tonight, he’s closing his brilliant one man show The Ten Commandments of Sex (Male Version):

Come witness one man’s sexual journey through religious guilt, Southern Baptist style! This dirty and disturbing, yet heartwarming, coming of age tale reveals how hard it is to deal with sexual desires and still keep Jesus in your heart.

A bunch of industry people are coming to watch the show tonight, and Kevin wants to fill the house, so the show is free for anyone who wants to see it.

It starts at 8. Tell them Wil sent you from blogging.la, and win a free T-shirt*

*Actually, you won’t win anything, but you’ll still get in for free.

After we were passed by the asshole driver doing his best to kill himself and everyone else on the road, we drove up the 210 through La Tuna Canyon. I grew up in La Crescenta, and I know the hills on either side of the freeway very well, so when I noticed that they were the driest I’ve seen them in my entire life, I commented to my wife that this was a prime spot for a serious brushfire this fire season.

Well, it turns out that my thoughts control the future, because there’s a fire burning there right now. At the moment, it’s about 5 acres, and LAFD and county fire is already on scene. CHP says that the 210 West between Sunland and La Tuna Canyon will be closed indefinitely, so go do your asshole driving somewhere else for the next few hours, I guess.

There are updates in the LAFD Twitter stream, but so far nothing on local media websites. CBS2 has video, but you need to infect your computer with something called “Windows” to watch it.

KCAL had some aerial shots a few minutes ago, and since they’re not staying with it on FIREWATCH!!11 I’m hopeful that the whole thing will be under control and wrapped up shortly.

Last night, while driving on the 210 in Sunland, a car flew past us, doing well over 100. When it got about a quarter of a mile ahead of us, it braked hard, then jerked to the right, cutting off another car and nearly causing two vehicles to crash. Once it cleared those cars, the stupid motherfucker driving it sped off again, weaving in and out of the light traffic without any regard for the safety of the other drivers on the road.

“I hope the only person he kills is himself,” I said, to my wife.

About fifteen minutes later, we were in La Canada, just past JPL, when the entire freeway came to a halt. Emergency crews were in the fast lane, and highway patrol cars were beginning to move drivers over to the right side of the freeway.

“I bet you it’s that stupid guy who almost clipped all those cars,” my wife said. She was right.
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There was some sort of brushfire burning close enough to Dodger Stadium right now to put some serious smoke and haze on the field (I’m claiming it’s the reason the Dodgers were trailing the Braves 3-2 at the time.)

I headed over to KCAL’s website to see if there was some BREAKING NEWS@!!!1 but came up empty.

What I found, though, was something that I thought said a thing or two about the KCAL/KCBS audience.
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Out in East Pasadena, where Whole Foods competes for attention with obnoxiously large car dealerships and looking too long at a woman on the corner will get you propositioned for a “date,” there is a gentleman’s club called Pleasures.

I’ve never been, but according to my friend Steve, it’s “the place strippers go when nobody else — not even Hooters or Craig’s List — will have them.”

However, Pleasures got itself a bit of free publicity this week when it was raided by the fuzz:

More than a dozen performers at an adult club in Pasadena had to take an unscheduled break late Friday when police cited them during a surprise inspection.

Pasadena police say the 14 performers at Pleasure’s Gentlemen’s Club were engaging in excessive nudity and illegal contact with patrons.

The performers were cited at the club and released.

There were seventy customers in the joint when John Q. Law came knocking, which tells me that maybe my friend had no idea what he was talking about. That, or there’s a particular fetish for really hideous strippers. Hey, whatever bumps your gind, dude.

But the citations seem a little silly to me. Excessive nudity? At a strip club? Illegal Contact? At a strip club?
What’s next? Excessive beer in a bar? How about excessive annoying parents at a little league game?

This sounds more to me like someone missed their kickback to the right people. Either way, if you’ve been to Pleasures and care to weigh in, feel free. Your secret’s safe with us.

Dear little baby Jesus, who’s sittin’ in his crib watchin the Baby Einstein videos, learnin’ ’bout shapes and colors, thank you so much for ending HILTONWATCH!!11

TMZ.com reports that Paris Hilton has been ordered back to jail to serve out the rest of her sentence, medical conditions be damned.

Paris Hilton was just ordered back to jail in Lynwood to serve out the remainder of her sentence! She’ll get credit for at least 5 days already served.

Media attention should turn to the morons who decided to treat this spoiled rich whore differently than anyone else who would face jail time, but it will most likely focus on the sideshow aspects, in full-on Schadenfreude-o-Vision.

I’ve been working all morning, and listening to The Cure is much more conducive to actual work than listening to local news, but my mom called earlier and told me that cable news broke away from G8 coverage to do an OJ-style chopper chase of the Sheriff driving the stupid spoiled rich whore back to court.

While the coverage is retarded, at least the medical condition of being a rich, white celebrity has been (temporarily) pulled out of the pile of get out of jail free cards . . . for the moment. Apparently, stupid spoiled rich whore is going to appeal. After already being convicted and sentenced. Brilliant.

I think Harvey Levin is going to buy a new boat before this is all over.

3 o’clock afterthought: Valley Jew expresses quite eloquently why so many people are cheering about this:

In the reality-created world of the last six years, I’ve often felt like our lives had been taken over by a Joe Millionaire/ Vince-McMahon/ WWE-type logic where motivations are so clearly obvious that the only goal of the whole shitty endeavor was to keep idiots tuning in . . . [P]erhaps this is a sign that people are tired of making excuses for the over privileged just because we’d like to be over privileged one day ourselves. Perhaps we will now value some sort of accountability for ourselves and others.

I think the Jew is on to something there. There’s a growing sense of plutocracy fatigue from those of us in the great unwashed masses, and this little episode seemed to touch that nerve rather forcefully.

Oh help me sweet little baby jesus in your golden fleecy pajamas, for I am on HILTONWATCH!!11

It’s similar to GATORWATCH!!!1, but with one less !, an extra 1, and a hero who isn’t nearly as sympathetic or attractive.

According to TMZ, Poor baby Paris just felt really, really sad about being in big tough mean old jail, and simply couldn’t handle it.

Law enforcement sources tell TMZ Paris Hilton’s medical condition was purely psychological and that she was in peril of having a nervous breakdown, and that’s why she was released early this morning.

Assuming this is true . . .

Are. You. Fucking. Kidding. Me.

Guess what, you stupid spoiled rich whore — it’s fucking jail and you’re not supposed to enjoy it. See, jail is where you go when you drive drunk and put everyone’s lives on the road with you at risk.

I seriously hope that every single inmate in the LA County system immediately demands consultations with psychiatrists, especially everyone who is serving time for non-violent offenses like possession or parking tickets, so they can receive equal consideration.

After all, jail is the kind of place that can make someone feel really, really sad, and that’s just not right . . . if you’re rich and white.