Not happy with the LA Times decision to set up a paywall limiting you to content on the LA Times Web?  Blogger and ever diligent lover of all things LA has a way for you to overcome the paywall limits and is explained entirely in his post HERE.  Happy reading.

I’m guilty of more than a few.  You?  I particularly like the dig about moving to the West Side…a place I barely know as there is simply no easy way to get there from where I live and there is never any parking.  There, I said it.

gift bags for the neighbors all loaded and ready for delivery

Over the course of the last week or so we’ve given you ideas for Holiday giving.  These represented a variety of ways to give to charities and causes near and dear to us.

A list of those ways to give back a little of yourself to L.A.:

• FixNation
• Foothill Unity Center
• Cri-Help Treatment Centers
• Occupy L.A.
• Five Acres 
• The Library
• Children’s Hospital of Los Angeles
• Chihuahua Rescue

Of course it is never too late to chime in with you own ideas for giving back to the community in the comments here.

I’m going for the obvious here, but I don’t care.

Kids. Sick kids and their families.

Children’s Hospital of Los Angeles and Orange County are pretty much tops at what they do. And what they do is help sick kids, not just to feel better, but to feel like they can and will grow into normal, healthy adults, instead of some outcast, freakshow survivor of childhood illness. And that last part is worth a lot.

Go to www.chla.org for more info.

5 acres logo

Five Acres is a child services organization in Altadena that specializes in helping abused kids.  It started in 1888 as an orphanage for Los Angeles County and today has grown to include full service to families where child abuse and neglect is an issue.  They have been creamed with the loss of government and private grants as the economy has tanked yet the kids needs has not changed.  They are in need of financial assistance now more than ever.

I apologize for the late notice but they are in need of help with their “Holidays and Family Angels” program.  They have a deadline of today to help if you can.  What they need is volunteers to adopt a family of 2-10 members and provide them with Holiday gifts.  If you can spare the extra right now this is a great way to bring a little joy to the season for a family.  More information can be had on this program by contacting Danielle Barr at 626-798-6793 ext 2250 or emailing her at dbarr@5acres.org

For more information visit their web. Other contact information on the group: Five Acres – The Boys’ and Girls’ Aid Society of Los Angeles County,760 W Mountain View St.Altadena,CA 91001, (626) 798-6793

Christmas in full swing in my 'hood

Over the next several days the writers here at Blogging.LA will be sharing with you ideas to help those in need in the Los Angeles Area.  We will cover a variety of ways to help from charities to causes that we hold near to our hearts.  And giving doesn’t have to be monetary, it can be your labors, your gifts in kind even raiding your pantry to help others out.  You don’t have to be religious either, much of what we share will strike a cord at least with your humanist and spiritual side.

Of course, feel free to jump in on the comments with your favorite charity or cause that needs a little extra help this time of year…include links where possible so others can help if they are so inclined.

Its hard to pick out what is “normal”  Hollywood Blvd weirdness vs regular stuff on Halloween.  A few more in costumes and begging to be photographed videoed for free is probably the only difference. Its sort of Halloween Light compared to the insanity that is WeHo but it is subway easy and still festive enough.  His original blog post HERE.

John Cho and Kal Penn as Harold and Kumar

The folks over at 8 Asians is running the contest.  Pretty simple rules you ask a question of John Cho and Kal Penn, they’ll read them, answer them and pick a winner.  All the details HERE at the 8 Asians post.  Its very important you ask the questions on their post as they won’t be looking here.  Seriously, ask the actors not the character (like my knuckle-headed kids insisted on).

While you are at it take a look at the 8 Asians blog.  They look at numerous issues, serious and humorous that affect the Asian American community.  The humorous ones are the most fun, but its all good.

Just a simple plug and we are cross posting with permission.  As well as using their publicity photo with permission.

Perhaps this one would be more accurately described as “Vlogging” (in) LA, but I think it still applies. I had the pleasure of meeting the Nutty Nomads at the Kalbi Burger Challenge, and have been planning to write them up ever since. Their LA-based videos cover a variety of cultural events and popular attractions, such as the Japanese Obon Festival, Ciclavia, and the San Diego Zoo. (Okay, so they’re not all LA-based videos, but it’s still entertaining!)

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Hat tip to my friend Petrea Burchard over at Pasadena Daily Photo for turning me onto On Bunker Hill this morning via a tweet.

On Bunker Hill has blogs and historical archives of the history we lost when Downtown LA grew so explosively after World War II.  George Mann has quite the historical archive of images of some of the old homes that once stood on Bunker Hill taken in the 40′s and 50′s.  (They are for sale too if you are so inclined).  A little quoted from their blog to get you interested in checking out the site:

Bunker Hill is a ghost, and though you may today walk streets named Grand and Hope and imagine that you stand where once were grand Victorian homes turned flophouses, you are in fact one hundred feet beneath the old roads, which the city shaved away to make a wider footprint for the high rise tenants that replaced them.

Its always just a little interesting to see what we have lost in the name of progress.

It’s been just over five years since I first arrived here in Los Angeles, and even still there’s a part of me that wants to tense up a little bit when friends or family threaten to visit. “Where will I take them? What can we do?” This dilemma was one of the first things that really attracted me about Blogging.LA: Hearing firsthand accounts about the good, the bad, and the “meh” that our city has to offer from real live people. The Experience LA Blog (official blog for the bookmark-worthy ExperienceLA.com) is another fine source of that type of experience.

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Did ya know that  near Union Station was the village of Yangna back in the days of the Tongva Nation?  That name means “Place of the Poison Oak” and fortunately the settlers of the area saw fit to rename us to Los Angeles.  Need more history this month?  You just need to simply meander over to the Militant Angeleno blog where he is celebrating 230 years of Los Angeles city-hood with a giant history lesson on the native peoples who first inhabited the area.

He has several posts, the one I found most fascinating was the map of Tongva Villages overlaid onto a map of the L.A. area.  Militant Angeleno went as far as to take that map and list the villages by name and the modern city built over them.  I just wish I lived in one of those cities that had a Tongva name, I’d go as far as using it as my official city of residence instead of the current name…mail would still get to me using the zip code but how fun would that be to pay homage the natives that were here first and confusing stalkers at the same time.

Joker Beethoven, Jesus, and Justin Bieber all showed up

How awesome was yesterday’s Blogging.la 2nd Annual Donut Summit? A picture is worth a thousand words, so you can look at the pics after the jump and judge for yourself.

We had enthusiastic attendees (I estimate at least 100). We had the creative Blogging.la crew, especially Alexandra and Lucinda whose production and organization were off the charts. We had expert celebrity judges. And we washed it all down with stellar Intelligentsia Coffee. Yeah, it was something special.
More pics after the jump

Having been sufficiently worn down by Jack McFarland and Christian Siriano, America has developed quite a taste in recent years for a good sassy gay friend. You know, so long as they can’t get married. On the subject of being gay, sassy, and single in LA, I direct your attention to “I Naired My Balls For This.”

I must admit, upon hearing a friend describe this blog to me, I think perhaps I may have gotten my hopes up a little too high. As in, I was expecting that it might be a blog that has been updated in this calendar year. Not every Blogging (in) LA blog can be a winner, so perhaps this one can offer some lessons on how not to do it.

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Pablo Aya and El Gladiador

Loyal reader Evan commented to suggest we feature Street Gourmet LA as one of our Blogging (in) LA sites, and Evan’s clearly not the only fan. Street Gourmet won LA Weekly‘s Best Food Blog award a few weeks ago. Big ups for that. Stiff competition in this town, where food blogs seem to outnumber political blogs by some substantial factor. Street Gourmet specializes in Latin-American food, covering not just LA but Brazil, Mexico, Argentina, and elsewhere. Bill explains the blog’s focus this way:

Why street food? Because it’s profoundly delicious when you arrive at the right place, and it’s the most common dining experience we share among humans. Street food is the first restaurant experience of organized societies.

But really, I’m just a zealous messenger. I’m happy to share the delights and pleasures of a rapturous afternoon at Ensenada’s La Guerrerense, a random Argentine parrilla that will blow your mind, one of the best night’s of my life at a Brazilian temple of north-eastern cuisine right next to a favela,or coming across perhaps one of the best tacos LA has ever tasted.

It’s not just the focus that distinguishes Bill’s blog, however; it’s the writing. He’s an entertaining writer with a voice of his own. Take his most recent post from which this picture is pinched. How can you not want to read a post that begins with this sentence: “I have no idea how we ended up at a torteria made famous by a giant sandwich developed by a luchador (wrestler) after two weeks of relentless, gluttony, but there we were”? And the rest of the post lives up to its opening hook. Bill’s posts are thorough, informative, and fun. Thanks Evan, for the recommendation, and thanks Bill for the great blog.