On a whim last Saturday I responded to a tweet from @Koreatown about a burger-eating challenge, not exactly expecting that I had a real shot at getting into the contest. Many of my friends have remarked about my voracious appetite in the past, having punished myself through such gastronomical exploits as eating 24 pancakes at IHOP, 7.5 Dodger Dogs at a ballgame, and twice completing the Fatburger “Triple King Challenge” in under ten minutes.

Well, the folks at Koreatown got back to me, and they let me know I stood a good chance of competing in the challenge. The concern at that point in time was the lack of female participants. If I could wear a wig, they suggested, I might even stand a better chance. I started to get a little hope that I might be able to back out of this with my pride intact.

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Over the weekend, a few dozen old- and new-skool food stands, trucks, restaurants, and even some eateries from Baja trekked to the Rose Bowl to participate in the second annual Street Food Fest. There were three entry times, two during the day and one in the evening. I got there at 6 and, whether it was because of Carmageddon or because everyone decided to do the day trips, the crowd was comfortably crowded – very few long waits and ample time to sample everything you wanted to sample, and then some.  At the end of the day, a few awards were handed out: Javier Plascencia’s smoked oyster with chicarron and sea pickle was the Best in Show amongst the official judges and the crowd, and one of my favorites, Antojitos Carmen, won “Best Old School Street Food” for its huitlacoche huaraches. A few photos from the event below:

Would you like to see a man and his flip chart?

If so, you’re in luck: Demetri Martin is on tour, and we have a few tickets to see his one-man-plus-props show this Sunday, July 24th, at the Fox Theater in Pomona.  To win, just leave a comment below with your favorite Martin prop: that flip chart? His guitar? Ukelele?  Have at it, folks, and I’ll pick a winner on Wednesday.

On that first day of the anticipated/feared “Carmegeddon,” in Los Angeles , while other far fleeter pedalers were kicking ass over a jet plane in a race from Burbank to Long Beach, I was joined by four awesomely like-minded cyclists — Ann, Harold, Robert and Thaddeus — for a more casual 47-mile bike tour that began and ended in Silver Lake and included a climb up from the valley to the top of the Sepulveda Pass for a look at the ongoing demolition of the Mulholland Bridge over an entirely emptied 405 Freeway.

Unfortunately (or perhaps fortunately depending on your tolerance for stopmotion videography) I can’t show you the entire ride as my camera’s memory card filled up at Mile No. 37, just as we were entering Beverly Hills on the way back to our start point.

But it was an awesome day and an awesome group with which to ride.

Route: http://www.gmap-pedometer.com/?r=4642041

We are very excited to have assembled a crack team of Donut Experts who will be serving as celebrity judges at the Donut Summit!  The judges will vote in all of our voting categories (more on those soon!) and will also select a donut to win the Judges’ Choice award.

Our expert donut judges are:

Billy Vasquez, The 99 Cent Chef

The 99 Cent Chef’s blog is one you should be following, if you don’t already – it’s a tasty ode to cheap, creative cooking, largely using stuff you can find on the shelves of your local 99 Cent Store.  Our own Frazgo interviewed the Chef a few years back, and you can read his interview here.  Billy has been blogging and posting how-to recipe videos since 2006, when the writer’s strike inspired him to help people eat on the cheap.

And when it comes to donuts, the 99 Cent Chef doesn’t mess around.  He took on the heavy hitters and made his own Krispy Kremes in the video below, which, at current count, has over 160,000 youtube hits:

Jenn of Just Jenn Designs and Just Jenn Recipes

Jenn is a designer (if you don’t love her big bundts greeting card, you probably don’t have a soul) and a food blogger, and certainly knows her way around a donut or two.  From tasty plain baked donuts,  to chocolate sour cream donuts; from mochi donuts, to strawberry milk donuts, Jenn has written some of the most creative donut recipes I’ve seen.  And I am completely in love with her totally cute coffee and donut cupcakes!!

Shelley, the Fry Girl

We loved Fry Girl donuts at last year’s Donut Summit!  Shelley has a portable mini-donut maker, and you can hire her to do donut catering for events and parties.  Her donuts are tiny, homemade, melt-in-your mouth taste explosions (and I do not use the phrase “taste explosion” lightly), and they took home awards last year for Best Yeast-raised donut, Most Visually Appealing, and Most Unconventional donut.   Since Shelley’s donuts were such a big hit, it seemed only natural to have her back this year as an expert donut judge, and we are really glad to have her.

And, of course, we want to thank Intelligentsia for providing us with coffee to help the judges cleanse their palates between bites of donut.

From the Skirball Bridge (click for embiggification), taken at the midway point of today’s 47-mile Autocalypse Now Ride.

Carmageddon?  Karmageddon?  Is everything on your GTD list this weekend within a 2 mile radius?  Or are you really jonesing to drive that automobile around to hit up a food festival or two?  Decisions, decisions.

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Unlike most of the general city citizenry who’ll be doing its collective best to get away from the autocalypse this weekend, I’m just too curious not to get on my bike and go for a looksee by riding up into the eye of that storm that is the Sepulveda Pass tomorrow morning (July 16).

The Autocalpyse Now Ride

If you’re partial to longer rides and interested in coming along, I’ve charted out what’s roughly a 47-mile route that will begin and end at the Happy Foot/Sad Foot sign at Sunset Boulevard and Benton Way in Silver Lake (here). In a nutshell it will involve heading upstream along the Los Angeles River Bikeway in to Burbank where we’ll then access the Chandler Bikeway to North Hollywood and then the Orange Line Bikeway to the Sepulveda Basin. After a sidetrip to marvel at the monochromatical Kafka-esque vastness of the Sepulveda Dam spillway, we’ll make the climb up to the top of the pass where we’ll pause to fathom the rareness of the entirely dried up Interstate and perhaps imagine in the marked silence that there might be a valley-bound zombie horde made up of UCLA students and reanimated corpses from the Los Angeles National Cemetery trudging toward us from Westwood.

Presuming I’m not the only one on the ride, If I’m feeling particularly talkative I might regale you with the tragic/triumphant connection I have to the Mullholland Bridge that makes me kinda sad to see it demolished.

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Sure, it’s no Cinnabon, but Soundgarden’s show at The Forum next Friday is bound to be rockin.

Soundgarden was one of my favorite bands as a teenager. I plagiarized some of their lyrics in one of the first poems I ever wrote. The first band t-shirt I ever wore, which I stole from my older brother, was from their Superunknown tour circa ’94/95. I felt like a rock star when all the other kids in the 8th grade kept asking what the logo—a superman symbol with a ‘?’ in place of the ‘S’—meant. A couple years later, the song “Pretty Noose” was on repeat in my head the first time I ever ate mushrooms.

Now blogging.la has the chance to make one lucky reader feel like a rock star with a free pair of tickets (mushrooms not included) to see Soundgarden and The Mars Volta play next week here in LA:

KROQ presents
Soundgarden
The Mars Volta
Friday July 22, 2011
The Forum
Show time: 8:00pm
Door time: 6:30pm
Age: All Ages+
Complete Details | Buy tickets

For a chance to win, tell us about a Soundgarden (or The Mars Volta) memory in the comments section by 12noon on Tuesday, July 19th. Bonus points if you’ve plagiarized any of their lyrics for bad teenage poetry.

This third edition of Los Angeles’ CicLAvia events was a much, much quieter one. While originally planned to be as full-on as the original CicLAvia in October 2010 and the second one last April, organizers decided in May to throttle back and take the one planned for July 10 off the calendar so that efforts could be better focused on the extended one set for this October.

But that didn’t stop them from putting out the call to come ride the open roads with them on a nine-mile route beginning and ending at Boyle Heights’ Hollenbeck Park, and I met up with friends Stephen, Alice and Ann in Echo Park to pedal out to the Eastside and join in the festive, leisurely paced trek with a couple hundred other CicLAvians.

After crossing the 6th Street Viaduct and coming down Central Avenue to pay a visit to the African-American Firefighter Museum, we headed into downtown, where on our approach to Chinatown, the four of us broke off from the ride and continued up to the LA River’s West Bank bikeway. Saying our goodbyes at Atwater I headed back through Silver Lake home. Wonderful day. Wonderful ride.

Total distance covered: 21.98  miles
Route link: http://tinyurl.com/6g4785r

Bobby McFerrin

Give or take a couple hundredths of a percent, about 97.7526% of the world’s ears were introduced for better or worse to Bobby McFerrin by way of his unlikely 1988 No. 1 poptart Don’t Worry, Be Happy. But thankfully my pair met the a capella fella two years earlier when I went to see the 1986 film ‘Round Midnight, albeit unknowingly. I say unknowingly because Herbie Hancock’s version of the movie’s title track featured what my wondrous ears thought was an awesome trumpeter named Bobby McFerrin, and subsequent plays of the cut on LA’s then-jazz station KKGO made me go out and by the album. It was only when surveying its liner notes, which listed McFerrin as a vocalist, that it dawned on me that Bobby played himself and not a piece of brass. Blown away, I immediately went out and bought his 1984 album The Voice, an amaaaaaazing solo jazz vocal recorded with no accompaniment or overdubbing. To date I have listened to it 867 times.

But back around its 91st spin on my turntable in the summer of 1987 I luckily stumbled on the information that McFerrin was to be part of an upcoming night of jazz at the Hollywood Bowl, along with Sarah Vaughn and Modern Jazz Quartet, and I scraped the money together for cheap seats for me and my then-fiancee to be present.

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This weekend: a (free!) Best Coast show, Outfest 2011, and a CicLAvia community ride.  Also: the Royals are in town and, even though they are kind enough to grace us and our freeways with their presence on a weekend unlike some people, you best watch out for all that traffic.  Think of this as a practice run for Carmageddon.

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The City of Burbank is celebrating its 100th Anniversary today! Tonight, from 5pm to 10pm, you can join in the Centennial Celebration at the city’s “Party of the Century.” The free event is happening in Beautiful Downtown Burbank and will include appearances by local dignitaries and celebrities, an air parade, a mascot parade, a variety of live stage shows and special deals at many local restaurants. The night will be capped off with fireworks.

Burbank will always be a special place for me since it is where I first lived when I moved to L.A. nearly seventeen years ago. Besides, I only moved a few blocks outside of it, so it’s still a big part of my life. You can read a brief history here of the area that started as a sheep farm and is now one of the world’s preeminent media capitals.

Burbank’s Party of the Century is TONIGHT from 5pm to 10pm and is FREE!

Some of you have been around long enough (and are lucky enough) to have attended SUPERBALL – the crazy, eclectic, celeb-studded (but in a good way) event where damn near anything could and did happen.

Like all gigantic, out of control events, SUPERBALL kind of reached its peak and when the dudes behind it got busy with life, it went away for a while.

But nature abhors a vacuum, and out of the ashes of SUPERBALL came … TwentyWonder! A Carnival of the Mind, and a great cause too.

Plus, TwentyWonder just got featured on GoldStar. Discounted tickets are now $20 for a limited time. Jump on it, and then alert your friends!

Tickets: http://www.goldstar.com/today/los-angeles/2011/7/4

This Saturday! July 9th! From 6pm to Midnight!

21 and older with ID

VIP Tix include a souvenir medallion – very cool!

(hope this image cures the JumboTron effect – was posting from the phone)

If you’re not already familiar with Where The Hell Is Matt?, then the next four and a half minutes is my gift to you:

If you are already familiar, you probably didn’t mind watching again.

So, here’s the deal. Matt is making another video, and he’s going to be shooting in L.A. tomorrow! This is your chance to dance with Matt.

Matt will be at Watts Towers at 7:00pm tomorrow. From his email:

“PLACE: In the semi-circle next to Watts Towers
DATE: Tuesday, July 5th
TIME: 7pm

Here’s a Google map of the location:
http://tinyurl.com/6axeovs

The photo at the bottom of this email shows exactly where to meet. You
can also view the image here:
http://tinypic.com/r/b5joz5/7

When you get to the spot, look for the guy who looks like the guy in
the dancing video. Just come on over, say hello, and ask if I am Matt.
If I’m not Matt, I will let you know.

Before we dance, I will need to get your legal permission to appear in
the video. I’ll shout some legal-sounding stuff on camera and you can
just nod and give me a thumbs up if you’re okay with it. Kids under
18, please bring a parent or guardian, or at least bring a photo of
one of their thumbs to hold up (just kidding, don’t do that).

Wearing distinctive clothing will make it easier to spot yourself in
the video, but please do not dress as a licensed character (Mario,
Spider-Man, Sarah Palin) or I will have to blur you and that will make
everyone think you showed up naked or something. Also, please do not
show up naked.”

There you have it. It’s going to be a ton of fun, so come out and dance with Matt (and me.)