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.

I was unsuccessful in an attempt to leave a comment of support or of use on his blog. I was swinging too severely between outrage and sadness. Still am. So I came here. To tell you a little something about Ed — which isn’t much, but it’s better than me cursing or crying.

Probably about five or six or so years ago we first met online here at Blogging.la. In January 2007  I posted an open invite for any and all fellow lunatics to join me in making good on a long-time resolution to walk the entire 24-mile length of Sunset Boulevard from Union Station to the sea. Ed commented that he was interested but had other plans. When the fateful day came in February I was joined by another B.la reader Don Hosek and USC grad student Lisl Walsh and off we went.

After the jump, Ed magically appears around Mile No. 23.

From my February 11, 2007 write-up of the trek:

A few more miles to the 405 Freeway at mile 17 or so is where Don opted to retire and await a ride home from his wife rather than continue on and get blisters on his blisters. So after a sentimental group hug photo Lisl and I trundled onward alongside the long and winding and rising and falling road until somewhere approaching the final mile a white Mercedes convertible came to a stop beside us and its kindly pilot asked me “Are you Will?” to which I said “Who the hell wants to know!?” “Why yes, I believe I am but a far more exhausted version of him” wherein he wanted to know where all the other walkers were and Lisl said “We’re it!” and then he introduced himself as regular B.la reader Edward Padgett and compimented us on our perseverence before saying he’d meet us at Gladstones and we said cool. After he pulled away I only half (OK, two-thirds) jokingly asked after him if he’d give us a ride, but deisel-powered Lisl who had her eyes on the prize had already gotten back into step and onward we soldiered until we kicked ass in acheiving our PCH destination at 4:13 p.m. wherein we proudly retired to Ed’s congratulations and his table inside Gladstones and he bought us a round of drinks and we talked until it was time to get back up Sunset to catch the No. 2 MTA bus that would bring us back from whence we’d come. And it did.

My point with all this is to demonstrate what an absolutely awesome guy Ed was to go out of his way to be there to celebrate us when Lisl and I put an exclamation point at the end of that 24-mile sentence. From that very moment when he drove up to us from out of nowhere I’ve been a card-carrying member of his fan club.

Looking back over the last almost-40 years of the Los Angeles Times there have been parent companies, publishers, editors, writers, and photographers who have come and gone. But in that span of ever-increasing disposability Ed Padgett has been there helping make every single paper that I’ve picked up and read. It was something I proudly acknowledged any number of mornings standing there with the day’s edition fresh in my hands.

With such a pro-Padgett bias I just can’t rationalize continuing my subscription to the product of a company so decidedly and dastardly anti-Ed. I expect when I call to cancel today, I’ll do so via representatives in Bangalore or Manila who’ll be obligated to ask the reason why I’m terminating. I’ll tell them, “They fired a friend of mine.”

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.

More information on the art and artists can be found on Fine Art Trekkin’ Torrance and Fine Art Trekkin’ South Bay.

Deets: 9/3 & 9/4/11Saturday and Sunday Sept 3, 4 noon-6pm. South Bay Lexus.24777 Crenshaw Blvd. Torrance, California 90505

The 99 Cent Chef, one of our celebrity judges, videoed the whole thing and crunched down a few hours into a nice documentary of the day.  Fun crowd, fun times.

More picks of the day in my flickr set.  If you have images of the day you want folks to see sound off in the comments with a link to them.

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.

Calm before the storm

Lucinda and her handmade donut games

Some of the Donut Summit crowd

Hard at work at the registration table

Our celebrity judges

Our prize winners and their "golden donut" medals

That Joker Beethoven is a media whore

A Mariachi band stopped by to eat our donuts ...

... then sang for their supper

Donuts + antacid bottle. I swear this photo wasn't staged

However, I can't swear to this one

In 2003, Mike Schneider and Maria Villar, a young married couple living on Franklin Avenue, started a blog of the same name. More than eight years have passed, they have moved to another part of the city and added two kids to their family, but they continue to chronicle all things Los Angeles and more.

One of my favorite Franklin Avenue features is the restaurant reviews. They have visited hundreds of eateries and provided short and sweet write-ups with just the essential information. High points, low points, what they ate and whether or not they will go back. I’ve referred to it more than once. In addition to eating, Mike and family attend and report on lots of local events, such as the annual Festival of Books and ice skating downtown. They chronicled the remaining years of the Ambassador Hotel and its eventual demise. For the past few years, Mike and Maria have organized the Great Los Angeles Walk. Over 100 Angelenos joined them for the entire 15.8 miles of Wilshire in 2010.

You’ll also find frequent coverage of the local media on Franklin Avenue. Mike is a media insider and L.A is a media town, so it makes sense. Look for posts featuring everything from retro newscast videos to screenshots of Los Angeles locations appearing in tv shows, which I get a kick out of. Franklin Avenue is a personal blog and is peppered with posts about family and occasional out of town vacations. But, it always comes back to Los Angeles, the city that Mike and Maria call home and enjoy exploring.

another excellent xkcd comic

If you’re a regular Blogging.la reader you’ve seen some of our Blogging (in) LA posts by now. We’ve tried to be fair, covering some of our favorites like Weho Daily and the perhaps regrettably named Eastsider LA, as well as at least one that we wish might be different. We’ve interviewed the bloggers responsible for L.A. Can’t Drive and Green LA Girl. We’ve done a round-up of photo blogs and touched on food, real estate, and public service blogs.

Of course, the smattering of blogs we’ve covered over the past two weeks represent not even an iceberg tip of the sites devoted to LA, and we plan to keep highlighting one or two of our favorite and not-so-favorite LA blogs weekly. Drop a comment or write to one of us if you have a site you’d like to have us check out.

Twice-Seared Duck from Playa (photography by kevinEats)

In the lovely Blogging (in) LA series thus far, there has been a wide variety of news worthy, photographically stunning, and extremely useful blogs covered, but I’m here to bring in a little sweet & savory into the mix.  Food.

Foodies and Food Bloggers in Los Angeles are making a huge impact in the landscape of both culinary invention as well as the venues in which food is both served and enjoyed.  They are at the forefront of defining a new set of guidelines on which a restaurants success or failure can be measured, and perhaps one of the most prolific (& one of my personal favorites) food bloggers is kevinEats.  (http://www.kevineats.com/)

If you haven’t ever read his reviews, you are in for an undeniable treat.  A well versed photographer who is able to capture the mouthwatering essence of high end dining, kevinEats‘s knowledge of chefs du jour as well as their master counterparts is astounding, and his posts which generally pre-empt the debut of new restaurants to hit the LA scene exquisitely summarize  the experience and tantalize his readers to follow in his footsteps.  If there’s a new chef in town, you can bet that kevinEats will be there, hobnobbing with the staff, part-taking in tasting menus designed to make us wish we had better paying jobs and in general giving us a glimpse into which restaurants SHOULD be added to our never-ending bucket list.

But, reader be warned… this is not a blog to be consumed on an empty stomach, or you’ll find yourself angry that you’re not sitting in front of a plate of teriyaki foie gras or squid ink pasta.  Well, you might still be angry on a full stomach, but it won’t be quite as painful.

[This post is part of our Blogging (in) LA series]