This fast and this close:

It's NOT the end of the world as we know it, says Griffith Observatory Planetarium lecturer Kelley Hazen, just the daze of our lives.

I got an invite last week to come to a media preview of Time’s Up, the Griffith Observatory’s new planetarium show, so in between Good Samaritan Hospital’s never-miss Blessing of the Bikes yesterday morning and a long-overdue physical exam that afternoon, I biked up the hill to one of my favorite places in Los Angeles to take advantage of the Observatory’s hospitality and see how and why they decided to counter the anxiety being produced by those doomsdayers dead-set in their belief that the Mayans predicted the world to end this coming December 21 and that it’s so going to happen.

The answers are with a provocative and eye-popping new program in the Samuel Oschin Planetarium that opens on the beach next to the Santa Monica Pier, serene for a few moments until meteors start raining explosively down upon the westside, a huge tsunami closes in and a rogue planet grows larger as it bears down on its collision course with earth — accompanied by flying monkeys, of course.

Inside joke: Pictured during this doomsday scene is Lifeguard Station No. 5150. Since most of the station IDs are no more than two digits, I’m betting this was done in snarktastic reference to the police code that’s basically short for bugged-out basketcase kRaAzEe.

But just when all seems lost, Planetarium Lecturer Kelley Hazen steps in bearing a beautifully illuminated and illuminating hourglass to put a freezeframe to all the apocalyptic nonsense and go on with a visually stunning and intellectually compelling show that counters folly with fact and explores what time is all about.

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Patrick Boss of Bosses (click it to biggify)

Last week I looked up in the sky at the super moon. This week, I looked down and found this undated though well-worn pleasant surprise from a once or perhaps would-be street king on an old piece of sidewalk during an early morning dog walk up near the top of Descanso south of Sunset Boulevard in Silver Lake. All hail, Patrick.

I’ve lived in the Hollywood Hills for a while now. Used to be that navigating around the hills was a breeze, slow and easy, like a drive on a country road. Seriously, it was cool.
Not anymore. It’s turned into a crazy, frenetic, traffic-filled, tourist-stopping-in-the-middle-of-the-road-to-take-pictures mess.
In Beachwood Canyon especially. On the overlook up on Mulholland between the obnoxious tour buses, rental cars and hordes of people taking pictures, you take your life in your hands going around the bend. Forget parking laws, people stop suddenly in the street and jump out of their cars blocking traffic, which is a nightmare anyway on the narrow twists and turns. If you ask them kindly to move their car (it is, after all, stopped on a highway on a curve and a true scary traffic hazard) you usually get the finger and some shouting!
Relief may be in sight though.
After many meetings with Councilman Tom LaBonge, and assorted other corporate entities, Google has agreed not to include directions to the area for Hollywood sign seekers anymore. More importantly, most of the major GPS makers (Garmin most specifically) have agreed not to put it in the GPS units that go into rental cars out of LAX and Burbank airport.
It will be interesting to see in this age of people not looking on maps if this helps.
Now, if we could just find a way to eliminate the tour buses. Which are illegal and not supposed to drive (weight limits) on these streets!
Hello traffic control: Want to write some easy tickets? Just hang up there on any sunny day and wait! Tour bus after illegal tour bus will be stop as will lots of illegally parked cars!

Will Campbell's Manzanar Photo - click through for post

Sure, Angelenos are no strangers to the concept of a makeover. But when it comes to an egregious error on the part of elected officials—decades in the past—is it possible to get a do-over? County Supervisor Mark Ridley-Thomas thinks that it might be possible, at least, for the LA County Board of Supervisors to try to facilitate some healing regarding one serious misstep taken by the board in 1942.

Specifically, when our country decided that certain broad swipes of our populace could not be trusted based solely on their ancestry, the LA County Board of Supervisors voted 70 years ago to pass a resolution urging the President of the US and Congress to proceed with internment as soon as possible. According to one of his aides, current LA County Supervisor Mark Ridley-Thomas will introduce a motion to repeal that resolution at the 5 June 2012 meeting of the board.

We’ve blogged about the internment at blogging.la before, here and here. (And by “we” I mean Will Campbell!) It is certainly a dark page in the past of our nation, and one that we would like to think is mostly behind us. Alas, in the post-9/11 attitude toward Middle-Eastern Americans and the ongoing atmosphere of racial profiling and harassment that thrives under Joe Arpaio, perhaps that page hasn’t fully been turned just yet.

Still, steps such as this move by Ridley-Thomas—which on its face may appear not to change much of anything—can help to push the dialogue of greater racial tolerance and perhaps prevent further injustice as we progress as Angelenos, as Americans, as humans. In fact, this move will help to highlight the progress Los Angeles has made in overcoming institutional racism, as current Chief Executive Officer of LA County, William Fujioka, and the LA County Board’s Executive Officer, Sachi Hamai, are both Japanese Americans.

That, and everyone’s favorite Japanese-American actor and celebrity, George Takei, will also attend the board meeting and offer testimony in support of Ridley-Thomas’ motion. Goodness knows he’s familiar with the challenges of being a second-class citizen.

In the gallery below, view the board’s resolution as it was passed in January 1942.

This Saturday, CreateFixate will be presenting a photography show in downtown LA as part of MOPLA—”Month of Photography LA.” The event sounds like a good time, with art, music, video, and so on. Find out more at the Create:Fixate site or just read a snippet from an overly-long press release after the break.

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M*A*S*H ambulance with recent paint job

Two of my L.A. area loves, hiking and filming locations, were married recently when I joined a group of hikers to tour the set of the television series M*A*S*H in Malibu Creek State Park. As a bonus, much of the original Planet of the Apes movie was shot there too.

More pics after the jump

No, that picture is not a still from a new J-horror movie that’s bound to be remade for US audiences, and Mare Nubium is more than just a trench on the moon; there’s a new show opening soon at the Japanese American Cultural and Community Center in Little Tokyo, and we have FIVE pairs of tickets to give away! Here’s a description of the show:

Mare Nubium is the abbreviated performance of the kalpa, which was performed at the kick off of Pacific Standard Time at the Getty. In Sanskrit, kalpa means eons, or a long period of time. It’s said that once every hundred years, an angel comes down from heavens and swipes the surface of a stone with her silk sleeves until the rock disappears. Hiro Kosaka creates a symbolic parallel between the kalpa and the inevitable passage of time that slowly transforms our lives and the memories that we hold onto. Performers include Butoh (Japanese dancer) master Oguri, who leads a small company of dancers.

Find out more about the opening night show and how to win tickets after the jump.

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I like going out to the movies. And I like cheap stuff. Normally, however, the second-run theaters may have lower prices, but the experience can also be somewhat lacking, as well. (I did learn this weekend, though, that the cheap theater in NoHo has $1 hot dogs. Awesome!)

As of this month, Grauman’s Chinese has been a fine establishment for movie outings in Hollywood for 85 years. To commemorate the anniversary, they’re doing some low price showings of movies that are decidedly not first-run. Find out more from their flyer below:

Caine’s Arcade.

(h/t to Tony Pierce and Boing Boing)

After writing a post about Three Year Swim Club a few weeks ago, I was contacted by a small new-ish theater group called “Lonesome No More” and invited to come see their production of Sartre’s No Exit. As an English major who toyed with the possibility of declaring a philosophy minor as an undergrad, I was a bit embarrassed to admit that I had never read the French philosopher’s play. (I did read The Age of Reason around the time I finished my BA, so I’m not a complete slacker…)

In any event, while I was interested in seeing the Sartre play and hearing Travis Koplow‘s favorite line (“Hell is other people!”), I was also somewhat intrigued by the Lonesome No More! company. Los Angeles being a city so filled to the brim with aspiring actors and writers, I’m just so damned impressed by folks who are willing to step out and take a risk like starting a new theater company. Read more of what I learned about Lonesome No More! and my thoughts on No Exit after the break.

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Tilted sandstone formation in Red Rock Canyon

Forget your troubles, come on get dizzy. That’s what I did last weekend on a hike from Topanga Canyon area through Red Rock Canyon to the top of Calabasas Peak. The hike was about 4.5 miles, pretty short as the crow flies, but there was a lot of climbing (up to 2,000+ feet) and zig-zagging, plus we took some rock scrambling side trips, so it was challenging. One highlight of the hike was the rocky terrain, consisting of numerous sandstone outcroppings. At times I thought I was in Zion National Park, not the Santa Monica Mountains just minutes from L.A. Many of these rocks are tilted at Titanic angles, and it’s mind-boggling to think that they were once under sea, and how it has taken them millions of years to get to this point. There were even seashell fossils in some of the rocks, as the picture after the jump indicates.

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Screengrab from LA Times.com

Staffwriter Hector Becerra spends all of the front page article in today’s Los Angeles Times and plenty more after the jump building the implication that the Dodgers were the primary reason for the Chavez Ravine disgrace, including this patently disingenuous paragraph:

“But the removal of more than 1,000 mostly Mexican-American families from Chavez Ravine to make way for the stadium is a dark note in LA’s history.”

What a surprisingly reprehensible and negligent generalization that is.

I was relieved when Becerra eventually explained that the public housing debacle by the city’s leadership years before Los Angeles was even a gleam in Walter O’Malley’s eye was the true catalyst for the evictions. And he finally contradicts his previous fallacy by mentioning there were only a few families remaining — not “more than 1,000″ — in 1959.

But it is shameful and irresponsible that Becerra and his editors failed to reference those previous events higher up in the article and instead of qualification opted for false simplification in the form of an inaccurate chronological order to the dreadful sequence of events that destroyed the entire community, not just the handful of brave families who fought eviction to that bitter end.

I shall read any words appearing under Becerra’s byline now with a far more skeptical eye.

Update after the jump.

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Where there's smoke...

Spotted at 10:35 am, there’s a serious plume of black, black smoke just outside my office window near the border of Northridge/Chatsworth. There’s already a ghetto bird police helicopter overhead.

Anyone know what happened?

Update: NBC Los Angeles is on the story.

Update 2: About 20 minutes after the plume first appeared, the fire seems to have been successfully extinguished. Go LAFD!

Pair of Ford Focus at the Petersen Museum.

This promises to be an interesting event this coming Saturday on the steps of City Hall in Pasadena.  The folks at Clean Vehicle Rebate Project and the city of Pasadena are sponsoring the fair and it is free and open to everyone.

The EV Fair will feature a number of vehicles for test drives and on static display. As of now I have confirmed that a Nissan LEAF, Chevy Volt, Mitsubishi i-MiEV, Toyota Prius Plug-In and CODA will be available for attendees to experience at the event. (Unfortunately Ford dealerships have not quite received the all-electric Focus so the dealers will not be participating. They are, however, working with Ford to provide a Focus EV for the event).   UPDATE 3/29 Ford will have a new Focus EV at the event.   They will also have a number of electric vehicle charging equipment providers at the event displaying products and providing information on home installation). Read the rest of this entry →