I call this The Nordstrom Effect.  It reminds me of those Nordstrom salespeople who, though typically not young nor Goth, are just as overly helpful as the sex shop girls.  In both cases, what starts out as accommodating quickly becomes annoying.

At Nordstrom, I think the salespeople do this because (1) commission is likely a big part of their compensation; and (2) they want to uphold Nordstrom’s well-deserved reputation for excellent customer service.  However, at the sex shops, I think it’s nerves.  Specifically, the salespeople and their managers figure that many customers in their stores are uncomfortable and in need of hand-holding.

And sometimes they are right.  I’m sure there are many people — perhaps women more than men, if this series is an indication — who feel shy about striding into sex shops and picking out personal items.  (Guys often have their own problems in other stores, such as when picking out lingerie for their women).

The cure for The Nordstrom Effect, and the shyness which may cause it, can be found online.  There are tons of Internet retailers out there, such as Adam and Eve , 123 Adult Store, and Sex Toy Sex.org (links NSFW, obviously), where you can shop in the privacy of your own home.  Moreover, some of the Los Angeles area shops profiled in this series provide online shopping as well.  Many of the well-known sites will send your items in discrete packaging designed not to raise the red flags (or any other parts) of nosy neighbors and pervy postmen.  Coincidentally, I met one such retailer the other night, the woman who runs the Los Angeles-based Sex-Butter.com (not to be confused with Mr. Zog’s Sex Wax for your surfboard, unless you are using “surfboard” as a euphemism), who sells her products primarily online.

Of course, it is a fun experience to grab your sweetheart or friends and check out a sex shop or three in the flesh, whether as a bona fide shopper or simply a tourist.  Our writers in this series have done just that, profiling some of the sex shops they like in the Los Angeles area.  However, if avoiding The Nordstrom Effect is a priority, then shopping online might be just what the Naughty Nurse ordered, on Valentine’s Day or any other day.

[Part of blogging.la's "We've Got Valentine's Day Licked" series]

LAPD Bomb Squad by Clinton Steeds (2009)

I came home this evening to find a lot of police activity in my neighborhood and had to do a little detour. I realized that the happenings were pretty close to my street. In fact, one end of my street, about half a block from my house, was yellow taped off. I really wanted to find out what was going on, but wasn’t too keen on wandering over to the scene. I learned some basic information from a neighbor (suspicious package, homes evacuated), but I wanted to follow the progress.

Someone suggested I go to an online police scanner, which hadn’t occurred to me. I found what looks to be a pretty good resource. Radio Reference.com’s Los Angeles County page has live communication feeds from a variety of police, fire, and EMS departments. I tuned in to the Los Angeles Police and Fire-San Fernando Valley Divisions broadcast and  learned fairly quickly that the situation was resolved and that the “resources” were being released. In a relatively short period of time, I heard all kinds of things from animal bites to suspects being apprehended. I know I’m not the only one who get frustrated when up-to-the-minute info is not readily available, even on Twitter. You might want to bookmark this one.

I am now being followed by the Mayor of Los Angeles.

Do I consider this my crowning achievement as a Metblogs contributor? Yes. Do I think it will end well for either party? Probably not.

Consider my most recent tweet regarding @Villaraigosa, after the jump.

Thanks for the follow. Mr. Mayor. Keep your friends close, and your enemies closer.

Which means, at this point, you should be following most of the city.

OK Go performing at USC Conquest 11/21/09 Photo by Jodi

If you’ve been anywhere near the internet this week, you’ve probably seen the new, innovative video from local band OK Go. The group is well-known for its viral one-take creations, most notably “The Treadmill Video,” in which the guys did a fairly complicated routine on four treadmills for their song “Here It Goes Again.”

To promote their third studio album Of The Blue Colour Of The Sky, which is a fantastic, Prince-inspired record, OK Go has pushed the DIY music video to a new level. Teaming up with L.A.-based creative powerhouse, Synn Labs, the band’s ambitious concept involving a massive Rube Goldberg machine was brought to life.

The engineers were tasked with creating the device with the requirements “that it had to be interesting, not “overbuilt” or too technology-heavy, and easy to follow.  The machine also had to be built on a shoestring budget, synchronize with beats and lyrics in the music and end on time over a 3.5 minute song, play a part of the song, and be filmed in one shot.  To make things more challenging still, the space chosen was divided into two floors and the machine would use both.” The geniuses of Synn Labs spent a few months in a warehouse in Echo Park creating a physical manifestation of the band’s vision.

In case you haven’t joined the over 3.5 million people who have watched the latest “This Too Shall Pass:”

If you like the video and/or are a fan of the band and you’re in Los Angeles wondering how to spend your Friday night, you should head over to LACMA at 8pm for the band’s official West Coast video release party. Not only will you get to see the video on a screen bigger than your computer monitor, but you will be treated to a rare acoustic set by OK Go, a Q&A with band, and a DJ set by the band’s own Tim Nordwind. But wait, there’s more! Select pieces of the Rube Goldberg machine featured in the video will be on display. Yes, OK Go makes kick-ass videos, but they are also consummate musicians who are great live.

Since the event is in a few hours, there are only a limited number of tickets available at the box office. I’d say it’s worth taking a chance. Ticket sales to the event benefit the museum’s Muse group.

The problem is, I keep learning the results from these Internet sources hours before seeing them for myself.  I learned of Hannah Kearney’s mogul skiing gold medal, Apolo Ohno’s record-tying silver medal in speed skating, and the generous figure skating judges doling out high scores to skaters who fell during their short program, all before seeing it on tv.  I tried appealing to my Twitter peeps who aren’t located on the West Coast not to post Olympics results, but they seem to need to do so, as if their reactions won’t count unless shared electronically and immediately.

I’m sure some of you are more computer-advanced than I, and can tell us how to get a great webcast of the Games on our computer in real time, even on our big-screen hdtv.  If so, I would love to hear the solutions.  I investigated this briefly, and did not find a satisfactory solution — for example, the online ads I saw were even more annoying than those on NBC.

I’m afraid the only solution I have found to watch the Winter Games unspoiled by spoilers is the most radical solution of staying off the Internet altogether.

If you’ve been on Facebook in the last couple of months, then you might have been inundated with requests to vote in Chase’s Community Giving Facebook Campaign. With financial resources drying up for many organizations, this campaign has been a rare opportunity for non-profit orgs to come by cold, hard cash by simply leveraging their social media muscles. Out of more than a half million eligible organizations, the Top 100 vote getters in Round 1 have moved on to the final round of voting, which is happening now. Top 100 orgs are already the recepients of a $25,000 grant, but the top organization gets $1 million.

Six Los Angeles area organizations are in the running for the $1M: [links go to Facebook pages]

In the spirit of full disclosure, I have been supporting the Center for the Pacific Asian Family (CPAF) in this campaign, since I feel that their “big idea” has the greatest potential for immediate impact on those who are living in Los Angeles, right now. CPAF was founded to help address domestic violence and sexual assault in the Asian and Pacific Islander communities. Up to 60% of Asian and Pacific American women experience domestic or sexual abuse in their lifetime, and are the least likely to report the abuse. Since the economic downturn in 2008, domestic violence has been on the rise. With cutbacks in state funding, non-profits like CPAF are forced to turn away more callers trying to flee a violent home.

CPAF proposes to fund a multilingual call center (beyond Asian languages) to support emergency shelters and rape crisis centers to stretch their resources to serve more survivors of domestic and sexual abuse. Currently, each of the 20 domestic violence shelters and 6 rape crisis centers in Los Angeles County run their own 24 hour hotlines. One joint hotline would benefit everyone, but the resources to plan for and develop a sustainable joint hotline do not exist. If CPAF receives the Chase dollars, it will invest in developing the technological and programmatic infrastructure to handle crisis calls for all partnering agencies, in over 30 languages, at CPAF’s Multi-Lingual Call Center. CPAF will also extend the hotline services to include ONLINE CHAT to make services more accessible to survivors. CPAF will also establish VIDEO CONFERENCING capacity at partnering agencies, which will allow bilingual staff based in CPAF’s Call Center to provide multi-lingual services throughout Los Angeles County. Materials, including multi-media productions in various languages, will be collected and developed to be shared with partnering agencies and larger community through an ONLINE LIBRARY.

All that said, the Asian American community has been banding together in this campaign to get folks online and to VoteCPAF.org! This is significant in terms of community organizing because it is probably the largest and most effective grassroots online effort done by the Asian American community– one which has gotten big names from different fields together behind one cause. A series of PSAs have been released on YouTube, and I share with LA Metbloggers one of my favorites, Danny Cho as Kim Jong Il folllowing up on his “eHarmony” video and tells us how much he loves women– asking us not to “violence women domestically or internationally.” It’s a funny video with a a serious message.

There are only 3 days left to vote in this campaign, so definitely check out the various worthy candidates for $1 million.

Meant as a hub for local online sports coverage one could set as their homepage, the site features SoCal-specific “SportsCenter” segments, local breaking news, and direct links to pages for all the major pro teams, including the Galaxy, Chivas USA, the LA Sparks, as well as the Angels and Ducks. There’s also a “Headlines” tab you can click to view nationwide sports headlines, in case you care about what happens outside of our little bubble. ESPN launched similar local sites for Dallas, Boston and Chicago earlier this year, and the sports network opened a new broadcast studio (along with an ESPN Zone sports bar) Downtown at LA Live this past spring.

But the best part of the site is the local team blogs and columnists, providing quick-access to news and columns about your favorite teams that is also easy to subscribe to by e-mail or RSS feed to keep up on everything. The other ESPN city sites have Twitter accounts you can follow as well, but as of this writing, @ESPNLosAngeles exists but hasn’t tweeted a thing. The @ESPNLosAngeles Twitter account is also up and running, providing links to stories on the site. So far there’s a USC blog (but no UCLA blog yet), a Clippers blog (sort of – it links to the outside ClipperBlog.com, part of an ESPN affiliate network), and of course, that Lakers Blog, which is basically a direct transplant from the LA Times’ Lakers Blog. Brian and Andy Kamenetzky, who just yesterday afternoon announced their departure from LATimes.com, pick up at ESPN right where they left off, except now the blog is called “Land O’ Lakers”. The Lakers Blog was regularly one of the most-visited on the site, sometimes getting over a million page views per month. No announcement has been made yet as to who or what will replace the brothers at LATimes.com. It seems that, at least for now, a few different staff writers are taking turns contributing posts to the Lakers Blog to keep it going.

Other columnists at ESPNLosAngeles.com include Ramona Shelburne and Tony Jackson, both formerly of the Los Angeles Daily News, Mark Saxon, late of the Orange County Register, Arash Markazi from Sports Illustrated, and former NBA.com writer Dave McMenamin. Now, granted, in print journalism’s current state a good writing gig with a major brand can be a very special opportunity, but with what amounts to an acquisition of the Lakers Blog, ESPN is clearly looking to take a bite out of the readership of LATimes.com and other local news sources.

The New York Times warned of this back in July, when the LA site was announced following a successful test-run in Chicago:

In less than three months, ESPN Chicago has become the city’s top sports site, attracting about 590,000 unique visitors in June, according to data from comScore, an Internet measurement company. Second place went to The Tribune’s online sports section with 455,000 unique visitors.

ESPN Chicago does not seem to have cut into The Tribune’s online sports audience as much as it has slowed its growth, according to a review of the traffic data.

At The Los Angeles Times, which is about to face ESPN head-on, the associate editor, Randy Harvey, said: “It would be foolish to underestimate ESPN, but it comes down to resources. I don’t see them being able to replicate what we do.”

Of course, Harvey said this well before the LAT lost two bloggers, but it did follow the Times shutting down team-specific blogs such as those for USC and UCLA and merging them all with The Fabulous Forum back in February. Many of their niche blogs have been shut down in the past year, but its doubtful a blog on such a popular subject that arouses so much as passion in Angelenos would be eliminated or folded into another blog. It remains to be seen how many of the Kamenetzky brothers’ readers will follow them to ESPN after years of loyalty, or how many might stay behind to see what the Times has in store for the future.

Now, lots of readers, myself included, read stories from both ESPN.com and the LA Times already, so this new addition may not make a huge difference, at least not yet. But as ESPNLosAngeles.com grows and adds more blogs (you know a Dodger’s blog has got to be coming, right?) and handy Twitter accounts for all the teams like ESPN’s Dallas and Boston sites have, its appeal could widen and pull more readers from LA Times and elsewhere, as well as provide new content to ESPN fanatics who don’t follow a lot of local sports online otherwise.

The one thing I can tell you for sure, though, is that (since, for some silly reason, ESPN still hasn’t bought it and people have already started incorrectly using the URL), the dude who owns the domain ESPNLA.com is about to make a lot of dough.

Winter Silence

Tomorrow night is the Longest Night of the Year to snuggle up to someone warm.

The Solstice is exact for us here in Los Angeles at exactly 9:47 AM this Morning. It’ll be the shortest day, and the longest night of the year. And that’s pretty much the story for the whole hemisphere.

But in L.A. it’s at exactly 9:47 AM.

See, my Pagan sensibilities come with a certain amount of anal-retentiveness. My Astrological curiosity comes with a little exactitude, ya dig?

I mean, y’ever wonder exactly when sunrise and sunset happen on a particular day? Maybe exactly when a New or Full Moon is? Ever find yourself trying to do the math from Greenwich Mean Time, and wondering whether you needed to subtract an hour or not?

Okay, probably not. But for all you amateur astrologers out there who aren’t ready to invest in their own telescope, or all you fledgling vampires out there who want to avoid bursting into flames or looking conspicuously sparkly, a few links for current Los Angeles data:

Seasons, Equinoxes and Solstices
Sunrise and Sunset
Moonrises and moonsets (That’s Right.)
Moon Phases
Interestingly enough, (at least, if you read this far, I assume it is) the Griffith Park Observatory has a list of Moon Phases, as well. They differ slightly, by about a minute, on a few of the times. To be fair, the “Time and Date” website claims an accuracy of “within one minute,” so there yeh go. You can make you’re own decision about who has the final word. Personally, the Griffith folks are local, I been there, I’ma go by what the local kids say, but you do as you like.

So, there it is. All the Loony info you need. Now if I’d just tell you something useful, like when it’s okay to park in a green zone. (Never, that’s my space on Sunday!) But that kind of thing only happens once in a Blue Moon.

Which, incidently, occurs this year on New Year’s Eve. (At exactly 11:13 AM)

Access to its archives is one thing LAT is offering as part of the deal, and they are also touting that it’s available at 5:30 AM everyday, unlike the online edition, which is available the preceding midnight, contains much more news and, um, it’s free– for now.

I guess this is a first step (and trial balloon) for the online paid subscription model we’ve been hearing about from other newpapers in dire straits– which means the vast majority of them.

As a side note, PBS.org is streaming Inventing LA, the recent doc about the Chandlers and the LA Times. Worth a look.

Watch the Derby Dolls from the comfort of your own Intertube.

Tonight at 6:30, the Los Angeles Derby Dolls are taking the excitement of high-speed all-female banked track roller derby out of the Doll Factory in Historic Filipinotown and bringing it live to the entire planet via the World Wide Web.

Varsity Brawlers (the pretty team) will take on Tough Cookies (last year’s champs) in a full-length exhibition game streamed live to your very own home, office, or car (if you’re on your laptop, parked down the street stealing WiFi.)

Now how much would you pay? But wait! There’s more!…

Have you seen the trailer for Drew Barrymore’s directorial debut, “Whip It?” I can’t wait to see it when it’s released this weekend. Barrymore, Ellen Page (“Juno,”) Juliette Lewis (“Old School,”) and other stars from the movie will be at the event for a post-bout Q&A. I’m told you can submit your questions online, too. There will also be a live half-time concert by Landon Pigg.

All for the low, low price of…FREE. That’s right! All you have to do is log in to www.derbydolls.tv at 6:30pm and it will all stream right out of the internets and into your eyeballs and ear holes.

I’m kind of excited about this, so there’s even more. Click the link and follow me…I’ve written about the Derby Dolls before, so you already know I’m a big fan. It’s no secret that I’m a bit of a roller derby evangelist. What you may not know is that as of about a month ago, I’m also a new member of the Enforcers (Derby Dolls ref team.) You can call me Third Degree Burns! I’m hoping to have some roller derby insider stories for you soon, but so far I’ve been having too much fun to stop and write about it. Can I tell you the best part about my new team, though? The Enforcers always win.

We here at LA MetBlogs may have had an indirect hand in bringing another disciple to roller derby, as well. Our very first Derby Dolls ticket winner back in February used those tickets to attend his very first bout. He hasn’t missed a bout since, and now he is one of the new Enforcers, too. I won’t tell you his government name, but when you come out to see him at the Doll Factory he’s known as Schindler’s Fist.

As exciting as tonight’s webcast is going to be, once you see it on the screen you’ll want to come see all of the action live and close-up. Luckily, you can do just that this weekend! Tonight’s exhibition game is a preview of the official bout happening this Saturday, October 3. Here’s a little teaser:

These bouts are known to sell out, so get your tickets now at the Derby Dolls website. Just scroll down to the big pink box that says “Buy Tickets Online Now.”

Log in tonight and see it on the web. Come out Saturday night and see it live. After the bout Saturday you should find me, say hi and tell me what a great time you had. I already know, but it’s nice to hear anyway.

Are you as excited about tonight’s webcast, Saturday’s live bout, or “Whip It” as I am? Leave me a comment below. Fellow roller derby fan? Or just think I’m a crazed roller derby cultist? Raise your voice and be heard (via text below.)