Category: Los Angeles

I admire your tenacity at remaining relatively unchanged for more than a decade but lately I’ve noticed some fraying around the edges of your social fabric. Your village has accumulating a lot of village idiots and it’s time to flush them out and enroll everyone in some remedial etiquette. Consider this some tough love.

If you are in a car:

1. The universal sign for “I’m waiting for a parking space” is to turn on your right-hand turn signal. You may only do this if you see someone who is visibly getting into their car with an intent to vacate the parking space. Do not stop on Larchmont in the hopes that someone *may* vacate a space.
2. If you are behind someone who is waiting for a parking space to become available you may not a) use your horn unless a suitable length of time has passed. b) pass the car in front of you by veering suddenly into the left-turn lane and accelerating profoundly.
3. Parking spaces are defined as, well, parking spaces. Stopping your car in the middle of Larchmont Blvd. while you “dash” in for your coffee does not qualify as legally parking your car. If anything, this qualifies you to have your car crushed and melted – even if (or especially if) there are still passengers inside.
4. Remember, even if you are parking you still have to follow the rules of the road. You may not disregard stop signs, turn signals, and randomly walking pedestrians even if there is an empty parking space ahead.

Exceptions to 1, 2, 3, and 4: if anybody (and I do mean anybody) is on a mobile phone, you are free (if not obliged) to open fire. However, I believe Miss Manners suggests firing a warning shot over the miscreant’s head first.

And if you are a pedestrian:

1. Although you might prefer to think of Larchmont as a sleepy little village it is still in the middle of Los Angeles – a very busy city! If you are in a group of three or more people, please do not walk in tandem across the sidewalk if there are other people attempting to pass. If you are piloting a SUV-sized baby stroller barge, the maximum limit is one across.
2. Driving an oversized baby stroller does not give you an automatic free pass to cut in line, stand in the middle of doorways, or otherwise be a road hog.
3. If you are crossing Larchmont Blvd. please use the crosswalks… Nah, screw that. Just use some common goddamn sense. If you run out directly in front of a driver, sure they are legally required to stop, but you’re also running 2-1 odds of causing a rear-end collision between circling parkers who aren’t paying attention to anything other than parking.
4. If you are crossing Larchmont Blvd., please cross the street! Do not stop in the middle of the street to talk to your friends, talk on your phone, etc.

Thanks everyone! It is my hope that with these suggestions we can all cooperate and make our difficult lives a little bit easier. Otherwise, may the forces of the Great American Corporate Leviathan mow every single inch of your “village” down in its tracks and sow the ground with radioactive salt. I’ll miss Sam’s Bagels, but if it’s going to continue to be such a pain in the neck to deal with Larchmont Village I can handle scratching it off the map.

P.S. To the two douchebag guys and one douchebag girl who felt the need to become a slow-walking roadblock on the sidewalk: OK, sure… I’m vaguely irritated at having to walk into the street to pass you guys even after I attempted to excuse myself through, but did you really have to offer up a stream of “some people” and “what’s your hurry?” criticism? It’s very high schoolish and not age appropriate for folks like you who are in your early 30s. I have to admit that I was initially thrown because you guys were still clinging to your Part Time Punks tote bag, your dubious hipster haircut, and your loud self-assumed intellectual broheim critique of Z Pizza as being “too California.” Guys, you are in California but even we managed to get rid of the pink polo shirt and white jeans combination some time ago. It’s just embarrassing now and not at all ironic. Actually on second thought, please just go die now. k thx bye.

Sheesh, I feel like some sort of emo blogger. Oh wait a sec…

Somewhere awhile back I read that coyotes were being sighted in Hollywood. I certainly didn’t expect to see one as far south as Detroit and 4th St. near La Brea. This guy was just loping along 4th probably looking for some grub and/or water. I suspect that after the Griffith Park fire, there’s probably a lot of critters looking for the same.

(Blurry phone cam picture shot out my car window)

Taken outside my workplace in Glendale about 10 minutes ago.

The ScannerBuff Network is streaming radio traffic from L.A. County Fire’s Mutual Aid channel if you want to listen in. Also see Flickr photos tagged fire.

I can’t be the only Los Angeles blogger that has noticed the similarity between this

And this

Sheesh, KCBS only just moves out of Columbia Square to their new Studio City digs and already they’re declaring war on Los Angeles. I would have loved to have been a fly on the wall in the focus group that approved this ad campaign.

QC has been out of town for a bit and didn’t get a chance to dogpile in with photos of the Burbank fire. However, I’ve pretty much concluded that every new “Los Angeles Is Doomed” book or news article will be illustrated with that picture of flames approaching the Hollywood Sign.

Anything that keeps more people from moving here…

Mark Gribben’s posts on The Malefactor’s Register are better than 85% of any true crime series out there. ‘The Murder Of Captain Wanderwell” should be on the short list of the all-tie great Los Angeles true crime stories.

Take a suspected German spy, his beautiful wife, a soldier-of-fortune with a grudge, throw in a British peer, a mysterious “man in grey,” allegations of mutiny, and an unsolved murder aboard a barely seaworthy ship manned by an amateur crew of adventurers and you have a Hollywood melodrama that seems to write itself.

But the murder of 43-year-old Captain Walter Wanderwell in 1932 wasn’t dreamed up by Tinseltown scriptwriters. It happened in Long Beach not too far from Hollywood when Wanderwell, born Valerian Johannes Tieczynski — a German-Pole, was preparing his two-masted schooner, the Carma for a South Sea adventure cruise.