Way back near the end of the aughts — July of 2009 to be more exact — is when my disenchantment with Metro’s TAP cards began, producing two posts, linked below should you be interested in what a pain in the ass it was:

• And Now A Tutorial On How To “Hack” Yourself To A Metro TAP Card Without Really Trying (Or Ending Up Getting One)
• In Which The TAP Card Saga I Previously Ranted About Comes To A Successful (If Ultimately Doomed) Conclusion

The card’s usage on various bus and rail lines in the interim since had been entirely without incident, until yesterday when I biked downtown to 7th Street to take my first trip on the shiny new Expo Line. The thrill at riding fresh rails into the westside was somewhat buzzkilled when I went to purchase my one-way ticket with my TAP card only to have the machine tell me that it had “expired,” and suggesting I visit a Metro customer service center for assistance.

Though I’m predisposed to some pretty elaborate grousing displays, I kept my outward petulance to a minimum and instead fished out the $1.50 needed for the fare. With ticket in hand I boarded the appropriate train, deciding that I’d bike back up to the Metro customer office on the corner of La Brea and Wilshire to have a representative answer me as to why the fuck does a damn TAP card still loaded with about $13 of my own money expire?

Short answer: So Metro can rip off TAP card-holding riders every three years.

Longer answer after the jump. Oh yeah: and it turns out the card hadn’t expired yet.

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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!

Superheroes, nasty villains, and zombies will visit us as the Hero Complex Film Festival returns to Los Angeles on May 18-21, at the Regal Cinemas at L.A. Live. Cinema classics will be screened with stars and creators of the movies, such as RoboCop with an appearance by Peter Weller, Shaun of the Dead featuring director Edgar Wright, and A Clockwork Orange with Malcolm McDowell. On Monday, pioneer comic book creator Stan Lee (Spider-Man, X-Men, Fantastic Four, etc.) will be there for a not yet announced screening. Although the $105 festival pass is listed as sold out, individual screening passes can be had for $20, which isn’t much more than a movie ticket on a weekend night nowadays.

See link above for full schedule and details.

According to this tweet from LAFD Arson at least they are…

LAFD Arson tweet

Monrovia does things a little different.  In this case we turn Cinco de Mayo into a big street fair that is family friendly and hold it before the actual day.  We’ll be doing it Sunday April 29th to be precise.  The event is full of activities for kids, music and art featuring local artists.  It will even include a food drive for the Foothill Unity Center so bring a non perishable canned goods you can donate while you are there.

Details: Sunday April 29, Noon-9PM, Coloradao and Myrtle Avenue, Monrovia CA WEB SITE  MAP HERE

I’m not always successful, but whenever I’m biking around Los Angeles, I try to return a way different from whatever way I came and/or devote a little bit of my rides to exploring someplace new and/or at least revisiting an area I hadn’t been through in a while. Such was the case yesterday coming back to Silver Lake from a trip out to SPCALA headquarters near the Jefferson Park community that I ventured up through the Pico-Union area from Hoover, and made two discoveries.

The first is the hole-in-the-wall bakery pictured at right, seen just as I crossed Washington Boulevard. Looking up I spied that yellow banner hanging outside a Panaderia for the Bicycle Bread Company (BBC). While it’s true I hadn’t been on Union in about six months, unless this place opened during that time than I was guilty of never seeing it before. Because if I had seen it I most certainly would’ve stopped and bought something, given much I like bikes. And bread.

Sure enough: guilty. According the the BBC website it’s been in business since 2009. Also according to the website they’re hours in that space are limited to 5-8pm on Thursdays, but I apparently got both lucky and over-charged in that the place was open and I was able to come away with a one-pound round loaf of BBC’s cinnamon raisin whole grain sold by the panaderia owner for $5 (apparently there’s a hidden 25% commission surcharge above the $4 per-loaf price listed on the BBC website). Thankfully that extra dollar dinged didn’t detract from the absolute homemade milled-on-site scrumptiousness of the bread.

A little bit more about the BBC as well as a great mural found up the street, plus a bonus Victorian that surprised me after the jump.

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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.

Tag numbers obscured to protect the guilty.

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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Mustang in a "cast" click to embiggen

Sunday I ventured out to the Fabulous Fords Forever car show. Among the cars there was this recently wrecked Mustang in a “cast” for anyone to sign. First time I’ve ever seen that at a car show or on the streets.  Pretty clever.  Hope it gets it fixed soon without much hassle. Click to embiggen the image.

Another new LA-based theater company, Little Candle Productions, is getting all set to do a one-night only production of Shakespeare’s “The Winter’s Tale” in June. Not only is it a one-time performance, but it will take place at Glendale’s historic Alex Theatre, a beautiful venue with a whopping 1,400 seats.

To help make this possible, Little Candle Productions is having a fundraiser this Monday—Shakespeare’s birthday the anniversary of Shakespeare’s death—at the Colorado Wine Company in Eagle Rock. See the flyer below, and click through to buy tickets.

Paseo Spring Fest Post Card click to embiggen

I’m not a fan of malls, but I am a sucker for a good fine art event.  At least Paseo Colorado is a semi-open mall.   Paseo Spring Fest promises to be among the better ones as it is a juried event, meaning the artists have to be reviewed by a jury panel to ensure they are accomplished at what they do.

During your time at the art show if you need a break and feel the need for a little libations do stop in at the Bodega Wine Bar.

Parking is fairly good at the Paseo.  It is about 6 blocks, an easy walk from the Gold Line Memorial Park Station which is a pretty good option if you are mass transit enabled.

Details: Sat 10AM-6PM, Sun 11AM-6PM, 280 E. Colorado Blvd.Pasadena, CA MAP HERE

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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pay dragon logo

It launched this morning.  PayDragon is a free app for your iphone or android.  It hooks you up with a participating food truck or restaurant, lets you order and prepay cutting down the hassle of lines and worry if you have cash on hand.  Actually it does quite a bit of nifty stuff for you…

• QR reader: scan codes with participating PayDragon merchants to instantly begin a transaction
• A discover tab: locate nearby participating merchants
• A game layer: earn points toward incentives from merchants
• Exclusive deals: take merchants up on sales and food deals
• Facebook integration: tell your friends about the great meal you just enjoyed
• Receipts for transactions: keep track of purchase activity
• Notifications: receive alerts when an order or item is ready to pick up

Participating vendors include the sweets chain Beard Papa and a number of LA-based food trucks such as The Bun Truck, CambalaCHE’s,Auntie’s Fry Bread, Chunk n Chip, The Grill Sergeant, The Wien, and Rounds Premium Burgers.

You can get your free download for your iphone HERE and your Android HERE.  I’ve been told by the good folks that other formats…Blackberry and Windows are being worked on.