This fast and this close:

As projected at its maximum through a spotting scope at 20X magnification from the front porch of our Silver Lake house. It buuuuuuuurns! It buuuuuuuuuuuuurns!

You won't know if you're coming or going

Last summer’s blockbuster “Carmageddon“ was such a smash hit, we’re bringing you the sequel. That’s right, fasten your seat belts for the ride of your lives. On June 22, “Carmageddon II: The Rampocalypse“ comes to a 405 near you. In a world where L.A. area road construction causes widespread panic, “Carmageddon II” will blow your doors off!

We’ll destroy and then rebuild all the Wilshire Blvd. ramps connecting to the 405! We’ll take a year to do it! We’ll have Ramp Jam 2012, and it’s all in 3-D!

Get your tickets now!

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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After dancing around and debating about going or not I broke down and went this weekend. Why I was putting it off I don’t know.  It was actually a lot of fun, something one needs to do at least once in their life.  There is a lot of period confusion among the fair goers, its not all pure Medieval Renaissance times with some fun in the form of trolls, ogres and fairies tossed in for good measure.  But its all in good fun.

You get a good smattering of crafts, free wine tasting courtesy San Antonio winery, beer huts, music, free shows…minstrel, comedy/variety, magic and wenches all tossed in with some pretty good food too.

This isn’t a free event. Tickets at the door are $25 head, you can purchase slightly discounted tickets at select Walgreen stores enumerated HERE.  Parking at the Santa Fe dam will also set you back $10 bones for a dirt lot.  Map to location here near the junction of the 210/605 Freeways.  Better hurry as next weekend is the last weekend it will run this year.

Little effort required on your part.  Get a bag and fill it with canned goods.  Leave it by your mailbox and your letter carrier will pick up and deliver it to your local food bank.  How much easier can it be to help out those in need?  Just do it this Saturday May 12th.  Details HERE. I got my bag ready.

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.

One of our area's vintage cars, spotted in Santa Monica

One of my pleasures of living in the relatively dry SoCal climate is our thriving classic car culture. Part of that culture will be on display this Saturday, as downtown Culver City hosts its “Crusing Back to the 50s“ car show right out on Culver and Washington Blvds. from 9 a.m. until 3 p.m. I was there four years ago, and it was loads of fun.

In addition to a selection of over 400 classic cars, expect to see some of the world’s most famous tv show custom cars and their creator, George Barris (Batmobile, Munster Koach, etc.). There will be food, music, and car-related merchandise on hand as well. Oh, and did I mention that admission to the show is free?

I’m a sucker for a fuller-than-usual moon and couldn’t wait for tonight’s so-called Super Moon to rise high enough to be visible from ground-level in my backyard. So, shortly after it rose tonight, I scrambled up to the tippy-top of my steeply pitched roof in Silver Lake and at 8:54 p.m., put my point-and-shoot camera up to the eyepiece of tripod-mounted 60x spotting scope and shot this frame (click it to biggify):

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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