Last week my girlfriend and I had dinner at Cucina Paradiso. It’s a great little Italian restaurant that shares a building with The Palmer Room on Motor Ave. The Palmer Room is a bar / club with a tiny stage for live music; Their website is fairly bland, but the bar itself is quite cozy and a perfect spot to catch a show. We were there to see Landon Band perform. We got to the bar a bit late and only managed to catch the last three or four songs, but I liked what I heard. The lead singer has definitely got some pipes and she put on a helluva good show even though there were only maybe a dozen other people in the audience. It’s tricky because the whole thing is done in Flash, but if you work at it you can download three of the seven songs from their debut album from the official band website.

You have to get out of bed pretty early to pull one over on the local coroner in Los Angeles.

Southern California kicker Mario Danelo was drunk when he plunged over a cliff to his death, but the cause of his death was “undetermined,” according to a coroner’s report released Monday.

He’s a football player in excellent physical health. He got really, really drunk. He climbed a large wall and fell over 100′. I don’t see the mystery here. Tragedy? Yes. Mystery? No.

We found yet another fabulous restaurant last night: Memphis. (map). This “Southern Style Dining” establishment is located in Hollywood in “the last remaining residential house … left on this highly commercialized street.” It’s quirky and fun to eat in a restaurant that used to be a house. The lighting is very romantic and the food was excellent. I had the jambalaya appetizer and the fried chicken and ribs combo and — I have to tell you — it was the best piece of chicken I’ve ever had. Dinner for four, including appetizers, plenty of libations, and a nice gratuity, came to about $300, which is really not that bad for a good place in LA. The service was only so-so, but I think the place was a bit understaffed; it was a slow Wednesday night. If you have a hankering for a taste of N’awlins and you’re stuck in SoCal, I highly recommend it.

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Last night was another crazy cool one in Los Angeles. The fun began with dinner on the Sunset strip: Ron Jeremy was at the table on our left and Scott Baio was at the table on our right. The service was uncharacteristically craptacular, but the food was excellent. (You can’t do much better than the steak and lobster at the Rainbow Room.)

After that we went to see Von Cotton play at Molly Malone’s. (Photos at Flckr) They played eight or ten original tracks — all very, very awesome country tunes. I think my two favorites right now are “Shotgun Blast” and “The Tell”. Then Brant closed with a great cover of Lynyrd Skynyrd’s “Sweet Home Alabama”.

On May 20, 2006 I was tagged for speeding on the 405 while returning from my friend’s wedding in Valencia. This was one of the (rare) instances when I felt I was undeserving of a speeding ticket. There were cars on either side of me and a guy was coming up my rear like a bat outta hell. I even said, “Look at this happy a**hole!” as I gunned it to get out of his way and into the right lane. The happy a**hole was a CHiP and he gave me a ticket even though I tried to explain to him that I was only getting out of his way.

I had to deal with the ticket by July 14th, and of course that didn’t happen. I actually had the date confused with the court date of a different speeding ticket so I went to wrong courthouse. Ha! (Note: The LA Superior Court didn’t find this even remotely comical.) Even though they were upset, the State of California allowed me to reschedule and set a new court date. I had to appear at the San Fernando Courthouse in September.

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Got plans for January 24th? Of course you don’t. Now you do.
Mark it down. Von Cotton will be live at Molly Malone’s next Wednesday. These guys are excellent. You must be there. Come see them now before they sign a multi-record contract for millions of dollars. That way you’ll get to say, “I saw them before they signed a multi-record contract for millions of dollars.” Find me and I’ll buy you a beer.

“What happens here, happens in the rest of the country a decade later.” We’re talking about Los Angeles, folks. This excellent quote is from a stupendous essay on why there will never be an NFL team in LA. It only took me a few months to realize that this place wasn’t going to be able to support an NFL team. Apathy is key. The article makes several perfect points, but the one that matters is the one about caring. In Gainesville, Florida the city is crushed after a Gator loss. And I’m not just referring to a championship game, kids. If the team loses a single game at any point in the season, the entire county is crestfallen for days. There isn’t a smile to be seen anywhere. The baristas at Starbucks glumly pour lattes for grown men who look like they just got the news that JFK was shot.

In Los Angeles the day after USC won the National Championship in football was pretty much exactly the same as the day after UCLA lost the National Championship in basketball. There are — quite literally — millions of people here who are dedicated sports fans. The problem is that there are many, many more millions who don’t know the difference between the SEC and the ACC.

Last night my girlfriend and her stepmother went to a wine-tasting class at The Wine House in Westwood. They recruited me as a designated driver and after I picked them up we went to Pastina Trattoria for a late dinner. Pastina has quickly become my favorite Italian place in Los Angeles. It is almost sacrilegiously inexpensive for this city and the food is fabulous. I had the Penne Arrabiata for the third time in a row and couldn’t have asked for a better meal. If you’re ever near UCLA and dying for a delicious pasta dish, this is the place to go.

To celebrate straight As on her report card, I took my girlfriend to Robert De Niro’s Ago Restaurant Friday night. This lovely little Italian eatery is on Melrose Avenue in West Hollywood. We didn’t have reservations, but after a few glasses of wine at the very crowded bar, the maître d’ managed to squeeze us into a table near the back. The food was absolutely fabulous and the atmosphere in the place was just terrific. The service was fast and friendly and my only regret is that we were both too stuffed to sample any of the tremendous desserts on display. If you’re looking for a good place to eat in Los Angeles, I highly recommend it.

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Their website is craptacular and looks like it hasn’t been updated since last June, but the Panini Cafe in Marina Del Rey is a damn good place to have lunch. I’ve eaten there probably two dozen times since my company moved into our current building several years ago. I’d go there more often but there just aren’t many places within walking distance of my office and I don’t want to spoil Panini’s by going there every other day.

Except for Uncle Darrow’s (best Cajun food in LA) and Benny’s BBQ (best BBQ in LA) there are only fast food chains near me. We usually rotate between Soup Plantation, Rubio’s, Del Taco (barf!), Quizno’s, and Panda Express. We’ll splurge and go to Chin Chin if it’s someone’s birthday lunch but nobody wants to be spending $15 on lunch on a regular basis.

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After eighteen months I was forced to consider my foray into the lifestyle of luxury car ownership a failure. Just after Thanksgiving in 2004 I traded my red 1990 Toyota 4×4 for a black 2001 BMW 330 CCi. It was a gorgeous car. I really, really loved it. It was a sport model and a convertible. The car had every option you could get on a BMW at the time: heated leather seats, six-disc CD changer, the works. The engine purred like a kitten. It handled like a dream. It was, in short, the best vehicle I’d ever owned.

The only real problem with it was the tires. The tires and rims were so sensitive — and the I am so accustomed to driving a truck, and the roads between my office and my home are so often blanketed in construction detritus — that they kept getting destroyed. In a year and a half I had to buy eight $250 tires and five $750 rims! There was just no way I could justify spending more on wheels for my wheels than I was spending on the car itself. I loved it, but it had to go. While driving home from a 4th of July weekend in Palm Springs this year I had a blowout on the highway. It was 114° F and I was so upset I decided it was time to end it.

The next day I strolled into the Marina Del Rey Toyota dealership and traded my baby for a black 2006 Toyota Tacoma 4×4. I could only afford the base model, no bells or whistles. I’m really more of a pick-up man, I guess. I do seriously miss having an intermittent setting on my windshield wipers, though. :0(

There is something pathetically ironic about being stuck in twelve lanes of 15 mph traffic in Los Angeles while driving to court to deal with a speeding ticket. Late at night back in May I was doing about 65 mph in the center lane of this same freeway when a maniac came flying down the road behind me. I gunned it to get out of his way and the maniac turned out to be a cop who proceeded to give me a speeding ticket. When I explained that I was only trying to get out of his way he laughed at me.

Traffic on the 405 at 3pm on an average Thursday in Los Angeles.

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Last night Tricia and I saw Von Cotton perform at Molly Malone’s. They are an awesome new country act playing in Los Angeles. We saw them the first time at some dive honky-tonk just south of Marina Del Rey a year or so ago. Back then they mostly were doing classic country covers. Now they’ve got a slew of original songs and they’re really fantastic. The lead singer has an amazing voice and their stuff is seriously good.

Where do I go to complain about grocery store shenanigans? I’m at the end of my rope with Ralph’s, the local supermarket here in Los Angeles. There are two things they are doing to blatantly defraud customers and it’s driving me crazy.

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On Sunday my girlfriend and I attended The 2006 Children’s Choice Awards event Bogart Backstage, sponsored by The TJ Martell Foundation. It was held at The Hollywood Palladium and featured a presentation by Bonnie Hunt in addition to appearances by Bowling for Soup, Hilary Duff, and Aly & AJ.

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