Posts tagged “Los Angeles”

• Drop everything and go watch Teenage Zombies right now.
• The Green Day rock opera album American Idiot is now a Broadway show.
• After a grueling 58 hours of continuous play, John McAllister of Seattle, Washington officially became the best Asteroids player on the planet.
• I also spend a fair amount of my life trying to determine what went wrong, so I can appreciate a stroke of luck.
• Well this is pretty crazy: There are a bunch of functioning oil wells hidden around Los Angeles. The first one they feature is about two miles from my house; it’s covered by giant paintings of flowers right next to a high school football field. (I always thought it was some funky art project!)
• A few drinks and a little idle curiosity have led to the discovery of a hidden chapel under a family home.
• This is what I keep wondering about Dancing with the Stars: “Oh you mean world champions like Jerry Rice and Emmitt Smith and Ocho Cinco, who make millions because of their brilliant hand-eye coordination and ability to move in a rhythm with exact timing and precision? How will that translate to dancing?”
• It has a double penis, is as long as a tall human, and lives in a heavily populated area of the Philippines. Yet somehow the giant lizard Varanus bitatawa has gone undetected by science until now.
• I’ve been skeptical of solar power for a long time. There are simply too many cloudy days. (Not here in LA, but certainly in Florida.) But I’ve always been a fan of wind. [ed: I have since changed my stance! Solar power is awesome!]
• The reason why Apple is going to win — again — with the iPad, is because the overwhelming majority of people don’t care about Flash, software, files, directories, RAM, or whether their machine has a CD-ROM drive. They just want stuff that works.

• Potholes are a serious and dangerous road hazard in Los Angeles. Designers in Italy are promoting the idea of a brightly-colored second layer of asphalt which would turn roads into a sort of skin, so you can easily tell when there’s a pothole to avoid.
• It’s so very hard these days — but so very important — to remember that the email address on the other side of the screen is a real person, a lot like you.
• There is much to be learned from analyzing photos of Michael Bublé being stalked by a velociraptor. But you might have more fun looking at a few dozen movie posters recreated to feature Garry Shandling.
• There are only a few single English word domain names still available to register.
• Grab the Airplane and Go: True Tales from the Airplane Repossession Business
• The Los Angeles Department of City Planning audited itself and learned that it does a very poor job of planning.

• That’s What Bea Said!
• Avoid customer service prompts and long hold times with GetHuman.com. (And, of course, there’s an iPhone app for that.)
• The graphic Jish found depicting a Visual Explanation of Family Relationships is the first I’ve ever seen that made sense.
• If you live here, you already know this: Los Angeles is a lonely city.
• “If you believe what you read in scientific literature, you shouldn’t believe what you read in the scientific literature.” This is (probably) why everything you think we know might be wrong.
• Behold! The Periodic Table of Science Fiction!
• Chris Coyier explains the genius of asking for the hard part first.

And if you care about football and the NFL Draft at all, ignore what all the pundits are predicting and make sure to read what Cold, Hard, Football Facts says in A Tale of Six Quarterbacks:

Tebow not only passed the ball far more effectively than any of these No. 1 overall picks (Peyton Manning, Tim Couch, Eli Manning, JaMarcus Russell, and Matt Stafford). It pays to remember that, in his spare time, he set the SEC career record for rushing touchdowns. Oh, and he won a Heisman Trophy and two National Titles. Other than that, he didn’t do much.
But Tebow didn’t just put up big stats … he put up supremely efficient stats. He was more accurate, and produced more big passing plays, and was more likely to put the ball in the end zone, and more likely to keep it out of the hands of opposing defenders, than any of the recent collection of No. 1 passing phenoms to come out of the SEC.

• Runmeter (iTunes) looks to be a very slick iPhone app for tracking runs. I can’t run the LA Marathon this year because it conflicts with Kelly’s bachelor party in Las Vegas, but I’ll probably grab this for training for the 2011 race.
• Speaking of iPhone apps: The guys at AppAdvice really are on the ball. So far it’s the best blog I’ve found for discovering new apps. They write terrific reviews and always find the gems hidden in the glut of the tens of thousands of applications and games currently available in the iTunes store.
• I have become completely addicted to Ikariam, a web-based Civilization-style game. It’s free to play, though I guarantee if you start you’ll quickly get hooked and want to pay for the premium features. (I’m on the Ny shard if you decide to give it a try and want to look for me.)
• If you’ve been thinking about building a laptop-controlled robot made with LEGOs that can solve a Rubik’s Cube in 12 seconds, just give up. It’s already been done.
• Kottke.org has a cool post with video showing a slew of television shows that you probably never would have guessed were shot on a green screen. Did you know that The Mentalist (allegedly set in Sacramento), Monk (allegedly set in San Francisco), and CSI: Miami (allegedly set in Miami) are all mostly filmed here in Los Angeles?
• Have you subscribed to The Impossible Cool yet? Once or twice each week this blog posts a fantastic (and rarely-seen) photo of a cultural icon. Check out this killer image of Sean Connery. See also: Iconic Photos

• If you are (a) a man or (b) a woman, you should read Kay S. Hymowitz’ Love in the Time of Darwinism: A report from the chaotic postfeminist dating scene, where only the strong survive.
• Fascinating facts can be found with a statistical analysis of graffiti found at the University of Chicago Library.
• I never knew there was a name specifically for the edges of uncut book pages.
• In 1959 the Santa Susana Field Laboratory suffered a partial radioactive meltdown, leading to the contamination of the neighboring hills in Canoga Park. Now a group of Oak Park tenth-graders — Teens Against Toxins — are trying to reverse that contamination with a bake sale. (The cities of Simi Valley, Thousand Oaks, Oak Park, and Chatsworth all have extremely high rates of cancers similar to only one other place in the world: Chernobyl.)
• There are literally hundreds of t-shirts in my closet, and I swore I wouldn’t get any more. But I must have this one. (Maybe I will have one of my other ones turned into a sleeve for my MacBook Pro.)

• General Stuff
  • My dad has posted more gorgeous shots of New England to his Flickr feed.
  • Nothing is over until we decide it is!
  • Suck it, Michael. The Beatles are one notch above the King of Pop for most-viewed Wikipedia article.
  • How the hell does a car’s differential work? I never understood it… and then I watched this General Motors 1930s tutorial which explains it wonderfully. (link via Kottke)
  • “Injustice anywhere is a threat to justice everywhere.” – MLK, Jr.
  • Dooce is still writing the best stuff on the Internet. Seriously. If you haven’t yet read everything she’s ever written, take a few months off work and go do that right now. You’ll laugh. You’ll cry. You’ll wonder why she doesn’t have her own television show.
  • What did you think you were going to find at hiddenpassageway.com?
  • What’s the business benefit of free bread at restaurants? (AskMeFi is just awesome, although some of the questions people ask can be quite depressing.)
  • My wife is sure to be thrilled to see LA Weekly’s list of 99 Essential L.A. Restaurants.
  • Yes, you could build your house with LEGO blocks. But why?
  • Pizza Hut Fails Basic Grammar, another excellent post from the witty One Step Forward
• Techie Stuff
  • Check out these cool grunge peeling sticker social media icons.
  • Ten ways to stop spam in WordPress covers the basics and includes a few new tricks I didn’t know.
  • Make your Mac prettier with a glossy dock.

• General Stuff
  • I followed a link on Hidden Los Angeles and found a killer list of film locations in town. (I’m going to go out on a limb and assume LA has a lot more of these than most cities. Sometimes I forget that I am living in what has to be the coolest city in the world.)
  • If you post a classified ad, think twice before replying to Mike.
  • “I thought he wanted to kill us,” Heard said. “He was so angry and upset.” — Perhaps he wasn’t asked if he wanted to spend the rest of his life in captivity. I’m just sayin’.
  • They’re a bit expensive, but these trash compactor bookends are sweet.
  • Fun: Check out the size of these balls! [Ed. note: Local copy of image for posterity saved here.]
• Techie Stuff
  • It’s great to hear that the first ever entirely volunteer-run open source conference was a huge success. My good friend Thomas had a big hand in that.
  • When you’re designing websites, it’s handy to have a test template to check what your stylesheets will look like.
  • WordPress 2.8 makes it even easier to code widgets.
  • If you want to target links to open in a new window while still having valid code, it can be done with jQuery.
  • Which iPhone 3.0 software features does my iPhone support?