Illustration by Noah Patrick Pfarr

Parked at the Grove's Farmers Market is a Volkswagen Jetta that costs more than a Lamborghini -- $250,000, to be exact. The Volkswagen is one of only two such cars in Los Angeles at the moment, and one of only 50 in the world. It looks fairly normal except for the pile of high-tech equipment mounted on its roof like a futuristic Eiffel Tower.

Owned by the mapping company Navteq, which is owned by Nokia, the car is called a True Car. Navteq is a pioneer in digital mapping, and its True Car represents the next generation of map building. It drives around the city collecting a terabyte of information every day.

Its driver is Ron Jimenez, Navteq team lead, whose business card describes his work address in latitude and longitude -- 34 degrees 11'9" N, 118 degrees 30'4" W, aka Encino.

On a drizzly weekday, Jimenez and the company's polished director of product development, Sara Rossio, stand in the parking lot with the car, which is on a brief break from cruising every street in town.

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Creative Age Communications/Armando Sanchez

Controversial winner Amy Becker

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At the competition to determine the World's Fastest Set of Acrylic Sculptured Nails, the air is thick with the smell of acetone and ambition. Eight contestants sit at long folding tables, heads bowed as if in prayer. Hosted by the Nailpro Trade Show, the contest is being held at the Pasadena Convention Center on a spring day so lovely and carefree it gives little indication of the tension inside.

Preparation has been intense. Contestant No. 112, Shannon McCown, for instance, sat in front of the TV all night every night for a month doing her 19-year-old daughter's nails, driving her family crazy with nail talk. She now fiddles anxiously with bottles of sanitizing solution and Tammy Taylor conditioning cuticle oil.

Two tables over, as if the pressure weren't bad enough, sits contestant No. 113: Tammy Taylor herself, holder of the unofficial record for fastest set of acrylic nails, author of the beauty school standard The Complete Guide to Manicuring and Advanced Nail Technology, inventor of the flattened brush ferrule and Dazzle Rocks White Twinkling Stars nail powder, and president of Tammy Taylor Nails Inc., "where nails are always fun, and never feel like work." Word is that Taylor has this thing in the bag.

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Gendy Alimurung

The Los Angeles Speed Project runners gather at the Santa Monica pier.

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To the young men who bombed the Boston Marathon: You picked the wrong people to fuck with. Or so say the members of the Los Angeles Speed Project runners group.

It's the crack of dawn two days after the April 15 bombing, and they and about a hundred other marathoners are at the Santa Monica Pier stretching and hydrating and jogging in place and otherwise getting ready to do what they do best: run.

"Marathoners are warriors. They don't quit. Their spirits aren't exactly easily broken," Blue Benadum declares. He's team captain of Los Angeles Speed Project, which organized today's impromptu tribute run.

The project comprises six extreme runners — "extreme," of course, being a relative term. To these six athletes, it means both distance and speed. It means running 300 miles through the desert — from Los Angeles to Las Vegas — as fast as you can. It means running and running until every ounce of fat has melted from your body, and then running some more.

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Wikimedia Commons

Wanna get rid of that breakup letter? Give it to Colin Dickey -- he'll take it to the Arctic.

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When writer Colin Dickey goes to the Arctic this summer, he will be bringing two pairs of long underwear, insulated boots and a whole lot of misery. The misery is not his own — he has been dying to go to the Arctic for as long as he can remember — but that of others.

"The idea is if you have things you want to get rid of — break-up letters, crappy news, a terrible health diagnosis — I will take them up to the North Pole and read them out loud to the frozen, terrifying wasteland, banishing them forever," Dickey says.

Dickey, 35, is participating in a residency called the Arctic Circle, which takes 12 scientists and artists up to the Svalbard Peninsula, a small cluster of islands 10 degrees shy of the North Pole. In exchange for help with banishment, people are giving Dickey money to fund his trip.

A week after launching his Kickstarter campaign, he is sitting in a nice, warm café in sunny Los Feliz thinking cold thoughts. Not only will he banish things into the snow, he will preserve them. "It's the opposite," he says, "but practically speaking it's the same thing." He will read a piece of good news, a love letter or anything else you'd like "locked away in a frozen time capsule."

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Drew Barillas

Mary Roach at the Natural History Museum

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When organizers of the Los Angeles County Natural History Museum's First Fridays series asked the public what sorts of programming it wanted to see, people overwhelmingly said that they wanted (a) sex, and (b) science author Mary Roach. Oddly enough, organizers found they could kill two birds with one stone.

So, on a rainy Friday evening in February, Roach, having just flown in from her home in the Bay Area, is sitting in the Hall of North American Mammals, waiting to talk about her book Bonk: The Curious Coupling of Science and Sex. As sound techs fiddle with microphones, Roach looks around and declares the stuffed badger to be "fabulous."

People who love dioramas and museums and dark stormy nights also love Roach for her deeply, and humorously, reported stories about bizarre subjects. Roach is the kind of person who will figure out exactly how much food it takes to make a stomach burst. She is the kind of writer who will eat boiled rodent knees with a blow dart–wielding tribe in the Amazon, just to tell the tale.

"You really have to choose carefully," she says. "If you're not interested in something for 2½ years of your life, it's gonna show in your book. You have to ask, will your readers read 300 pages of it?"

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Prancing through the 80,000-gallon lake

Normand Latourelle dreams about horses. Such dreams are appropriate because Latourelle is the creator of the touring shows Cavalia and Odysseo, which, for lack of a better description, have been called "Cirque du Soleil with horses." As one of the original co-founders of Cirque, Latourelle doesn't much mind the comparison.

His dreams are fairly elaborate. One involves Pegasus, the mythological horse with wings — although in this dream it isn't the horse that flies but the spirit of the rider. The spirit is a girl in a diaphanous gown, hovering over the horse and rider like an angel.

Another dream features a jumping competition: horses versus humans, leaping over a bar, Olympics-style.

In yet another, Latourelle walks in a dark forest. He looks up and sees musicians in the trees: The forest is singing.

All these elements now appear in Latourelle's shows, which combine acrobatics and multimedia special effects with the equine arts. The flying girl became one act in Odysseo. The forest became the opening scene, with musicians in the trees standing on hidden platforms.

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Photo by Nanette Gonzales

Shaye McKenney

To its founder, Los Angeles' first fashion library is less a closet than a medicine cabinet. Shaye McKenney started the Fashion Athenaeum last year in a small square of donated gallery space on Fairfax Avenue in West Hollywood. In her view, the Jimmy Choo heels and Dolce & Gabbana military jackets and Alberta Ferretti chiffon dresses hanging in the library are just as effective as Prozac or penicillin. Fashion, she believes, is a revivifying art form. "It's so healing," she says.

McKenney has cause to feel this way. She is a sick woman. She suffers from third-stage Lyme disease, which she picked up 18 years ago on a trip, one of any number she has taken. She has gone on countless adventures.

But these days, she is in a lot of pain a lot of the time. "I've been sick all week," she says, pulling her sweater closer.

McKenney is 34, tall, pale and slender, with gawky limbs and a sleepy, languid voice. She used to be a fourth-grade teacher. But now, lacking the health to work full-time, she is content simply to "plant the seed" of the fashion library with the hopes that someone eventually will take it over.

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ILLUSTRATION BY NOAH PATRICK PFARR

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Once a year, or maybe every four years — no one knows for sure — jumbo squid make their creepily delightful presence felt in the coastal waters off Southern California. When that happens, Captain Jack Van Dyke of Dana Wharf Sportfishing in Dana Point ferries people out to catch them.

One evening approximately 16 days into this season's squid news cycle, Van Dyke is on his boat, contemplating the blobby red animals that have lately been occupying his time. Misconceptions abound. Jumbo squid, aka Dosidicus gigas, or Humboldt squid, or diablo rojo, have a reputation as creatures of the night. But Van Dyke has caught them in the middle of the day. He's also seen them in the early morning, sitting on the surface of the water, hundreds of little heads popping up like carrots in a field.

Some people believe the cold brings them out. Which is sort of true. "We tend to catch 'em in the middle of wintertime," Van Dyke allows. "But I've caught them in the summer. So you're talking a 30-degree water temperature change." You can't count on them at any particular time of the year: "They could be out there in the canyon at 2,000 feet, year-round."

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*More L.A. Weekly Film Coverage
*Our Bill Murray Appreciation Day Slideshow
*Our Report on Bill Murray Appreciation Day

Christopher Guerrero, a 27-year-old USC grad student, wrote one of the main roles in his thesis film for actor Bill Murray. The problem is what it always is: Actually getting Bill Murray.

Overtures to the star's business manager and lawyer didn't work. Neither would calls to agents or publicists: Murray has none. He fired them three years ago.

Appealing to Murray's pocketbook was out of the question; the guy has a reported net worth of $120 million. Besides, with $200,000 worth of student-loan debt, Guerrero isn't exactly flush with cash. Nor does he know people who know people. Not that being a person who knows people necessarily helps with respect to Murray. Sofia Coppola famously pursued him for eight months for Lost in Translation. Until the first day of shooting, she wasn't even sure he would turn up.

In the end, Guerrero resorted to that old tried-and-true method — appeals to an actor's vanity. He created a Bill Murray holiday.

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Nanette Gonzales

Neto Velasco's body is his canvas.

Neto Velasco came to Los Angeles to make his mark, but the city also made its mark on him. He arrived from the Mexican town of Querétaro a year ago. "I had a really good life in Mexico, but I prefer adventure," he says. "That's why I came here."

Velasco, a graphic designer, had left his house and given everything away except three pairs of jeans, five T-shirts and a camera. "I want my life to be simple. Like, if tomorrow I want to go to Japan, I just grab my backpack and let's go," he says.

At 26, he is young and passionate and wears his heart on his sleeve. He admits that it wasn't just adventure but misadventure that fueled his decision to come to the United States: A girl in Mexico had broken his heart. She'd met another guy. "I never want to talk to you again," she said. Velasco refused to remain in the same country she inhabited.

In L.A., he got a snake-and-dagger tattoo to remember her by. He'd given her everything but received nothing — just a dagger in the heart.

"Every time I have a broken heart, I need to get a tattoo, and I need to go out and do some stencils," he explains. Tattoos and stencils — which he's used to mark the streets of L.A. — are his therapy.

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