Courtesy of Stephen O'Gara and Geocaching.com

Stephen O'Gara of Team Ventura Kids geocaching in South Hills Park, in Glendora

In La La Land, the home of movie magic, we're used to our surroundings being not quite what they seem. But did you know, at this very moment, you are surrounded by thousands of tiny containers of various shapes and sizes, camouflaged in bushes, hidden in fake electrical boxes, attached by magnet to the bottoms of bar stools and perched atop stop-signs? You might need an ultra-violet light to discover the final clue to find them or wait for low tide to wade out to a cave at the beach, but they're there. That creepy guy at the bus stop who keeps looking around suspiciously might be totally nuts...or he might be a geocacher.

Geocaching is a worldwide treasure hunt that began in May 2000 when the U.S. government gave up "selective availability" and allowed civilians to use GPS devices with almost perfect accuracy for the first time. Computer consultant David Ulmer was one of many GPS enthusiasts brainstorming how this newly available technology could be used. The day after "selective availability" was lifted, Ulmer decided to hide a bucket in the woods near his home in Beavercreek, Oregon filled with prizes and post the coordinates online for anyone to find. He called it "The Great American GPS Stash Hunt" and its one rule was, "Take some stuff; leave some stuff."

Within three days, two readers had found Ulmer's bucket using personal GPS devices, and more readers had begun to hide boxes and post coordinates online. By September 2000, there were 75 caches across the country. Now there are 2 million around the world. One hundred seventeen thousand of those are in California and over 300 are within a 5 mile radius of our own 90012.

Today, Geocaching.com is the hub of all things geocache and the place to find the coordinates of caches around the world. Geocachers can use the gps on their smart phones and download an app that identifies the caches closest to them at any given time. The app provides maps, comments from fellow finders and clues. Even though the coordinates lead you to the cache's location, the real trick is is finding the camoed pillbox hanging in a nearby tree or knowing which sprinkler head is actually a hidden geocache filled with booty.

Los Angeles has become a world hotspot for geocaching, partly because of our year-round mild climate, partially because of our tech savvy population and partially because of our varied and intriguing terrain. "Whatever geocaching experience you're looking for, you can find it in L.A.," claimed real estate broker and geocacher Andy Perkins in a phone interview. "On the same day, you can be digging for boxes at the beach, grab easy urban caches through the city, then head up to the mountains or out to the desert."

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Rachel Heller

Rad vintage figurines make visitors wax nostalgic.

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*5 Artsy Things to Do in L.A. This Week
*Our Calendar Section, Listing More Great Things to Do in L.A.

Nothing says happy holidays to a nerd like a shelf full of vintage action figures in Santa caps.

That's the sight that greets customers outside Curry House in West Los Angeles, drawing gasps and nostalgic smiles from passersby who peer into the display window outside the restaurant. In a large glass case, the usual faux-food spread has been cleared aside to make way for more than 120 late-80s and early-90s figurines, arms raised in yuletide glee. And atop their plastic and metal heads sit more than 120 tiny, red-and-white felt Santa caps handcrafted by Curry House assistant manager Hiroichi Echizen and his wife, Yoshiko.

There are characters from Street Fighter, Power Rangers, Dragon Ball, Gundam, Transformers, Godzilla and Kamen Rider, and even a bulky Arnold Schwarzenegger figurine from Last Action Hero. Marge Simpson, perched in the front row with her family, sports a modified hat that hugs her blue beehive. Ninja Turtles crony Usagi Yojimbo has paper carrots taped to his cap's brim.

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Topless Robot, home for "nerd news, humor and self-loathing" is looking to immediately hire a new chief blogger and editor.

Yes, really!

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Paul T Bradley

Typewriters are sexy!

Well, sort of.

Sunday afternoon, Venice's venerable poet headquarters Beyond Baroque hosted a Type-In featuring a dozen vintage typewriters, their vintage repairpersons and a whole slew of other typographic delights -- including typewritten poems on demand and a screening of Christopher Lockett and Gary Nicholson's documentary The Typewriter (in the 21st Century).

For those of us old enough to remember the distinctive clickety clack of the old typewriters (and that industrial oil smell), fear not, there's still a healthy subculture of typewriting enthusiasts keeping those grand old machines from becoming permanent paperweights. They run the gamut from 9-year-old collectors to Pulitzer Prize-winning authors -- all of them in healthy love with the single-function, intricately designed majesty of the typewriter.

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Catherine Frizat

Who knew Gandalf considered himself part of the 99%?

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*Lord of the Rings Parody Musical Returns to L.A.

"We were the number one place to be in Hollywood on Oscar night!" Josh Rubinstein gushes, reminiscing about the three celeb-laden Academy Awards parties he helped plan as one of the L.A. events supervisors for Lord of the Rings superfan site TheOneRing.net (TORn). Elijah Wood, Peter Jackson and most of the cast and crew preferred celebrating their gold statuettes with fans in suits of armor over execs in suits of Armani, ditching the New Line Cinema party each year in favor of TORn's.

"At the Fellowship [of the Ring] party, [makeup, props, costumes and special effects creator] Richard Taylor showed up totally drunk and was letting everybody hold his Oscar," Rubinstein says. "He was like, 'Take my Oscar! Take it!'"

What began in 1999 with Kiwi co-founder Erica Challis defying numerous cease-and-desist orders to sneak over fences and take photos of the LoTR production in New Zealand and sharing what she found with a small group of fans around the world has become the web's leading authority on all things Tolkien, with over 66,000 Facebook likes, two published books of interpretive essays and a unique, friendly relationship with the filmmakers who brought Middle Earth to life. This past Saturday, TORn held their annual Griffith Park potluck picnic to commemorate Bilbo Baggins' birthday, September 22, which not coincidentally is the date The Hobbit was published 75 years ago, in 1937.

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Cris Dobbins

L.A. Startup Club founders Daniel Hengeveld and Micki Krimmel outside of their offices at the Idyllic Nerd Commune in downtown's Arts District.

Would you contribute 10 bucks to get an adult webcomix series featuring voiceovers from real porn stars off the ground? How about $5 for a stainless steel buttplug project? Ben Tao and Eric Lai, founders of Offbeatr, an adult version of crowd-funding sites like Indiegogo and Kickstarter, seem to think you might.

There's only one problem. Who will hold onto the money while the buttplug company waits to see whether it can raise the full amount it needs? Crowd-funding sites take donations under the condition that your credit card will be charged only if the project being funded reaches its goal, but PayPal, American Express and Amazon Payments all refuse to process orders on adult material.

What's a struggling startup to do? Why, consult and exchange information with the competition, of course!

Every other Monday evening at the Idyllic Nerd Commune (INC), a co-working loft space in the downtown Arts District, the L.A. Startup Club, a collective consisting of the leaders of seven new tech companies, gathers over take-out to vent about the challenges their businesses face, to offer each other honest feedback and goal accountability and to share tangible resources, such as the contact info for a good Java designer or a comprehensive list of deep-pocketed investors. Startups involved range from the L.A. branch of a D.C.-based solar utility company to a service that saves parents from tedious shopping trips by sending a customizable box of children's clothing every month, started by Sean Percival, featured in LA Weekly's 2009 People issue as founder of L.A. tech blog lalawag.

The intimate, leaderless club is the brainchild of startup veterans Micki Krimmel and Daniel Hengeveld, who aim to find a happy medium between the superficial schmoozing of networking events and the top-down mentorship and forfeiture of equity at startup incubators and accelerators, all of which provide support and advice for fledgling companies in the newly thriving Silicon Beach tech scene in Santa Monica and Venice.

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photo by Jacy Wojcik

Photo booth art by Jef Aerosol

The 2012 International Photobooth Convention was held this past weekend at the Electric Lodge in Venice. Yes, a gathering for hard-core enthusiasts of booths where you sit and get your photo taken.

But let's clear things up. These are not the digital photo booths of today. They are not the kind your cousin Denise had at her wedding, which seemed like a good idea until everyone was taking hilarious photos of themselves instead of paying attention to the cake-cutting ceremony and she cried.

These are the photochemical booths of yesteryear. The kind that haven't been made since the '70s/early '80s, can be expensive to maintain, require chemicals, and are a pretty rare commodity. Rare in the sense that, as convention co-founder Brian Meacham explained, these photo booths may have gotten new shells in the '90s but the moving parts are hodge-podged around from different machines. Even rarer in the sense that, we learned, all the old photochemical photo booths in Europe have been trashed, save a few Swiss booths now in Berlin; all the rest are digital. There is a growing community for photochemical booth fanatics and artists and this was their Comic-Con.

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Diego, 10, plays the piano near LACMA

On a sunny but breezy Saturday, 10-year-old Diego Grijalva of Gabriella Charter School in Echo Park found himself at 5900 Wilshire Blvd., seated at a piano designed by local artist Evan Skrederstu. Diego, who has played on his school's piano, was intrigued by the street piano and was playing a simple tune.

The piano, strategically placed adjacent to a line of food trucks across from LACMA is one of about 30 currently ensconced all over Los Angeles as part of the international public art installation "Play Me, I'm Yours."

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Nerdist

Nerd Emperor Hardwick announces the lineup

Nerd.

What was once a word used to assert adolescent alpha male dominance over the guy who would eventually become your boss is now a nearly complete empire run by the once-oppressed. Unlike the Habsburg, Incan or Qing, this one has its own channel on YouTube, complete with Weird Al, Neil Patrick Harris and, well, cute shit exploding, among other nerdly things. Oh, and there...will...be...puppets. Henson puppets.

We caught up with Chris Hardwick, high emperor of the multifaceted project Nerdist, and his business consigliere Peter Levin to talk about the channel, plus bowling, nerd-cred, and why getting whacked in the face with a toy lightsaber can ultimately be a good thing for a lot of people.

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From Ze Frank's Kickstarter page, in which he wants to revive The Show -- "Same same, but different"

Ze Frank sometimes makes you feel a little stupid. But it's not on purpose -- he's pretty brilliant. In case you've forgotten, Frank was the occasionally singing, speed-talking, non-blinking (he edited out his blinks) online genius from The Show, an early exercise in interactive Internet video intellect, creativity and pop culture. When The Show's one-year run ended in 2007, it had a legion of fans called "Sportsracers" and its own universe of in jokes (i.e., the running fool, duckies and an "earth sandwich," where two people on opposite sides of the earth put bread on the ground).

Setting up on Kickstarter a few weeks ago, Frank began to create what he hopes will evolve into an alternate reality game/show/experience of sorts. We say "of sorts" because Frank's not entirely sure what will happen. We'll get to that in a minute.

Ending Friday, Frank's wildly successful Kickstarter campaign lasted 10 days and included his signature absurd whimsy. (Don't you dare call it "twee" -- the man has an Ivy League degree in neuroscience, after all.) He promised his backers all sorts of Ze Frank-style oddities in return for their contributions, including but not limited to: jars into which Frank himself will whisper words of encouragement, plastic babies that might not "grow up into a Ken doll" without your support, signed signatures, potato stamp art, black-on-black ducky T-shirts, and tons of The Show swag. If you're confused, don't worry, he's more than adept at explaining it -- cool college professor adept.

Basically, Frank's got some new shit up his sleeve and it will blow your mind -- and he told us all about it.

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