A heart-shaped box of chocolates? Sentimental and short-lived -- not to mention fattening. But girls like having nice things, and boys like having girls who have nice things. So why not get your honey a high-tech vibrator? 
The Weekly asked a married couple to test-drive some of the latest models. Here's what the missus reported back.
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The cellular device is a wonderful technology. But that wonder is tempered every time a John Philip Sousa-like ringtone fanfare blares out, say, during the bloody dagger scene from a live performance of Macbeth. Which, of course, is why mobile phones have been unconditionally banished from the sacred precincts of live theater since their invention. 
Tweets from @CTGLA as part of the org's "Tweet Seats" event during Clybourne Park and A Raisin in the Sun
So it was something of a surprise when CTG appeared to bend that ironclad ban last week by introducing synchronized tweeting sections at the Thursday evening performances of A Raisin in the Sun at Culver City's Kirk Douglas and Clybourne Park across town at the Taper. Both audiences used the same hashtag, #WhereWeLive, to discuss the two shows, whose stories are interconnected. The "experiment," which was the brainchild of Jim Royce and Jim Halloran of CTG's marketing department, reportedly was managed with enough tact and discretion that few in the audiences were even aware of the Twittering transgressors in their midst.
Outside the two theaters, however, the precedent quickly turned into the tweets heard 'round the world, argued about in places such as the nationwide email list for dramaturgs and literary managers. Opinions ranged from tweeting during performances as a valid and innovative way to attract and engage younger, more tech-savvy audiences, to the notion that any cellphone use during a live performance is a disruptive, distracting and, particularly for the actors, fundamentally disrespectful activity.
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Startups is a new column about new companies, big ideas and bold discoveries happening in the L.A. area.
>Postcard on the Run
The idea was simple: Take all those moments captured on smartphones and make something tangible out of them, fusing the online and the offline world. That's what Josh Brooks set out to do when he created Postcard on the Run last year.
The application converts any picture on an Android or IOS device to a real-world postcard. Users can write notes on the back and sign their names with a finger. They can choose to add a GPS-tagged location or even a small scratch-and-sniff sticker. "Basically, I cold-called the company that was making scratch-and-sniff back in the '80s and said, 'Please tell me you've innovated, because this is what I want,' " Brooks explains.
The company now offers 11 smells ranging from popcorn to ocean breeze to teen spirit --which, according to Brooks,"smells like a combination of band sweat and rotten stale drinks, with hints of skunk. It stinks, but it's funny."
The postcards are printed at a West Coast printer and mailed -- no need to deal with stamps. The cards cost $1.49, or $1.99 with the scratch-and-sniff. Cards sent overseas cost $1.69.
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Everybody's looking for work right now and, according to L.A.'s Craigslist, there's a lot of work to be done. Perusing job hunters will find the usual "party girl" openings ($250/hour, "must be liberal but race is open"), surrogacy ads offering up to 35 grand for allowing a strange couple to rent your womb for 9 months (that's like New York rent prices!), and recruitment ads for the National Guard.
We culled through positions for scientists interested in studying poop, an old lady looking for someone to fix her scooter, casting agents ready to expose babies to the world market, and the oddest fetishes we never knew existed to deliver to you 5 particularly odd jobs being offered on Craigslist in L.A. right now.
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Who knew Debbie Reynolds was the gatekeeper of all things Hollywood? And who knew that Debbie Reynolds had anything to do with Star Wars ? (Okay, okay, aside from the fact that her daughter starred in it... that's coincidental.)
Star Wars Episode IV: A New Hope. A world record. Thanks to Debbie Reynolds.
And who knew that anything from Star Wars: Episode IV was even available to collect anymore? I would have thought all the Star Wars geeks... er, enthusiasts in the world had eaten up everything left from the original shoot at this point. Not so, my friends.
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Earlier this week, our news blog The Informer reported on ​the Robbins Brothers jewelry store Facebook campaign that lets people use Facebook to post rather bland messages of love to an electronic billboard over the westbound 91 freeway in Corona. It's not known as the most happening part of town, but apparently that freeway is always jammed, so the eight-second long billboard messages will get a good share a viewers.
Of course, the messages, submitted through the store's "Share The Love" page on Facebook are moderated, but how carefully? Can double entendres and naughty imagery slip through the cracks?
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Photos by Zachary Pincus-Roth The moment of truth
On November 11, 1998, when Howard Braham was a student at Columbia University, he realized around 10:30 p.m. that it was about to turn 11:11 on 11-11. He knocked on the door of his friend Steve Schwartz and they decided to gather 11 people, head up to the 11th floor, turn on the television and watch channel 11, which, Braham recalls, was the 11 o'clock news.
Since then, Braham hosted 11-11 parties almost every year, spacing them out so that the 11th of these parties took place last Friday, on on 11-11-11. The venue was George Izay Park, selected because its address is 1111 Olive Ave., in Burbank.
Braham, who now lives in Glendale and works as a Disney Imagineer, arrived just before 11:11 a.m. and stayed until the final moment of truth -- 11 seconds after 11:11 p.m.
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Have you heard of the new WB/Facebook web series Aim High? You know, the show about a high school student/CIA operative that actually allows you to incorporate your own pictures and data into the story? I didn't think so. Neither had any of my 997 Facebook friends, or the people I interrogated at Halloween parties last week, or the 50 teens I tracked down around Fairfax High School.
Jackson Rathbone takes charge as Nick Green: a high school student/CIA assassin in Aim High
Exec produced by mega-producer/director McG, Aim High stars Twilight star Jackson Rathbone as Nick Green, a teenage undercover CIA agent who assassinates terrorists in between homework and coffee dates with his crush Amanda -- played by Aimee Teegarden from Friday Night Lights. The first 11-minute episode premiered on Facebook and Cambio.com in October.
The series' signature gimmick is that on Facebook you can choose a "personalize" option and have your public data (profile pic, name, etc.) incorporated subtly into the show. After choosing the option, for instance, I saw a "Steph for Prez" sticker with my picture on it on the back of Nick Green's laptop. Aim High claims to be the first "social series" ever, and with blockbuster production quality, breathtaking stunts, a smart script, some semi-name actors and McG's involvement, I would have expected Aim High to go viral instantly. Yet much like its stealthy hero, this show is still flying way below the radar.
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Pasadena Museum of California Art Pasadena Museum of Art's Project Room is covered in a layer of fog to make it look like Jupiter
At the Pasadena Museum of California Art, art lovers can gain a sense of what it might be like searching on the surface of Jupiter -- by using a cellphone. The installation was created by Jet Propulsion Laboratory and its visual strategist, Dan Goods, and it tries to bring the Juno spacecraft and its mission to Jupiter to life.
The PMCA's Project Room is covered in a vast layer of fog, beneath which infrared light -- invisible to the naked eye -- will create forms that can be seen only with the assistance of a screen, such as on a cellphone camera after you've taken a picture. Just as the Juno mission is peering beneath the top clouds of Jupiter to understand its internal structure, the museum says, visitors will be able to "see" another world of light beneath the surface.
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Nasa photo NASA pilot Bill Dana watches a Boeing NB-52B carrier aircraft fly overhead after a successful test flight of the Northrop HL-10 lifting body at NASA Dryden Flight Research Center in 1969. Fellow pilot John Reeves can be seen at the cockpit of the lifting body.
At a new exhibition at the Huntington Library, there is a surfboard, a rocket engine and a 1950s desk, complete with slide rule. The thread that ties everything together? Aerospace.
The exhibition, entitled "Blue Sky Metropolis: The Aerospace Century in Southern California," brings together approximately 50 manuscripts, documents, and photographs drawn from The Huntington's growing collection of aerospace related materials and other private and public collections. "SoCal as we know it really wouldn't exist without aerospace," said Peter Westwick, the exhibition's co-curator and a professor of history at USC. "It was the driver of growth during last century. If you look back to 1900, this area was rural and semi-agrarian; now it's a high-tech metropolis. How did it make that transformation? Aerospace."
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