Ryan Myers

​It's tamale season in L.A. And if you haven't put your holiday order in to your friendly, neighborhood, cart-pushing vendor yet, you better get moving.

Except if you live in the MacArthur Park / Westlake district near downtown, where immigrants' rights activists say cops have been cracking down on allegedly illicit street-food vendors.

You might not get the order you paid for if your guy has been put out of business:

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Illustration by Jack Balingit

Forty stories? That's nothin'!

​Hollywood is about to become a sea of skyscrapers. And our only consolation prize is a goddamned cat park.

Opponents to L.A.'s new "Hollywood Community Plan" never stood a chance. As if it wasn't off-putting enough that today's Planning Commission meeting was scheduled for 8:30 a.m. -- with little to no public notice -- the commission scheduled another hot topic for very same morning: approval of the New West Charter High School near Stoner Park. (Which, like the community plan, passed with flying colors, despite similar protests from nearby residents who don't think their 'hood can handle any more clog.)

By the time the Hollywood Community Plan was finally addressed around noon, a pool of 50-odd naysayers had drained...

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la.indymedia.org

Butcher paper is no match for a sweet development deal.

​We knew L.A. City Councilwoman Jan Perry liked to cozy up to rich real-estate types, but this takes City Hall's sleazy development hounding to new lows.

It all started in 2003, when the city sold a South L.A. land parcel hosting the community's beloved South Central Farm to developer Ralph Horowitz -- on the promise that 2.6 acres would be turned back into a park. For the last half-decade, a group of South L.A. residents known as the South Central Farmers have been protesting, passing around petitions and flat-out begging...

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sightseeingworld.com

Hollywood Boulevard's about to get some country-bumpkin competition.

​Just because we live in the biggest, brightest county on the West Coast -- famous for its neon signage, supergraphic billboards and helicopter searchlights -- doesn't mean we can't fight for our right to stargaze.

By the beginning of next year, the L.A. County Board of Supervisors is expected to pass the Dark Skies Ordinance, proposed in 2008 and given its final blessing by the Regional Planning Commission last week.

It adds outdoor lighting to a long list of neighborhood unpleasantries...

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Professional Helicopter Pilots Association

Bullseye.

​The L.A. County Board of Supervisors picked up the hot-button helicopter noise issue this week, adding their (somewhat meaningless) endorsement to the recently proposed House of Representatives bill that would "force the Federal Aviation Administration (FAA) to restrict helicopter flight paths and set minimum altitudes within 12 months." It was launched after nice, quiet communities in the Valley and Hills got a dose of regular ol' L.A. helicopter hell around Carmageddon-time.

We said it then, and we'll say it now:

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Burbank ACTION

​Over 100 worried residents packed into the disco-themed ballroom of Moose Lodge in Glendale last night -- summoned by a growing base of health, privacy and consumer advocates lashing out against California's sketchy new method of measuring household energy use.

The new wireless devices are called Smart Meters, and they're part of a United Nations-led movement to hook the world up to a happy green "smart grid." Such a network would, theoretically...

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New York Times, circa 2007

Still annoying.

​Update: L.A. City Councilman Bill Rosendahl says he has some tricks up his sleeve to possibly take down the airport before 2015. Also, he calls it "a health emergency for the lungs of my people." More drama below.

Originally posted October 18 at 12:50 p.m.

It's a tale as old as time (or at least dating back to the mid-90s, when our institutional/Internet memory kind of peters out): Venetians are pissed at the airport next door.

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PHOTO BY SHANNON COTTRELL

Alex Thompson, armed with her scanner and LA Weekly's "Best Police Blog" award.

​Alex Thompson, that very controversial lady behind the Venice 311 police blog and Twitter account, has begun to expand her online empire -- just as she told the LA Weekly she would in "Clamor Over Venice 311," before she quit speaking to us halfway into the reporting process.

Koreatown311.org appears to have launched around the beginning of last week. Only a couple items are posted on the blog -- including a promo piece for the LAPD Olympic Division's upcoming Fall Carnival -- but the Twitter feed of reports coming over the police scanner is in full effect.

Thompson is one busy Samaritan:

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Yo! Venice

Don't even think about it.

​Neighborhood forum Yo! Venice has riled up some longstanding anti-Santa Monica sentiments today with a photo of a "No Parking" notice at the corner of Ozone Avenue and Seventh Street (see right).

Bret, the forum's administrator, notes that the signage was posted this morning "right on the border of Venice and SM ... pointed toward Venice of course."

It's a ground-level reminder of the seemingly eternal battle between Santa Monica and Venice over sky traffic:

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The Eastsider via Picasa

The lake was last drained in 1984. Yes, it was awful.

​For the new wave of borderline-eastside gentry who weren't around to see Echo Park Lake in a surly state of "stinking mud flat" in 1984 (or 1902, 1906, 1919, 1922, 1932 or 1946):

We hate to be the bearers of bad news, but your Central Park in SoCal fantasy is about to get, very literally, drained into one giant crater of caked dirt. The $64 million city project was announced at the end of last year, and -- after some delays -- is well on its way to completion. As of this fine Labor Day Weekend, Eastsider LA has detected a "bathtub-like ring" ...

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VeniceBeachLiveCam.com

Don't mind us! Just checkin' the surf!

​This isn't Venice's first online surf watch -- but in the wide world of webcams, the brand-new Venice Beach Live Cam, sniffed out by crime blog Venice 311 today, is certainly king.

And it does a lot more than surf watch. With insanely high resolution, this thing will zoom, pan and rotate at an Internet creeper's every whim. If that whim happens to be staring down some Minnesota high schooler's touristy spaghetti-strap...

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Get Buckets via Facebook

Joe Frazier

​Pro basketballer Joe Frazier has had former teammates and current students at his bedside in Northridge Hospital since Thursday night, when he was plowed over by a hit-and-run driver between Tarzana and Reseda.

Police told the head coach at Calabasas High (who told the Los Angeles Times) that "the driver of a light-colored, SUV-type vehicle ran a red light near the intersection of Ventura Boulevard and Wilbur Avenue" before knocking Frazier off his motorcycle and putting him in a coma.

CBS2 reports that the 28-year-old assistant coach was heading home from practice...

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poonomore.com

Genius.

​William Schindler, a retired schoolteacher who walks his little terrier mix down Griffith Park Boulevard in Silver Lake every morning, says he recently started to become "disturbed, seeing all the uncollected dog poop day after day." So he did what any self-respecting Good Samaritan would do: He started a cheap, convenient community business called "Poo No More." And made adorable flyers. Lots of them.

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pbase.com

What we imagine the Venice Beach pipe might be looking like, right about now.

​The hodge-podge of jurisdictions along the L.A. County coastline is pitting local governments (and their constituents) against each other once again -- this time, over a crappy old sewer pipeline running from Venice to the Hyperion treatment plant in Playa Del Rey, direly in need of replacement.

Not only does the project sound gross -- who really wants to imagine Venice's excrements surging beneath them 24/7, much as Beverly Hills might imagine a subway running beneath their mansionry? -- but, for the next year, its construction would seriously clog the already over-trafficked streets that carry outsiders through the Marina.

We Are Marina Del Rey...

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SZONE via Flickr

Yeah, we know. It sucks.

​The national media is in a tither this week over the concept of "helicopter traffic" in Los Angeles -- an offshoot of the ridiculous amount of buzz we received for Carmageddon.

Though the big 405 closure turned out to be an anticlimactic breeze, the motherlode of choppers that took to the sky to observe the empty freeway and Mulholland Bridge demolition on July 15 and 16 was a tipping point for nearby residents of L.A.'s more rural, lavish valleys and hills.

So much so, that State Congressman Howard Berman, with pressure from Sherman Oaks homeowners, has proposed the Los Angeles Residential Helicopter Noise Relief Act of 2011...

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Careful there, foliage: Y'all are getting a little colorful for La Cañada.

​As it stands, the outlying L.A. County suburb of La Cañada Flintridge isn't the most thrilling sight to behold.

"It's kind of all browns and whites," says Ina Dan, a friend of yours truly who grew up at the mercy of the city's excruciating drabness. "It's almost missionary -- your typical American town."

But recently, to the horror of La Cañada's largely wealthy, largely white/Korean/Christian residents, a drive-thru shack on Foothill Boulevard, the only street in town with any stores on it (we're a "main drag" kind of city, says Dan), repainted its roof a monstrous shade of neon yellow. Uh-oh: Ordinance time! The La Cañada Valley Sun reports:

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The sycamores are perched on the southwest edge of the picturesque Silver Lake Reservoir.

​Is it really any wonder the L.A. Department of Water and Power is the 13th most-hated company in America?

On top of greedy, unnecessary rate hikes and surprise thousand-dollar bills out of nowhere, DWP officials are now openly admitting to the Los Angeles Times that they prefer to make neighborhood-altering decisions behind closed doors -- because that way, they never have to deal with the very people who pay them to exist.

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East L.A. wants to secede from county control.

​While Angelenos bicker over small matters of locational pride like who's westside (read: supersnob) and who's eastside (read: street), the unincorporated patch of L.A. County known as East L.A. -- boxed in by cities on all sides -- still goes identity-less and proper-less in the 21st century, 38 years after residents first pushed to form their own city.

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Roosters!

​Norco, a blossoming desert town (to put it nicely) in the northwest corner of Riverside County, used to be just the kind of no-man's-land where 25 to 50 early-rising roosters would go unheard by everyone but the farmer's wife and the tumbleweeds.

Not anymore! Just call it desert gentrification: "City regulations were intended for rural ranch-type neighborhoods where individuals could house many roosters without disturbing neighbors," writes the Riverside Press-Enterprise today. "But neighborhoods now are more densely populated."

Cue the classic neighbor-on-neighbor feud...

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Google Maps

Crown Chrome Plating: jewel of the Valley.

​If you lived anywhere near Van Nuys Boulevard and Roscoe in the Valley before spring 2009 -- time to get righteous.

According to the Environmental Protection Agency, you might have been exposed to some improperly stored hazardous wastes at nearby metal-plating facility Crown Chrome Plating. Nasty stuff.

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