Joe the toe stubber

Workers doing renovation at Clifton's Cafeteria downtown discovered a neon light behind a wall that was on and lit up, it was reported today.

A neon history expert told the Weekly that it was quite possible that it could be the oldest continuously lit neon light in the world if it has been on for 70 years, as was claimed in blogdowntown today.

According to the site, Clifton's owner Andrew Meieran says ...

More >>

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...

More >>

Copiale Cipher: the eye was the key to knowing

Cool news from USC: a computer team led by a professor who has been trying to crack the Zodiac Killer's weird hieroglyphics has instead cracked the dense Greek and Roman code in the Copiale Cipher, a 105-page manuscript of a secret society obsessed with ... eyeballs.

City News Service reports that the 18th Century doc was found in East Berlin after the Cold War. Computer scientist Kevin Knight's team at Viterbi School of Engineering unlocked the ancient patterns used by the strange Eyeball Society that was deep into eye surgery and ophthalmology -- in the 1700s. Sounds painful.

More >>

Google

"Forking paths," indeed.

The 112-year-old ghost of Jorge Luis Borges has to be be feeling rather conflicted today.

On the one hand, he scored a center-stage cameo on Google's home page -- an honor the search engine/world ruler, with headquarters in whitewashed Mountain View, California, denied both Cesar Chavez and Cinco de Mayo this year. The Google spotlight promptly set off a domino effect of news stories and aggregations this a.m. ...

More >>

​​

Carl Van Vechten

Writer and art collector Gertrude Stein

​​In the history of the world, gays and lesbians have always contributed to advances in many different societies. One such person is Gertrude Stein, influential writer and art collector who grew up for a period of her life in Oakland.

"She provides a model of radical experimentation in poetry and prose that has really stimulated people for generations to go out and break forms and do things that have never been done before," Jayne Walker, lecturer emerita of the UC Davis writing program, tells the Contra Costa Times.

In California, a group called "Stop SB 48" wants to repeal a state law that allows students to learn about Stein and other important people in history who were gay.

More >>

El Mirador in West Hollywood

It all started over the inability to replace windows, and now West Hollywood's historic El Mirador apartment building may be demolished.

"If they don't allow any use for this building," says El Mirador owner Jerome Nash, "and I can't rehab it, it will have to be torn down."

Built in 1929, the city-designated landmark stands on Fountain and Sweetzer avenues. If flattened by a demolition crew for, say, another run-of-the-mill condominium project, it would be downright scandalous.

More >>

Best day ever!

As chance would have it, the day before Carmageddon has turned out to be a very big day. Not only is it Bastille Day, it is also apparently a lot of other important Days, including National Nude Day, Mac 'N' Cheese Day and Spongebob's Birthday. Whoever's in charge of scheduling Days kind of overbooked us here, but we're going to celebrate them all best we can.

Let's begin with National Nude Day, which, according to New York (who we slightly suspect of making things like this up so as to slip the word "nude" into more headlines, but we'll bite), "is a day in which to point fingers at people who are not wearing clothes in public settings."

Here's how to ring it in the L.A. way (NSFW photo after the jump):

More >>

Los Angeles Times

What dork in his right mind would offer $1.7 million for a big drab hunk of moon, you ask? Turns out the feds will -- but a Riverside woman found out the hard way, via cutty deal at a desolate Lake Elsinore diner, that they're not so much good for their money.

The undercover NASA brainiacs traded their rocket wear for a sketch disguise as Joe-blow millionaires, the finale of a months-long investigation. (Moon rocks are apparently "national treasures.") The Riverside County Sheriff's Department describes the Thursday-morning dogpile of deputies and cops and, uh, astronauts:

More >>

Beverly & Pack

Among some of the facts you didn't know about Cinco de Mayo -- besides the holiday's invention at the hands of Corona beer -- is that Mexico's 5th of May French invaders wanted to stop U.S. expansionism and planned to join up with Confederates against the Union Army.

Whoa. So says scholar Dan Arellano.

Not only that, but he says that 500 Mexican Americans -- "Tejanos" -- were enlisted by Mexico to defeat the French on that fateful date, and that the holiday, right so, began in South Texas. So ...

More >>

Anyone seen my vertebrae?

This was a tough race, considering 16,000 fossils have been pried from the ground beneath L.A.'s metropolitan Page Museum since 2007. The first round of catalogued bones was just announced Wednesday, and they've all got one thing in common: They're really ridiculously cool-looking.

But after chatting with collections manager Aisling Farrell for a spell (cool job, cool name, no biggie), we've managed to identify our five favorites --

More >>

Columbia

Battle: Los Angeles.

Sixty-nine years ago tonight the air raid sirens wailed across Los Angeles as frightened residents looked to the western skies.

It was nearly three months after Pearl Harbor and the start of World War II for the United States so, needless to say, people on the left coast were rightly scared.

Anti-aircraft artillery filled the skies and those who had bomb shelters went below. But what triggered the wave of fear known as the Battle of Los Angeles?

More >>