Opinion: Items of local interest
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Downtown blogger Don Garza takes a series of pictures at the intersection of Skid Row’s 6th and San Pedro and finds ... not much!
I am amazed that there is no one there at all . but it did rain. [...] Just a few months ago, the southeast corner of 6th and San Pedro streets was a drug bazaar nestled amid cardboard boxes, tarps and tents.
LA’s Homeless Blog’s Joel John Roberts questions the accuracy of having homeless people counting the number of homeless people:
So will the number counting be effective? Especially, after spending over $800,000? I wrote an op-ed piece two years, after the first homeless count. I called it a Homeless Numbers Game. Because the reality is, the politics with these numbers is extraordinary. So the question of whether homeless people will effectively count homeless people is actually moot. The question to really ask is this... Since the final tally will be simply an estimate, will city and county officials decide L.A. is getting better (less homeless), getting worse (more homeless), or just more of the same? It’s a highly political decision.
BoingBoing’s Cory Doctorow posts excerpts and an illustration from Disney’s 1943 employee manual.
UCLA Professor Mark Kleiman, a drug policy specialist, writes:
There’s now good scientific support for the claim that psilocybin, the active agent in ‘magic’ mushrooms, has a better-than-even chance of generating a full-blown mystical experience in properly selected and prepared subjects.
Animal Services chief Ed Boks drops some science about feral cats:
Feral cats, which are wild animals, typically live in colonies of six to twenty cats. You often never see all the cats in a colony and it is easy to underestimate the size of a feral cat problem in a neighborhood. When individuals or authorities try to catch cats for extermination this heightens the biological stress on the colony. This stress triggers two survival mechanisms causing the cats to 1) over breed, and 2) over produce. That is, rather than having one litter per year of two to three kittens, a stressed female could have two or three litters per year of six to nine kittens each.
City Council President Eric Garcetti posts his annual State of Hollywood address.
LAist’s Tony Pierce interviews Sarah from Brentwood, more famously known as the Bears fan who sold herself on EBay to get a Super Bowl ticket, and who as a result received four free tickets from Axe Body Spray, invited two girlfriends, and is now taking auditions for a male date:
About how many emails have you gotten from eligible men looking to be your date?Um...probably about 200 so far.
Losanjealous identifies (and photographs) Pico Blvd.’s ‘Naked People Store District.’
Blogging.la’s Lucinda Michele, on assignment from the local art mag Coagula, discusses art ‘with one of the premier donors and patrons on the art scene’ ... a man perhaps better known for portraying a Vulcan named Spock.
Martini Republic’s Joseph Mailander takes a swipe at the Grand Avenue project:
The idea that whatever becomes of the north end of Grand Avenue—the street for LA’s own bridge-and-tunnel crowd, where suburbanites can feel comfortable and safe at concerts and museums--will much impact all of downtown is about as silly a notion as the idea that going to a restaurant on PCH impacts the surf and sand and cliffs and bluffs on either side of it. It’s not mere boosterism to say that downtown LA is more interesting than the people who dismiss it realize. And it is something far more insipid than boosterism to think that Grand Avenue--a shiny, silly project, controlled by a man who has made two fortunes by appeasing the minds of suburbanites--will have much impact on downtowners at all, beyond their occasional visits, which may even be as infrequent as the visits by the suburbanites themselves.