• No one likes the stigma of saying they live in Van Nuys, so they chip away making their own new neighborhoods. To that, Councilman Tony Cardenas, who we admittedly give a hard time to on this site, said something that is right on target about this so called community pride: "If I had that many people show up to a community cleanup or an anti-prostitution night out it would do much more than changing the name of a few blocks."
  
• Leading California tenants’ rights organizations announced today that they have launched a new interactive website and blog, www.NoLandlordScheme.com, that will be focused exclusively on defeating the proposed ballot initiative sponsored by apartment and mobile home park owners. The measure, dubbed “the Hidden Agendas Scheme,” claims to be about eminent domain reform but it’s really an attempt to roll back rent control and abolish other important tenants’ rights laws in California.
  
• What does it say about the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences when they value an Oscar statue at $10?
  
• Yes! Cirque du Soleil + Kodak Theatre = 10 year contract for a permanent Hollywood show. So excited.
  
• "A former antiquities curator for the J. Paul Getty Museum in Los Angeles went on trial yesterday in Athens on charges of conspiring to acquire an ancient gold funerary wreath that Greek officials say was illegally removed from Greek soil about 15 years ago."
  
• We're covering the Writers Strike here in LA, but there are other strikes going on in the world such as the Broadway Stagehand Strike in NYC.
  
• The LAPD has identified and released the name of the suspect who ran down one officer today in his car this morning in Boyle Heights. Joe Ortiz Jr., 33, also tried to hit another officer, but missed. The injured officer and his two broken legs are now in serious condition, an upgrade from this morning when it was critical.
  
• "It's not a big deal to me." That's what 18-year-old UCLA alumna Kathleen Holtz said after learning she passed the California bar exam. "I struggled to be challenged and I wasn't... Every grade I skipped, I thought then it would challenge me, but it didn't."
  

Photo by retro traveler via the LAist Featured Photos pool on Flickr