So The Torrance Police Department busted these four people living in the South Bay area of Los Angeles. It turns out that they weren't tipped off by his Afghan rocket launcher, or the imitation police badges, or even the "Anarchist Cookbook" and other illegal books. They were busted because the police where there looking for drugs, and apparently ended up hitting the jackpot. The house was located near the intersection of 190th and Rindge,......

Part of an ongoing series. On Saturday evening, local green-minded band (and Go Magazine covergirls) The Ditty Bops (MySpace), with Jesca Hoop (MySpace), John Reynolds, and Kaveh Rastegar (MySpace), performed at McCabe's Guitar Shop in Santa Monica. The shows also celebrated the release of The Ditty Bops' third full-length album, Summer Rains, with Hoop singing backup on three tracks: "Skinny Bones," "What Happened To The Radio," and "Feel From The Outside In." The Ditty......

Illustration courtesy of the artist. We saw in this week's Los Angeles Downtown News that Doug Davis, the paper's former art director and current contributor of the "Urban Scrawl" political comic strip, has his first gallery show. It opens tonight in Downtown LA and runs until April 30. In "Urban Scrawl," Davis captures the essence of the city with his pen and ink -- skewering government officials, projects and Downtown life in general. At......

The list of reasons for using public transportation just keeps growing: saving energy, protecting our environment, having fewer traffic jams. Now Bay Area commuters have an even bigger incentive to ride public transportation. The Contra Costa County Library has begun a partnership with Bay Area Rapid Transit (BART) to provide an automated book “vending machine” for its patrons. The new “Library A Go Go” machines will appear first in county BART stations in April, then......

LAist listed a top ten list of sorts: things they hope not to see in Los Angeles in 2008. (one example, pictured above). Shanghaiist was surprised to learn that "godless," "atheist," and "commie" China is soon going to be the world's largest supplier of Bibles! Torontoist picked some of their favorite photos of 2007. Londonist was relieved to hear the fire at the Royal Marsden hospital didn't harm any of the patients even though......

Last Friday, I made a plan to go out to Club Underground at The Echo for my birthday, and I had all my friends meet me there. On a total stroke of luck, I realized a band I had discovered a month or so before was also playing that night before Club Underground started. So I told everyone to get there at 9 if they wanted to see a good band first. The Morning......

I'm spending Thanksgiving with my husband and two young daughters in the Bay Area. So this year I am thankful for sharing some San Francisco treats with my kids: Cable Cars Ghiradelli Hot Fudge Sundaes Vietnamese food at The Slanted Door Sourdough Bread And candy and cakes at Miette. I am also thankful for the Jewish World Watch Solar Cooker Project. The solar cookers help the women in refugee camps in Chad have a......

Artist: Sharon Jones & the Dap-Kings Album: 100 Days, 100 Nights Label: Daptone Records Release Date: 10/02/07 Promo Track "100 Days, 100 Nights": When I first listened to this CD I thought it was a reissue of some '60s soul supergroup but no, this gem came out just last month! This album made me nostalgic for my first car, a '79 Honda Civic 4-door hatchback with an AM radio and the only music station that......

You know who makes a lot of sense? Michael Pollan does. If only he had the ear of the Senate as it prepares to pass a sorry, sorry Farm Bill. I love alcohol in unusual, fruit-oriented containers. Slashfood turns us on to this pumpkin keg -- yes the beer was actually brewed inside the pumpkin shell. Expect to see one of these at an LAist party near you very soon. It's good to know......

Sister -ist site, SFist, is reporting a 5.6 magnitude earthquake in the Bay Area, south of San Francisco. The USGS says...A moderate earthquake occurred at 8:04:54 PM (PDT) on Tuesday, October 30, 2007. The magnitude 5.6 event occurred 8 km (5 miles) NNE of Alum Rock, CA. The hypocentral depth is 9 km ( 6 miles). To us, that's a pretty decent earthquake. And at 5.5 or greater (here's the teaching us part), this is......

As California transplants, my family home up north has been a revolving door for visitors ever since we arrived in the Bay Area. While the constant influx of visitors can sometimes get a little tiring, it has had its benefits, primarily that my family has gotten to know NorCal's tourist destinations pretty well, particularly the Napa Valley and Sonoma County. For some reason I always seemed to miss out on wine tasting excursions when......

Layered in funk and schooled in rock'n'roll the bay area trio Honeycut will be busting out the jams at the Echo Wednesday night with Norwegian duo DATAROCK sharing the marquee. Honeycut are a unique band full of soulful lyrics and keyboard riffs, while being counter balanced by the loopy, hip-hoppy drums provided live via an MPC. And of course the rockin' presence they can't help but exude. And what do you get when you......

Only one major event for the Los Angeles Fire Department today in which 30 firefighters quickly fought a three-story commercial building at 515 S. Los Angeles St. Lindsay Lohan lawyers claim she's innocent in the crash involving Raymundo Ortega and his black Mercedes, citing that Ortega made an illegal U-Turn to snag a parking space putting him in Lohan's tracks. The case will go to trial in April. Five oriental fruit flies have been......

There was very little else for Londonist to be concerned with when the threat of a Tube strike became a very unpleasant reality. The inconvenience was extreme: there aren't many alternatives to the Tube in London despite the best efforts of the Londonist team to get everyone from A to B. Brighter news came in the form of the first ever female Yeoman Warder, or Beefeater as the position is more commonly known, and......

Things got off to a rocky start between us and TD Camp. We think he possibly knee-jerk reacted to our review of the new album "From The Ground Up" (see the comments), and wanted to give the San Francisco native a chance to tell his side. Bored Stiff's album comes out today, click here to check it, blah blah blah... OK! here's the interview: LAist: Whats life like as a musician/record label owner? TD Camp:......

These Bored Stiff guys chose an ironic name, because bored stiff is what you'll be. It's like they decided to make the most nondescript album of all time, "From The Ground Up". They come from the Bay area, and have a reputation that goes back as far as the 90's, so what gives? It's not like "From The Ground Up" is horrible. It's good in the sense that beats are pleasant, and the rhymes......

As timing would have it, my trip to San Francisco last week came right on the heels of Michael Bauer's controversial article, The Dish on Los Angeles. Unlike many Angelinos, I did not get the impression that his article was maligning our entire restaurant scene. I thought it was a pretty standard assessment of a certain class of restaurant - the good, the bad, and the Patina Group. As I prepared for my trip......

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It didn't register when I heard that Bill Walsh died. My phone had just beeped at me. Somebody was suggesting that I do an obit here on LAist. "Sure," I thought. "Too bad I don't have time. Maybe I'll bury it in LAst Night's Action." I was wrong. Maybe I was in denial. While trying to recap the happenings in local sports, I couldn't discard Bill Walsh into a pile of other stories from "elsewhere."......

While SFist cringed at the fatal dose of crime littering the Bay Area, it found solace in Hillary Clinton's San Francisco campaign headquarters opening, which featured loads of exposed mammary glands. In other news, SF Taxi Commission ruled that Satan's cab must keep its (in)famous medallion number, 666; and in an un-fashion-forward frenzy, San Francisco Fashion Week (chortle) bars bloggers from covering and getting smashed at their shows and parties, respectively. Also, they found a......

Warning, Los Angeles foodies: reading Michael Bauer's article on the Los Angeles dining experience might cause your eyes to roll back so far in your head that you will become permanently blind. Bauer, who is the executive food and wine editor at the San Francisco Chronicle, deigns to visit ten of the city's "top" restaurants, and comes away with these insights: In the Bay Area, food is the driving force of successful restaurants. But......

At last week's Digital Hollywood, I spent a few moments speaking wih Don Rose, Editor in Chief of the LA Report on the subtle but important difference between the monikers "geek," "dork," "nerd" and "dweeb." Having probably been called each one of these at various points in my life, I concurred with Don that by far geeks are where it's at . And so I feel compelled to share one of LA's best kept......

Seattlest has a talk with the photographer from last week's "Segway Mom" and then experiences some dissension in the ranks over the question of wine vs. beer. It's not West Side Story, but about as close as they'll get. They're also still waiting on some inbox relief after a spammer is arrested. As Chicagoist counts down the days to its third anniversary party, they found all-organic pizza to be underwhelming amidst the hoopla, tried......

Bay Area transplant Patrick O’Sullivan (above photo, right) is creator and director of All About Walken: The Impersonators of Christopher Walken, a comedic homage to the actor-dancer who plays creepy-spooky better than anyone else we know. LAist recently queried O’Sullivan to find out exactly why Walken is worth such a pop culture celebration. LAist: According to a news clip posted on your site, the idea for your show sprouted when you and your friends......

Photo by Malingering Wait... the Summer of Love is officially over? And we're just finding out about it now?! Tuesday's LA Times featured a piece titled "There's not a lot of love in the Haight" focusing on the street kids and drug addicts that populate San Francisco's famed Haight-Ashbury district. The scoop? Although Jerry Garcia used to drop acid in the Haight, "the legions of idealistic wanderers who migrated here during the Vietnam War"......

There's so much going on across the Ist-a-Verse that it's almost impossible to keep track these days. Fortunately, we do it so you don't have to! Londonist took a walk through Oliver Twist's London, thanks to a gorgeous map layer for Google Earth. They also caught up with modern-day fictional London, with the Fantastic Four and 28 Weeks Later. It was a week of insanity over at DCist. They started the week off with......

The third iteration of BarCamp LA is in full effect with a record number of attendee/participants. BarCamp is an ad-hoc un-conference produced, attended and presented by enterprising media/tech/Internet junkies, worker-monkeys, and inquiring civilians as an alternative to the overly-corporate, overpriced mega-conferences that commonly occur at the Convention Center, Loews Hotel, or somewhere-in-the-Bay Area. Still don't get it? Just come on down, BarCamp is free (thanks to sponsors) and its fun. Day one is winding down......

- "With little fanfare until this month, Los Angeles County has quietly become the country’s capital of medical marijuana." - LA Business Journal - Tuesday night he was sent to Hollywood on "American Idol". Wednesday TMZ reported that he had been busted for possession of weed.Thursday he was fired from Idol. Thursday afternoon he says they knew about his record even before he auditioned - People - Marijuana-like chemicals (whatever the hell those are) may......

- The founder of Reason magazine wrote a column in today's LA Times entitled "Let them have their pot" about the feds cockblocking weed from sick people - LAT - The cost of getting a California medical marijuana ID card is going up almost 1,000% because not enough people are getting California medical marijuana ID cards. Which is interesting because we thought that marijuana dispensaries in LA were booming. So wtf? - Bay Area......

In an alarmist post on Digg.com, someone is feeling like the big one is coming. "Third Earthquake Hits San Fran/Bay Area in Three Days! Exact same spot, and the Bay Area is due for the Big One any day now!" As commenter PunkRampant points out, there should be no worries. "We get weak earthquakes all the time, ~3 magnitude quakes aren't uncommon. This is a good thing, because if the weak quakes suddenly stopped......