First, some non-tonight news. This is for Sunday, but you should know now. The Police have added a second Hollywood Bowl show on Wednesday, May 28. They play with Elvis Costello. "General on-sale begins March 9 - that’s this Sunday - at 10am," says LosAnjealous. And how about some American Idol News? Despite local Samanta Sidley of Alex & Sam getting snubbed from moving on in the competition, another local, Chikezie, a 22-year-old from Inglewood,......

Don't know what to get for the gun toting rifleman who has everything? In San Francisco, turning that rifle in to authorities will net you a cool $100 gift card. Eh, you say? OK, how about $200 for AK-47s? I wonder how that conversation might go at home: Honey, where is my gun? Oh, I turned it in sweety, for $100 worth of movie rentals. You did what? Guns don't kill people, gift cards......

It's time we all realized something very very important about Britney Spears. Something incredible. Something -- redemptive, even. Much like Tamburlaine, she has been sent by God as a scourge to rid our fair city of its vermin-like paparazzi, one crushed foot at a time. Thank you, Britney. Thank you. Looks like the ArcLight at the Sherman Oaks Galleria might be up and running! Now us Valley kids don't have to cross the big......

Tony Bennett @ House of Blues Eleni Mandell @ The Echo Glen Phillips @ The Hotel Cafe Sarah Silverman @ The Troubadour Bill Kirchen, Johnny Dilks, Tony Gilkyson @ Safari Sam's Volumen Cero, Los Super Elegantes, Silvestre @ The Knitting Factory The PKO, Julie Cain, The Jazzabilly Blues, Elevator Band UK @ Lava Lounge The Starfuckers, Mouth to Mouth, Firefly, El Camino @ The Cat Club The Youngs, Hello Menno, Hopewell @ Silverlake Lounge......

A suit was filed yesterday against major sunscreen makers for harmful advertising. Waterproof? UVA blockers? "Snake oil," says a lawyer filing the suit. Insert "somebody's getting burned" joke here. The birdflu is coming! The birflu is coming! Officials met in LA yesterday and announced that they expect to see Avian Flu arrive in LA in two months. And then if it jumps to people, well, sunburn will be the least of our concerns. Farther......

That disturbance at the Convention Center — would you believe it was a Fame-style riot? "Dozens of youths, some wearing gang colors, reportedly began to spar with vendors and dance on cars and disobeyed police orders to disperse," Channel 2 reports. Someone heard a balloon popping and thought it was a gun. The massive rally of police force seems to be, uh, disproportionate to the incident. For the second year running, Taft High School......

Leonardo DaVinci lived in all of the following except: Milan Amsterdam Rome France You have 7 seconds. (no googling) That was the first question of the 2006 LAUSD academic decathlon superquiz. It's being broadcast now on KCLS and will be rebroadcast on LA36. The theme? The Renaissance. Today there are local competitions; state finals run from March 16-19. LA's own El Camino Real High School was last year's national champs, but Taft ruled at......

The LA Times is running an in-depth series about high schoolers who drop out, focusing on Birmingham High in Van Nuys. The paper shows that it's not a bad school, but about 20% of the class of 2005 didn't graduate. Sadly, it's hard to even get the people in charge to agree on what the exact dropout numbers are. The numbers tell a pretty bleak story: if you rebel without a cause, chances are......

A columnist for the Gilroy Dispatch investigates a matter that's been bugging us all winter: how come the bells on the Hollywood Freeway look rusted already? We already knew about Caltran's mission bells project that follows the original El Camino Real, which linked the 21 California missions and follows much of U.S. Highway 101 but the answer surprised us. [A reader asks] “I’m calling about the bells lining the El Camino Real along Highway......

LAist freely admits to being a nerd in high school; probably not a startling revelation, but the condition was compounded by participation in the Olympiad of academics: the Academic Decathlon. In Decathlon competition, teams of nine high school juniors and seniors compete in ten events that test students in the areas of art, music, literature/composition, science, math, social studies, speech, interview, economics and Super Quiz, a quiz-show styled event which focuses on astronomy for......