You’ve probably whizzed by his 17-foot image dozens of times or been stuck in traffic behind one of the many trucks that he rides on. The Little Man with the Hammer, the trademark of The Western Exterminator Company was born in 1931. The creation of telephone company artist Vaughn Kaufman, “The Little Man” has been used as the trademark for this family-run company (celebrating it’s 86th year) ever since. The Los Angeles icon known over......

Guest Day Editor LA City Nerd will be joining LAist with a few posts throughout the day. Read the introductory interview here and check out the nerd's blog. Everyone knows Los Angeles is the second largest City in the US, but here are some LA City Nerd facts you might not have known... 1. LA City has the largest urban forest of any City in the US. 2. LA City has the largest municipal street......

Ken Layne is serializing his new book thing right here on LAist. He's also the West Coast editor of Wonkette. It’s a basic 1950s low-end ranch house of the sort you might have paid $659,000 to buy in Culver City last year — before the SoCal real-estate collapse was visible to the untrained eye. Although the people are gone and the windows are mostly broken out and boarded up, there are signs of a normal......

With 268,138 millionaire households, our county, the largest in the nation, holds 3% of the nation's millionaires, or 23% of the state's. And California, that's just for starters: 1. L.A. 2. Cook (Chicago) 3. Orange 4. Maricopa (Phoenix) 5. San Diego 6. Harris (Houston) 7. Nassau 8. Santa Clara 9. Palm Beach 10. King (Seattle) From CNN Money Photo by Kristo via Flickr......

I'm a total sucker for aerial photography, especially images of my immediate surroundings. Call it aerial narcissism, if you will. The Thomas Guide is my Bible while I'm on the road, but what to do when I'm chained to my computer? Fortunately, online mapping technology has advanced miles beyond what it used to be even a couple of years ago. The standard road maps are usually accompanied by satellite imagery that allow the user......

Did you know that where you live equals when you'll die? Well, sort of. NPR reports that according to a new Harvard study, your location, how much you earn, and many other duh factors contribute to how long your life will be. That’s good news for Californians. We rank number 10 in the nation for longevity, which puts us in the… let’s see… fifty… plus a district… carry the one… divide by percentile squared…......

This fact is not from our archives, rather LA Observed's. But this old fact that Kevin announced more than three years ago, is still new and useful to many. Recent arrivals to L.A. might like to know this useful mnemonic for figuring out what side of the street a building is on: SeE NoW The even numbers are almost always on the South and East sides; the odd numbers are almost always on the......

There's a lumpy, farting, gum-chewing thing in the art world called outsider art. Outsider art can be many things - art by the disabled or merely unschooled, art in the eye of the beholder, or just art out of fashion. Here in ultra-sophisticated, un-bumpkinish Los Angeles, it seems that outsider art might be something of an endangered species. Thankfully, that just ain't so. You see, once upon a time there was a man named......

We all handled this business of Shaq winning the championship with the Heat thing differently. LAist wrote an open letter to Kobe. Some readers of the LAist told us where we could stick our open letter to Kobe. LA City Nerd however chose to count the lakes of LA - since the Laker name comes from the fact that the team came here from Minnesota, the Land of 10,000 Lakes. This is why people......

LA has 22 Sister Cities * Athens, Greece * Auckland, New Zealand * Berlin, Germany * Bordeaux, France * Busan, South Korea * Eilat, Israel * Giza, Egypt * Guangzhou, People's Republic of China * Jakarta, Indonesia * Kaunas, Lithuania * Lusaka, Zambia * Makati City, Philippines * Mexico City, Mexico * Melbourne, Australia * Moscow, Russia * Mumbai, India * Nagoya, Japan * St. Petersburg, Russia * Salvador, Brazil * Split, Croatia *......