The Kings were riding a comfy 3-0 lead late in the second period on Thursday night, and were ready to cruise to a victory, but they didn't account for Anaheim's Bobby Ryan. The rookie who began his season in the minors and was called up in November put on a clinic, scoring a hat trick (three goals) against Kings goaltender Jonathan Quick in the span of 2:21 to set a new franchise record and also tie the game. more ›

Waking up at 5:30 a.m. and being rushed out of your downtown Wilshire Grand hotel room is not the ideal experience for your Los Angeles stay. However, better safe than sorry when the 10th floor of at least 80 people was evacuated due to pepper spray being released. In an e-mail alert, Los Angeles Fire Department spokesman Ron Meyers said 20-30 people were evaluated with none needing treatment or transport to a local area hospital. People complained of eye and throat irritation. more ›

Clippers 99, Heat 98 - With Shaq in Phoenix and Dwayne Wade injured for the season, the Clippers had an opportunity to beat somebody -- and actually took it. Cuttino Mobley hit a pair of free throws in the final three seconds to seal the deal. He led the way with 29 points. more ›

This is last Friday as reported by LAist Featured Photos contributor Jonathan Alcom: "A gallon of regular gasoline priced at 3.99 at a Unocal gas station on Pico Bl and Barrington in West Los Angeles on Friday March 7, 2008 as surging oil prices jumped to a new record above $106 Friday. This gas station was about 40 cents higher than other gas stations in the area." more ›

Update, 3/15/08: Here's a video of the LAPD at the Anonymous event and a photo essay of all the craziness. Also, here's a video from the Anti-War March.

">Weekend America report about urban foraging in Los Angeles. That is, can you take a walk in your neighborhood and find and eat lunch without any cooking or prep back in the kitchen? Why, yes, yes you can. more ›

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New York Gov. Eliot Spitzer, who rode into office on the high horse of morality after years of spearing Wall Street robber barrons as the attorney general, has been linked to a prostitiution ring that has operated in Los Angeles. more ›

Luckily, since SXSW Music officially starts on Wednesday, tonight's massive line-up of residencies is hardly affected, save for The Voom Blooms who are replaced by We Barbarians and others at the Viper Room tonight (full list of tonight's residencies after the jump). However, the exodus of Los Angeles based bands is upon us. more ›

The Hollywood Coalition of Neighborhood Councils is hosting a Town Hall on Thursday night to address "Parking, Planning and Transportation." more ›

Matt Belknap is changing the way people experience comedy. As founder of Aspecialthing.com , Matt's created a place where comedy nerds, whether they be fans or the artists themselves, can discuss the art form they love so much. But Belknap isn't only a comedy fan. He runs See You Next Tuesday at the UCB Theater, is producer of and panelist on Never Not Funny, one of the I-Tunes picks for best Podcasts of '06 and '07, and founder of Aspecialthing Records, which in 2007 put out comedy albums by comedians Jen Kirkman, Paul F. Tompkins, Jonah Ray, and The Sklar Brothers. LAist got a hold of Matt's email and sent him a few questions about his plans for AST, his thoughts on comedy, and got some details on what new AST releases are planned for 08. more ›

I wake up every morning with the weather and traffic reports on ABC7 Eyewitness News. (My boyfriend and I love to share a fresh pot of coffee every morning and gently guffaw at Garth Kemp's goofball antics and shameless puppy-promotion.) more ›

In Rick Orlov's weekly Daily News column on City Hall and local politics, today he touches on the Democratic presidential race and Los Angeles Mayor Villaraigosa, who has recently been criticized for his time away from the city to campaign for Hillary Clinton. He defends his out-of-town moves and talks about what happens if Clinton loses: more ›

As reports and tweets comes out of of SXSW in Austin, TX where BusinessWeek's Sarah Lacy reportedly held a disastrous interview with 23-year-old Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg, news of the popular social networking site with more of a national and local business twist hit the wires: Paramount will offer movie clips via a Facebook application, a first for the movie industry. more ›

After a 5-month investigation, the Associated Press found that Los Angeles drinking water has traces of Anti-epileptic and anti-anxiety medications. "To be sure," the AP noted "the concentrations of these pharmaceuticals are tiny, measured in quantities of parts per billion or trillion, far below the levels of a medical dose." more ›

• Remember when we told you that Los Angeles tap water was the best tasting in the world? Turns out that our delicious H20 might have been sprinkled with delicious drugs. The AP found that a multitude of pharmaceuticals, like antibiotics, anti-convulsants, mood stabilizers and sex hormones, have been found in the drinking water supplies of at least 41 million Americans including water in Southern California. Little Johnny has taken such a liking to water these days, I wonder what's gotten into him.
• On Friday, Newport Beach police were baffled when they found a fully clothed woman dead and packed in dry ice in an upscale hotel room near John Wayne Airport. The room was rented from known Cocaine dealer and the woman, whose body was well preserved, was apparently wanted on drug charges in Colorado.
• Before she was ousted for saying Hillary Clinton was a "monster" for some of the "underhanded" tactics used to defeat Barack Obama in the Ohio Primary, foreign policy adviser Samantha Powers took a few questions at LA City Beat. Nowhere in the interview does she disparage Clinton, but she does offer some pretty enlightening opinions, such as this opus on how to have a dignified foreign policy: "...if we could just sort of remember that there are individuals at stake, that the “human” in human rights is not an abstraction." On second thought, I'm glad she resigned. We can't have those sorts of hippie, drugged out commie type of relations with the world. It would be un-American!
• In other political news, a Democrat won a special election to fill a congressional seat left vacant in Illinois by outgoing Republican Speaker Dennis Hastert. Bill Foster claimed the seat partly on the strength of Obama, who campaigned for him. Obama supporters claimed this was a signal of things to come in what many observers said was a national referendum as John McCain campaigned for the Republican.
• An off-duty cop in Temecula allegedly shot 2 and killed 1 person over some sort of melee at a Mexican restaurant in Riverside. Guns don't kill people, crazy ass people with anger management problems do.
• A 21-year-old member of the San Fernando Valley Illegal Soapbox Federation died this morning when his adorable little vehicle collided with a light pole in Tarzana. Thing is, it may not have been so adorable. The motto of the local soapbox federation is, "Action, Mayhem, Destruction, Bodily Harm...All For Free". I'm sorry, it seems pretty tough to macho yourself out when riding in a little cart made for 6-year-olds.
• Andy LaRoche got some bad news this weekend. The Dodger third baseman who was expected to share time with Nomar Garciaparra at the hot corner this season is out 8-10 weeks with a ligament tear in his thumb after getting hit trying to catch an attempted pickoff at third during a pre-season game Friday against the St. Louis Cardinals. Learn this name kids: Blake Dewitt. He's been tearing up Spring Training pitching and flashing some great leather. He could get some time at third in LaRoche's absence.

Big Business, Red Fang, The Cops @ Spaceland (Tho Cops reviewed on LAist, 3/20/06) more ›

Like many coffee shops, Polly's may just be a great place to take your grandma. Maybe the menu isn't very interesting beyond breakfast, their exotic chicken salad sandwich (ooh, are those cashews?), and the chicken pot pie. And yes, they are in an unholy alliance with the Colonel ("it's a well-known fact he puts an addictive chemical in his chicken that makes you crave it fortnightly"). But if there was only one Banberry Pie left in the world, I would fight you to the death for it. more ›

Today was the day that the first Barbie doll made her debut at the American International Toy Fair in New York in 1959. Make fun of her all you want, but Barbie's an icon whose life has been far more interesting than any reality show, and yes we know if she were real her head wouldn't be supported by her body dimensions or some such thing, but come on. Even Dolly Parton named her newest record "Backwoods Barbie." more ›

In the wake of last week's shooting death of 17-year-old Los Angeles High football star Jamiel Shaw, his community--and the community of LA at large--are mourning the loss and trying to make sense of how a kid who was on the right path in life was in the wrong place at the wrong time. more ›

Matt Belknap is changing the way people experience comedy. As founder of Aspecialthing.com , Matt's created a place where comedy nerds, whether they be fans or the artists themselves, can discuss the art form they love so much. But Belknap isn't only a comedy fan. He runs See You Next Tuesday at the UCB Theater, is producer of and panelist on Never Not Funny, one of the I-Tunes picks for best Podcasts of '06 and '07, and founder of Aspecialthing Records, which in 2007 put out comedy albums by comedians Jen Kirkman, Paul F. Tompkins, Jonah Ray, and The Sklar Brothers. LAist got a hold of Matt's email and sent him a few questions about his plans for AST, his thoughts on comedy, and got some details on what new AST releases are planned for 08. more ›

UPDATE!!! The event has moved to in front of Grauman's Chinese Theater. Check Facebook for updated details.

$3.55 for unleaded. Check, albeit annoying. more ›

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. more ›

Governor Schwarzenegger announced today where some of the Proposition 1B, the $20 billion infrastructure bond approved by us voters in 2006, will go... right here in Los Angeles: more ›

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The city of Ventura has been taken off the map. Specifically, the Greyhound Bus Line service map. This week the company shut down the station in Ventura, and wiped it off their route, to the surprise of many who had been hoping to hop a bus out of town. So is busing it a relic of a bygone era? more ›

Everyone needs a place that restores their faith. Not only in a religious sense -- a place that restores one's faith in humanity, in rightness and balance. A place that makes the unseen become momentarily visible. Some people find their place in church, nature, or fellowship. And some people's faith is restored when they stand in the presence of great art. There is something truly special when the place itself is art -- the art that grows from one pair of hands crafting a vision. Places like the Watt's Towers and Nitt Witt Ridge, where one person has painstakingly made their home a shrine, shard by broken shard. more ›

After reports that 10 members of congress, including California Senator Dianne Feinstein, received letters and photos in the mail that possibly claimed responsibility for yesterday's bombing in Times Square, the FBI did the obvious thing: go to the man's house who was listed on the return address. Nothing turned up when they questioned the man. "We're continuing to investigate, but right now there is no evidence linking the individual being questioned to the incident in New York or the letters themselves," Eimiller said to KNBC. more ›

Update 8:25am, 3/7: "Laura Eimiller, an FBI spokeswoman in Los Angeles, said an individual was questioned there about the letters to Congress and "there is no evidence linking the letters, which contained no threat, to the bombing," according to ABC7.