Carolyn Kellogg

Leave it to writer Tod Goldberg to put together a wickedly good preview of the LA Times Festival of Books, which has just come out with its panel schedule. His recommendations are good, if oddly humble (apparently you may find him at the LA Lit panel instead of his own); we have to add that it's worth seeking him out, since he's entertaining as hell. The best part, though, is his imagined conversation between Joyce...

Science fiction writer Ray Bradbury: he's the author of Farenheight 451, The Illustrated Man, the Martian Chronicles and many more. He's won a pile of awards, including a Kennedy Center honor in 2004. (What do you think is going through his mind when this photo was taken?) He's 85, and he lives in our very own Pasadena. After his family moved to LA in the 1930s, Bradbury hung around Hollywood; special effects visionary Ray...

Si se puede — yes we can....

In the midst of labor negotiations, the National Captioning Institute fired its entire (unionized) Burbank staff. And the workers are pissed. What the company called its best offer included, according to union reps, wage freezes, tripling and quadrupling of production expectations and wage concessions amounting to 58% of salary. Yuck. Closed captioners are the people who translate what happens on the audio track of TV shows or DVDs into words, including sound effects like...

When the Ambassador Hotel was knocked down, parts of its pantry went into storage. The pantry, of course, is where Robert F. Kennedy was mortally wounded after speaking to supporters in the hotel's ballroom; he'd just won the 1968 California Democratic primary. Now the LA Times catches up with 29 items, socked away in storage. There's a cabinet door. There are some fixtures. There's a table. But there's not actually a pantry anymore, even...

Yesterday the LA County Board of Supervisors voted to regulate medical marijuana dispensaries, effectively lifting a ban on medical marijuana in unincorporated areas of the county. The Daily News reports that several facilities had been dispensing medical marijuana anyway, including 20 in the San Fernando Valley. Long Beach police found 400 marijuana plants growing in a warehouse under the careful supervision of one Philip Northcutt. Northcutt had been using a silkscreen business as a...

As people continue to pour out into LA streets to protest immigration "reform," the pundits awaken. The LA Times notices that Spanish-language DJ Eddie "Piolín" Sotelo was a major force behind Saturday's rally; Salon thinks the activists may say "hola" to the Democratic party; the Daily Breeze wants us to slow down, please. LAUSD will be in lock-down to prevent further student walkouts today. Chief Bratton suggests that the cold rain will also encourage...

Record stores may have folded, but fans of vinyl soldier on. Where to get their fix? Well, there's Amoeba, there are swap meets, there are Sing Along With Mitch albums laguishing at the Salvation Army. And this week, one vinyl fan took her for-sale collection virtual with Hollywoodland Records, a blog-slash-store. Prices range from $1 - $50, but most are less than $10. It's not a bigtime operation; in fact, you've got to live...

We're glad the blog Martini Republic is around. The site is politically outspoken, sometimes to the point of being a gadfly in the LA blog soup. But doesn't every community need a gadfly? Somebody who half the time makes you think "I wish I'd said that" — and the other half the time makes you cringe and think "ouch, I wish he'd just shut up." It's not easy being the gadfly, we're sure. Last...

This week Apple Computer will be in court in the UK, facing two of Britain's favorite sons: Sir Paul McCartney and not-sir Ringo Starr. Seems that Jobs & Co. had an agreement with the Beatles and their heirs to keep Apple Computer out of the music business, where the Beatles had a firmly established their fruit identity as Apple Corps in 1968. The agreement has been revised a couple of times; in its most...