Carolyn Kellogg

You've heard that the South Park Scientology episode was pulled. Trey Parker and Matt Stone wrote, in a statement to Variety, "So, Scientology, you may have won this battle, but the million-year war for Earth has just begun! Temporarily anozinizing our episode will not stop us from keeping Thetans forever trapped in your pitiful man-bodies. Curses and drat! You have obstructed us for now, but your feeble bid to save humanity will fail! Hail Xenu!!!"...

We're #2! It's no fun being up near the top of the list of the most toxic air in the nation, except that we trail New York. Just think: without the AQMD, we probably would have been #1. Last week UC Regents, meeting at UCLA, voted to divest from companies doing business in the Sudan. Students, who led the divestment effort, say their achievement "represents student activism of the 21st century." Good news, this...

Porsche: check. Vanity plate: check. Agressively litigious: check. How many times has the car been keyed? It looked pretty pristine when we found it in Glendale, but we can't imagine it will go scratch-free or loogie-free for long....

Another step has been taken in transforming downtown with the Grand Avenue project. Now we're not sure we're going to get the technicalities of municipal development right, but as we read in the Daily News, an agreement to begin design on the park (see illustration) that will stretch from the Music Center to City Hall has been approved. A gallery of park proposals from the people has been put together by good-intentioned rabble-rousers at...

Every week in Living in Sin, Jen Sincero provides advice for LA's sexually curious. e-mail Jen your question, which will be posted anonymously. Dear Jen - My wife and I had a threesome involving another man and she was pleasured by him in a way I've never seen her be before. It was so good, she ended up leaving me for him, but, to make a very long story short, we recently got back...

We were excited to hear that KCRW is taking its music shows online in a brand new 24-hour music website. How smart: KCRW isn't just a station, it's a brand. Take a formerly local radio broadcast and leverage it as a national online brand and soon they'll be raking in even more donations from all over the country, not just Santa Monica and Brentwood and Silverlake. KCRWmusic.com launched today after the close of music...

We know that as far as fashion goes, the '80s are back, but in webland it's 1996 all over again. Remember the coffee cam, which was fun to look at just because you could? You could use this newfangled internet to look at something as hysterically inane as a coffeepot in an office thousands of miles away; you could watch it get drained and refilled in blurry 10-second refresh updates. The internet was, like,...

At 10:25am this morning, it's Norooz — Persian New Year. There was an advance celebration at City Hall on Friday and the Downtown News has the story of the holiday, which is little-known outside of the Iranian (or "Irangeleno") community. The Daily News reports that DWP workers racked up $51 million in overtime in the last half of 2005. The DWP says it's cheaper to pay existing employees overtime than hire new staff. It's...

LAist and our friends at RES Magazine are giving away two pairs of tickets to the RES Screening at the Egyptian Theatre tonight. It all starts at 8 PM and features the new Traktor video for the Flaming Lips. A mini-retrospective of award-winning filmmaker Jonas Odell will feature his new cherry-popping short Never Like the First Time! Plus more shorts and music videos to make you happy. Once the visual entertainment is over, DJ...

Max S. Gerber has captured janitors, scientists, porn stars, Willie Nelson, Carrie Fisher, Tim Hawkinson, Jim Jarmusch and many more. He's a photographer who does editorial portraiture, and his website features engaging editorializing of its own. His photos have appeared in Time, Newsweek, the UK's Sunday Telegraph Review, the LA Weekly, LA Magazine, LA Citybeat and more. Later this year, his photo series My Heart vs. the Real World will be published as a book....