Carolyn Kellogg

Oh, great sadness! An organization has tested the tuna served at local temples of sushi (Matsuhisa, Sushi Nozawa) and found the mercury levels to be twice the FDA standard; some came close to having so much mercury so the fish should not have been sold at all. Is marguro the new fugu? Defamer has gone Hollywood and gotten a facelift. Really, it looks 10 years younger. Mayor Villariagosa is planning to tighten the city's...

Tourists in Hollywood posed in front of a line of LAPD motorcycles as the Oscars geared up a block away. Right after this photo was taken, 20 cops jumped on their bikes and roared off dramatically, like they were in a movie....

Everybody's still inside. The red carpet is pretty cool anyway....

Seen in the back of a car in Hollywood. We just can't quite figure this out. Did the car's owner find the sign funny and buy it from a homeless person, then stick it in their car? Or is this actually a plea for employment? Is the car's owner an acoustic:rock musician looking for work? What exactly is Work Etc? Is the driver looking for work or something else like work — say, a...

Leaving Hollywood we saw a pile of fancy envelopes next to a dumpster in an alley off Selma. We braved the cast-off catering debris and found these: The George W. Bush Award for Mispronunciation: To Jack Nicholson, for rhyming "Capote" with "chipotle." The James Cameron Award for Inappropriate directorial thank you: Ang Lee to his new Oscar "I wish I knew how to quit you." The Effort to Make Fiction Real Award: To the...

The streets of Hollywood are either desperately, hatefully crowded with traffic or wonderfully open. Hollywood Blvd itself is blocked off, and the regular Sunday Farmer's Market went ahead as scheduled, so even the tricky back routes were hard to navigate. Of course, if you've got an Oscar street pass in your limo, it's smooth sailing. There are zillions of ready valet parkers, white-gloved traffic cops, and sweaty, exhilarated crowds to scream your name (or...

Could Thomas Kinkade, the painter of light, actually be a sleazeball? Although Kinkade is a loudly-proclaimed Christian — "When I got saved, God became my art agent," he said in 2004 — misbehavior alleged in a new lawsuit against him includes driving gallery owners into bankruptcy, copping a feel, getting drunk and peeing on a Winnie the Pooh statue at the Disneyland Hotel. The Pasadena Star-News profiles resident Dr. Stephen Kwon, who founded a...

We can't wait until Sarah Silverman gets to host the Oscars. Would she make jokes about the freshness of her vagina, like she does in the opening monologue of the Independent Spirit Awards today? She kicks things off saying George Clooney "has proved himself both artsy and fartsy," and "Felicity Huffman, I am such a huge fan of his." The Independent Spirit Awards are happneing right now, in Satna Monica, at 2 in the afternoon...

South LA's most well-known community gardeners have been told to get out. The Farm at 41st and Alameda has 360 plots where locals grow fresh produce and hold a market on Sunday that includes, we can see from Kathryn Hill's excellent photographs, grilled corn, fried plantains, taquitos, carnitas, fresh sugar cane and prickly pear. After the 1992 riots/uprising/unrest, the land, which was to be the site of a garbage incinerator, was given to the...

Yep, that's Felicity Huffman, and yes, she wins Best Actress at the Independent Spirit Awards. Think she's got a shot at the Oscar? Sarah Silverman continues to knock it out of the park. And the attendees like her. "Finally there's an award show host that you'd wanna fuck," Kevin Smith says. He had a long dirty story to tell before announcing the best director winner. Best Foregin Film goes to Paradise Now, the only...