Carrie Meathrell

As you might have guessed, we're pretty big into gaming over at my house -- our console set-up includes the both generations of the Xbox, not one but TWO PS2's (one for the living room, one for the bedroom), a Dell XPS with a wide-screen monitor (for PC gaming), a Nintendo Gamecube, a Nintendo 64, an SNES, and a Gameboy -- oh, and possibly a Sony PSP floating around somewhere. Our 50" big-screen is optimized...

What will Hike The Geek do?!?! In order to face up to budget-balancing woes and a state-wide financial crunch, Governor Schwartzenegger has proposed to close 48 different national park sites, as well as cut funding to many school, health care, and criminal justice programs. Parks in the L.A. area like the Will Rogers State Historic Park, Topanga State Park, and Pio Pico State Historic Park in Whittier will all be shut down, affecting many...

Oh L.A. and your crazy kooky vagrants! Please meet Crazy Doll Lady (as we are calling her), pictured in the photo above. She and her scary puppet friends hang out around Sunset and Vine every day, and wait outside the Hollywood Public Library every morning for food handouts. Say hi to her if you see her...or drive by real real fast like I do! Even if the Globes are cancelled, Academy Awards organizers are...

A London vacation for $900 -- airfare and hotel? Cancun for $500? I got an email alert this morning about big after-holiday airfare sales -- and as a frequent traveler who is often frustrated by the price of airline tickets, I jumped at the chance to research some sweet mid-winter vacations. Via Expedia, if you book now and travel by mid-March, you can snag very cheap round-trip tickets out of LAX for places like...

What better way to get 2008 started than with some cheap booze at some happening city spots? Here's a few more we managed to dig up this week -- send your secret spots and recommendations my way at carrie@laist.com. Yes, some of these are later than the usual after-work happy hour, but I know you L.A. kids -- you can't be bothered to go out before at least 9pm, so enjoy some after-hours drink...

I've got great news for Los Angeles dining connoisseurs: DineLA Restaurant Week, a new restaurant-showcase event, begins this month and runs from January 27th through February 8th. Participating diners will be able to feast on prix-fixe three-course meals from such fine establishments as Crustacean, Simon LA, BLD, Katsuya, and many many others. The event aims to [Unite] restaurants from the traditional to the ultra trendy, dineLA Restaurant Week will promote the extraordinary diversity and...

Shock the monkey indeed! One of the weirdest hybrid-electronics to come out of the CES is a personal tasing device -- that also doubles as a 1-gig MP3 player! So useful for those morning jogs, when you're fending off rowdy UCLA students and working out with the new Chromeo record! The MP3 player is actually a separate holster that you fit your taser into -- the whole thing fits comfortably into a pocket or...

How many times have you seen some boneheaded driver make a stupid move on the road, only to drive up beside them and see them yapping away on their cell phones? Too many times, I'll bet you. Now a new study shows that cell phone users also drive more slowly and make poor lane-change choices, which may slow down traffic overall up to 10%. From the LA Times: Researchers at the University of Utah...

Rain, rain, don't go away, don't come again another day! Wet weather is on its way. And not a moment too soon for some portions of the city. A lack of water in the Valley might slow growth: "West San Fernando Valley Councilman Dennis Zine said he called for the mandatory water conservation in new development after Mayor Antonio Villaraigosa's plea for voluntary water saving was largely ignored by Angelenos." You know all that...

Happy New Year from LAist and your brand new Food Editor! I've arrived home refreshed from a fantastic vacation in the Philly/New Jersey area, and now I'm revved up and ready for the New Food Year. It was difficult to leave Philadelphia and its fabulous dining options behind (cheesesteaks are only the tip of the iceberg), but nothing beats Los Angeles for its range of offerings. Here's my wish list for places to go,...