Jason Toney

So you know how you have to be invited to The Magic Castle and know secret words and be able to levitate like the MindFreak or something or other in order to get in? Well, tonight, for one night only, the three regular Friday night magicians - David Lovering (the drummer for The Pixies), Rob Zabrecky (of Possum Dixon fame) and Fitzgerald - are performing for the general public tonight at the Steve Allen...

Apparently the creator of Ren & Stimpy is hot for Mischa Barton but thinks Nicole Richie resembles a biology classroom human skeleton. Cartoon Brew (who liked the Katie Holmes/Tom Cruise sketch) points us to cartoonist Katie Rice's blog where she has a bunch of these Kricfalusi sketches of our favorie gossip rag regulars. Somehow these are still a lot more forgiving than gallery of the absurd....

We're not quite sure what The Amazing Race has to do with it but the Sac Bee (login required) decided to figure out how long it takes to get from Sacramento to LA without the use of a car. Amtrak will take you about eight hours assuming you go the Bakersfield route. Going along the coast is likely to take you much longer and you can expect delays (if you're taking the train, though,...

36 Years Ago Today...The Manson Family began their killing spree, murdering Sharon Tate and four friends in a house hidden away between Beverly Hills and the Valley. The BBC News article that reminded us of this notes that the Manson trial was the longest murder trial in US history. Is that still true? And, we're curious, do you think it is still the most well-known California murder trial or does the OJ trial now...

Discovery woke us up this morning with a crack and a boom at about the buttcrack of dawn with the 5:12 AM shuttle landing. Bad weather in Florida brought Discovery to California and Edwards Air Force Base. The Shuttle landed without a problem after some in-space repairs. Spokespeople for NASA said that the safe landing honors the crew of space shuttle Columbia who died when the shuttle broke apart 16 minutes before landing two...

We were annoyed yesterday when we caught headlines and stories announcing that LA County Sheriffs would be investigating the BB gun attack on a photographer outside of a wedding that Britney Spears attended over the weekend which then seemed to be updated hourly with new details and pseudo-information. The sheriff's office said it was putting the situation "on the front burner" because of media attention. That's great. Over-aggressive media coverage of Spears leads to...

We were one of the few people (although the small screening we were in was packed) who saw The Island this weekend and...it wasn't terrible. It is a sci-fi story probably more suited to the style of Minority Report than Con Air but you take what you can get. What can we say? We were in to it. More interesting though is the vision of Downtown Los Angeles portrayed in the film. Set in...

One of the great mysteries of our local driving life has been the curious change from Vine street to Rossmore Ave in Hollywood. Last week, PreserveLA came up with the answer noting that Vine is so named because it went through the vineyard of 1880s US Senator Cornelius Cole while Rossmore was named after Miracle Mile's developer, A.W. Ross. Now if only someone can explain why the 101 goes north and south and east...

The week ended oddly for some us here at LAist (editor's note: mainly me) so we didn't get a chance to tell you about some of the other cool stuff going on this weekend. We did mention Instant Gratification which had a very successful opening last night. Much of the featured artwork was sold and they even had a Six Feet Under alum, Anne Ramsay, make her way through the deceptively large Kraft Studios....

Get your art on this weekend with twelve/six art's first area show at Kraft Studios. The opening reception is tomorrow, August 6th, from 7-10 PM with complimentary red stripe. The show itself, curated by Audrey Wu, features six local artists with varying styles. We're fans, in particular, of deth p. sun and Marci Washington but Jeni McKenna's photography has also caught our eye. If you can't make it out for the opening reception, the...