lornamatic

Not the real lyrics, but the ones I sing when I’m in public and can’t get the Brazilian Girls out of my head. Live at the Avalon, this Friday Night.

Really Mother’s Day IS this weekend. I recommend Proflowers - they pretty much rock, although I’m not entirely impressed with their local florist choices, so order *early*, like, as in, yesterday.

UCLAExtension (shh, their site’s a little broken today) presents ArtsDay LA this Saturday, 1-3PM. All manner of interesting artistic people will be there. Show up early, get a goody bag. Also, 10-percent discounts offered for some summer arts courses. (schedule: PDF, launches Acrobat)

Not really Los Angeles, but if you are in the San Diego area, check out the Goya’s Portraits exhibit, at the San Diego Museum of Art.

Did you ever wonder how people found their way around Los Angeles before the Thomas Guide? Check out Los Angeles Mapped, upstairs at the Disney Hall. Free with admission to a performance, otherwise you need to take a tour. LATimes has details.

So it started with a little anomaly in the stats.

Hundreds of referrals from Craigslist.

Hundreds.

Not just from one Craigslist. From Craigslists all over the place. And every link had been removed by the CL community, or sometimes by the staff.

WTF?

I dig around in the stats for a while. Ah-ha, there it is: vaio.jpg. Open up the photo.

OMG.

It’s a photo, of me, embracing a new vaio box with maybe a little too much love, but you know, cut me some slack. Things were bad for a while there, what with that Dell laptop that caught on fire, remember, in my lap. Then there was the replacement for that, which broke after a month or so, and then the replacement for that, which never caught on fire, but wasn’t so great either.

Anyway. I was glad to have that stupid little Vaio. It was the promise of Good Things To Come. At least, for a little while.

Ultimately that Vaio wouldn’t boot up unless you popped it in the freezer for 5 minutes or so. When I moved into an apartment with a side-by-side refrigerator/freezer, the 15″ screen didn’t fit anymore, and the machine hasn’t been turned on since.

But, I digress. Back to the mystery: Why were so many people from Craigslist hitting my server?

At last, the answer! Someone was using my picture to hawk some kind of laptop “giveaway.” Just go fill in your information at this website, and you’ll get your free vaio, just like I GOT MINE. (insert picture of unsuspecting internet idiot with vaio here)

So the thing is, I have access to this image. I can change it to whatever I want. Not feeling all that creative, here’s what I came up with. (My contribution is in green)

Anonymous Craigslist scamming dude still hasn’t figured it out. So here’s the LOL: while this is still up and running, do please offer up your best suggestions as to what else I should post instead of this image.

updated: Looks like our friend has moved on. Fun while it lasted!

Sunday is Mother’s Day.

NEXT Sunday is Mother’s Day.

All Moms love butterflies and flowers, and since it will be busy NEXT Sunday (which is Mother’s Day)so make your reservations for the so make sure you stop by the Pavillion of Wings THIS Sunday, at the Natural History Museum.

Cotsen Institute of Archaeology’s annual open house is at UCLA, this Saturday. Just to increase my awesome search engine mojo with the bizarre keywords, if you go, you’ll discover why owl vomit is beloved by Archaeologists. At the Fowler Museum building, north campus.

Saturday 9am - 4pm, One day sale, 40% off storewide at Graphaids, Culver City location only.

Early reviews, not so great, but I’ll probably see it anyway: Art School Confidential opens this weekend.

Now through Sunday, check out the Bel-Air Camera 4 day tax-free sale, Westwood. Go before you visit Cotsen, so you too can take pictures of owl pellets.

And Happy Cinqo de Mayo!

A few weeks back, some friends were passing through town. What better way to spend a long layover at LAX than dinner at Nozawa?

Our group needed a table that seated six. There was one empty table in the place, fortunately, right next to a couple that was just finishing up. While we waited for them to pay the bill, a nervous little waif of a starlet came in, flanked by a Sidekick-enabled thumb typer sporting last season’s signature b-list red Kaballah bracelet.

At first, I couldn’t place the anxious little starlet. It wasn’t Brittany Murphy - she has that same nervous energy but she’s got that whole Oakenfold-enabled faster pussycat-suit thing going on, but this little thing was wearing dirty sweats. It didn’t add up. She looked like that girl who used to be Paris Hilton’s best friend, but what was her name again?

The starlet became very agitated at the fact that she (and her entourage of one) had to wait behind such a crowd of losers, while the Perfect Table was so clearly ready and waiting.

See, the thing is, be nice to the staff. Don’t hassle them, not even if you are a student of Kaballah. It’s just the number one rule of eating out.

So anyway. That other table finished up, the staff rushed in and pushed the tables together, and our group was promptly seated. Master Nozawa was on the job, and we all ordered Omakase, because, hey, do you order anything else at Nozawa?

Dish after dish came out. It was fabulous. We happily stuffed our faces, while the starlet glared at us from the front of the line. The women in the group quickly came to the conclusion that it was in fact Nicole Ritchie. The men in the group quickly responded with “huh? The 14-year old in dirty sweats?”

Lucky me, I had the seat facing the line. Nicole Ritchie is still standing there, and now she’s glaring at me. I’m stuffing my face with hamachi, maguro, and that slimy thing covered in scallions.

I confess, maybe it was the fact that the sushi was so good. Maybe the wasabi was a little too hot. I don’t know. It might have been all the pressure of being stared at by a b-list celebrity. Impolite, I know. But, somehow, I found I just couldn’t keep my mouth closed while I chewed.

Anyway. Nicole and Kaballah-thumbtyper are finally seated. At that ratty little table right in front of the door, too. (Always be nice to the staff.) After a few minutes, I decide I must know what they are eating. Really, how do you stay so thin on a diet of fatty tuna?

Nicole and Kaballah each ordered an iced green tea. From what I could tell, that’s the sum total of what they consumed.

And now they’re saying it’s an eating disorder? Poor girl. My goodness, who could have seen that coming?

My advice? Skip the nutritionist. Go to the laundrymat.

So unless you live under a rock, you have heard about the protests against HB 4437.

HB 4437 calls for a lot of things, and whatever your opinion on “the immigrant problem,” it’s worth reading the actual proposal. After reading through the bill, I’m actually surprised there’s not a section calling for RFID chipping of every person that crosses the country’s border. Perhaps they left the door open enough under the rubric of “Biometric data enhancements.”

It seems to me that what’s upsetting people the most is the F-word. Even if you believe in a hard stance against illegal immigration, you might consider the toll this would take on our courts. And I wonder, in these cases, what would truly constitue a jury of peers.

I dearly wish I had been in the thick of the protests today - I love nothing more than taking pictures at events like this, but today was a sick day. I made it out of the house this morning to bring my broken car to the mechanic. He’s what you might call a pink immigrant, hailing from one of those English-speaking countries where they have charming accents. On the way out, he wished me “happy uno de mayo!”

Before heading home, I stopped for lunch at a restaurant in Brentwood, Literati. I ordered my usual breakfast burrito, and the girl at the counter gave me an apologetic look. “I’m sorry,” she said, “but we’re not serving breakfast right now.”

I pointed to the sign that promises breakfast all day.

“I’m sorry, but we are so short staffed today,” she said. “We’ve only got two people in the kitchen so we can’t do breakfast.”

I suddenly realized why this was the case, and said “WOW. That is pretty cool.” A huge smile came over her face.

The place was chaotic, and it was really fascinating to watch the reaction of the different customers. The north of Wilshire ladies (you know, the More-Important-Than-You set) don’t much care for waiting for their lattes, and I watched more than one lady undertake her very own personal protest march, right up to the counter to loudly demand her chicken salad for which she had been waiting over HALF AN HOUR.

My substitute sandwich took a long while to come out, but as I watched a nervous-looking white kid busing tables, I enjoyed that wait. I loved the thought that the guys who normally take care of those details were off doing something more important than folding my breakfast burrito: American citizens, participating in free speech.

That is more than pretty cool.