Sorted by date Results 395 - 419 of 646

It was perhaps predictable, but two Santa Monica Big Blue Bus drivers have tested positive for Coronavirus. aHi David Transit Services Director Ed King confirms. "It's a difficult time for transportation agencies across the globe including Big Blue Bus. Our team is deeply dedicated to the work we do to provide safe and reliable commuting services for our region," said Director of Transit Services, Ed King. "We remain committed to public health practices that ensure the health...

Evidently, a bakery in the New Orleans area is selling customers cakes in shaped like rolls of toilet paper. TP has become hard to find during the coronavirus pandemic. "We have some toilet paper cakes in the bakery today! Swing on buy and grab a TP cake and your favorite bakery treats! To-go only. 😋" tweeted Haydels bakery. “It’s just anytime something in the city happens, we’ve garnered the reputation for making light of bad situations,” co-owner David Haydel told the T...

I met him once in a bar in Santa Barbara in 1983. I was barely old enough to get into the bar. I walked up to him and said "Kenny Rogers?" Yes he said thank you for all the music all these years I said and shook his hand. Kenneth Ray Rogers, 81, was an American singer, songwriter, actor, record producer, and entrepreneur. He was a member of the Country Music Hall of Fame. On March 20, 2020, Rogers died under hospice care at his home in Sandy Springs, Georgia, a representative...

Tweeting last night what many of us have been thinking about Covid-19, that the cure is worse than the disease, US President Donald J Trump tweeted last night that the shutdown will last no more than 15 days. Today the stock market fell another 4%, and the major indices are now at about the levels they were when Trump was elected in 2016. The president has used the stock market as a measure of his success as president. "WE CANNOT LET THE CURE BE WORSE THAN THE PROBLEM...

Shoppers came to Santa Monica's tawny Montana Avenue Friday, emptying the shelves at Vons, Ralph's and other markets. They bought quantities of items such as eggs, bread, peanut butter, all sorts of meat and poultry. And of course, toilet paper and other paper goods, and bottled water. "There were long lines of shoppers here earlier today, this afternoon. They bought everything in sight," one checker told us. News out of Italy says that people in the Red Zone were ordered to s...

Kehillat Maarav Synagogue in Santa Monica conducted its annual Purim costume celebration without its Rabbi. The Synagogue Executive Director said in advance that he would not attend the celebration, "out of an abundance of caution," since he attended the AIPAC conference on March 2, 2020. Most churches and synagogues locally have suspended gatherings for a couple of weeks. In Judaism, congregants gather on Friday night or Saturday morning to celebrate the Sabbath. For the...

Social media posts say that a hot dog cart exploded into a fireball ten feet high on the Santa Monica pier Sunday afternoon, outside of Bubba Gump Shrimp Co. restaurant. One witness said that the hot dog vendor was badly burned in the apparent propane explosion. The Hot Dog On a Stick restaurant near the Pier was not involved in this incident. Bubba Gump Shrimp Co. was not closed or affected directly by the incident. It is uncertain at this time what ignited the propane. We...

About half as many spectators came to watch runners cross the Los Angeles Marathon finish line in Santa Monica Sunday. This as the runners finish the race near Wilshire Blvd and Ocean Avenue in Santa Monica. There was an online petition to cancel the marathon, due to coronavirus concerns. But despite this, many people did come to cheer on mom, dad, or big sister. Near the finish line are many thousands, but many fewer than in 2019. The event finishes about 1000 yards north of...

The County of Los Angeles declared a public health emergency Wednesday morning, after the discovery of 16 Novel coronavirus cases. The director of public health also urged people not to boycott "Asia Pacific restaurants," and said LA County was concerned after, "the discovery of racial profiling." The County opened its Emergency Operations Center to "coordinate across different departments." All of the sixteen new cases were linked to one known exposure, i.e. one man who...

A car chase across the 5 freeway in Sylmar and into the five freeway in Los Angeles resulted in sparks falling flying off the vehicle after it ran over spike strips. Then the driver pulled over on the right and ran across several lanes of freeway, onto the 14 freeway southbound where he was struck by at least one vehicle. The five freeway was closed in both directions for several hours after the chase ended at 10:15 PM Thursday night. He then fired at least one shot at Los...

Despite declaration of a local public health emergency, crowds will gather for the annual Los Angeles Marathon on Sunday March 8, 2020. "The marathon will go forward because there is no reason for it not to go forward," Los Angeles Mayor Eric Garcetti told reporters Friday. “We are not currently recommending the suspension of any large public events, including the L.A. Marathon,” Barbara Ferrer, director of LA County Public Health Department, said in a statement Thursday. “Th...

Soap opera actress Marj Dusay has died at 83, says Elizabeth Perine in a Facebook post. Her stepdaughter posted that Marj "passed away peacefully" in her sleep on Tuesday. "She was quite a woman and had quite a grand life. She was deeply loved and will be deeply missed," Perine said in a Facebook post. I'm sure she was a more than competent actress, but the 1968 episode entitled Spock's Brain, in which Dussay starred, is widely regarded by Trekkies as the worst of the series....

As the Stock market sold off for the second day (I mean 1800 points down on the Dow in 2 days); the Centers for Disease Control warned American citizens to get read for the Coronavirus to reach epidemic levels in US cities. "It's not a matter of if but when a pandemic will happen in the US" said a spokesman for the CDC today. "Coronavirus cannot be contained, and will cause significant disruptions in our lives." On a cruise ship called the Diamond Princess in Yokohama Japan,...

A young woman leads her, umm, videographer into the aisles of the Ocean Park Library. They take off their clothing in the aisles, and you can just imagine where it goes from there. But "don't be fatuous, Jeffrey." A local mom has demanded that pornography not be shot in areas frequented by children, after an explicitly sexual video filmed at a Santa Monica neighborhood library was posted on Pornhub dot com. The Pornhub video portrays a young woman having sex with a man, who...

Those of us who follow the CoronaVirus statistics coming out of Mainland China, have always suspected the Chinese are lying about their 650 death toll, in less than 30,000 cases. After all, why bother to quarantine Wuhan, a Los Angeles sized city, unless it were absolutely necessary. And why build 2 hospitals in ten days, unless you think they're going to soon be filled with dying patients. In an article entitled "Tencent may have accidentally leaked real data on Wuhan virus...

Don't mess with a student driver. Wilshire Blvd was closed to Westbound traffic for about 3 hours Saturday afternoon, Feb. 8th, after two men were in a car accident that caused one vehicle to flip over. The vehicle that did not flip has "Primo Student Driver" painted on its side. The driver suffered neck and back injuries, and was brought to Santa Monica UCLA Medical Center, directly across the street from the accident site. Yes, SMFD Paramedics loaded the injured man into an...

In line with progressive densification, WS Communities, a synonym for NMS Properties, is upscaling your community. The company will tear down a 4 story mixed use building at 1543 7th Street, in order to replace it with 8 stories of apartments. The developer is proposing a 100-unit apartment building with 4,441 square feet of ground-floor retail space, according to Urbanize LA. The interesting thing is that they opened this particular building only 15 years ago, in 2005. Well,...

Time to migrate, gamers. According to a note on the App itself, Angry Birds is coming to an end and will no longer be supported. "All good things must pass, and at the end of March we will be winding down some aspects of Angry Birds Rio including the ingame shop and adverts. The game will also no longer be available in app stores from that date, but we will continue to provide player support for those who have the game installed on their devices until the end of 2020. We want...

A five alarm fire broke out Wednesday at 11740 Wilshire Blvd damaged ten apartments, drawing 350 firemen and leaving tenants without access to the building. Thirteen people were injured, including two firefighters and two civilians in critical condition. 150 residents had to seek alternative accommodations. The 25-story apartment building was also the scene of a major fire in 2013. The fire began on the sixth floor at the Barrington Plaza complex around 8:37 a.m., according to...

A source who has been attending NTSB briefings for relatives of the Sunday, January 26, 2020 crash that took the lives of nine people, including basketball star Kobe Bryant, says that to a limited extent, the crash can be blamed on Kobe himself. This according to reports appearing in the LA Times. The source, who asked not to be named, says that air traffic voice recordings substantiate that Ara Zobayan, the pilot of the doomed helicopter was concerned about heavy fog over...

It's not exactly affordable housing. If you want the two story 5,000 square foot home on like, 50K square feet of land; it'll only cost you about as much as an F-135 Raptor. The press release from Coldwell Banker is below. If you're interested, drive by 808 Woodacres Rd. in Santa Monica, the five-bedroom, three-bathroom, 4,726-square-foot home. It's north of San Vicente. Bring your checkbook. Press release: Mary Beth Woods, a Coldwell Banker Global Luxury Property Specialist...

CNN settled with Nick Sandmann, a Kentucky high school student who had sued the news outlet for defamation. A CNN spokesman confirmed Tuesday that the claims had been settled. CNN paid Sandmann and his lawyers $750,000, small money to the network, but enough to put the young man through college. Attorney's fees are not public, but are customarily around one third of the recovery in such cases. In any defamation action against a news organization, a defendant can argue that it...

12 new laws going into effect today include AB5, the anti rideshare amendment. The bill attempts to create stricter rules around independent contractors. The intent is for Uber and Lyft drivers to pay their drivers as employees. The rideshare companies say their drivers are still independent contractors, and they intend to spend $100 million or so to put the issue before voters in November. Several other new statutes will make it more safe and complex to drive. AB 1810 remov...

Santa Monica residents are circulating an online petition at Change.org, demanding that the City of Santa Monica perform annual assessments of its funding for social service agencies and programs. "City staff publicly admitted that they do not prepare annual assessments," the petition says. "This lack of transparency and accountability is unacceptable." Lacking a "realistic mechanism for annual assessments," Santa Monica "will continue to simply collect unverified,...

The annual display of nativity scenes will return to Santa Monica this December, but they will be located on church property, rather than in a public park. Personally, I blame the Flying Spaghetti Monster. No, seriously. In 2015, the Ninth Circuit ruled that the Establishment clause barring the State from establishing a religion, requires that the City hold a lottery to determine which organizations would be allowed to erect nativity scenes in Palisades Park. Satanists won...