Today's LA Times's story about the one-way plan for Pico and Olympic Boulevards made it sound like such a great idea that I'm already redrawing my daily driving plans.

Once the traffic engineers make their case to the public, I expect all of Los Angeles will wholeheartedly agree. If LA is unified in its fight against anything, it's together in the battle against traffic congestion. Who would dare oppose something so simple as turning two boulevards into one-way channels in and out of the downtown area?

I drive both W. Pico and W. Olympic boulevards most days of the week. I know how bad the traffic can get on these two-ways. Not only that, but I live in a neighborhood between Pico and Olympic. I dwell among those who have long bemoaned the commuters who bomb down our traffic-humped streets in search of a faster route home. You can trust that none of those who complain about this behavior partake in it while driving through someone else's neighborhood. We Pico-Olympic people follow the rules.

Nonetheless, just like everyone else, we want change. We want the traffic to end so much that we won't crowd the public podium to attack this plan once it completes its speedy journey to the LA City Council for approval. If we show up at that meeting, it will be to witness history in the making — the day we did away with traffic.

Everybody's bound to get behind this one. (UPDATE: The LA Times blog has one, two posts on the subject.)

Forget about all those shiny new bus shelters the city just installed a couple years ago. Yes, one-way traffic will mean ripping half of them up on both boulevards, but government is usually so responsible with transportation dollars that voters are sure to overlook this one bit of waste because it's a guaranteed fix.

Bus riders will see the bigger picture too. Those who ride LA's MTA, Santa Monica's Big Blue Bus and the Culver City Bus will surely shoulder any burden the changes might create. Considering all the courtesy LA drivers show buses on city streets, isn't this a way for the bus-riding public to say "thank you, kind driver, for yielding the right of way at rush hour?"

Likewise, the cities that run the various bus lines will be happy to reroute them. Maps and schedules will need to be redrawn, reprinted and redistributed, but it's a small price to pay for the promise of faster travel.

And while we're on the subject of paying prices, won't it be sweet to see research firms cut their fees when they're employed to study all of these changes? Lawyers will prove their critics wrong when they attend meetings merely to applaud the committees and sub-committees and city councils that will have to grant approvals for this and that along the way.

This is where we cash in on all that respect we've shown for the ADA. If there are any handicapped persons who rely on Pico or Olympic buses to get to and from work, they'll not think to utter a word of complaint. It will be the least they can do to repay our generous efforts as a society to improve access to public facilities. Who among us in LA would not happily walk or wheel ourselves a half mile out of our way each day to make it easier for the courteous drivers encountered at crosswalks and intersections?

For once, the stake-holders won't wield stakes like vampire slayers, but rather hold hands as one. (Can I get a Kumbaya?)

If school bus routes have to be rerouted, so what? Even if it means a few public hearings by the LAUSD Board of Education, parents feel the pinch of traffic too. We're all in this together.

Firefighters and police officers have no end of available staff to rewrite emergency response routes written into policies and plans, so that's bound to be no sweat either. They've got people occupying desks just waiting for tasks like this to come along.

If there's any potential impact on existing infrastructure, we'll find creative alternatives. For example, we could make a public garden out of one of the two ramps at the Ave Of The Stars overpass on W. Olympic Blvd.

Billboards on Pico that end up facing the back end of motorists won't be an issue either. There must be advertisers looking to reach a demographic that looks up and back when driving in city traffic. Wait! What am I saying? What traffic?

This whole process will be as easy as repainting road stripes and reprograming turn signals at every intersection on both boulevards. Some signal lights will need to be taken down, of course. (What need have we for left-turn arrows on a one-way street?) And, hello? Is anyone going to shed a tear for any photo-cop devices that end up being displaced? Those machines probably weren't providing much revenue to the city anyway.

Yep, this deal's as good as done. All I need to know now is which way LA?*

*With apologies to Warren Olney

My girls and I headed out to Pasadena this weekend for a sleepover at their Auntie Ali's house. When we pulled up in front of my step-sister's 100 year-old Craftsman house on El Molino, she was out on the front lawn, bracketed by her two huge Bull Mastiff's, Grace and Charlotte. All three were whimpering and wore worried looks.
"What's wrong?" I asked, looking forward to the Martini that I hoped was waiting for me inside the house. It had been a long, slow drive and I had been thinking about vodka since the 10/110 interchange.
"Bees!" Ali panted, "They're everywhere!"

Just then, as if on cue, a bee swooped past her head. I looked up at her porch, bees looped dizzily in the air behind her as though they had a head start on happy hour. I walked cautiously up to the porch, which was literally abuzz.
"They're in the house too. Tons of them." I was amazed at Ali's calm. She is a bona fide bee phobic. I have known this woman a long time. One Berkshire spring, nigh on thirty years ago, a single bee wandered into our freshman English class and Ali screamed, threw her copy of The Canterbury Tales in the air and dove under her desk. Eventually she ran sobbing out of the building. The fact she was relatively calm now tells the story of her extraordinary personal growth over the years. But still, she was very much not digging this.

Being good in a crisis and not particularly afraid of bees, I took the situation in hand. "I'm gonna go in and check it out," I said heroically, but really, I was just hoping I could shoo them away and get at the liquor cabinet. There were only a couple of slow, dopey bees in the living room, and a few more in the dining room, but then I walked into the kitchen and it was like I had walked into a B horror movie. Bees were everywhere - flying in through the open back door and the open window over the sink. I ran to the back door and kicked it shut, then slammed the window closed, then grabbed a copy of Bon Appétit and got to work swatting. I had fifteen down before I looked at the corner window, which was blackened with a veritable bee seige. I panicked, shrieked like a girl and high-stepped it out of there fast.
"That's a lot of fucking bees!" I gasped.
"This is what I'm saying," Ali replied.

I skirted the house, looking for a hive, but could not locate the bee source. Ali handed me a can of Black Flag flea spray and sent me back into the kitchen. I made one last stand, randomly fogging bees and the appetizers she had set out for us. I turned the spray on the seething, black hank of insects gathered on the windowpane. Many of them immediately dropped to the sill, overwhelmed, but I knew I was using the wrong chemicals. Aqua Net would have had the same effect. The less-doused bees got angry and started dive-bombing me and we fled back out the front of the house, slamming the door behind us. I herded my excited children back into the car. Simultaneously Ali and I started dialing our husbands on our cell phones with shaking hands. Ali's super capable and cool-headed husband was at The Last Mimzy with his own niece and nephew, and was not answering his phone.
"We need some bee spray," I said, speed dialing my own man and putting the car in gear. "Let's go to the store for supplies."
"Yeah Mom!" Franny my eldest exclaimed, "Let's kick some bee butt! We don't need a man!"
"Yes, of course we can handle this on our own honey... but let's also call daddy."
Luckily Doug picked up on the second ring. "Google us up Pasadena Bee Control, Honey, we've got us a situation here!" I commanded like Jack Bauer dialing up CTU . Doug pulled up numbers for exterminators, all of which were closed at 5pm on a Saturday. City bee services all had notices on their websites informing us that due to budget cutbacks, there would be at least a two day wait before a certified bee man could come rescue us. We were on our own. Why is it that there is never a man around when you're having a real bug crisis? How many times have I been cornered by a water bug or a wasp and my husband has been annoyingly away at work or some such piffle? More disturbingly, why do I go all Annie Hall when there's bugs? Can't I smash them with my own tennis racket? Clearly, I needed to set a better example for my daughters.

We were on the bug aisle at Osh ten minutes later, contemplating insecticides and fondling fly swatters in a rainbow of soothing colors. Georgia picked a blue one, Franny got green and Ali chose yellow. There were insecticides for wasps, yellow jackets, mosquitoes, cockroaches... but not for bees. A salesman in a dingy, curled-up Osh Cap informed us that in fact, it's illegal to kill bees in the state of California.

Of course, as a gardener, I know that bees are beneficial insects. But I never knew I could be cited for Apicide. Bees are the tiny, efficient hinges that our entire agricultural system swings on. Without them our state's farming infrastructure would collapse. In fact, bee keepers have reported a strange disappearance of bees from hives across the country recently and this mysterious die-off is deeply alarming. I thought of the tens of bees that had died at my hands, crushed beneath the glossy pages of a gourmet food magazine and the irony smacked me upside the head. No bees cross-pollinating the almond and fruit trees? Then no almond pear clafouti. It's that simple. I felt a pang of guilt realizing that not only was I endangering our delicate ecosystem, but also the future of desserts everywhere.

Ali, had no such issues. She was on auto pilot - her love of shopping and her fear of bees coalescing into an extravagant purchase of swatters and insecticides, yellow jacket traps and repellents for everyone. Thus armed, we headed back to the house. On the way, Ali left another panicked message on her husband's voice mail. Franny was getting fed up with us, "Look you guys, we don't need a man! We've got bug spray and girl power! We can do this on our own!" Ali hung up her phone in shame, and I drove on, proud to have raised the bar on future womanhood with this courageous, single-minded girl.

We pulled up to the curb and got out of the car and immediately I knew the bees were gone. The air was cool and still. In the kitchen dozens of bees lay dead and wounded, their tiny, pollen-laden legs twitching in the air. There was no hive after all, it was just the edge of a swarm, passing over my sister's house, looking for a long gone orange grove, or a stand of almond trees, or, maybe, a place to die en masse. If it was indeed the latter, they had found deliverance here with us.

Here's a link to my Independent piece about the collision between Lana Clarkson and Phil Spector, as promised in my recent blog on this site. In this article, I explore their lives and the forces that may have propelled them to a deadly encounter at Spector's home four years ago. The article includes interviews with friends and colleagues of both who have not been interviewed elsewhere, such as Denny Bruce, an old friend of Spector who says, "I am the black man saying that OJ did not do this crime," and various Clarkson pals who talk about her frequent wrist injuries and wonder how much strength she had in her hands on the night the gun went off. As mentioned in my earlier blog, the article also takes a deep look at the strange Tom Wolfe connection. And then, of course, there's the ghost of Marilyn Monroe...

Ever wondered what lies behind that wall of houses on the PCH between Topanga and the Malibu Country Mart? Would you like to see what the view looks like on the other side?

Herewith Part 3 of the Malibu Beaches Owners Manual, for public owners who want to know how to find and use the 20 miles of public beaches (out of 27) that are lined with private development. This third installment covers the beaches east of the Malibu pier. Parts 1 and 2 covered the beaches to the west.

Happily, these beaches aren't nearly as sign-crazy as in the western half. Sadly, the access to them is minimal. The nearly six miles of beaches have three--count 'em, three--officially open accessways. Three. And why bother with all those inaccurate "private beach" signs when the public can't get there?

Remember: all California beaches are public below the mean high tide line (working definition: the wet sand). Like all Malibu beaches, these beaches also have abundant public easements on the dry sand. Check the easement maps on the Coastal Commission site (go to p. 23 of the PDF): they're a bit hard to read, but you can just call the good folks there at 805-585-1800.

Also, these eastern beaches are narrow, and are often covered at high tide--so check the tide charts in the L.A. Times (plug in 90265 for zip code) or at a tide-prediction website to make sure you haven't planned your walk too close to high tide.

Three accessways--which is all the more aggravating since this stretch includes two unopened accessways that are tied up in lawsuits and four fenced-off public properties along the PCH. And, rather incomprehensibly, one official accessway that's been closed for repairs for six years.

But know what's a good place to go when you get aggravated? Where you can forget about all these cares and woes and all those lawsuits? Where you can enjoy the fresh air and watch the sunset?

The Beach. Here's how to do it, from west to east:

CARBON BEACH--Zonker Harris Accessway--betw. 22706-22664 PCH

Carbon Beach, aka Billionaires Beach, is one of the widest and nicest of the eastern beaches. It's still far from a public-access paradise, but with the opening of the Geffen accessway (below), it has two access paths. The county Zonker Harris stairway has been open since 1981.

How to operate: Ignore the few "private beach" signs--on the adjacent property to the east, for example, which has a public easement.

Public easements--Upcoast:
1st property (old Windsail restaurant)--50 ft from mean high tide line (MHTL)

Public easements--Downcoast:
1st property (big white)--to bldg
3rd property (red roofs)--25 ft from MHTL--to 5 ft from bldg
4th property (white)--25 ft from MHTL--to 10 ft from bldg
5th property (white w/brn deck)--25 ft from MHTL--to 10 ft from bldg
6th property (white U w/pool)--to bldg

CARBON BEACH--new accessway--betw. 22140-22126 PCH

The world-renowned walkway next to David Geffen's house. Why not call it the Hooray for Geffen Accessway, since it's made Carbon Beach far more accessible--and the 22-year battle and new 24-hour video surveillance notwithstanding, the public now uses this walkway with nary an incident. Maintained by the indomitable nonprofit Access For All.

How to operate: Carbon Beach teems with public easements--on the DG property, but there are lots and lots and lots more (thanks to the Coastal Commission and Access For All)--and why should DG have the public sunbathers all to himself?

Public easements--DG property:
You can plant a towel and umbrella anywhere up to 10 ft. from the compound. See the maps in the walkway.

Public easements--Upcoast:
7th house (white w/dk brn roof)--25 ft from MHTL
9th house (white w/lt gray roof)--25 ft from MHTL
10th house (white/brn w/gray roofs)--10 ft from house

Public easements--Downcoast:
1st house (red corrugated roof)--25 ft from MHTL
2nd house--to deck
3rd house (blue roof)--to deck
7th house (gray roofs, white chimney)--25 ft from MHTL
10th house (reddish 1st story, white 2nd)--10 ft from house
11th house (white)--25 ft from MHTL
12th house (white w/dk gray roof)--25 ft from MHTL
13th house (white w/blue roof)--25 ft from MHTL
14th house (big yellow)--25 ft from MHTL

CARBON BEACH--Advanced features

Want to visit your Carbon Beach accessway that's stalled in litigation? It's easy to find with a lovely stroll along the beach--just 13 houses downcoast from Zonker Harris and 31 houses (or compounds) upcoast from Hooray for DG. Look for the big white several-story house with the tennis court on the east side. Your accessway is on the east edge: well, it has a wall in it right now, but one would hope that the victory at DG means that all the money on the continent won't stall the opening of new entrances for too long.

In the meantime, enjoy the public easements on this stretch:

Public easement--white house (and tennis court)--to seawall

Public easement--Upcoast:
1st house--to seawall

Public easements--Downcoast:
1st house (lawsuit source)--25 ft. from MHTL
3rd house--to seawall

LA COSTA BEACH

Zip. Nada. (Though you can make a roadside visit to the big Coastal Conservancy lot betw. 21746-21660 PCH, which is now free of lawsuits and should open in the near future.)

LAS FLORES BEACH--a sort-of accessway--betw. 20516-20466 PCH

A sweet little Caltrans-owned empty lot, which the Coastal Commission would like to see un-fenced and developed for public access. Still, the gate (east end) is unlocked, so check it out if you like. The neighbors have got boats and chairs in there, and the rest of the public should use it freely as well.

BIG ROCK BEACH--the backward-progress accessway (aka the fix-it-already accessway)--betw. Moonshadows-20340 PCH

This official county accessway has been closed off for repairs. For six years. The county keeps declining to fix it despite the state's offers of help.

It's inexcusable. And can you imagine the frustration of anyone who lives across the street? The closest accessways to a beach they can see out their windows are 1/2 mile downcoast and 2+ miles upcoast.

BIG ROCK BEACH--big wide accessway--betw. 20000-19958 PCH

A great wide staircase. This is a pretty stretch of beach, with big rocks, yes, in the tide and an especially scenic view upcoast.

How to operate: The "private property above mean high tide line" county sign at the entrance is inaccurate since there are plenty of public easements here--starting with the adjacent properties on both sides of the accessway.

Parking: The ocean side of the PCH is overrun with illegal "no parking" signs, that residents have posted in the public right of way. The Coastal Commission has asked Caltrans to have them removed. In the meantime, you still might get towed, so it's best to park in the few no-sign gaps or on the other side of the PCH.

LAS TUNAS BEACH

If you're driving east on the PCH to get home, feel free to pay your respects to your other unopened accessway that's under litigation, at 19016 PCH. I'm told that the locals have a way of getting to this Las Tunas stretch, that involves a culvert, a rickety ladder, and wading through sludge--access deprivation leads to desperate acts--but best to wait until this accessway opens, which we trust and hope will be soon.

Somehow I never believed it would really happen, but Cathy Seipp, a friend, died yesterday of the kind of lung cancer you can get even if you never smoke. She was 49.

Already, the memorials and testimonials are pouring in. Especially touching are accounts by those on Team Cathy, the group of close friends and loved ones who made sure she was never alone or wanting during her final days, who offered rides, food, or just their strength and company. Surprisingly gratifying are the widespread condolences and heartfelt comments of those nationwide who knew Cathy only through her writing. Denise Hamilton’s elegy here on Native Intelligence is a moving addition.

I will also miss her.

I met Cathy, along with Emmanuelle Richard, through Amy Alkon, about five years ago. In early 2003 they threw me a boisterous book party for “The Mailroom.” I get the feeling, though it was never said out loud, that because I took the three of them to lunch soon afterward as thanks, that my good manners was the wedge in the door that let me into Cathy’s world, where, as has been said before and better, a whirlpool of personalities and philosophies, with Cathy in the center, sucked me in. She helped get this stay-at-home writer out of the house more often, and I made some good friends because of her generosity.

Cathy and I weren’t the closest of pals, meaning that we didn’t spend hours dishing, chatting on the phone, going to the movies, having Farmers Market breakfasts. During her final days I never felt my visiting an overcrowded ICU was appropriate; honestly, I didn’t think Cathy would want me to see her in a hospital gown.

We certainly didn’t agree politically, and I think that was true of many in her circle -- a testament to her inclusivity. I'd tease her now and then by (honestly) telling her when I loved a recent piece or post she’d written – even though she was, of course, completely wrong. (Smiley face here.) In fact, that day we went to lunch, I glibly told Cathy that I had no opinions. In other words, why let any political differences stand in the way of anything? Fine by her. Still, I looked forward to her weekly email touting her new NRO column or somesuch. The emailbox will be a little poorer now.

When we saw each other over the years (at Yamashiro Friday nights, at her home, at various media functions around town), we always had something to talk about: the burden of joy that is raising children (our kids are the same age), our guilty pleasure TV shows, the latest local or media kerfuffle, or which pretentious underachiever she thought acted more entitled than her place in blogging society merited. Cathy sometimes sought my advice and vice versa. She was always interested in the latest news of my endless (and most recent) book. We always hugged. I wanted to tell her she was a babe, but because I’m mindful of a married man seeming untoward, I settled for complimenting her hair, luminosity, and the occasional dress.

I remember that as our first lunch drew to a close, she began to talk about the cancer. Typically, I immediately suggested she write a book about it as a cathartic way of dealing with her illness. Cathy chose not to; she was never the navel-gazing type. In fact, she waited another two years to spring the news on the world, on her blog, Cathy’s World. Even then, unless she was too tired to attend an event, Cathy never dwelled on her illness or acted at its effect. She never seemed to feel sorry for herself; she was too busy writing up a storm and, teaching by example, making sure her daughter was prepared for life, and for life without her.

Here’s what I liked most about Cathy: With a zest unmatched by the healthy, Cathy simply willed herself to endure. To smile. To laugh. To care. To befriend. To love. To live.

We should all be so.

What she’s left behind for her family and friends is the strength and purpose to carry on -- and more.

My wife does not like that billboard.

Each morning on her drive through Westwood she sees it, sees him staring down through Clark Kent-ish spectacles, his dress a conservative suit and tie, his expression blank. His stance is so awkwardly stiff, as though someone shoved him out there, this man with the hypnotically seductive voice and a face for radio. It's such a disappointment to my wife, and not just because he was more attractive through her mind's eye.

She didn't want to know this much, preferred to imagine him and all those wonderful stories. In these look-at-me days of a world gone YouTube, there was great value in this thing that not only required imagination, but inspired it. But now it's being ruined it for my wife, for me, for a lot of us.

A version of This American Life is coming to pay television, too.

My friend Cathy Seipp died today. It’s hard to write this because I can feel her peering over my shoulder, scolding me, telling me to buck up, stop sniffling, lose the adjectives and just get on with it. Because that’s how she lived her life, long before she became ill and all the way down to the very end.

The fact that we were friends at all is something I cherish, because it’s proof that human beings are more complex and confounding and willing to connect across ideology than we get credit for in this era of militant shouting heads.

Because as Cathy often said, she was politically to the right of Attila the Hun. And I was well, somewhere on the other side. And yet we found common ground, a place that was about writing and family and animals and living on the eastside and the writergrrrl brunches at Kokomo’s in the Farmers Market that Cathy presided over monthly with fierce benevolence.

In recent years Cathy found justified fame in the blogosphere and elsewhere but back in the early 1990s she was my personal hero for daring to take on the Los Angeles Times each month in the Buzz Magazine column she wrote under the pseudonym Margo Magee. We ink-stained wretches at the Times read Cathy’s column with breathless glee to see what pompous edicts and personalities she would skewer next. Here was an audacious young woman who clearly wasn’t afraid of speaking her mind, no matter how many bridges she burned. As the Times was the biggest game in town and she was a freelance writer, this took great chutzpah, something that Cathy never lacked.

And it wasn’t just for show – she was as rigorous and brutally honest with herself as she was with others. Cathy put a lot of store in respect and manners and etiquette. She was MissSeipp online. She thought chewing gum was vulgar. Just several weeks ago, still reeling from chemo, she chided me for setting the table with the wrong forks and not putting out the cloth napkins.

But she was funny and generous and ferociously loyal. Cathy’s the one who told me I had to get disability insurance when I left the Times and started freelancing, then writing novels. And this was years before doctors discovered the lung cancer that would kill her. (She never smoked, by the way). Cathy was just being Cathy, doling out advice where it was needed, making sure everyone was taken care of.

At the free-ranging Kokomo brunches, Cathy would urge all of us freelance writers to demand full kill fees and grow spines so editors wouldn’t walk all over us and she’d tell us we had to learn to resell our stories in different markets. We listened and followed her example. She was indomitable, she had endless energy and a terrifyingly strong will that one associates with Amazons and Valkyries, Joan of Arc and Masada. It started young – Cathy’s wonderful and caring father Harvey said that at age two, she demanded to be allowed to tie her own shoelaces.

But the steely will was hidden inside a very deceptive package. Cathy had an ethereal beauty – large eyes, translucent skin, fine features, high intelligent forehead – that seemed almost from another era to me, like a scallop-edged ingenue from the late 19th century.

When I saw her in the hospital two days ago, Cathy didn’t look like someone who’s been ravaged by lung cancer and chemo and radiation for five and a half years. Sandra Tsing Loh noted this too, but it was truly shocking how radiant she looked, as if the doctors had made a terrible mistake and any minute now she might throw off the oxygen mask, dust her hands off and say, well now, that was quite a fight, but I’ve finally beaten it back for good and taught it quite a lesson. She was only 49, and it seems doubly cruel that she’d be taken from us so young, and in the prime of her writing life.

These last weeks, I’d try to visit on Thursdays, bringing apple pie because Cathy craved sweets. She was so proud of her extraordinary daughter Maia, who’d just started college, and wanted to give her uninterrupted time at school during the week. So Team Cathy made sure that she had lots of company from Monday through Friday. But even as we visited, Cathy fretted about whether we were able to get enough writing done at her house while she napped (for we were all writers of some kind). She’d quiz me anxiously about this because she knew I was on deadline to turn in a book, and I told her that it was quiet and peaceful at her house, unlike mine, where two little boys run around like Tasmanian devils.

Ten days ago I was stunned to arrive and find Cathy in her office, writing a column and asking if we could go for a walk in a bit because she wanted to build up her muscle tone. She was also pleased that the LA Times had called and wanted her to participate on a blogging panel next month at the L.A. Times Festival of Books.

“I told them I probably won’t be able to do it unless I start feeling better,” Cathy said.

And then, in her inimitable Cathy way, she started drawing up a list of replacements to suggest to the festival organizers in case her health didn’t improve enough to permit her to attend.

“Don’t you think that’s a good idea?” she asked.

Her eyes were clear, her voice measured. I found it hard to meet her gaze, didn’t trust myself to speak. All I could do was nod.

Rest in peace, Cathy.

I visit the furniture section on Craigslist a lot and get a lot of laughs: dinning room table, rod iron headboard, master sweet furnachure. But this is the funniest ad so far:

"I'm posting this ad in part to sell a table, and in part to lash out at you stubborn, stubborn people. I've been trying to sell this, like, fantastic side table for a few weeks now, and the only offers I get are severely undercutting (you might as well take a booger and fling it at me). I mean, come on, look at this thing! It's cool! The surface is cool, it's in really good condition, and it's selling for the same amount you'd spend on a lone night out at P.F. Changs. P.F. Changs! Buy the table. That's all I'm saying. Buy it. And don't try to bargain me down, just hand me $20. Okay? Let's not prolong this."

This morning I was at LAX to watch the world's largest airliner touch down in the United States for the first time. The Airbus A380 flew here direct from Toulouse, France. Another A380 landed nearly simultaneously at New York's JFK airport. Apparently, we were almost stood up.

In my video report I ask the president of the Los Angeles Airport Commission why Airbus almost flaked on its date with L.A., I check in with the A380's pilot, and some students from Richard Henry Dana Middle School give me a lesson in aviation 101. Take a look:

LAO video edited by Alex Gans and photographed by Thomas Macker

Six months after Lana Clarkson was found dead of a gunshot blast to the face in Phil Spector's Alhambra mansion, Esquire published an interview with Spector that included an inflammatory quote. "She kissed the gun," Spector told the reporter. "I have no idea why - I never knew her, never even saw her before that night." The inflammatory assertion was blasted everywhere, beginning with Anderson Cooper reading out loud from an advance copy of the interview on CNN and carried in headlines across the blogosphere, presented as truth simply because it was uttered by Phil Spector. At the time, I thought Spector's language was suspect. If someone you didn't know came to your house and killed herself, wouldn't you be upset that they decided to check out in your living room? Wouldn't you say so? Wouldn't you express remorse that anyone who felt compelled to kill herself at the home of a stranger must have been terribly desperate? Wouldn't you at the very least deem it unwise to use callow language to describe the horrific thing that your houseguest did? If the Esquire interview is transcribed and published accurately, such questions were never asked of Phil Spector, and nor were they posed elsewhere, by any other reporter, in any of the publications that reprinted Spector's claim. To say that Lana Clarkson "kissed the gun" is to say so much more, and we will hopefully find out exactly what in the upcoming trial.

I've been covering the case since Clarkson died and I happen to have my own theory, which you can read about in my upcoming article called "Death Behind the Wall of Sound," which will appear in the 3/25 edition of the UK Independent. In the mean time, here's a sneak peak: the death of Lana Clarkson has a lot to do with Tom Wolfe (no, I'm not saying he was there that night, not physically anyway). Wolfe, as many of you know, is the guy who wrote "The Pump-House Gang," his inexplicably famous piece in which he predicted the death of surf culture in 1965 - perhaps not unexpected from someone who wore a linen suit instead of a wetsuit to the beach. Wolfe penned a previous bad call in 1964, this one a giddy profile of Phil Spector called "The First Tycoon of Teen" for the International Herald Tribune, failing to take critical aspects of Spector's boyhood into account and presenting, simply, a wild and crazy guy. Until recently, this piece served as the go-to piece on the man, spawning an Ozymandias of coverage in which hordes of unthinking scribes have taken everything Spector has ever said or done at face value, ignoring report after report of violence towards his colleagues, his ex-wife, and his girlfriends. Lana Clarkson "kissed the gun"? Sure, no problem. What effect might decades of Spector adoration have had on Clarkson? For the answer to this and other questions (like what might have happened on the night Clarkson died and how she was affected by a series of injuries in the months before her death), please read my piece next Sunday (I'll be linking to it on this site). In the mean time, read my New York Observer piece about how Phil Spector and Robert Blake are reverse, perhaps unwitting Gatsbys whose east-to-west family journeys spelled their doom, reprinted here.

With the green shadow of Saint Patrick’s Day looming, my thoughts have turned to whether Los Angeles has produced any novels with Irish themes and characters. We’ve got hordes of stories set in New York and Boston (Dennis Lehane’s Mystic River immediately comes to mind) but I couldn’t think of any stories involving Irish immigrants set in the City of Angels. If you do, dear reader, enlighten me.

And yet L.A. must have hundreds of thousands of Irish-Americans. Is the problem that there’s no traditional Irish neighborhood in L.A. where layers of culture, adversity, crime, personalities, assimilation, tragedy, comedy, booze, music and lore could accrete the way they did the big East Coast cities? I mean, I attended Saint Patrick’s Elementary School in North Hollywood, and while we had a fair few Irish students and some Irish nuns and priests, we also had the usual polyglot jumble from all over. Like me.

My mother was Russian-French and we spoke French at home. My father was second or third-generation Irish-American, did a fine rendition of “Galway Bay” and wanted potatoes with every meal. He was a big reader and always had a book or magazine or newspaper in his hands after he came home from his job as a roofer for the Los Angeles Unified School District. (He’d also bring home pockets filled with the odd and sometimes precious stuff that kids threw onto the roofs each day – superballs, rings, troll dolls, necklaces, pendants, caps, keychains, baseball mitts. Some of my most precious childhood treasure came from those scavenged roofs).

I grew up to become a reader and a writer too, so today, in honor of Edward Joseph Francis Xavier Hamilton, I list a few of my favorite Irish tales and urge you to pick up one and give it a try.

“At Swim, Two Boys” by Jamie O’Neill. An achingly beautiful, haunting and lyrical novel about coming of age poor, devout and the son of a shopkeeper in 1915 Dublin, at the dawn of The Troubles and realizing you’re gay in a place and time that had no language to even conceive of such a thing. Absolutely brilliant.

Anything by Irish novelist Edna O’Brien.

Anything by Adrian McKinty, including the noir crime novel, “Dead I Well May Be” about a young illegal immigrant Irishman’s modern day sojourns in the Bronx as he hooks up with a crime mob.

“Are You Somebody? The Accidental Memoir of a Dublin Woman” by Nuala O’ Faolain, a journey toward discovery by a onetime Irish Times columnist that will make you laugh, cry and yelp with sheer joy. O’Faolain’s humor and exuberance in describing her poor, rural upbringing, alcoholic mother, philandering father, her struggle for acceptance in a male-dominated literary world and her search for love and absolution left me breathless.

Any poem by William Butler Yeats

“Haunted Ground” a mystery novel by Erin Hart. When the preserved body of a young, red-haired woman is pulled out of a peat bog, no one knows whether the corpse is 4,000 years old or four months old. So saturated with traditional Irish atmosphere - music, dance, landscapes – that you can practically hear the cowbells and fiddles.

Rhys Bowen’s Molly Doyle mystery series. These are traditional mysteries featuring a plucky young Irish immigrant woman private investigator in early 20th century New York and The Emerald Isle. Titles include “Oh Danny Boy” and “In Dublin’s Fair City.”

“Mystic River” the book or the movie. Author Dennis Lehane is the bard of tough working-class Irish-American neighborhoods in Boston and the close and intricate family ties that both bind and blind us.

Happy Reading!

I used to see people fishing in the LA River and wonder what they thought they might catch - a rusty can? A shred of tire? Maybe some seasonal polywogs?

But George Wolfe, the avid canoeist and naturalist I met last month as he kayaked the L.A. River, spotted several exotic 6-8-inch fish in the high-walled area a few miles south of the Sepulveda Basin and has concluded that they're South American catfish, so maybe the river is more filled with life than I knew.

A fisherman friend of Wolfe's who analyzed his photos believes the fish is a plecostomus catfish "that comes in many sizes, including a species that grows big enough to feed a whole village. The South American rivers of this fish's native habitat can be quite murky, warm and low-oxygen, so that's why it can survive in the L.A. County Flood control channel," writes G. Wing.

Wing hypothesizes that since Wolfe saw a handful of the little critters, a breeding colony must have established itself on our shores, probably from the release of aquarium fish. (I can just picture a 10-year-old boy biking to the Sepulveda Basin and dumping the contents of his fishbowl into the river rather than keep his fishy friends in captivity).

Will Amazonian catfish now join the legion of other non-native species that have adapted to our environment, like the squawking green parrots who roost throughout the Southland and our alligator/cayman/Loch Ness monster friend Reggie?

Since Wolfe is editor of the California satire website LaLa Times, it did occur me that he was pulling my leg, but decided he would have claimed to have seen Amazonian piranhas in the L.A. River, not a friendly little catfish, if he was.

I don't know how much larger these catfish will grow, or if they'll even survive the hunting birds and heavy pollutants in the river water. But it does remind us that rivers, even concrete ones, are the natural habitat of fish, not just rusty cans. And it's exactly the type of thing that Wolfe hopes to catalog during his upcoming full river trip later this month, broadly titled "A Survey of the LA River and its Wildlife"

If anyone has a better idea on what this fish is, or has seen other fish in the river, drop me a line. In the meantime, just knowing that these little guys are out there is whimsy enough for me, one of those offbeat details about this city that makes me happy.

I was psyched to catch up today with Helen Thomas, the dean of the White House press corps, after she spoke to students at Harvard-Westlake School in North Hollywood about Women's History Month. The trailblazing Thomas followed Kennedy from the campaign trail to the White House and has been a fixture in the first row of presidential news conferences ever since.

This year, as Women's History Month approached, the legendary journalist was notified that when the press corps moves in May from their temporary home back to their permanent White House digs, Thomas will lose her front-row briefing room seat to a cable news channel. Ironic? Helen thought so.

How it happened: The Politico has been following the story. Here's a quick look at some of the background:

Thomas usually comes to the press secretary’s morning “gaggle” but does not always attend the afternoon briefing, so sometimes her seat is empty. It’s the only seat that traditionally is left vacant if unoccupied. Every other chair gets filled in by those without regular seats, whose questions do not always live up to Thomas’s zingers.

[snip]

Steve Scully, president of the White House Correspondents Association, which traditionally decides the seating arrangement, said Thomas was “very gracious” when he approached her about the possible change.

“The wires and three networks have had a front-row seat dating back to the Nixon administration, when the West Wing briefing room opened,” explained Scully, who is C-SPAN’s senior executive producer and political editor. “When discussions began two years ago about redesigning the briefing room, both Fox and CNN expressed an interest in having a front-row seat. Among the criteria for seating arrangements are the size of the news organization a reporter represents and the frequency with which they attend the briefings. Helen Thomas remains the dean of the White House press corps, and we will make certain her needs are met. She has been terrific in understanding our situation." A final decision will be made by the group's board within a month.

* Geography observed: Harvard Westlake says their Coldwater Canyon campus is in North Hollywood. LA City Nerd notes it's actually in Studio City.

Jacob-

Nice post on Helen Thomas - a true media institution. I just wanted to let you know that Harvard-Westlake (Harvard being the all-boys campus in question that was merged with all-girls Westlake) is not in North Hollywood. I know on their website they claim to be and when they formed in 1937 they might have been, but today, in 2007 (and for at least the last 40 years) they are in Studio City. There is no part of North Hollywood that stretches down south of the 101 (and with the naming craze of the last 15 years, North Hollywood really barely extends east of the 170, except in the northern most reaches of the once large community). So, ignore the CalTrans sign on the 101 westbound before Coldwater announcing North Hollywood as the the next exit, there is no North Hollywood off of Coldwater unless you go North and pass Vanowen. Harvard-Westlake is in Studio City.

LAO video edited by Alex Gans and photographed by Thomas Macker

A couple days ago, my wife and and I were walking the dog and talking about selling our house.

We’ve lived in Tarzana for almost 13 years – which seem to have passed more quickly than the previous ten in Sherman Oaks. Our house value has doubled, and our son is a high school junior who wants to travel to a foreign country for college. Time to downsize.

It’s not the house. Unlike the McMansions that sprang up like lawn mushrooms all around us, we have only one floor, no sea shell bathroom sinks, no gold-flocked mirror tiles two stories high over the fireplace, no kitchen center island, no marble anywhere. There’s land, and there used to be a tennis court. We took it out after the Northridge quake and replaced it with a great lawn and terraced hillside because that was cheaper than fixing it – and it’s even more snobby/cool to say you’ve removed a court than that you put one in. But the gardening bills, not to mention the DWP and gas bills, are growing more and more prohibitive.

Don't get me wrong: I love my house, which says a lot since I also once swore I had no intention of moving to the West Valley where there’s at least one boat in a driveway, on every block.

Anyway, we want to travel once our son is out of high school. So why do we need to keep this place? I’m just afraid that when we sell it, some builder will buy it, tear down the house, fill in the pool, tear down the guest house (yeah, we have one of those, too), rip out the fire pit, level everything and build three houses that go straight up and have a five foot strip of lawn between them, and no place to put a market umbrella, much less a deck chair in what passes for a back yard.

But we’ve got to go sometime. We figure maybe if house prices don’t crash we can get enough out of our place to buy another, smaller house, for cash, with lower maintenance all around. Of course, we’d pay more in property taxes, so maybe it will be a wash after all. I guess we could always sell our 140 x 60 back yard to the neighbor above us . . . for his backyard.

“If we’re going to travel, maybe we should rent instead of buy,” I told my wife.

“What? And flush money down the toilet?” she said.

That made me immediately forget about the house and got me thinking about what it might be like to actually flush money down the toilet. No coins, though. I’ve got enough plumbing problems and the idea that the next plumber to snake a camera through the clean-out, looking for tree roots invading the sewer line would spot some sparklingly clean pocket change and start figuring how to over-charge me, did not appeal. I decided to start with a dollar and go up by denomination until I just couldn’t stand it any more.

So I stood over the toilet in the guest bathroom and dug around in my pocket for a single. I found a crisp new bill and rubbed it between the thumb and forefinger of my left hand while I contemplated the insanity of tearing it in half, and then in half again, and consigning it to a watery grave. Geez, I don’t know. Maybe I should just get some Lifesavers at the cheap gas station down the block, instead. Or buy one of those paper daisies at the supermarket checkout line and help an underprivileged kid. I could make change and do a load of laundry. Or give the bill to that guy who always hangs around outside the Rite-Aid. The guilt nearly did me in.

On the other hand, sometimes it feels good to be a little nuts. What the hell.

I ripped my bill – serial # E41490434 D – into four pieces, neatly bifurcating George Washington’s head into left and right brain and left and right jaw portraits. (I hope this is not against the law.) Then I let the scraps waft lazily down into the clean, inviting water. No stopping me now. I flicked the tank handle and watched as my legal tender for all debts public and private swirled clockwise into the great beyond. I imagined that it might meet and mate with another single and escape to sea in a freak sewage accident on Santa Monica bay.

But it was not to be. The flush ended prematurely, the suction stopped, and the wet green paper bobbed serenely back to the surface. Damn! I thought I’d fixed that problem.

I decided to take it as a sign. I picked the torn bill parts out of the bowl with salad tongs, and dried them with my hair dryer. (That’s when I discovered that money paper doesn’t absorb water very easily; another reason it floated rather than sank, which I take as a good omen at least for our battered currency). Then I taped it back together. Obviously, I’m going to need that dollar – and some of the other bills that luckily never made it out of my wallet – to buy a new tank floater before something else rises to the top.

Oh, and talk about flushing money down the toilet: I can see from my office window that I forgot to turn the pool water off hours ago. There goes at least $50.00. Oh well, in the absence of decent rainfall, in this near-record dry winter, at least the back stairs and deck are getting a long overdue bath.