I must be a little bit retarded, because I just finally figured out how to clean the CCD on my Nikon D50. So to celebrate the removal of dust from the sensor of my camera, I took it around with me today and shot some pictures while Rudy and I drove our roommate Stuart to the Trader Joe’s in Pasadena so he could fill out an application.
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Eight more videos after the jump! (more…)

After eating an insanely delicious scoop of Vanilla Berry Swirl at Pazzo Gelato today, I stopped in next door at Undefeated, the fancy Silver Lake shoe store. I didn’t expect to actually buy anything, because their stuff is, well, fancy– and I can’t afford fancy at the moment. But then I came across the above pictured ultra-neon blue shoes. Maybe neon is played out, and maybe posting on your blog about clothing purchases is like, the worst kind of conspicuous consumption– but I don’t care– I’m in love with these crazy Nikes. And they were 50% off! How could I refuse?

Shorpy calls itself “The 100-Year-Old Photo Blog”, and acts as a catalogue of vintage snapshots and photos of little official (at least in a broad, historical sense) importance. In a time before the Internet, these sort of photos were confined to mysterious, musky antique shops, thrown in old shoeboxes with yellowed postcards from long since demolished tourist traps, and baseball cards with the smiling faces of now-unknown players adorning them. Nowadays, these ancient images are being digitally frozen, the originals left to perish at the unforgiving hands of time.

So much overlooked history is being catalogued in searchable databases, in the Web 2.0 world of Youtube, Wikipedia, and Flickr– not just in the realm of antique photos, but in all forms of ephemera. Images and sounds are resurrected (Shorpy says it “brings our ancestors back, at least to the desktop”) after so many years imprisoned in desk drawers, bootleg VHS tapes, and moldy out-of-print books. Now we need not leave the comfort of our homes to seek out unique objects in foreign places. The function of said antique stores, each with their own character and atmosphere, as keeper of such artifacts, will disappear at the same rate as the already-declining record stores and video stores, as all media loseWeight Exercises its physical nature, soon to be accessible only within in the sterile virtual space of every monitor hooked up to the Internet.

Is that too much to sacrifice for glimpse of the abandoned past? Decide for yourself, by checking out the beautiful images in Shorpy’s already vast collection. Click the jump to see some of my favorites. (more…)

Speaking of homoreotic sport images, check out this fantastic new ad from Paris’ tourism board. According to the campaign’s website, the purpose of the ad is to “use offbeat wit and the Rugby World Cup to show the world that Paris is also the capital of humour.” Right… more like the capital of hot rugby player stadium orgies. They’ve got me sold– book me on the first flight to good old gay Paris!

+ Via Jockohomo and Towleroad

Plan 59 is an online archive of vintage illustrations from the 1950′s, mostly from bizarre American advertising. Personally, I prefer the aesthetic of 1970′s advertisting, but amongst the squeaky clean forced wholesomeness of that nonsense decade, there are some fun little gems.

The above illustrations of wrestling stars are explicitly homoerotic. The true American hero on the left is named Yukon Eric. I want him to be my trail guide on whatever mountain he came down from. He can probably communicate with bluejays. According to legend, Yukon Eric was a friendly introvert who didn’t drink or smoke, and once beat up a saloon full of bullies who were criticizing him for being a milk-drinker. That’s my kind of man! There’s more great pictures over on Plan59′s Pro Wrestler gallery.

Plan59 also has a hilarious and terrifying collection of images called Demonic Tots and Deeply Disturbing Cuisine. The Bad Seed, anyone? Dakota Fanning is like, seriously jealous of these freaks. The kids in these pictures are the fictional progenitors of those cuddly Aryans in Village of the Damned. Why were parents in the 50′s so afraid of their kids? I mean, it’s not like they were on the irrevocable path of growing into pseudo-revolutionary herb-smoking, free-loving hippies, and then callous coke-snorting capitalists, or something… oh wait.

Living in Los Angeles, it’s almost impossible not to own a car, and spend countless hours sitting in traffic. Once upon a time, we had a streetcar system with almost 600 miles of operating track laid down, but that’s a story for another day. Currently, public transportation consists of buses that move only at the speed of often-gridlocked traffic, and the subway system that has been painstakingly slow in its development since the opening of the first line in 1990. There are a handful of places you can go on the subway, but not enough to rely upon it exclusively. And rail service ends at midnight, making it less than a viable option for going out at night.

The underwhelming breadth of the current subway system is visible in the map to the right. Expansion is on everyone’s minds right now, as in the past week, there has been news of progress on the proposed “Subway to the Sea”– a line that would run from downtown L.A. to Santa Monica, hopefully alleviating some of the outrageous everyday traffic on the west side. But funding is still an issue, so who knows when I’ll be able to make it out to the beach just by hopping on the Gold Line. While city hall inches forward, the Internet is rife with more ambitious ideas. The map at the top of this post is a small section of a proposed transportation project called Get L.A. Moving. It’s a brilliant plan that imagines Los Angeles with a subway system that goes everywhere, much like New York, Paris, and many of the other well-planned cities of the world.

The current L.A. subway system. Click for a larger view.

Others think we need streetcars downtown, or a monorail to the sea– even Ray Bradbury thinks so! Something’s got to happen, that’s for sure… by 2050, the Southern California population is supposed to have increased by 60%. Check out MetroRiderLA for everything you could possibly want to know about public transportaion issues in L.A. LAist also has consistently great coverage on the ever-changing developments.

This morning I was reading probably the 6000th blog item about the Kwik-E-Mart 7-Eleven in Burbank, and I said to Rudy, “We should go to the Simpsons 7-Eleven. Like, right now.” So we grabbed our friend Patrick and drove up north to check it out. And of course I took pictures so I could post the 6001st entry about it in the… blogosphere.

There was a small line outside, but the wait was only three or four minutes. The people waiting were genuinely excited about the whole affair. The Indian or Pakistani clerks, who did not seem amused by the hysteria, were even less enthusiastic when a tactless white woman asked one of them to pose for a picture next to a cut-out of Apu. All I have to say about the special Simpsons-themed merchandise is that those pink donuts are, without a doubt, some of the most delicious pastries I have ever consumed. And I know my pastries. Check out the pictures after the jump.
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