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You Know You Want an iPhone Flask: 4 Awesome Booze Oddities You Can Buy Online

A couple of weeks back, we scoured the internet to find food oddities for you to lust over and/or buy. Today, we're back with a whole new crop of fun stuff, this time to help you imbibe. It's a little early in the week to fall down the rabbit hole of internet lists and consumerism, but hey, what the ... More >>

LuvAmp Wants to Open Up Your Heart (Don't Be Scared)

The notion of opening your heart through music definitely sounds like cloying new age stuff. Tony Moss is aware of that. But he also knows that music can actually open the heart up, as proven by quantifiable data (having to do with electromagnetic fields and planetary energetics). It's called heart ... More >>

6 Great Wine Books For the Holidays: Old Wine, New Books

Drinking wine is not the sort of activity known to inspire scholarship. The pleasures of writing and the pleasures of wine seem to work mostly at cross-purposes, despite the latter's renowned capacity for loosening tongues. But several books on wine's history, as well as its appreciation, hit the bo ... More >>

Top 5 Gifts for Bread Bakers: Your Kitchen, My Boulangerie

For some of us, baking bread is something that we do without much thought, whenever it's cold enough to crank the oven, for giving to friends, when our kids demand it, or as a coping mechanism (see: the recent election, long distance relationships, Steve Nash). The smell of bread baking is a fundame ... More >>

The Top 5 Things Restaurants Should Never Serve Again

There are plenty of opinions out there about trends that are played out. People are sick of small plates. Down with communal tables. Recently, there was even an internet screed against bar food (what's up with that?). All of this is basically a backlash against trends in dining in general -- a way f ... More >>

10 Comedy Events We're Looking Forward to This Fall

The leaves are turning, the pumpkin lattes are over-caffeinating and the comedy calendar is packing in shows and releases like snot-nosed children onto the back of a hayride wagon. Here are a few of the upcoming highlights.

3 Best All-Around Summer Barbecue Books

Looking for a terrific barbecue book? In theory, not a problem, as barbecue books are a summer staple in the publishing industry. No matter how many recipes for grilled chicken you may have seen, tried and tasted over your cookbook years, you can bet there will be a new summer barbecue book touting ... More >>

The New Era of (Good) Healthful Cookbooks, Starting With Hero Food And Salad for Dinner

Those low-fat, low-carb, low-trend-whatever cookbooks will likely always have a market. But yet another positive trickle-down effect of the current farmers market and backyard gardening era has been the really great "healthful" cookbooks we've been seeing recently, Hero Food: How Cooking With Delici ... More >>

Microsoft Is Poaching Engineers: With A Bacon Cart

For some reason, Microsoft seems to think that experienced software engineers are difficult to find in this down economy, so it's trying to recruit talent from the Seattle offices of Amazon, Adobe and Google. The Seattle Times reports that the battle for skilled coders is being waged with free bacon ... More >>

Tupac Shakur and Biggie Smalls Murder Book Shoots to Top of Amazon

​Murder Rap, the book written by former LAPD detective Greg Kading implicating Sean Combs and Suge Knight in the slayings of Tupac Shakur and Biggie Smalls, officially came out today. So far, only LA Weekly has interviewed Kading about his self-published book and the revelations he shares, which ... More >>

Angry Birds: The Cookbook

Flickr/tomazstolfaone very angry bird​ If weather girls can become television food megastars, then why can't massively addictive Finnish game apps become cookbooks? That was a rhetorical question; of course they can. And what better game to make the transition to cookbook than Angry Birds, a g ... More >>

Modernist Cuisine: How to Score (Um, Borrow) Stunning Cookbooks Via Twitter What Nathan Myhrvold Does With His Blow Torch

A. ScattergoodModernist Cuisine​ Twitter can be a beautiful thing, for zamisdat poets, for Middle Eastern dissidents, for Newt Gingrich. It can also be a very useful emergency button. So when we recently found ourselves needing the answer to a specific question from the copy desk, we put out a ... More >>

Time's 140 Best Twitter Feeds: Marion Nestle, Michael Pollan, Harry Reid Lord Voldemort

If you only have 140 characters, they should be worth reading, no? Depends on whose Twitter feed you read. Time Magazine has just published a list (of course they did) of the top 140 Twitter feeds around the country. No, sorry, neither Charlie Sheen nor Kim Kardashian made it -- Neil Gaiman is #1, S ... More >>

8 Things You Need to Know About Music in the Cloud

cloud music...​ The future is almost here. Except for the part with jet packs and holographic television. The part that is here? Cloud based music storage. WTF is that, you might be wondering, and why should I care? Herewith we will tell you what it is, why it's important, and how it affects ... More >>

8 Last-Minute Gift Ideas for L.A. Music Lovers (and Obsessives)

​There's always that someone in your family or group of friends or entourage (this is LA we're talking about after all) who is a little intimidating come Holidays gift season. They're way into music, but they're into music in an obsessive way that seems to say "you'll never be able to find a m ... More >>

The Day Captain Beefheart Outsold the Beatles, the Stones and Pink Floyd

Beatle Bones and Smokin' Stones: The Captain abides​It is a widely known (and kind of sick) fact of the music business that nothing helps sales of the back catalog of an artist like the death of said artist. The massive sales bump caused by people rushing to online (and occasionally also to b ... More >>

Foodista Best of Food Blogs Cookbook: L.A. in the Mix

amazon.com​The need to obsessively bookmark every delicious-sounding recipe you find on your favorite food blogs is quickly lessening, since new cookbook Foodista Best of Food Blogs Cookbook: 100 Great Recipes, Photographs, and Voices hit shelves on Tuesday. Foodista, which is sort of like Wi ... More >>

What Do 'Bud Bundy' and the Streamy Awards Have in Common? Everything!

​Hi, I'm David Faustino, and this is what happens when I drink (so drunk right now): You may remember me from a little show STILL ON TELEVISION called Married... with Children. It's generated over a biiiiiiiillion dollars for... Well, I don't really know who gets all the money... But anywa ... More >>

Farewell to the Bodhi Tree Bookstore

Old friend set to close this year

100 Words For Foodies: CliffsNotes For The Gourmand

Amazon.com​Tired of trying to Google culinary terms when you're right in the middle of an episode of Top Chef or, I don't know, reading your favorite food blog? Well the editors of American Heritage Dictionaries have come out with a book for you: think CliffsNotes for food people. Six bucks to ... More >>

Frank Bruni in Town on 'Born Round' Book Tour: Movie of the Week Coming Soon?

Amazon.comHow to become a food critic​For anyone who's been missing Frank Bruni's restaurant reviews in the New York Times lately, or is fascinated by the seemingly paradoxical intersection of food criticism and bulimia, the NYT staff writer will be talking about his new book, Born Round, tomo ... More >>

Three Wolf Moon T-Shirt: The Book?

Just when you thought the "two memes one shirt" phenomenon had hit its last iteration (how long before we see a "Three Wolves with Dead Kittens in their Mouths on a Moon shirt?"), The Mountain -- the company behind the world's first viral T-shirt -- is apparently looking for a book deal. The propos ... More >>

Kindle This: Mastering the Art of French Cooking Tops Bestseller List

Amazon.comJulia Child a best-seller​For those bemoaning the lost art of reading (here's David Ulin's fine piece in the Los Angeles Times) or the lost art of cooking (Michael Pollan in the New York Times), there is good news on both counts: Julia Child's classic cookbook "Mastering the Art of F ... More >>

Dr. Eliot's 5-Foot Shelf: Diana Kennedy's "The Art of Mexican Cooking"

Amazon.comThe Art of Mexican Cooking​When Charles Eliot, the former Harvard president, declared that one could get a perfectly serviceable education by spending 15 minutes a day reading from the books that could fit on a five-foot shelf, he did not have cookbooks in mind. But these days, with ... More >>

Author Harris' Death: Heart Disease

Amazon.comE. Lynn Harris​The L.A. County Coroner's office announced that successful author E. Lynn Harris, who died suddenly last week at the age of 54, was stricken by heart disease aggravated by high blood pressure and hardening of the arteries, according to Associated Press. Harris, who lived i ... More >>

Friends Of Friends releases Daedelus/Jogger Remixes EP; Download Nosaj Thing's Version (MP3)

​ Last March a brand new local imprint, Friends Of Friends Music, kicked things off with a conceptually cute first release. Label head Lazy Brow (Leeor Brown, also of independent music marketing group Terrorbird) wrangled beloved L.A. electronicist Daedelus as curator of Friends Of Friends Vo ... More >>

Larousse Gastronomique: The Necessary 8-lb. Book In Your Cookbook Library

It is the Summer of Julia, when teenage girls will soon be lining up along the hot concrete sidewalks of Wilshire Boulevard to watch Meryl Streep flip omelets and deconstruct ducks onscreen.

Darth Vader Toaster, the USB hub of Evil, and other home appliances from the Dark Side

Okay, I know we're all hoarding our money these days, but I wanted to bring this item (and some others) to your attention, in case anybody out there happens to be shopping for USB hubs or Darth Vader helmets anyway. From ThinkGeek.com, Darth USB has 480 MBps of digital connectivity and four ports. T ... More >>

Last Night: The Internet Wants to Be Free, But We Need to Get Paid - Dealmaker LA

Dear Internet, You broke media. Please fix. Thanks in advance, Everybody As eyeballs flock to the Internet without a reciprocal shift in advertising revenue, the online world is scrambling for a new business model that reflects the potential and reach of online marketing. As traditional medi ... More >>

The "Revolutionary Road" Not Taken

Defamer has a film obitchuary for the Leonardo DiCaprio-Kate Winslet vehicle, Revolutionary Road, and its failure to sucker Oscar voters into giving it a single nomination. ("Good Fucking Riddance, Revolutionary Road.") One hoped-for outcome of the Academy Award snub, Defamer says, is "a foreseeable ... More >>

iTunes to Go DRM free, Drop Some Prices, Raise Others

A few weeks ago after a visit to the Mac repair shop for my ailing MacBook, one of my favorite albums of the year, the soundtrack to Gus Van Sant's Paranoid Park, stopped working on my iTunes because I apparently had used the music on too many computers. Which was a load of crap, of course. I had ... More >>

¡ask a Mexican!

Best Museum Gift Shop: Huntington Library Bookstore & More

Ask a Mexican! Las Puertas

Never realized Jim Morrison was the equal of Morrissey and Charles Bronson among other Mexican guero icons.

Radiohead Has Cake, Eats it Too, Thinks About Seconds...

There are quite a few twists to the story of the new Radiohead album that broke on the band's website last night . One that is getting very little attention is the terrible name of the album: In Rainbows. But here are a couple others: 1. Journalists won't get advance copies or early access. The ... More >>

Amazon's MP3 Bargains

Amazon.com launched their new MP3 store today to go head to head with Apple's iTunes store. In a nice bit of irony the #1 selling song on Amazon was "1234" by Feist, which is popular because it's played in an Apple commercial. Amazon's songs are DRM-free and 256k which are the big selling points. ... More >>

William Langewiesche on The Atomic Bazaar and Facing our Worst Fear

The eventualist

The Bookish Set

Inside the indie booksellers

Do You IMDB?

How a fanatic helped put Hollywood under one big tent

Maybe

The Community Is the Brand

Tactical Embarrassment

The subversive cyber actions of ®™ark

Patently Absurd

Hacking the Future

Why code crackers will lead the digital age

Patently Mine

Microsoft and Amazon test new open-door policy at U.S. Patent Office

The War Over Your Personal Privacy Is Over.
You Lost.

The top five ways the technological revolution has been a war against you

Wait-and-Switch

Why is Amazon.com debuting free digital downloads?

Campaign2000.com

What the administration's antitrust crusade against Microsoft means for Al Gore on the stump

Greetings from Multimedia Glitch

Crashing the Webbies; deconstructing Bil Keane

On the Line at Amazon.com

Blue-collar labor in a high-tech company