Skylaire Alfvegren

The palm tree is about as ubiquitous a symbol of Southern California as you're likely to find, although only one species — the California fan palm — is native to the state. We live in a desert, and if it were not for fastidious landscaping, would find ourselves surrounded by......

If you believe the AMA, the FDA and the USDA care about your health and welfare, you are D-U-M-B. We live in age where more deaths are caused by prescription medications than street drugs, where we enjoy the seventh-highest cancer rate of any nation, where the above-named agencies are bought......

As with any trademarked, money-making, globally televised event, those celebrating with an event of their own have to get creative. Bars enticing customers to "watch the Big Game here" can't name-drop the Super Bowl. "Tinseltown's Biggest Night" often stands in for the Academy Awards, but what kind of crazy person......

You love movies. You love books. Ergo, you must love Larry Edmunds Bookshop. The Hollywood Boulevard stalwart, in business for more than seven decades, boasts an inventory of half a million movie photographs, 20,000 film and theater books, 6,000-plus original movie posters, and encyclopedic cinematic knowledge you can't find anywhere......

Around 3 a.m. on February 25, 1942, Los Angeles was jolted awake to the sound of air raid sirens and anti-aircraft explosions. In the course of the "attack," which lasted less than an hour, more than 1,400 rounds were fired in a 40-mile arc from Santa Monica to Long Beach,......

You may have eyeballed this happening lady at any number of hep arts and music events around town, an ethereal, statuesque blonde clad all in white, playing the part of the Oracle. Perhaps you've popped into the House of Intuition in Echo Park and found this expert in Oriental medicine,......

Released on Oct. 11, 1965, The Loved One was promoted as "the motion picture with something to offend everyone." Refined English writer Evelyn Waugh made a temporary move to "a little town called Los Angeles," resulting in his satirical novel on which Terry Southern and Christopher Isherwood based their script......

When I was young, I was a rock hound, attending gem and mineral shows around the Southland. Once, among displays of pyrite and geodes, I found a box of paper bags, marked "$1 surprise grab bag." My interest piqued, I bought one and ripped it open, unable to identify the......

If President Jimmy Carter had been re-elected, we would all be driving electric cars and powered by green energy. Instead, one of Ronald Reagan's first moves in office was to kill all such projects and go nuclear. The triple meltdowns at Japan's Fukushima Daiichi nuclear plant last March come courtesy......

We all should be familiar with Philadelphia's famed Mutter Museum, the country's best-known cabinet of medical curiosities, which has been gathering specimens since the founding of the College of Physicians of Philadelphia in 1787. Those with a fetish for moldering human cyclopses, 50-pound tumors and antiquated medical practices, take heart!......