Archive for March, 2007
Our Quixo Peru Animals, Plants & Natural History page has been updated! Say you want to know where to find a llama, alpaca, vicuña or guanaco…. Or maybe you want to find the best reference books for bird watching in Peru and South America. And by the way did you know that in the highlands of Peru you might find a member of the chinchilla family that looks like a cross between a rabbit and a squirrel? You guessed it, the vizacha.
Anyway, there’s a lot more, like info on dear, foxes, giant hummingbirds. And as always great book recommendations.
March 27th, 2007
UPDATED, AGAIN
FUNdamentals of Music and Movement has moved their classes!
They’ve been working out the details and recently announced that classes are being held in two west los angeles locations:
Monday, Wednesday, Friday & Saturday classes are held at:
Pacific Arts Center
10469 Santa Monica Blvd.
Los Angeles CA 90025
Tuesday & Thursday classes will be held at:
Turnout Performing Arts Center
12113 Santa Monica Blvd. #201
Los Angeles, CA 90025
They encourage people to call 310 398 2500 with questions.
Check the website for class schedules and give them a call if you have any questions or to be sure nothing has changed!
FUNdamentals is one of our favorite kid spots and it is featured on our Stuff to do with Kids in Los Angeles page and will soon be included on our Los Angeles Birthday Party ideas page. They do great classes at the Center but also do outreach to pre-school and elementary classes and daycare. They’ll come to your birthday and they do kid rock shows for other occasions. And check out their CD if you get a chance.
March 22nd, 2007
Our cheap airline ticket guide has just been updated. The reviews have been revised and the sites are a little better organized and easy to get to. As a convenience, we tried allowing visitors enter travel info directly into forms on our page, but it seems like people just don’t like using them — makes sense, seems untrustworthy. We also included lots of ads and offers, but, again seems like people just want to know about the websites and take care of business.
So now we just offer a clean list of the sites and their advantages.
Some make it easy to get to published fares (Orbitz.com
, Expedia.com), others let you pick your own price (Priceline.com
), while some negotiate fares for you (Hotwire.com
), and others offer their unsold inventory (CheapTickets.com
). Our favorite, Kayak.com
, searches them all.
See the guide to learn more.
If you want to share your good and bad experiences with these websites feel free to leave a comment!
Thanks!
March 16th, 2007
We’ve just posted a new backyard science and fun with nature in los angeles guide! Catherine Criolla has submitted a fantastic write-up on backyard science activities, books, places to go and resources to find more information. I guess it is for kids, but there’s stuff for everyone. There’s stuff about all kinds of critters — bugs (insects, spiders and butterflies), birds, squirrels… You name it. Plus some tips on getting out and enjoying nature around Southern California and beyond. Leave a note here if you have any additions or suggestions.
March 12th, 2007
We’ve just posted a couple of updates on our campaign to stop Donald Sterling Corporation’s ugly full page ads in the LA Times.
So far the campaign has been an enormous success. Like-minded people from around Los Angeles have been finding comfort in knowing that they are not alone in their suffering. Bunches of LA blogs have taken up the cause, including LosAnjealous, Blogging LA, Franklin Avenue and LA Observed .
As a result, new details are coming to light. According to our sources — random people posting comments here and elsewhere– Donald Sterling Corp does not pay for their millions worth of ads in the Los Angeles Times. They got them through a trade for advertising at Clippers basketball games. This explains a lot. The Times has no power to control the quality of the ads and DTS Corp just doesn’t value the ads. We propose that the Times make their banners at Clippers games into eysores to pressure DTS to fix their ugly ads.
In other news, last weekend we were startled to see a new DTS ad layout in the Sunday paper. It almost looked like they were trying a little harder. The ad had a nice dark blue color in the background with a subtle gradient. There were even margins and the design elements appeared to be lined up intentionally. The new gold 3-D logo thing was pretty gaudy, but at least it looked like they were trying. Still, any hope that we were making progress was destroyed when the next page revealed an ad in the old style, rendered even more sloppily than ever.
Oh well. We’ll struggle on. I’m sure someone at Donald T. Sterling Corporation has taken notice of our campaign here. Hopefully even more pressure is mounting because, since they don’t seem to have their own website, people looking to do business with them find us. I’m betting right now they are already working on an ugly-ass website. At least with a website we won’t need a campaign, people have a choice whether to visit it or not….
March 8th, 2007
for kids and for adults 
by John Hemming. There’s also a nice coffee table book and a book about potatoes. Really.