In an era of closures, closures, closures everywhere, the un-incorporated town of Topanga Canyon has pulled off a miracle. A library opening!!

How did this happen?

Well, if you know anything about Topanga at all -- and how could you -- it's a formerly-tiny place (the population may be 11,000)...

Oh, Barack. You're such a nice guy. No matter what anyone thinks, they cannot take that away from you. I so want to be nice and fair, like you've requested.

It was in this spirit of reconciliation that I actually stopped re-visiting an article I had posted two years ago,...

My opening caveat: Barbara Boxer served on the high school board when I was in high school (1974-78). Fyi, my own mother would have been shocked by a female State Senator. A year before she died, my mother overheard a woman at the LA Gift Mart say to her child,...

For something to reach out and grab me, it has to have the effect of Changing My Life, and right away. Just say:

The Public Library is closing on Mondays.

Let's begin by introducing you to my first boyfriend. We began our courtship when I was three. His name was...

There is a story in the Washington Post that is so horrendous I almost don't know want to mention it. It criticizes Elena Kagan's fashion choices. It's written by a woman. It so perpetuates things that have not furthered either Elena's or my own life (and she's done...

I got my first convertible when I turned forty. It was purple, a Chrysler Sebring. It was also a vague kind of purple inside (though people who didn't love her like I did, they called her grey). She was used. I'd never bought a used car, before. Never considered such...

I can't believe my luck. I just drove by this new store on my way home. Good luck is for sale here on my busy boulevard. Talk about your good luck! In fact, I would have stopped right away, but I've just spent $7.10 at my favorite thrift shop, a...

There's a coffee place I go to, every morning. You might imagine that in LA, it could be very easy to surround myself with only like-minded leftists, but you'd be surprised how many people are across the political persuasion, even here in crazy Cali-for-nia. Still, someone on my side of...

Saturday night, the Man burned. Over 49,000 people watched. A windstorm had kept most of us captive during the day. Eight hours of white dust.

What brings 49,000 crazy people together to put themselves to these tests?

Burning Man, a part revolutionary, part art instillation, amazing visuals, part rave...

Farrah Fawcett died, yesterday morning. I found out about it first thing, in my local coffee joint, Jennifer's, an independently run place in Studio City that's only recently given into a modern ticker tape TV. I was sad. Who doesn't have someone suffering from cancer, after all? I know three...

Black Like Me: A seminal work, a 1959 experiment in which an author darkened his skin and traveled the South, opens with the sentence, "What is it like to experience discrimination based on skin color, something over which one has no control?"

Okay. Now, let me get one thing straight,...

At a time when stock prices are -- you might say -- at a decline, Apple reported in September a rise in it's stock prices. It was at $150 a share as the economy collapsed around it, and though it has dropped to $92, that's still quite remarkable. It's a...

A collision of campaign politics and free expression occurred in two Southern California neighborhoods that could not be more different.

High school kids were planning to go march against a hanged Halloween effigy of Barack Obama, complete with meat cleaver in his head and a sign that said "Nobama," in...

Now, I don't pose the question above to the protesters, those out -- but all of us. And I do realize that anyone who has found their way to a liberal blog is already preaching to the choir. But there is something I've had to get off my chest, for...

I have been struggling with something about the 'mainstream media'. I find myself both puzzled and fascinated by what they choose to cover. Here's a 'for-instance,' which I saw last week on MSNBC -- a brief discussion about whether or not one of the candidates intended an obscene gesture when...