LOS ANGELES – The black choir clapped and swayed, propelled by the organ’s groove and drums’ beat as gospel music filled the tiny New Life in Christ Church on Compton Avenue.
The rhythm came naturally, but when it was time to sing, the choir had to turn to sheet music to keep from stumbling over the Spanish lyrics.
Two years after this African-American Pentecostal congregation of about 100 people welcomed their Latino neighbors, the two groups are still trying to stay in tune in a part of the city that has not always lived in harmony.
LOS ANGELES (AP) _ Tara Kolla fancied herself a green thumb-turned-green businesswoman when she planted an organic flower plot in her yard and sold poppies, sweet peas and zinnias at the local farmers market. For her neighbors, it was an eyesore.
Where Kolla saw her efforts as creating a lush sanctuary, her neighbors witnessed dusty pots, steaming compost, flies and a funky aroma on their tiny cul-de-sac in Los Angeles. They complained to zoning officials — and prevailed.
Kolla and other urban farmers are fighting back by challenging city halls across the country to rewrite ordinances that govern residential gardens. They believe feeding their fellow urbanites homegrown tomatoes, fresh eggs and sweet corn will change the world one backyard at a time.
Seattle has loosened its rules for backyard goats, New York City’s health department is taking steps to legalize beekeeping and Detroit is looking into regulating compost and greenhouses.
PASADENA, Calif. – After a run of celebrity grand marshals, a real American hero led the Rose Parade on Friday.
Onlookers stood and cheered as Capt. Chesley B. “Sully” Sullenberger III rode down Colorado Boulevard in a vintage 1928 Pierce Arrow with his wife, Lorrie, and two daughters as part of the annual armada of flower-draped floats, marching bands and prancing horses.
Sullenberger said he did not hesitate when asked to serve as grand marshal because his family has watched the parade when he was growing up in Texas.
“It’s really an American institution, a celebration of American values,” he said after the parade. “I think people see those in me, and I’m glad.”
Parade-goer Hilda Roy held a hand-painted, fluorescent sign that read, “We (heart) you Sully!” She waved and screamed the name of the man who landed a stricken jetliner on New York’s Hudson River and was thrilled when Sullenberger waved back.
SANTA BARBARA, Calif. (AP) _ Battalion Chief Scott Smith’s yellow jacket reeked of wood smoke and his eyes were red with exhaustion at the Emergency Operations Center.
Earlier, one of his crews nearly lost its engine to the flames and Smith fetched them out of a burning home where they had taken shelter Wednesday amid a wildfire near Santa Barbara that had charred 500 acres and driven thousands from their homes.
LOS ANGELES (AP) _ Noah Galuten spent the past three months eating his way around the world – all within a day’s drive of his Santa Monica apartment.
The 25-year-old playwright was broke and unemployed when he decided to eat cuisine from a different country every day and write about it on his Web site, Man Bites World.
Galuten figured he could stomach 60 traditional dishes from a different country on consecutive days until he ran out of options and was sated. But the project took him further than he ever imagined, stamping his culinary passport with food from 102 cultures by his final bite of Slovakian poppy seed cake more than three months later.
That he could cross so many borders so close to home is both a testament to Los Angeles’ cultural melting pot and the help he got from strangers who invited him into their homes to share traditional meals.
“If there’s anywhere you should be more inclusive, it’s eating,” he said.
Ran on AP Business wire, in USA Today and in LA Times business section (without a byline)
By Raquel Maria Dillon | ASSOCIATED PRESS
LOS ANGELES (AP) _ For decades, college kids have used stolen milk crates as the basic building blocks of coffee tables and dorm room shelves.
Now, a new breed of crate rustler is cashing in by swiping thousands of the containers from loading docks and selling them to shady recyclers.
AP Photo
The containers are chopped into bits and shipped to booming factories in China to be made into a variety of products, from pipes to flower pots.
Facing an estimated $80 million in annual losses from the thefts, dairies across the country are moving to stop the plastic pilfering. In California, companies are even hiring private detectives and staging sting operations.
LOS ANGELES (AP) _ As Hollywood’s striking scribes ventured out to their picket lines over the last two months, it’s been plain to see – female writers are outnumbered by their male colleagues.
“I’m surprised when I see a woman on the picket line and I always wonder, Hmm, do I know her?’” said Sarah McLaughlin, who wrote for “That 70s Show.” “If I don’t know a woman writer personally, I know of them.”
AP Photo | Ric Francis
Women make up 27 percent of television writers and 19 percent of feature film writers, according to the most recent Guild membership report from 2005, according to figures supplied by the Writers Guild of America.
Writers attribute the scarcity of women in their midst to tokenism, a tradition of bawdy humor in the writers room, and the dearth of women in key managerial positions.
Others say women have made significant strides toward parity in recent years, and feel increasingly comfortable working in an historically male-dominated field.
This story ran on AP’s national wire, the front page of the San Diego Union Tribune, the home pages of Yahoo! News and AOL, with video that I shot and edited.
Click to play AP Video: Firefighting water balloons
By Raquel Maria Dillon | ASSOCIATED PRESS
SIMI VALLEY, Calif. (AP) _ William Cleary believes aerial firefighting could become child’s play.
Five years ago, his son drenched him with a water balloon – and got him to thinking.
“He was three stories up and I was walking, and he still managed to hit me square in the head,” said Cleary, a Boeing engineer. “I thought, why can’t we be this accurate with water on fires?”
So he started working on a system to use giant water balloons to put out wildfires.
LOS ANGELES (AP) _ Among all the fossils, skeletons, meteorites and gemstones for sale Sunday at the I.M. Chait Gallery natural history auction, lot #127 stands out.
It’s a mummified baculum, or penis bone, from a species of walrus that went extinct 12,000 years ago. The piece is more than 4 feet long, curves to a point and is covered with weathered skin and dry muscle tissue.
Who would want to own such an odd thing? Lots of people, including technology executives, Hollywood producers and A-list celebrities. Bidding starts at $16,000.
“Size matters, and the walrus has got everybody beat,” said Josh Chait, operations director for his family’s auction house in Beverly Hills. “It’s a little sick, but where else are you going to get another one? That’s how collectors think.”
By RAQUEL MARIA DILLON for ASAP (AP’s now defunct multimedia service)
LOS ANGELES (AP) _It looks like the inspirational posters found in a guidance counselor’s office — a Siamese kitten playing with balls of colorful yarn. Then there’s the caption: “I’m in ur fizx lab, testn ur string therry.”
Lolcats — deceptively simple photos of cats with absurd captions — are cute and fluffy. And that’s all they’d be, if they didn’t talk so funny.
The captions adhere to a strict grammar of “kitty pidgin,” an amalgam of texting acronyms, poorly translated movie subtitles and leet speak, or hacker lingo. Proper lolcat features consistent misspellingz, subjects and verbs that disagrees and lotsa typos.
The “meme,” or an idea that propagates through culture, is so popular that the exhaustive lolcats library gets almost 200,000 unique visitors per month.
