I’ve always thought astrology a bunch of nonsense. I don’t deny its validity, I just don’t believe. It all seems very strange to me. Guru Singh was teaching a special Friday night class. I was of mixed mind. On the one hand, going to the class did not seem like the Jewish thing to ...

Great signage right off Pico Blvd. This is the store where I buy all my American and Israeli flags and lapel pins. As I've said, I love to roam the alleyways here in my neighborhood. This row of garages has layers of texture topped by wonderfully muted colors. Self-portrait in concrete. They don't b...

Sometimes I don't have to stray very far from my front door to discover dazzling compositions. This blue dot on the field of gray and green is on the sidewalk right in front of Casa Avrech. This week Karen and I replaced our old furnace—when I say old I'm talking 1930's—with a spanking new unit ...

I went shopping for new running shoes at the West Side Pavilion. Parked on the top level of the structure. Spent about five minutes taking pictures of this fabulous yellow zip running through a steel grill. Barnett Newman could not have done better. Did you know that the average running shoe costs m...

Rabbis Steven Weil of Beth Jacob, Elazar Muskin of YICC and Yosef Kanefsky of Bnai David-Judea all rank at the top of any list of America’s leading Modern Orthodox rabbis. Various Angelenos are honored in the Forward’s latest list of 50 influential Jews. As with the following case, the p...

Joe emails: To those who learn torah in the brisker method, the crucial portion of the analysis in torah learning, or any other field, is to ascertain the distinquishing characteristic between two occurrences and then the analysis is bulletproof. Your being barred from Pico Rob shuls and probably ne...

I stumbled across this unexpected industrial landscape in my own neighborhood here in Los Angeles. I love the lime-green and mocha punctuated by that splash of blue. Some of my very favorite places in Los Angeles are the driveways between buildings. People dump all sorts of stuff in these spaces and...

Tuesday. 4:10 p.m. I’m driving north down Livonia and swinging left on to Pico Blvd. The light is green. I’m 20 yards behind an SUV that has turned left on Pico and headed west. I’m traveling at about 10 mph. I’ve had the day from hell. I’m looking forward to ...

Lisa Alcalay Klug writes for Jewish Living magazine: "The key word that defines all 10 neighborhoods is‚ "vibrant." There is energy surging forth in every one. Together they form a mosaic of diverse pieces‚ mixing old and young; singles and families; suburban and metropoli...

The Happy Minyan meets on Shabbos at a karate studio. The bathroom is in the back, near the woman’s section. Women tend to congregate around the bathroom. There’s no loud fan in the bathroom and you couldn’t turn it on on Shabbos anyway. I pity the poor man who goes in there for so...