... if Governor Arnold Schwarzenegger signs a bill that's headed to his desk. Senate Bill 28, that begun making its way around the capitol in 2007 seeks to "prohibit drivers from sending or reading text messages while operating a motor vehicle. The law would go into effect on January 1, 2009, as an adjunct to the existing prohibitions against the operation of a cell phone without a hands-free device," according to State Senator Joe Simitian's......

A new law states that you cannot sleep on the top of your car... just kidding | Photo by Hamed Saber via Flickr Now there's an attention grabbing quote, spoken by Dick Messer, director of the Petersen Automotive Museum, up there in the headline. With the onslaught of laws and proposed ideas for drivers of cars (there are 33.5 million registered vehicles in California), many think it's getting a bit ridiculous in a report......

Those of you who rarely use your cell phones while driving need not take too much notice of the following announcement (oh, and p.s.? Thanks for being better than other people). For those of you, however, who insist on multi-tasking throughout your driving experience, watch out: that phone call you're making while wending your way down the 101 might just get you pulled over and fined, fined, fined. The CHP just released a press......

Two robberies at gunpoint took place late last night in Hollywood, resulting in injuries to the victims. The first incident, which was reported at 1:44 a.m. was a home invasion in an apartment at 1750 Wilcox Avenue. According to the Daily News, the victim "was standing in front of his apartment building when two men walked up, pointed a gun at him and demanded to be brought to his apartment." The tenant led the robbers......

How many times have you seen some boneheaded driver make a stupid move on the road, only to drive up beside them and see them yapping away on their cell phones? Too many times, I'll bet you. Now a new study shows that cell phone users also drive more slowly and make poor lane-change choices, which may slow down traffic overall up to 10%. From the LA Times: Researchers at the University of Utah......

According to a new study by David Strayer, a psychology professor at the University of Utah, talking on a cell phone while driving can make a person drive up to 2mph slower that other drivers, the LA Daily News reports. "The distracted driver tends to drive slower and have delayed reactions," said Strayer, whose earlier studies have resulted in the well-known findings that cell phone talkers react more slowly on the road than drink drivers.......

Today's issue of LA Weekly holds their top few picks of the 740 new California laws coming our way in 2008. The law that hits Californians on the most basic level is Senate Bill 33, which bans talking on a cell phone while driving unless using a hands free device. It also bans teens from using cell phones flat out while driving. Don't worry, you don't have to spend your money yet, buying that ear......

You may remember Tim Hammer's -- (or should I say, a "blogger who calls himself Tim Hammer"?) recent post on "American Gladiators": "There are no cell phones, cameras, iPods or knives allowed inside [the arena]. These rules not only got in the way of my plans of shanking a Gladiator while listening to my workout mix on shuffle but also required us to walk all the way back to our car to drop off our......

As you may have heard NBC is bringing back American Gladiators. The revamped version of the classic game show of the early 90s will begin to air on January 6. I wish I would have waited until January 6 for my first chance to see the new Gladiators in action. Saturday morning I got up early and headed down to the Sony lot to be a member of the Gladiator audience. I gave up......

When people trade scary stories, it's usually something that happened to them; a ghost they saw, a voice they heard. Unfortunately, most of my scary stories are things I brought upon myself. When I was a teenager, I hung around with a group of people who took a lot of acid. We would just take some acid, then decide where to go. The woods or the beach were usually good places to fry. 7-11......

I’ve always felt that political correctness would one day be our demise. When politicians refuse to acknowledge that the overwhelming majority of terrorists that try to kill Americans are Muslim, and 80-year-old Caucasian grandmothers are pushed to the side by airport screeners, political correctness seems a little absurd. When people illegally cross our borders and are then called “undocumented workers” who are catered to by Bank of America and our welfare system, Mayor Villaraigosa......

Texas congressman Ron Paul pointed his pen at his fellow conservatives at the New Hampshire presidential debates yesterday and won the Fox News text message poll, a day after winning the Maryland Republican Straw Vote, to the outrage of Fox mouthpiece, Sean Hannity. Hannity, who clearly hates freedom and obviously believes that all elections and polls that aren't rigged by Karl Rove must be rigged, flat out accused the American people of cheating when......

KCBS and its KCAL affiliate picked up seven awards at the Los Angeles Emmy Awards last night, with the award for live coverage of an unannounced event going to the team for the Esperanza fire. Let's all share in a joyous chorus of "Hell yeah!!": teen drivers may be barred from using cell phones while driving, under state legislation passed today. And while we're at it, give another whoop of joy for the resignation......

Can we say embarrassing? The LA Times reports in an investigation that there are major problems with cell phone 9-1-1 emergency calls.Elementary school counselor Brad Edwards said he waited eight harrowing minutes last year before a dispatcher picked up his cell call about a boy who had collapsed on a Los Angeles schoolyard and begun foaming from the mouth. "The fire station is just a few blocks away. I could have run there faster......

Around 4pm today a one-acre fire broke out within sight of the Griffith Park Observatory. ABC has been running indepth coverage, although there is very little news online and no photos available at this time. Hikers have been evacuated. If anyone knows anyone who may be hiking in the park, they are being asked to contact them on cell phones. Visitors to the Observatory were evacuated from the building and were being kept in......

We at the Gothamist network would like to express our heartfelt wishes to the people of Minnesota in the days after their tragic bridge collapse. We're not trying to discount the severity of the accident by making note of it in opposition to our usual -Ist lightheartedness - we just wanted to take a moment and recognize those affected last week. After the Minneapolis bridge collapse, Bostonist did a little research and found that Massachusetts......

What with Paris Hilton's release earlier this week and the upcoming celebration of American Independence (sorry, Londonist!), we've been thinking a lot about freedom. Freedom to vote, freedom to choose, and most importantly, freedom to blog. Here are a few things we're happy we've been free to blog about this week. Being the nation's capital, DCist felt especially proud to let freedom ring this week by exposing the really important issues, like how sad they......

People are freaking out by a law that requires that you be hands-free if you use a cell phone in your car. The law goes in effect July 1, 2008 but the LA Daily News is reporting that locals are thinking that the law will kick in this weekend, so they are rushing to the phone stores to get their blue tooth accessories. Officials have blamed an e-mail hoax for helping to spread the......

In the wake of the most recent King-Harbor tragedy, where concerned witnesses called Los Angeles County Sheriff's Department 9-1-1 to report that the medical staff was doing nothing about a woman dying on the floor of the hospital, only to be told that 9-1-1 would not dispatch any help, comes a plan by the LAPD to improve their handling of 9-1-1 calls. Yesterday officials told the L.A. Police Commission that they were beginning to......

Welcome to the latest edition of 'Ask the MACist', the column where I answer your Macintosh and other technology questions. Our question this week comes from Ryan in Silverlake. He asks: I'm seriously considering a new Mac but I always hear rumors about newer ones coming out so I always end up waiting. Should I just bite the bullet and do it or should I wait? When to upgrade or get a new piece......

Something miraculous happened last night at the House of Blues last night when Britney Spears made her return to an LA stage. Actually several miraculous things happened last night on the Sunset Strip that I cannot remember happening in my long history of seeing live music in LA. The first thing was, people paid hard-earned money for tickets (about $100 face value for a pair after all was said and done - more if......

While we would never comment on a stranger's parenting techniques, we, along with many, bristled at hearing Alec Baldwin call his young daughter a pig in this day and age of girls and women obsessing over their bodies, etc., sometimes to fatal conclusions. And even though most of the tirade was a victim rant about how she had injured him somehow by not being available to take his phone call, we do applaud him......

I am in shock. Despite a ton of promotion, great reviews and legions of Quentin Tarantino fans, Grindhouse opened in only fourth place. That would be $3.4 million behind the "former ghetto rapper heads to the burbs" comedy Are We Done Yet? and only $1.5 million ahead of the "I'm Hilary Swank, and I've won two Oscars, so I can star in whatever piece of poorly conceived commercial dreck I want to" horror film......

Remaining a hermit is going to be a lot harder as Mozilla has announced that it will be creating a social networking feature inside browsers such as Firefox. The Coop product will allow Firefox users to “subscribe” to friends in the browser, bringing those friends into a sidebar. Those friends can share content and web pages with you (receive content from you, and send content to you). Adding a friend will mean getting access......

Today marks the first day that 76 book titles will be available for your cell phones via Moka. Yet, we wonder if this books on phone thing isn't similar to Snakes on a Plane -- good idea in theory (might be cool, might inspire a cultish following), but a disaster in reality. As with the film, we're betting that such a lofty idea - who ever heard of books on phones (or, for that matter,......

Welcome to the latest edition of 'Ask the MACist', the column where I answer your Macintosh and other technology questions. Our question this week comes from Sam, who lives all the way in Portland. He asks: "Even though Apple and EMI are not going to have DRM on their songs, is there any way to have songs from other companies in your iTunes without DRM to? With Apple announcing yesterday that they, along with......

It seems like, all across the network, folks were up to no good. Maybe it was all the green beer from last weekend... Gothamist spent the week writing about New Yorkers behaving badly: at the post office, at the Garden, and at the fertility clinic. Calvin Klein may not be misbehaving, but he's just a little dirty, and in a completely different way than some NYC kitchens. SFist had its share of misbehave-rs, too,......

With all the hype over the upcoming iPhone, we probably shouldn't expect an announcement for the next iPod until MacWorld 2008. However, we can make many good bets about what's in store for the 6G model just by looking at all of the buzz currently traveling through the wire. The 6G iPod will use Flash Storage. This is almost a certainty. Not only are leaps and bounds being made in flash memory technology, but......

Welcome to the latest edition of Ask the MACist, the column where I answer your Macintosh, Macintosh-related and other technology questions with hopefully more clarity and insight than you could ever need. We'll get to your questions in a moment but first I just want to thank those of you who sent well-wishes to me during my bout with pneumonia last week. I'm happy to say that I'm well on the road to recovery......

Welcome to the latest edition of Ask the MACist, the column where I answer your Mac and Mac-related questions with hopefully more clarity and insight than you could ever need. As always, I want to thank those of you who sent in questions this week. They are much appreciated. Please, keep it up! And remember, if you have a question about anything Mac, Mac-related, or even something about other technology like TiVo, cell phones,......