Days after making up with rapper Kanye West, legendary daredevil Evel Knievel has landed himself in the news once again, not for making an improbable stunt landing, but for doing something one day all of us regular folks are going to do. He died today in his home state of Florida at the age of 69. The AP is reporting:Knievel's death was confirmed by his granddaughter, Krysten Knievel. He had been in failing health for......

Tom Anderson -dork ---------vs--------- Tom Anderson 2.0 -rich Cali millionaire +has more friends +has more money +works in front of the computer all day +makes club appearances +lives in LA +travels the globe +has to fight spammers +has to fight off hordes of hot chicks +has a window office +has VIP access +answers to Rupert +answers booty-calls +looks like a dork +looks LAmerican +has his own parking spot +takes the newscorp private jet winner:......

These dudes didn't make the list. The year is already over for L.A. Times pop critic Ann Powers; in a piece dated tomorrow, she lays out an unremarkable top 10 albums of 2007. Maybe Powers gave up on 07 when she couldn't get on OiNK anymore. Or perhaps, like Christmas decorations and presidential primaries, top 10 lists are just going up earlier than ever this year. Either way, I guess she's not waiting on......

Jessica got rufied and gang-raped. A Harry Potter-loving nerd beat up his sister then killed himself. And a deranged student fired off a semi-automatic weapon into the cafeteria of a high school. Yes, it was a busy day in hell, as told by the cast of Hollywood Hellhouse. But it was all in a day’s work. Created by Maggie Rowe, Hollywood Hellhouse is a spoof of Christian-themed haunted houses that are put on by......

Most Gay and Lesbian literature uses the initials LGBT to describe the community. It stands for Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual, and Transgender. But the bisexual part doesn't usually get a lot of attention. MTV's new dating show, A Shot at Love with Tila Tequila, has made bisexuality public. I normally would not have watched a show with some random Myspace chick, but this set-up, with straight guys and lesbians duking it out for the same......

On Monday evening, the winner of the 2nd annual Polaris Music Prize will be announced. This is not earth shattering news because many don’t even know what it is. The Polaris Music Prize is Canada’s equivalent to the U.K.’s Mercury Prize. It is an award given to the best Canadian album of the year, regardless of genre, sales, or record label. The winner receives $20,000 cash and a bevy of publicity. The initial jury......

There, we said it. We'll say it again. "That's Hot." Ohhhhhhh, burn. Paris Hilton is suing over the use of her picture and catchphrase ''That's hot'' on a greeting card. Hilton sued Hallmark Cards Inc. in U.S. District Court seeking an injunction and unspecified damages to be determined at trial. According to the lawsuit filed Thursday, the card is titled ''Paris's First Day as a Waitress'' and shows a photo of Hilton's face on a......

When it comes to crotch identification, no one works harder than LAist. Last week one of our favorite LA blogs, Defamer, ran the underwear photo above (and to the right), accompanied with a story about a movie and blah blah blah. But the mystery remained: Who's Crotch is That?" Happily, our tireless hours of up-close interviews and in-your-face journalism have not been for naught. Thanks to an amazingly reliable source close to the project,......

Just in case you haven't heard, a few corporations have recently decided that a really awesome way to get lots of free publicity would be to rent a beach house in Malibu, throw a ton of parties for celebs (some with quotation marks, some without) and invite the paparazzi along to ensure that photos of said celebs interacting with said corporation's product get splashed all over the web and certain print publications. It seems......

While SFist cringed at the fatal dose of crime littering the Bay Area, it found solace in Hillary Clinton's San Francisco campaign headquarters opening, which featured loads of exposed mammary glands. In other news, SF Taxi Commission ruled that Satan's cab must keep its (in)famous medallion number, 666; and in an un-fashion-forward frenzy, San Francisco Fashion Week (chortle) bars bloggers from covering and getting smashed at their shows and parties, respectively. Also, they found a......

Trishelle Cannatella is our favorite Real World cast member even though we just discovered her last name. Yes we love her even moreso than Puck, but that's probably because even through the tv screen we can tell that if we met him he would probably reek and snort a nose rocket at us, whereas Trishelle would probably stumble into our arms and give us a real sweet hug. We loved her in the Surreal Life,......

Smoosh was at the Troubadour with Monster Bobby last night in support of the Pipettes. Sadly, LAist was across town at the Juliette Lewis and the Licks show at Spaceland so we don't have any reports as to how the show was in WeHo. And looking at Koga's flickr photos, it doesn't look like the Pipettes let him take any pictures - which is odd because the Pipettes are extremely easy on the eyes......

Sunday night I crept down an alleyway, drank a bunch of absinthe and watched a girl get her eyes gouged out with a knitting needle. The gouging wasn’t real, but the absinthe was. Welcome to Los Angeles' theatre du Grand Guignol de Paris. The Grand Guignol was a theater in the Pigalle district, the seamy underbelly of Paris. The theater’s focus varied slightly with shifts in management, but the subject matter of its short......

We're not sure how you say bullshit in French, but there's a "controversial" film slated to screen at Cannes this week that should be called Red Flag. American indie film Last Looks has supposedly been blocked from entering France because it allegedly contains scenes of real deaths that occurred during the production. AP jumped on the "controversy," and even Film Threat bit, but the whole thing walks, talks and smells like a big fat fake.......

Country music proved to be an Achilles heel for many of our American Idol contestants. The night started off on a good note, with baldiePhil Stacey doing a decent job on Keith Urban's "Where the Blacktop Ends" and Jordin Sparks doing an even better job on coach Martina McBride's song "Broken Wing" (which is a lot of chutzpah for a 17-year-old). Then came Sanjaya. With permed hair in a do-rag, he butchered a song......

Anna Nicole Smith and Howard K. Stern scrambling to figure out ways not to give money to the father of her child - Defamer - Black dude from Bloc Party probably gay - Towleroad - Trump being sued for ageism - Pop on the Pop - The two people who have no regard for money just out-dummied themselves. On one side you have Pure nightclub in Las Vegas who reportedly had a contract with......

Sunday. Usually, a quiet, contemplative day in the Blogosphere. But not here in the Ist-a-Verse. Nonono! Just look below and see all of the wild and crazy stuff our staffs are up to. In Austin, bands are beginning to confirm for SXSW and the rumor mill is up and running. Good thing, too, because we all know how much Austinites love live performances. Austin also found itself in the national spotlight, with Longhorn Legend......

If you haven't heard the news (or watched FOX at some point in the past 24 hours) -- then let us be the ones to break the good news: O.J. Simpson is back. In a big way. He's riding a Bronco of publicity back into the American people's hearts, with a book and TV specials on the way. And we can't wait. A two-part interview with The Juice will be aired on Nov. 27......

Yup, that's our Mayor in the above picture pressure-washing a sidewalk in Watts. He's there to challenge you to help your neighbors. “We are inviting people from all over the City of Los Angeles to come together to give a little love to Watts. No matter where you live, we are all responsible for the communities that make up the City of Los Angeles. I want to challenge Angelenos to get involved in my......

By now much hay has been made over "Borat", both as a box office smash and as a mockumentary in which the innocent bystanders who participated in it were duped and cheated. When Borat opened over a week ago Fox booked it in about 800 theaters nationwide, that's less than one-fourth the number of theaters that "Santa Clause 3" opened in and still Sacha Baron Cohen crushed Tim Allen (Yes! There is a God!).......

Now that Katie Holmes has probably reached a higher Operating Thetan level, she's probably free and clear to marry Tom Cruise. Now LAist learns that the not-publicity-shy couple has set the date: Tom Cruise and Katie Holmes will marry in Italy on Nov. 18, Cruise's representative, Arnold Robinson, confirmed to The Associated Press on Tuesday. We are a little surpised that Suri's parents aren't opting for a little more subdued affair: like a pay-per-view......

Not that Quentin Tarantino and Robert Rodriguez need any free publicity, but you gotta love the 1970s-style color palette and cheeseball film effects of the Grind House trailer -- complete with Josh Brolin looking like a young Jeff Bridges, Danny Trejo as the badass knife-sharpening Machete, Tom Savini as a shotgun-wielding sheriff's deputy and Rose McGowan as an amputee stripper with a machine gun for a shin.......

In a publicity move you'll find under the "How to Revive a Flailing Career" chapter, Tara Reid went public today with the story that she had to undergo more surgery to undo damage to earlier boob job and lipo procedures. According to a Reuters story: In an interview released on Wednesday, the "American Pie" actress told the magazine she had surgery last month to reduce the scarring on her breasts and to even out......

H&M today announced that they have pushed back the opening date of their Beverly Center store from October 26 to Thursday, November 9, so that it coincides with the worldwide launch of the Viktor & Rolf for H&M collection, which will be available in the store on opening day. The 20,000 square foot, single-story H&M store at the Beverly Center store will carry fashions for MEN (emphasis mine), women, teens, children and lingerie. That's......

Offering low-cost clothing to slim-hipped wastrels isn't easy, and Swedish clothing chain H&M strives to stay on the cutting-edge of cutting costs. Competing in a cutthroat global marketplace, the company has found that budgetary consciousness doesn't only apply to the factory floor, it can extend to the highest reaches of the corporate machine thanks to the advances of the computer age. To that end H&M is the first major retailer to deploy the PR-Bot......

Last night was Katie Couric's debut on CBS -- and she had a scoop for those watching. No not secret government prisons or anything like that -- but photos of the just as mysterious Suri Cruise. The nearly 5-month-old scion of the Tom Cruise-Katie Holmes pairing will make her debut in a 22-page Vanity Fair spread that will be released next week. Now LAist got a look at the cover of the magazine and......

farm flashback These may be the last days of the community farm in south central LA; supporters are $10 million short in their efforts to buy the property from the developer who's ready to take his 14 acres and make a profit. But Hollywood is lending a publicity-generating, eviction-fighting hand: Daryl Hannah is camping out on the property, Laura Dern and husband Ben Harper stopped by and Joan Baez is treesitting. Treesitting, you ask?......

When we heard that Tom Hanks was cast as the lead Prof. Robert Langdon in The Da Vinci Code, LAist was worried. Then when we heard that Dan Brown's page turner would be directed by Ron Howard, we were totally bummed. Not to take anything away from Hanks or Howard, but really, why do the studios need to always take the safe (read: boring) route with the blockbusters? We reserved comment until the film......

It’s easy to forget how many Angelenos influence what we read, consume and think. For every telegenic actor accepting an award or CEO discussing his latest stock offering with a journalist, there is a phalanx of publicity professionals and marketing specialists choreographing the entire event. Eric Schwartzman is one of these behind- the-scenes maestros who are so adept at making the general public aware of the latest person, place or thing. After honing his skills......

LAist has a feeling that Tom Cruise, Scientology's patron saint, must be in the midst of the promotion campaign for Mission: Impossible III. How else can we explain the recent spate of TC and/or TomKat articles popping up, like everywhere, lately? Let's scan the headlines and find out what our boy's been up to in the past week or so, shall we? - With Isaac "Chef" Hayes quitting South Park, the Scientology episode scandal......