Home Turf

There are several local stories to report on in the new media scape. The New York Times reports from my home town, Pasadena, about next generation 3-D "printers" in "Beam in Down from the Web, Scotty." Having seen various prototyping machines all through my youth in innumerable family day tours in places where my father was an engineer, this technology doesn't seem particularly space age to me.

The nearby town of La Cañada Flintridge, home of NASA's JPL, is also claiming column space for "Animators Expanding Their Lines of Work." For more on how scientific presentations are being given "Hollywood pizazz," see my reactions to a recent tour of the facility here.

Of course, the big local story has to do with police reactions to pro-immigration protesters in MacArthur Park on May Day. Many captured the brutal confrontations with law enforcement on cell phones or made videologs that described them afterwards, which a search with "MacArthur Park" and "LAPD" on YouTube will bring up. Even cartoonish Ask-a-Chola claimed to have authentic footage.

Speaking of local media and YouTube celebrities, The Los Angeles Times also broke the complicated GreenTeaGirlie YouTube hoax-within-a-hoax, which actually involved the unmasker of LonelyGirl15. You can read all about it in "GreenTeaGirlie: innocent vidblogger or sinister marketing hoax?"