Gawker: defamer, traffic

Flood of Immigrants Mark Citizenship With Celebratory Traffic Nightmare

STV — Fri, 11 Jul 2008 17:30:00 EDT

Hearty Defamer congratulations go out to the estimated 40,000 immigrants acquiring their American citizenship today in Los Angeles. And even bigger kudos for making it the kind of party those Liberty Island underachievers in New York only dream of:

Traffic downtown was at a crawl this morning as immigrants flooded the Los Angeles Convention Center to become citizens. ...

KFWB 980 radio reported this morning that some people had gotten out of vehicles near the Convention Center and were walking on freeway shoulders, apparently in an effort to get to their events on time.

If your regular route home follows the I-10/110 elbow around the Convention Center, be warned that freedom will ring (and honk and swear in no fewer than 50 languages) until around 4 p.m. today. Complicating matters further, nearly 2,000 more visitors were expected for a Herbalife conference in an adjoining LACC facility, unwittingly inspiring the company's single-biggest one-day recruitment and sales spike in its 28-year-history. What a country!

Huge citizenship ceremony jams morning traffic in downtown L.A. [LAT]

It's All Over The Front Page, You Give Me Road Rage

Douglas Reinhardt — Fri, 27 Jun 2008 14:15:00 EDT

boomp3.com

My Name Is Earl star Jaime Pressly struggled to come grips with what is perhaps Los Angeles' best known feature — the traffic. Pressly was surprised to see that even the surface streets were as jammed as the 405 on a Friday night. To combat her raising stress levels, Pressly reached for a cigarette, but that it only calmed her nerves slightly. A passenger in the car in the next lane over jokingly asked Pressly if she could get Earl to put something about fixing the traffic in LA on that karma list. The passenger felt that Earl could probably get more done than Cal Trans ever could.

[Photo Credit: Bauer-Griffin]

*A Call To The Bullpen is a work of fiction. Although the pictures we use are most certainly real, Defamer does not purport that any of the incidents or quotations you see in this piece actually happened. Lighten up, people ... it's a joke.

Short Ends: Big Brother is Watching You Not Move on the 405

Seth — Wed, 26 Oct 2005 22:12:19 EDT

· Laguna Beach's teenage-girl-drool-inducer Talan has his eyes set on Hollywood, telling Teen Vogue "I could do a movie if I want to!" Yeah, right, Talan. Like someone's going to put you in some low-budget non-union teen slasher flick, then use Craigslist as their casting director. Shyeah. Whatever, dude.
· LA.comfidential notices a disturbing similarity going on with Fergie and Donald. Let's hope it ends there, and the Don's spawn is the only one who'll need a diaper change anytime soon at Trump manor.
· Lindsay Lohan tells OK! magazine of her recent near-death ordeal, when she was literally being fed through IV drips. And that was at the Geisha House! "I was going through a lot of stuff and overworking and not thinking of my body. I was going through that phase that everyone goes through." This is everyone.
· BLDGBLOG gives us a glimpse into the beyond weird crop-circley big brother world of LA traffic control.
· There's some seriously fishy-assed business going down by the DKNY art department. Either that or we have a Photoshopping Michelangelo in our midst.