Sahra Sulaiman

"What you got on you?" the 15 year-old girl says the cops pulled up alongside her asked as she walked along Vermont one night.

I am not a planner.

With each iteration of CicLAvia comes the stress of trying to figure out what new things can be written about it besides, "People rode bikes. And it was good."

When a week starts off with senseless acts of violence like those seen in Boston, it feels a little frivolous to prattle on about less serious subjects. That said, in its defense, CicLAvia is not as frivolous as it might seem on the surface. In the name of fun, health, good neighborships, and more livable cities, with each iteration, it manages to seamlessly bring together more and more people from all races and classes in what can otherwise be a very segregated city.

When is the last time you used a public payphone?

The last time I wrote a full piece on Community Coalition (CoCo) I was at their election-night viewing party last November. The energy in the room was electric -- from the dancing toddlers all the way up to the dancing retirees. The success of their get-out-the-vote and Prop 30 door-knocking campaigns had provided a powerful counterweight to the Times' declaration that “South L.A.’s zeal for politics [had] faded.”

As Damien noted in his post on city-wide projects, voting on proposals submitted for the L.A. 2050 Challenge begins today.

Just this past Wednesday, I wrote about how a pothole of epic proportions had bounced a small child out of his carrier and nearly been his undoing.

There are potholes and then there are POTHOLES.

"Nobody uses it," Liz told me. "There's dookies in there!"