Friday desk-clearing

⇒ Scientists at JPL were happy to hear a signal from the Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter following a successful entry into orbit. Added: Susan at 2020 Hindsight live-blogged the entry procedure from NASA TV.
⇒ As of 5 pm the weather-and-roads story atop LATimes.com is an 11:21 am report saying that Highway 58 through Tehachapi is closed. It isn't anymore, says Caltrans, and hasn't been for several hours. Also: Southland Weather is covering things.
⇒ LA Weekly columnist Dave Shulman has gone webby with Column Dave.com.
⇒ Marc Mazzetti of the L.A. Times Washington bureau is jumping to the New York Times. He tells the New York Observer "it was an agonizing decision." Also, Motoko Rich will take the NYT publishing beat vacated by Los Angeles-bound Ed Wyatt.
⇒ Forbes's new billionaire's list has 793 entries, up 102 from last year. After Gates and Buffet, #3 is Mexico's Carlos Slim Helu. Fun to see who dropped off the list: Jeffrey Katzenberg and Martha Stewart for starters. The whole thing.
⇒ Elio Carrion, the 21-year-old airman shot by a sheriff's deputy in Chino, spoke on a video produced by his attorney. He doesn't say much, but here he is via NBC4.
⇒ Larry King "seems increasingly frail physically" to people around Beverly Hills, Nikki Finke blogs, urging CNN to step up talks with potential successors.
⇒ LAist reports on a supposed image of Christ in a manicotti at Vitello's in Studio City.
⇒ Safari Sam's red-tape problems are easing (with help from 170 emails to Council President Eric Garcetti) and the East Hollywood club expects to open soon.
⇒ When she couldn't find "a kinky, dangerous, hyper-sexed, dirty, daring writer already immersed in the sexual underbelly of Los Angeles" to do it, Los Angeles Alternative editor Lesley Bargar assigned herself to interview the king of L.A.’s exotic bondage underworld.
⇒ The Dodgers have launched an expanded Spanish-language website, Losdodgers.com. I didn't know that when the Dodgers first went on the web in 1996, they had pages in Japanese and Korean as well as in English and Spanish.
⇒ Sunday's West magazine in the LAT is a home design issue all about loft living in Los Angeles.