Spring cleaning comes early to LAO

I'll be freshening up the site's look all week, eventually rolling out new logos and content. The ShareThis widget, new on some pages, is a one-click place to email posts or share with Digg, Facebook and other social sites. Overhaul of the links is also on tap (and long past due), so if you have a media, blog or author link to recommend — or a re-thinking of the links to suggest — drop me a line.

One goal of the tinkering is to better show off posts by LA Observed's writers, many of them published authors and all lovers and astute observers of Los Angeles. While Lacter and I wallow in the news, they get to enjoy themselves with posts like these:

credit David Rensin, awaiting the spring release of his book on surfer Miki Dora, reveals his fascination with people who are born on his birthday. He turned 58 yesterday and isn't shy about sharing his fantasies for getting to know some of his fellow January 28ians. Read it.

poster Jenny Burman, who patrols the hills and coffee houses around Echo Park when she's not polishing prose for Tu Ciudad and other journals, got on the list to receive artist Shepard Fairey's new poster endorsing Barack Obama. Will Obama's face become the next Fairey icon we see everywhere in L.A.? Hard to say, but look closely and you'll see that Obama is wearing Andre the Giant somewhere on his person. See it huge.

Deanne Stillman, author of the forthcoming "Mustang: The Saga of the Wild Horse in the American West," is one of the few journalists who could go deep on the strange connection between Christian Brando, who died over the weekend, and Bonny Bakley. Deanne wrote about Bakley's murder and Robert Blake in Rolling Stone in 2002, and at Native Intelligence she divulges what got cut out of her piece about Brando and Bakley. Read it.

Sandwich Erika Schickel, who is newly co-blogging with Neal Pollack at Moli.com, finds solace on these rainy days in the hot turkey sandwich at Pepy's Galley in the Mar Vista Bowl. She writes, "I tell you, this is quintessential diner food at its best." Go there.

TJ Sullivan, when he's not slaving over novels in various cafes around town, found the time to dissect Honda's ads showing the Los Angeles skyline and managed to locate a family-run market where things — the vine-ripened tomatoes anyway — actually cost less than at the supers.

Also posted recently:

Judy Graeme: Who would take Steve Martin for a Diane Arbus fan? And yet there's this photo of the Disneyland castle. Earlier, Judy sort-of had lunch with Katherine Heigl.
Phil Wallace: The Donald Sterling-Mike Dunleavy feud, UCLA's grab of Norm Chow from USC, the deaths of "Madame Ram" Georgia Frontiere and ex-Trojans coach Larry Smith, and a whole bunch more at SoCal Sports Observed.
Jenny Price: Tough choice between a tour of the L.A. River or Malibu's beaches. No, really.
Bill Boyarsky: Talking to Anat Rubin of the Daily Journal and Jill Leovy of the Times convinces him that good journalism will survive.
Veronique de Turenne: Five days of rain in Paradise Cove means the sea is a constant roar, the phones are useless with static and the DSL line cuts in and out.

Hear Mark Lacter's weekly analysis of the business news Tuesday mornings on KPCC, 89.3 FM. Or catch him every day at LA Biz Observed.