Pie, believe it or not, can be consumed any day of the year. Although it’s convenient to have an excuse for pie it doesn’t need to be a holiday or Pi Day. It can simply be a nice day outside and you happen to have a craving for a bakery treat. We’ve created this list of some of the best sweet and fruit pies in the city. Seasonality aside, if these NYC pies are available they should go directly into your mouth.
Category Archives: Travel
17 Weirdest Playboy Mansion Facts
For obvious reasons, the Playboy Mansion is known as Ground Zero for hedonistic parties in Los Angeles, but there’s more to the Gothic-Tudor than meets the eye.
1. The 4.5-acre Charing Cross Road estate was originally built for Arthur Letts, Jr. Construction started in 1926 and was completed in 1927. Letts moved in with his first wife and two children in 1928, but one wife wouldn’t be enough. He had three marriages and two divorces before his death in 1959.
Filed under Los Angeles, Travel
8 Weird Los Angeles Museums
Los Angeles is packed full of amazing museums, from the Los Angeles County Museum of Art to The Broad, but there’s also a long list of smaller, weird Los Angeles museums catering to very specific insterests. Check out these eight museums that focus on everything from broken relationships to collections of bunnies.
Museum of Neon Art
216 S Brand Blvd, Glendale
Photo: Museum of Neon Art
Glendale’s Museum of Neon Art “encourages learning, curiosity, and expression through the preservation, collection, and interpretation of neon, electric and kinetic art.”
Previously located in downtown Los Angeles, the museum collects neon signs and kinetic art. Notable signs in the museum’s collection include the Brown Derby and Grauman’s Chinese Theatre. The museum also offers a weekly “neon cruise” where attendees board a bus which drives around Los Angeles educating passengers about neon signs.
The Bunny Museum
2605 Lake Avenue, Altadena
Hopping over to Altaneda is worth it when your destination is The Bunny Museum.
Photo: The Bunny Museum
This Guinness World Record listed museum has more than 34,000 bunny artifacts (and multiplying, because, bunnies). The museum is open 365 days of the week, so whenever you start feeling your nose twitch and need a bunny fix you can get it. Yes, they have house bunnies.
The Velaslavasay Panorama
1122 West 24th Street
Part museum, part performance venue, and part film house, the Velaslavasay Panorama houses “the only painted, 360-degree Arctic panorama created in the United States since the nineteenth century.”
Photo: Chris Roman on Flickr
In addition to the panorama, visitors will find a replica of an Arctic trading post and an exhibit dedicated to the history of silent Hollywood and Inuit people.
Museum of Death
6031 Hollywood Blvd.
The Museum of Death isn’t only one of the weirdest museums in Los Angeles it’s also, easily, the most morbid.
Photo: Museum of Death
Behind the skull-bedecked doorway you’ll find “The world’s largest collection of serial murderer artwork, photos of the Charles Manson crime scenes, the guillotined severed head of the Blue Beard of Paris (Henri Landru), original crime scene and morgue photos from the grisly Black Dahlia murder, a body bag and coffin collection, replicas of full size execution devices, mortician and autopsy instruments, pet death taxidermy, and so much more!”
Museum of Jurassic Technology
9341 Venice Blvd, Culver City
Photos are verboten inside this museum which adds to the mystique.
Photo: Museum of Jurassic Technology
The best description of this quirky little museum comes from the Smithsonian magazine:
“The Jurassic Technology Museum is a witty, self-conscious homage to private museums of yore, such as the 16th-century Ashmolean at Oxford, where objects from science, nature and art were displayed for the “rational amusement” of scholars, and the 19th-century Philadelphia Museum, with its bird skeletons and mastodon bones. The phrase “Jurassic technology” is not meant literally. Instead, it evokes an era when natural history was only barely charted by science, and museums were closer to Renaissance cabinets of curiosity.”
Velveteria
711 New High Street
The Velveteria has a collection of more than 3000 velvet paintings and at any one time, more than 500 can be viewed on the walls. The museum is broken down into thematic sections including a section dedicated to President John F. Kennedy, another to influential Californians, and one section, lord help us, dedicated to clowns.
Photo: Eli Wolff on Facebook
If you’re thinking to yourself “how can a velvet painting collection be complete without a blacklight room?” don’t worry, they have that covered.
Museum of Broken Relationships
6751 Hollywood Blvd.
A museum of everyone, because everyone has experienced a broken heart. Except for that one guy who broke your heart. He’s cold and unfeeling but now you can put those broken pieces on display in a Los Angeles museum.
Photo: Museum of Broken Relationships
The Museum of Broken Relationships is made up of donated items that represent a broken relationship. As the museum says “Love relationships may end; relationships with family members, business partners, cities, religions and even with our former selves may end. But we learn and move on. The dislocation of a broken relationship may be isolating, but the experience is universal. No one is alone in this.”
The Animal Museum
421 Colyton Street
Photo: The Animal Museum on Facebook
One of the youngest museums in the Arts District, The Animal Museum is also, arguably, the most unique. The museum’s mission is “dedicated to enriching the lives of animals and people through exploration of our shared experience. To this end, The Animal Museum promotes respect for life and compassionate ethics in advancing healthy, meaningful interconnections with the animal world.”
A solid example of what you’ll find at the museum is the recent exhibition “SPOM: Sexual Politics of Meat.” It explored “the ways that women and animals are marginalized and objectified in patriarchal cultures.”
This Weird Los Angeles Museums post was originally published in May 2017 on the defunct UpOut.com.
Filed under Los Angeles
Map: What Would Game of Thrones New York City Look Like?
This Game of Thrones New York City map originally appeared on the now defunct UpOut.com. It was inspired by the brilliant Game of Thrones – San Francisco map created by Emma Gantz (illustrator of the icons), Kelly Anne Bonner, and Natalie Kelly. This version of the map was designed by Tandra Nguyen using Gantz’s icons (Nguyen made the Castle Black icon). The New York City descriptions were written by Jesse Russell with assistance from UpOut intern Nora Kistler. Bonner and Kelly wrote the Game of Thrones descriptions for the San Francisco map which Russell edited slightly for this Game of Thrones New York City version.
Disagree? Of course you do (please be gentle). This was a tough map to make because New York City is such an amazingly diverse region with shifting personalities. I’d love to read your interpretation of the ideal Game of Thrones New York City map!
Filed under Media, New York City
13 Weirdest San Francisco Museums and Collections
San Francisco is a city with wonders tucked away in every alley. A simple google will show you dozens of “Weirdest San Francisco Museums” posts, but they’re mostly clones telling you to go to the same places. We’ve looked at those lists and have tried to go a little bit deeper. This list attempts to get you off the beaten path and look for not only the weirdest San Francisco museums, but also some rather bizarre collections tucked away in unassuming locales. Here are 11 of San Francisco’s (and two of Berkeley’s) most unique museums and interesting collections.
Filed under San Francisco
Map: What Would Game of Thrones Los Angeles look like?
What would Game of Thrones Los Angeles look like?
It might look a little bit like this.
This map originally appeared on the defunct UpOut.com. It was inspired by the brilliant Game of Thrones – San Francisco map created by Emma Gantz (illustrator on the icons) Kelly Anne Bonner, and Natalie Kelly. This map was designed by Tandra Nguyen using Gantz’s icons. The Los Angeles descriptions were written by Jesse Russell with assistance from UpOut intern Cameron Walsh.
Disagree? Of course, you do (please be gentle). This was a tough map to make because Los Angeles is such an amazingly diverse region with shifting personalities.
Filed under Los Angeles
20 Words and Phrases You’ll Only Understand If You’re From DC
If you’re new to Washington, DC chances are you’re going to hear some words or phrases that don’t make sense. As with any place, Washingtonians have developed a lexicon that can often be confusing to outsiders. So order up some wings and mumbo sauce, because here are some words and phrases you’ll only hear in the District (see #3) and what they (in some cases debatably) mean.
Filed under Washington DC
DC Distillery Boom: Exploring the Ivy City Distillery Crawl
We’re currently in the midst of a Washington, DC distillery explosion and nowhere is it more prevalent than the three mile stretch of New York Avenue between 6th Street NW and the eastern edge of Ivy City. There are no less than six distillers operating along that corridor and they all, kindly, offer tours and tastings.
With that in mind, we decided to sit down and plot out an easy Ivy City Distillery Crawl (yes, yes, technically it starts 2-miles outside of Ivy City, but New York Avenue Distillery Crawl sounds so very pedestrian). This crawl will provide your mouth with the opportunity to sample rums, gins, bourbons, bitters, vodkas, and cocktails.
Filed under Washington DC
9 Ice Cream Trends San Francisco Needs Right Now
No one would dare argue that San Francisco has a shortage of quality ice cream trends. Over the last three years, we’ve covered San Francisco’s must-try ice cream experiences, the uniquely San Francisco ice cream flavors, the bomb ice cream sandwiches, and more. Heck, we’ve even been so bold as to declare San Francisco “a holy Mecca for ice cream.” When it comes to flavors we’re number one and lucky as hell to live here.
Even with all of our fancy ice cream San Francisco is a little slow when it comes to playing the game of ice cream aesthetics. Sure, we finally have rolled ice cream, fish-shaped ice cream cones, and ice cream filled donut sandwiches, but those things have existed in other cities for years.
Here are some ice cream trends happening around the world that we’d love to see come to the Bay Area.
Filed under Food, Ice Cream, San Francisco
Essential Chicago Music Festivals Guide, 2018
Chicago doesn’t receive enough credit for the sheer number of music festivals it hosts every year. We might not have the climate of Austin but we sure do make up for it between June and October. Over the course of 15 weeks, a grand total of 24 days are dedicated to some sort of large-scale outdoor music event – and that doesn’t include the city-run World Music Festival or random summer block parties.
And it doesn’t need to end at city limits. If you’re feeling ambitious and passionate about music there are more than a dozen upper midwest summer music festivals within a six-hour drive of the city.
Below you’ll find our comprehensive guide to not only Chicago music festivals, but music fest throughout the Upper Midwest. From Chicago to Wisconsin to Detroit to Iowa, we’ve got it covered. We’ve broken the festivals down by distance and within each distance cluster they’re ordered by date. Did we miss an important festival or update? Let us know in the comments.