A Los Angeles man wanted for allegedly drinking and driving was stopped today after a brief low-speed car chase in which LAPD disabled the vehicle with a spike strip. With nothing left to do but wait for police to apprehend him, the suspect started filling balloon after balloon from a canister in the passenger seat of his car and furiously huffing the ones he didn't pop. Eventually, police took him out with a "non-lethal projectile," dragged him out of the car, and wrestled him to the ground.

Police have busted a four-man crime ring in Los Angeles who had, for three years, been targeting the homes of Los Angeles Times subscribers while they were on vacation.

In case Twitter hasn't told you, it's very cold in Los Angeles right now. Well, 50 degrees, otherwise known as summer in Milwaukee. But our taco-eating, trail-running bretheren are sensitive, okay?

Two gunmen who took 14 hostages at a Los Angeles mall last night have apparently escaped after an overnight standoff that involved the LAPD SWAT team locking down the mall and holding around 200 moviegoers in theaters until nearly 3 a.m. All 14 employees who were trapped in the Nordstrom Rack where the hostage situation unfolded have been found safe; KTLA reports that the LAPD is saying the suspects are still at large.

Living in Los Angeles often means feeling like you have to spend time defending your city from those who would call it a vapid wasteland of celebrity inanity and pathetic wastrels pretending to be glamorous. To those in the know, L.A. is an interesting and varied place from which a person can ski, surf, go see some world-class art, and then have an exquisite Mexican feast, all in the same day.

Here's a general idea of how many weapons are just floating around this country right now. The LAPD held a gun buyback in Los Angeles on Wednesday (the image above is from a buyback in Bridgeport, Conn. last week) and they received the following: 901 handguns, 698 rifles and 363 shotguns. Oh, they also were handed two rocket launchers. No big deal. And these were just the people willing to turn over their guns in exchange for $100 gift cards (for handguns and long guns) or $200 gift cards (for rifles). In one city. Here's a photo of one of the rocket launchers:

Someone in L.A. is having a really shitty day, even though he may not know it yet. That's because a Silver Lake resident named Mack Reed (not to be confused with Gawker's Max Read, who would never find himself in the vicinity of marijuana) just so happened to stumble upon $175,000 worth of weed buried in his backyard, as chronicled on his Tumblr today. Reed promptly called the LAPD ("fucking narc, dude," says someone looking up from a bong rip), which means that there is a person in the L.A. drug game in a lot of trouble right now.

Barely a month and a half after Fox News shocked the nation by airing a car chase that ended in a graphic close-up shot of a suicide, Los Angeles-area television stations were back showing live police pursuits without a tape delay.

I gravitated to the fucked up writers. Hunter S. Thompson, Hemingway, William S. Burroughs, Raymond Chandler, Tennessee Williams, Dylan Thomas, Jack Kerouac, Truman Capote, Charles Bukowski, William Faulkner. There weren't many women in my list. Dorothy Parker, and that was about it. Somehow, hand in hand with booze and drugs, the terrible dance that substances led me on became one that I must perfect to be a writer. It was a required necessity, an essential rite of passage, and my writing heroes' words were the proof. I drank, gurned, snorted, swallowed and hallucinated like they did. That waltz into the dark was absolutely crucial for me in order to write like them—even if the familiar, haunting beautiful chimes of The Blue Danube led me instead to the depths of degradation, I could still write about it.

There are things that, while cute in the context of a private wedding between two loving people, immediately become the literal worst thing ever when they are publicly shared and pimped to the Huffington Post. This is one of those things.

Today jurors at the trial of chef David Viens heard a recorded confession explaining why officers could never find his wife's body: he slow-cooked her remains.

After robbing a Santa Clarita Valley bank earlier today, four men sped off in a black Volvo towards downtown Los Angeles trailed closely by LAPD. En route, two of the robbers bailed out of the vehicle while the other two exited the highway and took to the streets of a Los Angeles neighborhood tossing "unknown amounts of cash" out the window. All six of the men involved in the robbery were apprehended after over an hour when a local guy in a silver truck cut them off and forced the Volvo to a stop.

After a day of failed fishing, Sergio Alvarez was homeless and hungry in Malibu last month when he says he did what millions of red-blooded Americans do every year when they want some food: He killed a bird in order to eat it. What Alvarez didn't know is that while the type of pelican he strangled to death wasn't endangered, it was on the protected species list. The 30-year-old Alvarez was arrested on the spot, and now he's going to jail for two months after pleading no contest to misdemeanor animal cruelty.

A Bank of America branch manager claims she was ordered to rob her own East LA bank after masked gunmen kidnapped her and strapped a device they said was a bomb to her stomach.

Here is a video of a massive palm tree just burning like hell, and raining fire down on all the innocent Angelenos unfortunate enough to be below it. This happened on Fairfax Avenue earlier this month, when some kids at rap group Odd Future's T-shirt store shot a bottle rocket into it, igniting it and causing it to then burn the awning of the pizza joint next door. I called that pizza joint and asked what the deal was, and a man named Raul said Odd Future has already promised to pay for the damages. Good for them.

The Los Angeles City Council has ruled to ban medical marijuana dispensaries, shutting down as many as 900 dispensaries in 30 days.

I've never felt more important than when I lived in New York. I was poor and my work was neither very good nor very well-read, and yet every day I'd wake up in my 10-by-10 room, its window looking out over my building's rusted trashcans, and somehow think I'd achieved another great victory.

Wal-Mart has been the target of union campaigns for years. Why? Because Wal-Mart is the biggest fucking retailer in the world, and the most famous anti-union company in America. It makes sense for both practical and symbolic reasons. In L.A. right now, unions and worker advocates are trying to stop the construction of a new Wal-Mart in the city's Chinatown district. But Wal-Mart has an ally in the fight: the Wall Street Journal.

There are the standard concerns when walking down the street: dog crap, jutting tree roots, people sleeping. But imagine stepping onto organs.

If you live in Los Angeles and are a forgetful person, trips to the grocery store are about to get 100 percent more annoying.