The La Brea Tar Pits in Los Angeles are worth a visit!

Good call! One impressive thing in the adjoining George C Page museum is the wall of dire wolf skulls. The link speaks to how long they’ve been around and new evidence that they split from gray wolves millions of years earlier than previously thought. The exhibit gives you a sense that every other large animal trapped in the tar became a draw for dire wolves which may have lost entire packs. It might be more accurate to have those mammoths being attacked and some dire wolves stuck in the tar.

They have recovered at least the 400 skulls and 3600 individuals. It’s kind of overwhelming.

Today’s a good day to go. We expect that cloud-river-hose of rain for the next three days though. So if you have a roof that was leaking, today you should make like La Brea and tarp it.

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Yeah, it was a recurring thing for some reason.

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OB the Stranglers

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Showing movies? What I want to know is if they’re still filming them there. It was the location of such classics as 1987’s Cry of the Wilderness.

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Yes! Apparently still a popular filming location! Under The Silver Lake has a scene there

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There were several other recurring mentions of real places in classic Looney Tunes. Cucamonga, Perth Amboy, the Coachella Valley (and the carrot festival therein), Pismo Beach (“Since when is Pismo Beach inside a cave?!”), and of course Albuquerque, where Bugs repeatedly missed an obvious left turn (once landing him and Daffy in the Himalayas).

I think the writers chose places like the Tar Pits not only for their funny names, but also to play Bugs as a bit of a rube (he is from the country, after all), who gets hopelessly lost while trying to locate a classic tourist spot.

ETA

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My favorite thing at the La Brea Tar Pits was a big cube of lucite replacing the tar, with all the bones in their original found positions. The thing is practically more bone than lucite.

If we’re mentioning other LA must-sees then we can’t omit

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and thus, of course, “the La Brea tar pits” means

… “the the tar tar pits”

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You are Jimmy Two Times, and I claim my £5 !

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My mother used to live in a place called Tow Law, which means ‘hill hill’. It’s pretty far up a very steep road though, so it kind of makes sense.

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The La Brea Tar Pits don’t actually contain any tar, they’re composed of asphalt bubbling to the surface.

Now you know!

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Yeah sure, that’s what the tobacco companies said.

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Bah, they never said they didn’t contain any tar, just that they didn’t cause cancer. :stuck_out_tongue_winking_eye:

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df20010820

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:thinking:

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The tar pits have always been one of those things in America which are referenced on TV and film, but which I was only about 50% sure that they really existed.
Anyway, it does remind me of an episode featuring one of my favorite Simpsons gags:

(technically they were at the Springfield Tar Pits, but the influence is clear)

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I lived there for 20 years, and I always said “people who hate LA have never lived there”. It’s an amazing place full of wonders, but you have to be there a while to find them. It’s not an attractive city on the surface, but it’s easily one of the greatest cities in the world, just under that layer of sprawling muffler shops and nail salons.

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Even those nail shops have a fascinating history!

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df950213

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