Satellites

Lots of attention is being focused on Silver Lake now that Forbes has named it "America's Hippest Hipster Neighborhood. " In a stunning feat of skinny-jean-clad domination, it beat out such messy-haired hubs as San Francisco's Mission District and Brooklyn's Williamsburg for the dubious title. Whether the moniker makes you want to laugh or cry, it's here to stay. As a former longtime Silver Lake-ian, the announcement made me want to drink, which is why I'm pleased to announce that the revered Silver Lake indie rock club, the Satellite (formerly Spaceland)

LONDON — British Sky Broadcasting, the satellite TV network partially owned by Rupert Murdoch, remains a "fit and proper" holder of a broadcast license despite the phone-hacking scandal that has engulfed Murdoch's media empire, according to Britain's communications watchdog. But the regulatory agency harshly criticized Murdoch's son, James, the former head of BSkyB, for his lackadaisical response to the hacking debacle. The agency said Thursday that James Murdoch "repeatedly fell short of the conduct to be expected of him as a chief executive officer and chairman" of News International, the British arm of his father's media giant News Corp.

The clock is ticking, and like a lot of Southern California sports fans, Gary Price is growing anxious. For weeks, the Glendale resident has heard about stalled negotiations between the Pac-12 Networks and his satellite provider, DirecTV. This weekend, the stalemate hits home for Price and more than 1 million other viewers in the Los Angeles market. They will not get to watch UCLA play Houston in a game that is being broadcast only by the conference. The same thing could happen with the USC-California game next weekend.

Barely visible in the dense fog at Vandenberg Air Force Base, a 19-story rocket roared to life and boosted a top-secret satellite into orbit. Little is known about the spacecraft except that it belongs to the National Reconnaissance Office. The secretive federal agency is in charge of designing, building, launching and maintaining the nation's spy satellites. At 2:39 p.m. PDT, Thursday, the satellite was lifted into space atop United Launch Alliance's Atlas V rocket. The mission had been delayed six weeks because of a nagging glitch with equipment on the base northwest of Santa Barbara.

As Paul Ryan painfully discovered this week , Tom Morello of Rage Against the Machine doesn't give out political endorsements to everybody. So when he agreed in 2010 to record a cover of Woody Guthrie's plaintive immigration ballad "Deportees" with Outernational, which plays the Satellite in Silver Lake with Las Cafeteras on Saturday, the gesture spoke volumes about the direction of the politically minded, guitar-centric New York indie rock...

Bouchon turns 1: Until the end of the week, pastry chef Alen Ramos is offering signature items at Bouchon Bakery to commemorate its 1st birthday. The goodies include birthday cake macaron; tomato-brie summer sandwich; farmers market strawberry lemonade; and vanilla bean canele. Patrons can toast on the actual birthday, Friday, with a $1 glass of lemonade. Until Sunday. 235 N. Canon Dr., Beverly Hills, (310) 271-9910 x621 . www.bouchonbakery.com . Georgian feast with Satellite Republic: Satellite Republic will cook a four-course dinner at Jancar Jones Gallery on Aug. 24. Guests can enjoy wine from the suggested cash donation bar at 6:30 p.m. and promptly afterward, dinner of elderberry tonic, tonis puri bread with fresh herbs; roasted eggplant satzivi ; khinkali dumplings filled with lamb and adjika sauce; grilled sturgeon with pickled green beans and plum sauce; and walnut baklava.

When the Soviet Union launched Sputnik 1, the first artificial satellite, into orbit in 1957, its tiny radio transmitter allowed it to be tracked in space. There was only one instrument in the West that could track the intercontinental ballistic missile that launched it, however: the newly opened 250-foot radio telescope at Jodrell Bank in England. And when Sputnik's transmitter died after only 22 days, Jodrell Bank - towering over the English countryside in a small village south of Manchester - was the only instrument that could track it until it fell to Earth three months later.

About six minutes in to the rover's seven minutes of terror -- the time it took for Curiosity to reach the surface of Mars from the edge of its atmosphere -- the Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter took a pass over the landing site, the Gale crater. When it did, it took a stunning photo. In it, you can clearly see Curiosity, its parachute deployed, floating toward the surface of the planet. The Odyssey satellite got all the credit Sunday night because it was responsible for relaying signals back to Earth about whether the descent and landing were working correctly.

  Curiosity, the largest and most advanced spacecraft ever sent to another planet, stuck its extraordinary landing Sunday night in triumphant and flawless fashion, and is poised to begin its pioneering, two-year hunt for the building blocks of life - signs that Earth's creatures may not be not alone in the universe. NASA's $2.5-billion mission involved the work of more than 5,000 people from 37 states, some of whom had labored for 10 years to hear the two words that Al Chen, a Jet Propulsion Laboratory engineer, said inside mission control at 10:32 p.m.: “Touchdown confirmed.” Chen reported that Curiosity was in a “nice flat place,” and as icing on the cake, the spacecraft sent home thumbnail photographs of itself.