Southern California

Suddenly, Los Angeles is feeling a little like Sao Paolo. First, two large Carnaval-related events will take place this weekend -- a festival in Santa Barbara and the annual Brazilian Carnaval at the Palladium Saturday. Then, a DJ-centric dance party dubbed Made in Brazil returns to Hollywood early next month after a well-received August turn at the Avalon, and automaker Scion is sponsoring an art exhibition of emerging Sao Paolo street artists at the Choque Cultural Gallery, which debuts Feb.

Long Beach is going to the dogs. And as they knock on doors around there and in nearby Cerritos, Seal Beach and Signal Hill in an usual hunt for canine scofflaws, about the only excuse authorities haven't heard yet is that Fido ate the license notice. Animal control workers are going house-to-house in search of unlicensed dogs in what is turning into an unusual census of the area's dog population.

Do you think the ground feels a little shakier these days? It's not your imagination. Last year saw a significant increase in the number of temblors of magnitude 3.0 or greater in Southern California and the northern portion of Baja California, according to data from Caltech and the U.S. Geological Survey. The region recorded 267 shakers with magnitudes of 3.0 and above last year, compared with 125 in 2007. Seismologists said 2008 had the highest number of such quakes of any year since 1999.

Charred slopes in the foothills towering above William Johnson's La Cañada Flintridge home are now a mudslide in the making after being charred by recent wildfires. But getting insurance for his property has been impossible for him and many of his neighbors, he said, as winter rains loom. Johnson, 54, said he called three providers, each of whom said they would not issue insurance for his area. "While I'm trying to get protection, they don't want to deal with their losses, and they're trying to maximize their profits," he said.

The long, sharp slide in Southern California home values is all but eliminating demand for new houses. Just 1,813 new homes sold in the six-county region last month, down 53% from December 2007 -- and down 63% from the 20-year average for the month of December, a real estate information firm reported Monday. By comparison, sales of all homes rose 51% last month compared with a year earlier as bargain hunters continued to snap up foreclosures and other distressed properties.

A national community organizing group Thursday announced a campaign of civil disobedience designed to help families resist eviction and remain in their homes after foreclosure. Activists with ACORN, the Assn. of Community Organizations for Reform Now, said they would encourage people facing eviction to use text messaging and cellphones to quickly summon volunteers to their homes.

The major banks now collecting federal bailout money were not unwitting victims of the mortgage meltdown but instead were directly linked to the root cause of the problem: a subprime lending machine concentrated in Southern California, a new study asserts. The banks were "enablers that bankrolled the type of lending threatening the international financial system," according to the study being released today by the Center for Public Integrity, a Washington-based watchdog group.

Southern California is expected to see a sharp change in the weather now that a Pacific storm has blown out of the region, apparently sparing fire-charred mountain areas from disastrous mudslides Wednesday. The storm, which dumped 2 to 3 inches of rain in the Angeles National Forest, contributed to a number of traffic accidents but caused no significant mudflows in areas ravaged by recent wildfires. Still, officials said, even though the rain has passed, the danger of mudslides will continue as new storm systems develop in the coming weeks and months.

A voracious 6-day-old wildfire that has destroyed more than 50 buildings and churned through more than 105,000 acres of mountainous brush showed only small signs of slowing Monday, and fire officials offered little hope of containment as long as hot, dry conditions continued. The Station fire, the largest of several burning in the state, was plowing through dense hillside vegetation along the San Gabriel Mountains, cutting a remarkable swath that extended from Altadena into the high desert.

Why, you may ask, are we rushing north on Interstate 5 and veering east on California 126 into the Santa Clara Valley? Why are we pulling off the road by a fruit stand and slipping into the backyard? Are we going to tip a cow? Steal oranges? We are not. We are here for a date with a black-haired, blue-eyed beauty named Ramona. She is, by at least one historian's reckoning, "the most important woman in the history of Southern California." She boosted D.W.