Items from the 1969-1987 record store chain, including the original sales counter with a hand-painted mural, are now on display at the Valley Relics Museum in Van Nuys. As a record store devotee, albeit one who missed out on Licorice Pizza, I visited over Labor Day weekend. I report my findings in my Wednesday column.

I drove to LA on Sunday for a little outing. Hadn’t realized it was also the last day of the World Cup. It wasn’t quite like a Super Bowl Sunday, when I look for fun alternative things to do, but it was a little like that anyway. What the heck, I turned it into a column.

Following up on on my recent column about delis and a deli exhibit, I travel to distant Tarzana (by car, not jungle vine) to eat at a deli I had mistakenly listed as among those closed in recent years, and also round up comments from readers. If you live in the Inland Empire, well, as one Riverside reader put it, it’s “a Jewish deli desert.” Not a Jewish deli dessert, which would be delicious. Read more in my Wednesday column.

I visit LA’s Skirball Cultural Center for its exhibit “‘I’ll Have What She’s Having’: The Jewish Deli,” then repair to a Jewish deli for lunch, a day trip I recount in my Friday column.

Ever since visiting The Great Wall of Los Angeles mural in the San Fernando Valley on Labor Day weekend, I’ve meant to write about it. Even more so since visiting the Museum of Latin American Art in Long Beach in December, where there’s an exhibit about it. Other priorities keep getting in the way. They might have gotten in the way this week too, except I decided to go for it and make everything else wait for a change. You can read about this amazing mural in my Wednesday column. (Or you can skip it and wait for Friday’s column — it’s a free country.)

I take a tour of Barris Kustom Industries, the North Hollywood home of the late car customizer George Barris’ operations, which will soon be closing up shop and moving to Ventura County. That’s the subject of my Friday column.

I walked LA’s Music Box Steps recently to complete the full “Secret Stairs” complement of 42 urban hikes, the subject of my Aug. 18 column. But I didn’t have room to say too much about the stairs. And since I went back a few days later to do the two-mile loop all over again, this time with the book rather than with the author, to look for things I’d missed, I decided to write about the experience and the movie that gave the steps their name. Thus was my Friday column born.

After years of occasional forays from Secret Stairs, the 42-walk guidebook, I picked up my pace (literally!) during the pandemic to finish them all. Author Charles Fleming, LA’s stair master, joined me to walk the last one: the Music Box Steps. I write about our walk, the stairs and my quest to complete them in Wednesday’s column.

It’s a grab-bag of items. Readers share memories of North Hollywood after my recent column, my praise for a used bookstore that I’d said was the biggest and best is qualified, recollections are sought from anyone who attended the 1966 Rolling Stones concert in San Bernardino, the Fonzie statue in Milwaukee leads to a mention of a TV sitcom film site in Claremont, and a top pop singer hails from Murrieta. All of this — whew! — is in Sunday’s column.

Hot on the heels of my return from the Midwest, I was invited to housesit for a friend in North Hollywood for Independence Day weekend. This gave me another change of scene, but one closer to home, which I share in Sunday’s column.