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Figured what the heck. I’m now on ComicSpace.

Because I need yet another site to suck up all my time.

It’s being described as MySpace for comics people—creators, fans, reviewers, etc.—though the feature set is pretty sparse right now. I’ve resisted MySpace itself partly because of a somewhat adversarial relationship with the site*, partly because I can’t stand looking at most MySpace pages, and partly because my friends are all on LiveJournal, so there’s really no compelling reason for me to go there.

And yet I’ve got profiles at LiveJournal, Slashdot, Opera, WordPress, Spread Firefox… Even eBay is adding blogging capabilities. Maybe I should bite the bullet and sign up for a Blogger account too. At least then I’ll be able to comment on Crimson Lightning.

*The culture at MySpace seems to encourage hotlinking images without asking. I’m still a writer at heart, so I consider the commentary to be as important as the images or more… and it really annoys me when people en masse just embed the images on their own site. Though I suppose it’s not as bad as the occasional “geniuses” on other forums who will hotlink an 800×600 or bigger photograph as their avatar, even though it only displays at 80×80. Damn kids, get off my lawn!

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They say that the Southern California car culture is isolating. It’s hard to argue with that, when everyone’s shut up in their own little boxes. But today, on my way to work (delayed a bit on account of dentist), I was listening to KCRW’s Morning Becomes Eclectic and stopped at a traffic signal. They were playing a live version of Elvis Costello’s “Allison.” I looked in my rear view mirror, and realized that the driver behind me was singing along to the same song. Even though it only went one way—she had no way of knowing I was listening to the same music—it was still a moment of connection through shared experience.

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It seems fitting that I’d eventually write a post with this title, seeing as how the regular LA Times column is where I got the name for the Only in San Diego series.

We were up in Los Angeles for a wedding on Wednesday and Thursday. Since we were both involved, we stayed in a hotel instead of driving up and back two days in a row. (I’ve made that drive in 40 minutes. It took us nearly two hours on Wednesday.)

First up: the hotel. You may recall we found an interesting combination in the nightstand drawer the last time we stayed in Las Vegas. Here we found another combination, somehow appropriate for LA:

Hotel bedside drawer: Gideon Bible and The Teaching of Buddha

The Bible, of course, had been provided by the Gideons. The name plate on The Teaching of Buddha indicated it had been placed there by the Society for Buddhist Understanding.

Then, of course, there’s this place. We’ve been told that “Happy cows come from California,” but they never tell you where they go…

Happy Cow Diner

I had a few hours free the morning of the wedding (the bridesmaids had an earlier call time), so I walked around downtown Los Angeles a bit. The Disney Concert Hall is weird, of course, but it’s well-known weird.

Now, to a fan of Buffy the Vampire Slayer and Angel, the name “Angelus” has a somewhat sinister connotation:

The Angelus Plaza: a Retirement Housing Foundation Community

Finally, you may think you’ve seen truckloads of FUD coming from places like Microsoft, but we actually saw a literal truckful of FUD.

FUD!

It turns out to be a Mexican company that sells meats, playing on the pronunciation (“fud” in Spanish would sound like “food” in English). They’ve recently licensed the brand in the US, focusing on “areas of heavy Mexican immigration where the brand name is already well known”—in other words, areas like Southern California.

That’s it for now. Maybe I’ll post some of my sightseeing photos next year (i.e. tomorrow).