So L.A.

Elaine · So L.A.

This town is nuts. Other cities have Super Bowl Sunday, we have Oscar Sunday-- people leave work early on Friday to get ready for all the happening parties and then they stagger in late Monday morning with hangovers. And all day long I've been hearing nothing but Oscar pool predictions and party preparations.

Anyway, I have 4 parties to go to this weekend and I have absolutely nothing to wear-- well, nothing that I haven't already been seen in, that is.

André in Zuid-Afrika · Re: So L.A.

Elaine · Re: So L.A.

André in Zuid-Afrika · Re: So L.A.

Elaine · Re: So L.A.

André in Zuid-Afrika · Re: So L.A.

Porthos

I'm glad I left L.A. (Pico Rivera, Long Beach, Los Alamitos, and Lakewood) that is. The traffic and smog is enough to drive a person mad.

After I graduate from college, I'll probably move to San Francisco to take a job in the financial district, and possibly move back to the Central Coast to open up my own practice or at least manage my own branch perhaps.

Elaine

Welcome to LA, now go home.

André in Zuid-Afrika

That's almost double the number of people in my province.

Porthos

Uriel

That's more than double the entire population of my state -- and we're just a little big bigger than Poland!

Elaine

There's a brush fire burning in Griffith Park which is just a hop, skip, and a jump from my neighborhood of Echo Park. I hope the firefighters get a handle on it soon.

Deborah

Yes, indeed! I'll be sending positive thoughts your way.

Uriel

You live in Echo Park? Have you seen the movie? I think Susan Dey was in it.

Elaine

Deborah

That would be a real shame if the observatory burned down.

Poor animals! It must be so scary for them. Here's a link (probably short-lived) to an article about how they're handling the zoo situation.

Elaine

Deborah

Uriel

Where do you move the big ones to? And how do you transport them? These could be really big headaches, especially on short notice.

Elaine

Well, another brush fire broke out last night in L.A.-- this time the inferno was just above Avalon on Catalina Island. But I hear the firefighters have got it just about contained (after over 4,000 acres burned). TG. I was planning on spending another wonderful labor day weekend there this year.

It sure does look like we're going to be having a long, hot, fiery summer.

Deborah

Once when I was a teenager, my family was visiting Reno, Nevada, when their were large forest fires in the area. The sky was so smoky that you could stare directly at the sun (which was bright red) without hurting your eyes.

Julian

I was having lunch with a friend over at Marix Tex-Mex in West Holllywood yesterday when a guy approached, asked us if we'd consider "modeling" for his adult website and gave us his card. How very L.A. is that!

So I came home, told my wife, bragging how daddy's still got it, and you know what she said? "I wonder how much he pays" !!! I was like, "Whaaat?" and she goes, "Well, we need the extra money now that we have another mouth to feed."

I hope to God she was kidding.

Deborah

Was your friend male or female?

Julian

Uriel

You go, Tita! Pimp your baby-daddy out!

Elaine

Uriel

No matter how hard she tries?

Because the men are too busy handling each other?

André in Zuid-Afrika

Elaine

Elaine

File this under: "My Brush with Greatness"

My girlfriends and I headed to Les Deux last night for some shindig or another. There were many recognizable faces that I've seen in the tabloids and magazines, but not being a big follower of new young Hollywood, I couldn't place their faces (I can't tell a Lauren Conrad from a Hayden Panetierre!).

Anyway, we were hanging out in the outdoor courtyard, sipping our apple martinis when who should walk in but Mr. Yo Momma himself, Wilmer Valderrama, along with his posse of good looking playas. They were ushered upstairs to the VIP lounge so I didn't see him again for much of the night, but later as I made my way to the bar for my umpteenth drink, I accidently brushed up against some guy and as I turned to say "Pardon me" I see that it's shorty, er, him. So he winks, says 'Hey, sexy!" and comments that he likes my outfit, and I wait for some hokey punchline like "I'd like it even better on my bedroom floor" or something like that, but he didn't say more.

It's a good thing I'm such a good girl, otherwise I would've pressed the issue and exchanged digits.

Uriel

Please tell me he doesn't have that accent in real life!

Loic

As in the accent he had from That 70s Show?

Uriel

That's the one.

Loic

I always thought he was Indian until I decided to read the credits one day and realised that he has a Hispanic-sounding name.

Elaine

Deborah

Here's a link to a search on youtube for clips with Fez in them.

http://youtube.com/results?search...at+70s+show+fez&search=Search

Elaine

Ack! It's a YouTube link! I'm going to have to view that elsewhere.

Deborah

Here's something that may give you an idea:

The following is from a NY Times article about Wilmer Valderrama:

Loic

I thought David Beckham's opening match for the Los Angeles Galaxy at the Home Depot Centre is worthy of a newsbyte:

1.

Even Mrs Tony Parker is suddenly enthralled by the Beautiful Game.

2.

This bloke begs to disagree.

3.

Even the Simpson family are fans. Lisa seems to be especially attracted to the former Galactico.

4.

The precocious Don Juan in Cruz Beckham making a move on little Suria Cruise right under the very nose of Katie Holmes.

5.

But England and Chelsea skipper John Terry denied a fairytale script for ex England skipper David Beckham by scoring the lone goal of the match to put it 1-0 in Chelsea's favour.

Uriel

It'll be a flash in the pan, you watch.

Loic

Who knows - soccer might overthrow ice hockey as the fourth american sport in years to come.

Uriel

Them's fightin' words, buddy!

Julian

Joanne

Loic

And David Beckham has been a consistent no-show for the LA Galaxy so far. I wonder if his injuries are far worse than we think.

Really, if not for Beckham's move across the transatlantic pond, I wouldn't have known that the football league is divided into the eastern and western conferences.

Uriel

Good lord, man! Even I knew that, and I hate football! How do you you think they pick who gets to play in the Superbowl? The winner of one conference versus the winner of the other! (Years of living with a diehard Raider fan.

)

Anybody here read katakana? It's been years, so all I can pick out is the pa and the su!

(Well, the zu, too, since it's just su with a " after it. And I think I recognize the i. And the label on Dallas HAS to be ka-u-bo-i-zu (Cowboys), so that's a broad hint for deciphering the rest of the map!

Loic

You must remember that apart from the NBA when Michael Jordan was still in scintillating form for his Chicago Bulls, american sports do not make a blip on our radar.

I can read the kanji on the map and I think the map is about the 32 clubs divided into (in order of the ones displayed on the map): eastern, northern, western and southern districts.

Sometimes, I wonder if Japanese is a mere Chinese dialect. And yes, I am sneering here.

PS: Actually, I was referring to association football, not american football. Do you mean to say that american football is also divided into eastern and western conferences?

Uriel

Yes, silly, of course it is. The AFC and the NFC.

I had a friend in Japan (Ru-yi) who was originally form Taiwan (and her parents were from Shanghai), who had an interesting problem: since she looked Asian and lived in Japan, Japanese people alwas assumed she was Japanese and would address her in Japanese in stores, etc. Which made her feel stupid, because she had no idea what they were saying. But she could read kanji, too, of course (the meaning, if not the spoken translation), and so navigate he way around to a certain extent -- although kanji is usually mixed with hiragana in written Japanese.

The nice thing about katakana, though, is it is the "alphabet" reserved for transcribing foreign words, most of which are in English. So if you can learn to decipher it, you can read the meanings just fine! Naturally, we Americans were usually better at katakana than at the other styles.

Interesting that you condescend to the Japanese -- I saw a Japanese cartoon that featured a couple of Chinese chartacters once that had been dubbed into English, and the Chinese girls had silly accents and spoke in a broken, pidgin fashion.

Just goes to prove my theory that Asians love to hate other Asians ... and then they work their way down to hating the rest of us!

Loic

Not wanting to descend into Nip-bashing here, but it is technically true that Japan is nothing but a cultural offshoot of China. They had to resort to importing their religion, their written script as well as their Confucian culture wholescale from China.

Today, they are very good copycats, importing Western technology and giving them an indigeneous flavour before churning them back to us. Think of their cars and electronic products, for example.

When I was in Japan, I too was addressed in Japanese. Their foreign language skills are appalling. Even when I was in Disneyland, the staff could barely understand me despite my pathetic attempts at English, Mandarin and pidgin Japanese. How did you manage to survive for so long there without mastering the local lingo? I am gobsmacked.

You know, many Taiwanese do know how to speak Japanese. The former Taiwanese President Lee Teng Hui was a very fluent Japanese speaker. He even fought for the Japanese during the war. When I was in Japan, my guide was a Taiwanese who spoke melodious Japanese.

Liz

Loic, Loic...Even if I didn't see your photo on your avatar, I would know YOU ARE CHINESE. Japanese people do the same the other way round.

Loic

Haha. Why, Liz? Would I look a very unlikely samurai?

Liz

No, that's not the case - maybe you would make a good samurai.

I meant the way you were castigating Japan - the occassional Chinese-Japanese banter.

Porthos

Liz

Uriel

I got away with not speaking Japanese because I lived on an army base, and enough of my friends were half-Japanese and could speak it, so we just pawned off the communication job on them. Plus, the Japanese aren't big talkers anyway to strangers, so you aren't expected to chatter on freely. Memorize the characters to your usual train stations and you can find your way around no problem. Restaurants tend to have full-photo menus and even amazingly lifelike plastic replicas of every meal, so you can point and order in complete silence and still get what you want. A few minor words and pleasantries like gomenasai, dozo, daijobu, sumimasen, doishito mashite, domo, hai, iie, chotomate, and you're good to go. Numbers are easy, too.

Loic

Liz

Joanne

Porthos

Joanne

Err... that's a little hard to answer, Porthos

I'm extremely mixed! My maternal grandmother is American-born, of half-Irish and half-Japanese ancestry. My maternal grandfather is Filipino (naturalized US citizen), but his surname and his physical features indicate he's mixed (Malay-European-Chinese), as well. My late father was considered white, but his mother was mixed white, black, and Native American (many of whom have Asiatic physical features).

When people ask me "what" I am, I usually just shrug, or tell them I don't feel like making a f***ing pie chart...

Liz

Loic

Actually, to say that Japanese society is hostile is probably not the mot juste I was looking for. I have expressed myself poorly. What I meant to say is that their society can be rather daunting for one who doesn't speak their language.

I suppose it is the same for many English-speaking countries throughout the world where a knowledge of a second language is usually patchy at best or non existent at worst. In the same token, I can also say that such a society is hostile to those who doesn't speak the language.

Elaine

This is supposed to be funny, but I find it quite sad actually because it's not too far from reality.

Uriel

I've seen that one. It IS funny -- from a safe distance!

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