Smog Examined!

I had always heard that the smog in LA was some of the worst in the world. Before I got here, I expected to find that the sky was a constant shade of brown and people would be sporting Tommy Hilfiger breathing masks. This is not the case however, and as I sit once again in the outdoor cafe enjoying the fine weather out here, I suppose I should explain what smog is, at least according to the locals. The "smuh" of smog stands for smoke, and the "og" is the truncated form of fog, and when these two vapors combine, you get smog. it also includes a variety of other pollutants, not the least of which is the emissions of the roughly 56,267,947,728 cars out here, and becomes a veritable cocktail of noxious fumes.

You can't really see the smog from the ground, which I think is why no one really cares about it. Looking straight up, the sky is always a brilliant shade of blue and hardly a cloud in sight. The only time you can really see the smog problem is when the sun sets, and the suspended particles defract the light and the sun set sometimes turns green or red. I suppose this happens at sunrise as well, but let's not kid ourselves that I would ever be awake to see it or even care. These last few days though, with all the fires going on in the hills, the smoke has been very visible, and Katie's car was even covered with ash the other day. The reason the smog is so bad in L.A. is a result of the geographic and meteorological conditions that made this place so nice to live in the first place. There is a constant breeze that comes off the Pacific, so it is always relatively cool, and the surrounding mountains offer the perfect place to build a house on and act surprised and dismayed when a mud slide comes along and washes your $1.6 million home away. But when all the Hummers and BMWs starts spewing out emissions, that Pacific breeze pushes it toward the mountains, but not quite over them, and they get trapped in this bowl. In happy news, the smog is at its lowest point since the 1970s when people became aware of the problem. In unhappy news, they still expect about one in 200 people who live in the smoggiest of areas to contract some sort of smog-related cancer every year.

My dear sister sent me my birthday / Halloween package the other day, which was fun! For my birthday she gave me a pen with a squirrel on it, some of those pills that turn into little foam shapes in hot water, and a gift certificate to Best Buy. For Halloween she supplied me with some masks, a black light, some scary movie DVDs and various other decorations. Thanks Nicole! Bonus points for reassigning the Christmas wrapping paper to Halloween duty. In other news, my spider bite has pretty much completely healed, although without the side effects that Peter Parker exhibited. Also, I had the most exciting experience in Hollywood to date: I saw a Mercedes-Benz SLR McLaren, by far the rarest of cars on the road. There are plans to make only 3500 in the next 7 years, and I happened to be on the same road as one. I told Katie, who was thoroughly unimpressed with "just a car," that it is the equivalent to a star sighting of Tom Hanks. Among other features, the car has 617 HP and windshield wipers that work perfectly all the way up to the car's 208 MPH top speed. I can't imagine a person who would drive $450,000 worth of machinery 200 MPH in the rain anyway, but I guess wealthy people are eccentric. We also ate at Pink's hotdog stand the other day, an L.A. institution that is quite famous to the locals. I can say they make an excellent chili dog, because I kept tasting it for several hours after the fact. Katie was not amused.