and now before the Opus Dei come and get me, gotta sign off.

Timothy, hope to talk to you next Friday again - keep the faith, bro. Teresa, Slider8, Uncle Fester - good to meet you, always enjoy your comments. It's nice to be able to talk to everyone without worrying about being blind-sided by a true believer every 60 seconds. Goodnight Seattle, Idaho, SF and all points far-flung!

Joan, thanks for letting us veer pleasurably off-topic on your space-time, and thanks for the great posts.

You've got one vote; so do I.

Thanks, Joan, for keeping the heat up. I'm with you and Robert Reich - if we want it, we have to fight for it.

Here's a clip of Bill Moyers being interviewed by Bill Maher about healthcare reform. It's short, sweet, simple - and it's a beaut: "We're all in the same boat".

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2009/08/29/bill-moyers-on-health-car_n_271851.html

We're the richest nation in the world. Our military budget is almost as much as the rest of the world's combined. And we can't afford healthcare for all our citizens?

To Chris, George, Jonathan et al: if you want to quit, then be decent and do it quietly. Lead, follow, or get out of the way.

This is like watching Andre the Giant spin several munchkins off his back and into the stands. Thwwaappp! Crash! Owww!

This is a riot. You are awesome, dude.

Rowdy Roddy is a big fave. Did you see "They Live"? Amazing fight, and bold movie for its time. Some things (alien-lizardworlds) just don't go out of style. Go Boston!

What did Rowdy fall, like 5 and a half stories out of the picture window? And then rolls over. First movie to show massive homeless in L.A. too, as far as I know. Way ahead of its time.

Dude, you've either got the best smack-thesaurus in the world, or we need to get you on Nightline. You are on a roll.

T: Sorry your honest comments about religion from last night got co-opted. Sometimes this place feels like a war zone.

I know Buddhism, but not so much Confucianism. Thanks for your lovely explanation. Very eloquent.

GB: District 9 looks GREAT.

Gotta run errands. Hope to see you in your corner again.

If you don't have a lot of experience getting around Los Angeles, it's never where you think it is. The sprawl is insidious, but not much more so than other rapidly-growing sunbelt cities. The fires are big and photogenic - and sometimes horrific - but aren't dissimilar in effect from the myriad natural disasters that plague many regions around the globe. Why would you choose to live in the path of tornados, or hurricanes, or floods, or senior-killing blizzards.....except that the benefits of a particular place make up for them? You have to live somewhere - glass house or not.

Which place on earth is really self-sustaining, given the sheer quantities we're packing into them in the last 100 years? Food, water, gas, electricity - all are shared across state lines, and will be even more so as populations grow.

There are many things to criticize in L.A., but the fine grain of small Mom-and-Pops and real neighborhoods are consistently amazing - you can eat as many world-cuisines as you want for as cheap as you want, if you seek them out (Nepalese! Oaxacan! Filipino! Argentinian! Swedish! just down the street) - and the coastal-desert topography is stunning. There are more different kinds of landscape experiences within a few hours drive than probably any place you can name. The people are friendly, outgoing, and well-traveled, as befits a highly mobile city. They are un-insular.

It's true the entertainment industry is as superficial as it can get - but it's trafficked in superficialities from Hollywood Day One. It started out selling mirages, but now (especially for TV) it's just lip gloss.

No wonder the ET industry workers (including writers who make their living off it) are expert at stretching the veneer to one-size-fits-all.

More than other cities, L.A. is what you put into it. If you only look at it through the eyes of TV - garbage in, garbage out.

The wetlands that used to protect New Orleans didn't disappear from development, but from a combination of natural erosion, storms and particularly from the extraction of oil and gas in the area. The gas being syphoned out to go to your heaters in the Northeast causes the land to sink. It's a complex problem, but totally fixable. Republicans killed several attempts to restore the wetlands, which protect the entire southern part of the state, as well as a big chunk of our nation's oil and gas reserves.

Also, just in case it comes up: all of New Orleans built before approx. 1940 is above sea level, on a natural levee formed by the bend in the Mississippi. That's why it was established there.

As for Los Angeles - it's definitely sprawled, but the densities aren't so different from any other rapidly growing sunbelt city, and in the central parts of the L.A. area, they're higher. Overdevelopment comes from poor planning, but it mostly comes from population explosion, which is a problem anywhere on the globe. If those people weren't in L.A., they'd be in Vegas, Seattle, Cleveland, Florida, or the NY megacity called the Tri-State Area.

Also, to the poster who slammed the million dollar residences in this fire - the areas endangered are pretty solidly middle-class. Lots of construction workers, secretaries, etc. as someone else pointed out earlier.