A few hours ago, I got back from a rather pleasant event – LA Bloggers Live! What was it? LA Bloggers Live! Exactly what it says on the packet. So there were several bloggers from the Los Angeles area who met (at Tangier) to read out loud some of the posts from their blogs, listening to each other and meeting each other in the “real” world, as opposed to online. It was really great – there were several great readings, and it was excellent to meet and chat with some of the people whose blogs I’ve read from time to time. It was good old-fashioned community, plain and simple. There were readings on lots of topics, from joy and pain in relationships to learning how to swim and ride a bike as a child – the hard ways. Over on Leah Peah’s blog (she conceived and organized the event) (and also here) you can see the list of readers, and later there’ll be some links to the posts that were read along with some audio. (I was particularly pleased that Will Campbell, whose blog I read from time to time, read a post that I recognized fondly – in it he’s on his bike, and he gets to do one of those things that all cyclists have wanted to do at least once, Click to continue reading this post
I noticed that the eleventh edition of the blog carnival Philosophia Naturalis has been posted at 
This got me thinking a bit about where we are going with all these resources, how useful they are, and -very importantly- how easy it all is to find, and then to search through. (Imagine there are 10 hour long talks broadly on your favourite topic. Assuming there are no accompanying files, how can you search them to find a specific fact that they might mention, without sitting through ten hours worth of material?) Well, ironically, one of the first things that caught my eye on SciTalks was a 
A woman who’d been sitting on her own (also enjoying a tamale) spoke up and said that she’d been interested to hear that I thought there was a lot of good food in LA since she could not really find much of it (and she’d been here for four years). Happily I’d finished my tamale and so did not choke or splutter at this revelation, in equal parts horrifying and deeply sad, and spent a few more moments listing some recommendations at her request. Unfortunately, the conversation turned (as it so often does) to one where I find myself defending LA against someone’s expectations of it based upon their own city, and their own requirements (instead of them learning how to navigate and understand the place they’ve chosen to live). Usually it is New Yorkers I have this sort of conversation with, but this time it was someone from Chicago. Her thesis was that good food is hard to find in LA and you’re just falling over it in Chicago. Two other diners arrived (also with tamales that they loved, I’ll point out) and guess where they’re from? Chicago. And so on it went… next they were bonding with each other about their favourite places in Chicago, which was fine, but… I wanted to get back to this nonsense about good food being rare in LA. I hate that myth almost as much as the “no public transport” one (but not quite since it is not as dangerous and destructive)…and particularly despise that habit people have of worshiping the thing they love about their home city by dragging down LA. Can’t people learn to just like what they like without having to enhance it by trying to dislike something else, as though Nature has a conservation law about the total amount of “liking” that can go on? (Above, Anne Fishbein photo from an article to be discussed below.)
…and then you have days when nothing works. At all. This was not like 
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