I’ve been living in Los Angeles for about 2 1/2 years now, after spending 8 years in New York City. At first, the switch was dramatic. New York has exactly 3 days of pleasant weather every year, while LA has 3 days of unpleasant weather. New York has naked cowboys harassing tourists in Times Square, while LA has people in frighteningly homemade-looking superhero costumes harassing tourists in front of Grauman’s Chinese Theater. New York has Puerto Ricans, while LA has Armenians. And so on.

As I’ve settled in, I’ve discovered a few things about LA that only become clear to people who have spent a lot of time here. If you ever make it out here for a visit, please print this guide out; it just may save your life.

1. There is no good time to go to Trader Joe’s. Trader Joe’s is a West Coast-based grocery store chain that feels like a food co-op gone corporate. Its employees are mainly twenty-something hipsters who wear Hawaiian shirts and often look like they’ve cut their own hair with garden shears — but in a fashionable way.

Outsiders often make the mistake of assuming that Trader Joe’s is a high-end, expensive grocery store, in the same league as Whole Foods. This is a mistake. Trader Joe’s products actually tend to be cheaper than their name brand counterparts. If you do not live near a Trader Joe’s but you know something about the chain, it is that they carry an inexpensive brand of wine known as Charles Shaw, or “Two Buck Chuck” as it is know to out-of-state visitors who would like you to think they are not out-of-state visitors.

Trader Joe’s, at least the one in Los Feliz, where I live, is always busy. Because I’m a freelancer, I have often attempted to beat the rush by showing up at odd hours of the day. The parking lot is just as packed at 11:13 AM as it is at 5:30 PM. The aisles themselves are incredibly small and difficult to maneuver a grocery cart through, although, having come from New York, I’m pretty well accustomed to navigating impossibly tight spaces. If you need to go to Trader Joe’s and you find that it’s packed, take my advice and DO NOT leave the parking lot, thinking you’ll come back at a better time. Trust me, there is no better time.

2. People in Los Angeles have no standard of measurement for entertainment. In Los Angeles, you are either “being entertained” (watching a piece of entertainment) or “not being entertained” (not watching a piece of entertainment). It is impossible to watch a piece of entertainment and not be entertained.

For example, let’s say you go to see a mediocre movie, like Made of Honor or 27 Dresses. While you are in that theater, you will get the sensation from the crowd’s reaction that it is the most daring, original piece of entertainment that has ever been produced. People will be curled up in fetal balls of laughter. Complete strangers will smack you on the back in joy.

This actually happened when Sarah and I went to see Little Miss Sunshine. Now, I thought Little Miss Sunshine was okay, but the word I would use to describe it as “cute.” Judging from the reactions of the people surrounding us in the theater, the word they would have used to describe it is “revolutionary.” The woman next to Sarah, a complete unknown to us, grabbed Sarah’s arm at one point and, gasping for air, screamed “This is SO CRAZY!” If I didn’t know better, I would have assumed the audience was filled with cavemen who were just seeing moving pictures on a screen for the first time in their lives.

3. There are actually six different rush hours in Los Angeles. They are:

• The going to work rush. (6:30 AM - 10 AM)
• The going to lunch rush. (11 AM - 2 PM)
• The returning from lunch rush. (2:30 PM to 4 PM)
• The coming home from work rush. (4 PM to 8 PM)
• Saturday.
• Sunday.

If you must drive, your window of opportunity is Monday-Friday, 10-11 AM or 2-2:30 PM. Any other time, you’re better off walking.

4. People in Los Angeles are not flaky, they’re just extremely hopeful. In Los Angeles, people will say, “let’s get together for lunch sometime next week.” You are not a true Angeleno if you let reality cloud your response. Your response should be based on what would happen in an ideal world in which you had unlimited amounts of time and everyone loved everyone. So you say, “Yes! Let’s get together for lunch sometime next week.” You will not be held to it, and they will probably never call you, anyway. Everyone wins!

5. Everyone in LA has his or her own private monitoring helicopter that is constantly flying overhead, making sure everything’s kosher. At least, that’s the best explanation I can come up with for why helicopters seem to be flying around my neighborhood on a tighter schedule than subway trains.

6. Driving drunk is a terrible idea, but calling a cab is an even worse one.

So, I’m going to try a little experiment, and I’d love it if you, my friends, would help me out. I would like to get more traffic on my website. As you’ll see at the bottom of this post, I’ve added a little code that puts funky little icons at the bottom of all my blog posts. For those of you who aren’t in the know, these icons are your way of telling random Internet strangers that you enjoy what you’re reading. For instance, the icon on the far left leads to Digg, which is a site that compiles user submitted articles. If you like something I’ve written, please click on this button and send it to Digg in the hopes that others will come back to the site and read it, thus creating a snowball effect that will end in my complete mastery of time and space. If you do not like what you’ve read, please send me an email calling me a twat.

There are other little icons down there too, but I don’t really know what any of them mean. I’m sure they all link to awesome sites where nerds can turn other nerds on to nerdy inside jokes that will soon be turned into coffee table books. If you’re feeling particularly adventurous, feel free to click on the rest of the icons and see what happens. Chances are good they all lead to some kind of registration form.

A lot of people have been asking me lately: “Hey, Dinsmore! What do you think about this whole Obama New Yorker cover?” (Full disclosure: no one has asked me this question.)

Well, here’s my take on it. The New Yorker, of course, has the right to print any damn cover they please, and I would disagree that it’s either tasteless or offensive, as both of our presidential candidates have proclaimed. (Note: I would highly doubt that Obama actually felt offended and I can guarantee that McCain didn’t). If they painted Obama with a bone through his nose, dancing around a cauldron full of steaming babies, that I might agree is offensive, because that would reflect negatively on an entire race of people. This cover doesn’t play on racial stereotypes (unless somehow I missed the new stereotype that African-Americans are Muslim terrorists), it plays on the identity of the candidate himself, which is fair game for political cartoonists.

The question for me isn’t whether it’s offensive … the question is whether it’s funny, and that’s where I raise my objections. In order to be funny, a cartoon must have context. Now, as a right-wing cartoon, this is perfectly good satire. The message it sends is “ha-ha, Obama’s going to come into the White House and terrorize our country with his wicked, anti-American beliefs.” But dig this: the only thing about the cartoon that tell us it is poking fun at this attitude is the fact that it’s on the cover of New Yorker. This tells me that the New Yorker has such a high opinion of itself, it assumes everyone everywhere already knows its political viewpoints.

And that’s the part that offends me. That the editors of the New Yorker (and, to some extent, New Yorkers themselves) believe themselves to be so important that the only audience worth speaking to is the insular crowd that already understands their in-jokes. If you don’t get the joke, then you’re not cool enough to understand both the political context of the Obama-Muslim rumors and the meta-context that the New Yorker would never actually believe this. It is too complicated. And if you have to dig through that many levels to get to the heart of the joke, then the joke is not funny. As a learned scholar on humor, this is my decision, and it is final.

This is a lesson I had to learn the hard way. As I’ve mentioned before on my blog, I made a joke at my wedding that silenced the crowd. Sarah and I went up to thank everyone at the reception. I grabbed the microphone and said, “I’d like to thank you all for helping me to finally realize my dreams of starting my own baby factory.” Now, I will go to my grave thinking this was a pretty funny joke — and that a man who has just spent $30,000 dollars on a party has the right to make any joke he wants and receive at least feigned laughter in response. But it is only funny if you know me and know that I would never actually mean it. And a wedding, I learned, is not the best environment for irony. A gay wedding, maybe. Two men making that exact same joke at their wedding? It would kill. If I have any gay readers who are planning to get married soon, please, give it a spin and let me know how the crowd responds.

Sarah and I had a discussion the other day in which she asked me, “why should the telecom companies be prosecuted when the president was the one who broke the law?” And it’s a good question which is, I think, being used by a lot of people to justify giving them immunity. Glenn Greenwald answers this question in a very thoughtful way today, and I encourage you to read it if you’re interested.

The basic point is that, even if the President asked the telecoms to give up our private data, it was still against the law. I’m sure a lot of people think, “if George Bush asked me to break the law, I wouldn’t have a choice.” But in this country, when given the choice between breaking the law and honoring the request of your president, you are obligated to obey the law. George Bush doesn’t have the power to break the law, and he also doesn’t have the power to force other people to break the law. Now, I’d be scared shitless if I had to disobey a presidential order, but the telecom companies are vastly more powerful than I am, and they knew full well going into this mess that the were breaking the law. Maybe they had great reasoning behind their actions … but if this FISA bill passes, we’ll never know, because they won’t be obligated to explain their actions in a court of law.

So anyway, read the article, and if you’re moved enough to do something about it, please visit this link to call your senators and urge them to strip retroactive immunity from the FISA bill. I made the calls the other day, and it was totally easy. You don’t need to know a lot of impressive facts and figures … just follow the script given on the website, the Senators’ assistants will note your opinion, and you will have had the say you deserve as a member of a Democracy. And that’s the last I’ll say about it.

Happy Independence Day!

Hilarious.

Saturday’s Washington Post featured an interesting article about a woman trying to track down the source of the “Obama is a Muslim” rumors. I was listening to the radio the other day and I heard a forum of swing voters talking about this very topic. Here’s what I learned from this discussion: never trust an important task to a swing voter, because I have rarely heard a group of people so confused about basic facts.

Figuring out who started the rumors is beside the point, anyway. His father is a Muslim and his middle name is Hussein. It doesn’t take a creative genius to figure out where the GOP and the ignorant are going to turn for their attack fix. The point is, anyone who seriously believes a man could run for president as a secret, ticking-time bomb Muslim agent lives in a fantasy world. That a significant portion of our population believes movies are reality is far more distressing to me than the fact that GOP operatives would use this ignorance to their advantage. Not to mention the reality that Islam is the world’s second biggest religion, one of our founding principles is freedom of religion, and that religion should have nothing to do with politics in the first place.

I’m stuck on this question lately of what to do with myself. When I moved out to Los Angeles, I started freelancing for educational companies based in New York. I had a great year last year and made a tidy little income. Lately, though, the jobs haven’t been coming in as fast and furious as they had been, and I’m contemplating a career change. But what to do? Here’s what I can do: write. Pretty much anything. Need a catchy tagline for a movie poster? No problem. Here are a few, just off the top of my head:

• For a horror movie: He’s just hanging around … UPSIDE-DOWN. He is a vampire.
• For a romance: Sometimes the thing you’re looking for is right behind you: love. (This would be for a movie called Love Is Right Behind You.)
• For a buddy comedy about old people: The only thing they forgot was their teeth.

So, obviously I can do that kind of work. But I can’t get that kind of work, because nowhere on my resume does it say, “comes up with amazing taglines for movies that don’t exist.” And now that I think about it, even if it did, it probably wouldn’t help me much. If you look at my resume, you would think that the only thing I knew how to write was brief, 1 page stories and questions for standardized tests, because that’s how I earn my living. But I also know how to start publishing companies, write novels, program websites, and write catchy songs on demand. I believe I am a highly marketable person, but the marketplace does not seem to agree with me. No matter what you might hear on the Today Show “Job Watch” segment, it is far more important to have a rigid career definition than the ability to think outside the box.

And that even goes for jobs for which I have gobs of experience. Even though I’ve been a founding member of two publishing companies, I could never get a job at a publishing house, because I only know how to run them, not how to be employed by them. I’ve written a 250-page spelling review book and a vocabulary book of similar length, but where does that skill get me? More anonymity.

Here is my challenge to the universe: give me a sign that I can make a living doing the kind of writing I enjoy. Wake me up tomorrow morning to find that I’ve gotten 500,000 hits on my website and publications everywhere are clamoring for an opinion column from me. Make George Clooney call me in the morning and say that he simply must buy the rights to Johnny Astronaut or I, An Actress immediately.

Or just give me another crappy test-writing job, really. I’m not that picky.

There’s an article in the Washington Post today about how Obama is trying to bring evangelicals into the Democratic party. Fantastic. There’s gotta be a segment of the evangelical population who would rather help the downtrodden than murder abortion doctors. As could be expected, Republicans aren’t quite sure what to do about this:

It’s a move that’s caught some conservative evangelicals off guard. They say they are surprised and dismayed to see a liberal-minded politician attempting to conscript their troops. At the same time, they say that Sen. John McCain (R-Ariz.) has done little to court their affections.

“I’ve never seen anything quite like it before,” said evangelical author Stephen Mansfield, who wrote “The Faith of George W. Bush” and has a forthcoming book about Obama.

“To be running against a dyed-in-the-wool Republican, and to be reaching into the Christian community as wisely and knowledgeably as (Obama) is — understanding their terms and their values — is just remarkable.”

Oh no! He’s conscripting our troops! Who will we get to protest the funerals of gay teenagers?

Thankfully, the liberal media is right there to show us there are two sides to every story:

Still, some religious leaders wonder whether Obama’s Christian-focused outreach might alienate Jewish and Muslim voters, for example, not to mention the Democratic Party’s large secular wing.

“You really have to consider the question: What message does this send to people of other faiths?” said the Rev. Romal J. Tune, a Washington pastor who works on religious outreach with the Democratic National Committee.

So, Republicans have owned Evangelicals for the last God-knows-how-many years, but the second Obama makes the (incredibly wise) move of trying to include them, he gets criticized for disenfranchising Jews and Muslims. Here’s a little tip for reading articles like this: whenever a reporter uses a nonspecific phrase like “some religious leaders,” it generally means “we found one guy who expressed doubt.” Sometimes it means “we couldn’t find anyone who expressed doubt, but there’s probably someone out there who feels this way.”

Along these lines, I was at the gym yesterday when I saw footage from a press conference that Mike Bloomberg gave in Florida explaining to “a Jewish group” that Obama is not actually a secret Muslim. Now, really. I don’t mean to stereotype, but it seems to me that Jews tend to be more educated than the general public. The people who believe the Obama Muslim rumors aren’t Jewish voters in Boca Raton, they’re undereducated rednecks who are just itching for a reason to not vote for a black guy. And I don’t really think the mayor of Queer and Degenerate-ville USA is the best person to convince them otherwise. Now, if we could get Larry the Cable Guy to spread the good word, that would be a coup.

Two executives from Bear Stearns are being indicted today for their part in the subprime market crisis:

Barclays accused Bear Stearns of knowing for months that certain assets in the Bear Stearns High-Grade Structured Credit Strategies Enhanced Leverage Master Fund were worth “far less” than their stated values.

Now, really. Isn’t this sort of like suing your friend because you got hurt when you jumped off a building after him? The market collapsed because loans were being given to people who could not afford to pay those loans back. Everyone knew that part of the equation. And I guess the reason why the Bear Stearns guys are being indicted is because they claimed to have a magic formula where you could make money off of something that cost more than it was worth. While they should not be rewarded for claiming they had magical powers, anyone who bought into this scam should also accept responsibility for believing they had magical powers.

It has somehow become a sign of strength in our culture to point the fingers at others when you’re caught making a mistake. Well, I’m sick of it. Starting right here and now, I am going to fess up to everything I have done wrong in the hopes that my small gesture will create a Pay It Forward-esque shockwave that will permanently affect America’s value system. Here we go …

• To Matt Rasmussen: in 7th grade gym class, I told Brad something-or-other to throw a basketball at you because I was afraid he would throw it at me instead. And I am sorry.
• To Alan Head: Mike Tygeson smashed your graphing calculator and threw its pieces all over the hall when he removed it from our locker, and I let him, because I wanted him to think I was cool. And then when you asked me about it, I lied and told you I didn’t know what happened. For this, I will always be sorry.
• To Jon McCarron: I blew up at you when your dad called and asked me when you were going to get your copies of Danger City II, and I am still mighty embarrassed by it. I’m sorry.
• To Jon Harmon: Sometimes in high school I was kind of just a dick to you for no good reason. You were a good friend and I’m sorry.
• To Don Brewer: I could get pretty snippy and condescending sometimes when we were roommates, and I hope you know I’ve matured and I’m sorry.
• To Jeff Rosenberg: I talked to you on the phone at Silvio’s two summers ago and said I was going to call you. I still haven’t. You were one of the best friends a guy could have and I have totally lost touch with you and it’s easier to not call than to think about catching up on 8 years of lost time, and I’m sorry about that almost every day.
• To Ginni Biggs: you wrote me an email about 6 months ago saying you missed me and wanted me to come to Flagstaff, and it’s still sitting, unanswered, somewhere in my inbox. I miss you too and I’m sorry.

That pretty much covers it. I’ve done 7 wrong things in my life, and now they’re all better. If, however, I’ve wronged you somehow and forgotten about it, please feel free to write to me and get your very own well-deserved apology. The buck stops here.

Sears is reinventing its image:

First came the decision to stock Skechers, a line of footwear teens favor. Then came the personalized avatar, the virtual identity Sears shoppers could accessorize online.

Now, the company that once offered in-store hearing aids and dentures is teaming up with MTV to produce a back-to-school movie while adding a line of street clothes and accessories designed by hip-hop artist LL Cool J.

They’ve drafted LL Cool J to help them get in touch with the teen market? I guess Afrika Bambaataa & Soul Sonic Force must not have been available.*

*Please note: this punchline was thoroughly tested in an instant message with Matt before it was blogged.