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The eminent physicist Sir Fred Hoyle, has a thinly-veiled portrayal of LA as "Slippage City" in his charming book of short stories, Element 79 :
Suppose you wanted to start up a hell of a city. You'd probably put in a lousy climate. Well, the Devil didn't make that mistake. He put his City in a beautiful place, a place with a wonderful climate. There was a plain about fifty miles wide between a chain of mountains and the sea. It was a place of nearly perpetual sunshine. Yet it was no desert, quite the reverse. What happened was that every day the air moved in and out over the sea. It came in saturated with moisture during the early morning. There was always a heavy dew with a light mist. The water soaked into the fertile ground before the sun climbed high in the sky....
Then the SNAKE (aka Homo sapiens urbanus) moved into Eden :
The houses of the first settlers fitted tastefully into the landscape. Ample water for the first modest needs could be piped from the mountains, or even pumped from simple wells. Crops grew abundantly in the plain....Because the people had no thought of profit, the food they grew was real food. The vegetables tasted like real vegetables, the fruit like real fruit, not the flashy, spray-soaked rubbish that would come a hundred years later with the ultimate transmogrification of the City. The children grew up brown and strong....
And so on. With understated, elegant British disdain, Sir Fred methodically demolishes the American Dream.
Last edited by numan; 12/03/12 10:51 PM.
