Capitol Hill Blue Forums Misc. Topics Ain't This America SoCal/NoCal

Yet, responded? Interesting.

You just keep running around in circles Rick!
I asked if you guys would welcome a few million new neighbors as a response to L.A. tendency to grow unchecked and you never answered.

But I think I can guess how you'd answer, just by reading your opinion on "our water", as if you guys OWN all the water up there.

I didn't realize that there was still private ownership of water resources at the city and state level.
I thought that went out with the "Mulholland Falls era" in the 1930's.

How very "libertarian" of you.

So again, this just boils down to you being an elitist who doesn't like neon...and hates new neighbors, and can't even stand the fact that we share a state with you, despite the fact that we're several hundred miles away.
That's not good enough?

I'm not a fan of strip malls either but it appears that they're not unique to Los Angeles. I think I might have seen a few elsewhere!

You know, we have a toy poodle that is so prissy he can't even bear to venture outside to do his business if it's slightly cold, slightly hot, or if it's slightly sprinkling.

He's afraid of everything, he's even so nervous that he can't eat when anyone is in the same room, and he can't bear to drink from the same water dish as our cocker spaniel.

He would not survive if not for Karen and I treating him like an infant and providing the most ridiculous accommodations for his runty behavior. He definitely wouldn't last five minutes out in the wild.

My gut tells me that there are an awful lot of extremely limited and highly niche-bound individuals who harbor extremely elitist views on people, places and things which are "foreign" to them. They live in highly protected enclaves, surrounded by highly regimented and delicate atmospherics and circumstances without which they would surely perish.

The S. Pellegrino must be chilled to precisely 34 degrees, the Carr's Table Water crackers must be positioned precisely North by Northwest, the hunks of smoked salmon are ruined if not perfectly sliced to a 40 micron thickness, the Camember must have the perfect rind and there absolutely HAS to be Boston Symphony music on the vinyl record player, or they shall surely perish.

God forbid that they might have to stoop to mere selzer or consume those ghastly white box crackers made by machines in a factory, or eat packaged supermarket salmon, or listen to a (GASP!) RADIO STATION !!

It almost sounds like I am listening to the murmurings of Rain Man, who required his eight fish sticks and Judge Wapner at precisely 4 P.M., or he'd have a fit.

The origin of water rights is the starting point, or source.

Why dig up pristine lands to allow millions of folks to move and ruin the environment? That's what El Lay allowed to happen. We are careful not to repeat their mistakes.

We actually have green belts in-between cities here. In our county it's mandatory because we established Urban Limit Lines around each city. Urban Limit Lines, wot? ULLs are one reason why property values are expensive here because 35% of any city's perimeter won't ever be built upon.

The whole point is that El Lay lives above their environmental means and expects good ol' NorCal (...or others) to always fix things for them - such as water - when they get into a pickle.

We're stopping the dysfunctional relationship.

Curious to know the vast differences between Portland, OR and Seattle, WA. I've been to both cities and they seem pretty similar - to my poor faculties. The difference seeming to be that Seattle has better views on the rare occasions one can see further than 100 yds. through the liquefied air.

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Perhaps, Irked, the problem of perception comes from your faculties rather than from the air.

In any case, I doubt that the persona which you project on this site would find any problem with the corruptions of mega-capitalism which infect every aspect of life in Seattle.

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Even though I was born there and grew up there, I am always shocked when I visit Los Angeles at how little green space there is -- how, amid league upon league of unending, uniform suburb there is just nowhere to walk in something resembling a natural environment. It is horrible !! The triumph of money-lusting developers over everything that might be called human !!

Here where I live, there are not only green-belts, but every residential area is chock-a-block with little parks and green pedestrian "linear parkways" between residences so that one may walk almost anywhere in park-like surroundings.
How it must infuriate the developers!! -- I fervently hope !!

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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.

When I lived in El Lay proper I was going to college. I lived on Sunset Plaza Drive in the 2100 block - so I was pretty high up - higher than the smog line - which I could see below and above said line (gray, brown, blue) - imgaine! Blue sky over El Lay - not that those down below could ever see it. The ambient air temp was always 10°F cooler than down on Sunset BL - just five miles down the road.

Anyway, there was a cliff-dropoff across the road from where the house where my partner and I lived. "Somehow" the property was approved by the city of El Lay to be built upon. Never mind that said lots were always deemed "unbuildable" because all it took was to pay-off the right person/people in the El Lay planning department and a developer built three spec homes after dividing the property into three different lots - you know the type: Built on speculation that once completed they would sell at over $1m apiece (in 1989 prices!) because of the foundation pilings had to be drilled deep, deep into the hillside of these cantilevered homes.

This was my very first experience with graft and payola.

Gotta love smELL Lay.

Remember when the Pope visited El Lay in the mid-1980s? I saw from my front livingroom the Pope's plane descending into LAX. (Had to use binoculers, tho'). That's when the Devo guy lived next door to me and the GoGo's drummer lived three doors down.

With binoculars, you could look down onto the tarmac at LAX from my house.

LA actually has their own water supply system that delivers about 482,000 of the 700,000 acre feet of water they want each year from the Eastern Sierras. I think it's really all the other (non-LA) Southern California water districts that are so dependent on Delta water.