Merry everything everywhere. Amazing how much effort people put into decorating their houses for Christmas, especially around these parts. Slightly surreal, having an inflated snowman under your glissening palmtree. Fot Christmas we went down to the place with the best weather anywhere: Newport beach. I've been there twice and each time it was gray, chilly and rainy, but I've been told that when I'm not there it's extraordinarily pleasant and beautiful. A particularely nice touch for the holiday was the powersurge that sounded convincingly like *THE* terror attack everybody was waiting for. It apparently was caused by a tree brushing against the wires or something. We left the scene just in time: shortly afterwards the houses got flooded and electricity went off pretty permanently in that region. That's just Christmas, can't wait for the New Years events!

One more for christmas and BSE: Welcome to the MEATRIX!

Saw Les Triplettes de Belleville. Very interesting animated feature. Reminds me of what movies could be. I recommend.

Finally, the moment everyone was waiting for has come: the first case of Mad Cow disease in the USA (the first CONFIRMED case that is). Merry Christmas everyone!

Saw 28 days later. Funny.

We bought the album. They have a website also:The Shaggs

LA adventures are continuing: Traffic, traffic, bad traffic, freeways and attempts to go to yoga classes to counteract the effects of hours-of-sitting-on-your-butt-in-the-car and most of the time not going, because there is no parking.
But overall, LA is cool, I met interesting people I'll talk more about later and I saw a play called "The Shaggs" which was very entertaining, a little too long for my taste. It's about 3 sisters from Freemont whose father forces them to be in a rockband. Apparently they really existed and their album was at one point voted the worst rock'n'roll album ever recorded. Played at the Ford theatre, very interesting location.