For those of you who don’t know this, Hollywood is the ghetto…. or, if not the ghetto, it can at least be casually described as ghetto. As in, “Yo Jay-Jay, them shoes is so ghetto!”

As such, one of my new favorite pasttimes is to observe the tourists that come here, starry looks in their eyes, to be met not with Julia Roberts and Brad Pitt sightings, but with transvestite prostitutes and random screaming people.

Oh, and the Hollywood sign.

Which, by the way, used to actually spell-out Hollywoodland for the Hollywoodland Real Estate Group. But I digress…

I wouldn’t call the part of Hollywood I work in (within literal spitting distance of Hollywood Boulevard) particularly dangerous, but it is still hilarious to me to watch family tourists walking out of the Holliday Inn parking lot in full fanny-packed regalia expecting to be hit in the face with glamour, and instead see a homeless guy peeing on the sidewalk (theoretically, of course, mom and dad). I suppose it’s appropriate for a made-up city based on made-up movies, and built on made-up dreams to have a fairly flimsy fake facade (fairlyflimsyfakefacadefairlyflimsyfakefacadefairlyflimsyfakefacade) only barely covering it up.

Not to say that the Walk of Fame isn’t something to look at… it’s just that posing for the press isn’t the only reason the stars get dropped of directly at the Arclight’s red carpet instead of walking from the parking lot.

Beloved Japanese racehorse, Haruurara, is retiring with a record of 0-113
My earlier post about watching the road is apparently part of an intentional campaign