internet explorers club | thoughts of an expat angeleno now returned

As I now realize exactly how much time I spent on the East Coast before moving back to Los Angeles—12 years!—the Internet has come to meet me on my few questions about life in LA now.

Question the first: Why Is It So Hard to Get a Great Bagel in California? The New York Times (who absolutely has a complicated relationship with Los Angeles, so perhaps their success here lies in the fact that they focus on Northern California helps here) digs into the expectations of East Coast expats in their quest for bagels, and how a bagel almost can't live up to both those expectations and memories of bagels past.

Question the second: Why is the Los Angeles street grid so strange?

Other Los Angeles-based things I'm enjoying include the LA Public Library's collection of vintage menus.

Melbourne assigned individual trees in the city email addresses so people could report problems, but people started sending notes to the trees themselves instead. These mutant daisies from near Fukashima look like they're out of a science fiction novel.

Chinese workers all wore masks for a day to not have to worry about facial expressions, and the majority of them chose masks of "No Face" from Spirited Away, and I love every second of this.

While I'm a big fan of coffeetivity in terms of ambient noise while I'm working, someone has also come up with an hour-long loop of ambient sounds from the Star Trek: The Next Generation bridge, in case that's more your (warp) speed.

Longish reads: Matt Ortile's essay on why he ended a "perfectly fine" relationship is heartbreaking and a must-read.

etcetera: New Converse! Modernist sandcastles!

—Emily