I suppose that the point of this bit is to rant about a few things, so let's get down to brass tacks. What the hell is wrong with everyone in this damn town? Even though the LA Times loves to talk about how great the entertainment industry has been for the California economy, not everyone in town is directly connected to making movies, no matter what they tell you. Really, we don't need to hear what the clown at your office thinks about this producer's style, that director's technique, or those talent agencies having contract issues. Anyone can get the exact same studio P.R. stuff from any Entertainment Weekly clone. It really doesn't matter what you heard about the set of the next Star Wars, what you think about director's cuts, or which pre-release scripts you think shouldn't be rewritten. Unless you've actually got some clout on a movie production your opinion on movies is no more valid than your opinion on the Rwandan conflict, which is something you probably also got from prime time television.
My other current complaint has to do with the telecommunications industry. Within the last five years it seems like everyone in LA has gotten a pager, e-mail address, voice-mail-call-waiting, and digital cell-phone. Do any of these people really need these things? I'll admit that doctors, pimps, drug salesmen, and maybe parents need to be in contact with certain important people. But does that schmuck two rows back from you really have anything happening in her life that's so important that she needs to be paged in the middle of a movie? And what the hell could some dimwit on the freeway have to talk about that's so important he would value it over driving safely (where he could injure you as easily as himself)? Maybe what really bugs me about these things is the fact that people seem thrilled to adopt all of these great new gadgets and services and crap without asking themselves if they need them. I suppose that if you have to have a cellular phone then a smaller one is more convenient, but is there any point in making a phone smaller than a credit card? Is it worth developing a home theater system that claims to have "better than CD-quality" sound? I doubt many human beings can hear any difference in quality between CD and "better than CD." What's really bugging me here is that since each one is supposed to be infinitely better than its recently obsolete predecessor, I don't think people have any idea about the relative value of any of these things. And we all know what happens to a society without values, don’t we?