>Listening to traffic reports is pretty fun around the LA area for that
>reason--you can tell that some of the reporters actually do have fun
>with the names.

Many years ago (as regular readers may recall), I took a job that required me to move to California, and since I had a while before I needed to report for my first day, I drove out. At the Arizona-California border, there were two things of note: a California Department of Food and Agriculture checkpoint where I was literally asked whether I had any fruit to declare, and a sign encouraging me to tune my car's radio to some AM frequency or another if I desired more information about the state I was entering.

So I did - there's not a lot else to do on I-40 between Needles and Barstow (as in "We were somewhere around Barstow on the edge of the desert when the drugs began to take hold") - and discovered that the station at said frequency, presumably some kind of tourist bureau or Chamber of Commerce thing, was playing a highly romanticized history of California on an endless loop. It was narrated by the late Ricardo Montalbán, who was the kind of man of whom it's said one could listen to him read the phone book - particularly a phone book covering a region with a lot of Spanish names in it. Just the way he said "California" was mildly magical.

--G.
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Benjamin D. Hutchins, Co-Founder, Editor-in-Chief, & Forum Mod
Eyrie Productions, Unlimited http://www.eyrie-productions.com/
zgryphon at that email service Google has
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