I know there's nothing less exciting than talking about the weather, but since everyone's asking me, I will.

Yes. It's raining in LA. Contrary to popular opinion and that Albert Hammond song, it does rain in Southern California from time to time. Yes, it's been raining rather steadily and rather hard for a couple weeks now. There are breaks in it, but never long enough to get the damn puddles off the sidewalks -- but I'm one of approximately 26 Angelenos who uses sidewalks, so I realize this is a minor complaint.

I don't mind the rain. It's novel to have water in the LA River. What annoys me about the rain is not the water coming out of the sky, but the fact that all of SoCal seems totally ill-equipped to deal with it.
1) Everyone's bitching and moaning as though Noah had just told them to gather two of each animal.
2) LA people never learned to drive in the rain, so the freeways are full of accidents, tow trucks, cops, and nervous Nellies driving 8 MPH.
3) No one in LA seems to own proper rain gear. Hey, see item 1)...think the rain would suck less if you bought a friggin' raincoat or even an umbrella? You people all seem to have umbrellas for when it's SUNNY, when you ought to just be wearing a hat and/or sunscreen...
4) As Owen would say, Infrastructure By Billy. The drainage is terrible, and for crying out loud, we've got a drought on but this isn't going to help much because no one thought to build a way to *save* the water when it does rain. It mostly flows out to the ocean. Duh.

I clearly live in a different LA -- or on a different psychological planet -- than the people making this out to be big news. The LA Times says the city itself got 5 inches of rain over the weekend, so obviously I'm fine. Apparently the big problems are in the mountains and canyons, which were arguably never fit for human development/housing in the first place. For once, it's the rich people in the hills who have a problem, not the rest of us.