We're Not a Robot

Well, hi there! Sorry I've been MIA for a while, but I've been off on location, and also spending some time keeping an eye on Fatty... he's been partying kind of a lot lately. But things are looking up: He met a new girl at a party in San Francisco last night, and he tells me things seem really promising!

But just when you think you're out, they suck you back in with cliche-laden songs and videos from Greek-via-Welsh musicians who certainly are an expert on the Los Angeles way of life. Like this:



Aw, Marina and the Diamonds, really?? You're so gorgeous and talented and gaining so much indie cred via your KCRW airplay and music placements. But you've succumbed to a nasty case of LA cliche-itis with these lyrics. I mean, yikes:

She is a Polish girl in America
Tall tanned hot blonde called Anya
I asked her "Why would you want to be a Hollywood wife?"
"Because I don't want to end up living in a dive on Vine"
I'll do anything for a dime
Looking for the golden lie

Has she seen what apartments rent for on Vine lately? The above stereotype somehow hasn't made its way onto this blog yet, but it's pretty prevalent -- the naive outsider who arrives here and is immediately corrupted by the cesspool of LA. The best and most direct visual representation of this is here:



Oh Axl, stop stressing, I'm sure you'll be just fine. While those TV images probably gave him some nightmares, at least he wasn't accosted by a plethora of visual LA signifiers like poor Marina: really really piss-poor Marilyn and James Dean imitators, cheap Oscar statuettes, etc. are all over her video. The fake LA accent around the "Shakira/Catherine Zeta-Jones" lines doesn't help much either.

Nor do the non-sequiter glittery cheerleader outfits, which she somehow relates to Hollywood in a way I can't even wrap my head around. Then again, if this Bjork-ish mess is this is her other fashion option:

Then I'll say it: Rah, rah, siss-boom bah! At least we have a sports team in the finals.

Hard to Explain

Remember the Next-Big-Things of New York City indie rock circa 2000? (Not to be confused with the Next-Big-Things of Williamsburg indie rock circa 2009.) Every band playing every dive on the Lower East Side was ready for their writeup in Spin (or, more likely, Spin.com, being 2000 and all), and one thing they shared in common was their essential New York-ness, a rough-and-tumble blend of CBGB and Velvet Underground leather-jacketed Television-meets-Ramones cool. Right? I mean you could never see a member of this band packing up and preferring to live in Los Angeles:

Oh wait. Okay, well, these guys are really New York through and through:

Or they were until Strokes leader Julian Casablancas came out here for a bit. As he describes in LA Times:

"...I'm here for like two months, and I've gotta say, man -- I'm starting to kind of get sold on it."...Casablancas fingers the usual suspects for his pro-L.A. attitude. ("I didn't realize weather was such a big thing," he says.)But he also singles out a feeling of newness he says he doesn't get from New
York.

Mmm hmmm. And guess what he's been covering regularly at his shows at the Downtown Palace Theatre:

That's right -- and, surprisingly, that's that song's first appearance on this blog, too. (Yeah, we realize that when you really listen to the song it's about as pro-city as "New York City Cops," but it's become an unofficial anthem so we're gonna roll with it.)

All right, who's next? Paul Banks, we're looking at you.

I Am Trying to Stereotype Your City

Oh good, I was hoping someone would post a YouTube clip of this moment from Tuesday's fantastic sold-out Wilco show at the Wiltern:



That's right, Jeff, you can't stereotype Los Angeles! Not even our BPM. (And it's "Angelenos," by the way.)

I'm So Cliche

Oh, MYNX, you thought you could slip your viral YouTube sensation quietly by me, didn't you?



Ack! I hear "La-la land!" And every other cliche in the book, but you could probably assume you would from the title alone.

It's too bad, because I usually like music that basically sounds like this, but let's get real here, MYNX. You guys met as models on the set of a music video, yet are complaining that people tell each other they "look amazing" or are following fashion trends? Plus my BS meter goes off when I read things like this in their LA Weekly blog interview (by friend of NWiLA and fellow LA native Lina Lecaro):

Ara: My friend went on a date with Angelyne. He's not into blonds, and wasn't up for it, but I begged him to do it. "Do it for me!" I said. Anyway, halfway through the date, he tracked me down, and handed her off to me. We danced together and it was amazing.



Mmm hmmm. Pics or it didn't happen, dude.

And, in what should be a shock to no one, guess what else they bring up in the interview?

[Lina:] Satire, social commentary or pure celebration of excess?

Holly: It's definitely equal parts. We love all the excess and glamour of the L.A. lifestyle, but we're not blind to the flip side of that. We celebrate that too.

That's right! My favorite cliche, LA's Dark Underbelly didn't make it into the video itself, but it didn't take long for MYNX to let it rear its head again. So I thank you very much for one thing besides your catchy indie-electro-dance tones, MYNX: I've been saving up appropriate underbelly-related jpg's in anticipation of such a reoccurrence, and haven't gotten to use one in a while. Enjoy!

Cliche Writer's Blues

Oh, yeesh, I hated this song, Soul Coughing's "Screenwriter's Blues," back when it was first released in 1994, and somehow managed to erase it completely from my mind until a mention in today's LA Times (sorry no link -- it was in their Calendar section's apparently non-web-worthy "Underrated/Overrated" column).

The Times has the band, and particularly this song, listed as "Underrated," which is only really applicable if you're me and forgot how valuable its inclusion in a blog about LA cliches would be:

Exits to freeways twisted like knots on fingers.

Jewels cleaving skin between breasts.

Your Cadillac breathes four hundred horses over blue lines

You are going to Reseda to make love to a model from Ohio

whose real name you don't know.

You spin like the cadillac was overturning down a cliffon television

And the radio is on and the radioman is speaking

and the radioman says women were a curse.

So men built Paramount Studios.

And men built Columbia Studios.

And men built Los Angeles.

It is 5 am and you are listeningto Los Angeles.

And the radioman says it is a beautiful night out there!

And the radioman says Rock and Roll lives!

And the radioman says it is a beautiful night out there in Los Angeles.

You live in Los Angeles and you are going to Reseda;

we are all in some way or another going to Reseda someday to die.

And the radioman laughs becausethe radioman fucks a model too.

Gone savage for teenagers with automatic weapons and boundless love.

Gone savage for teenagers who are aesthetically pleasing, in other words, fly.

Los Angeles beckons the teenagers to come to her on buses;

Los Angeles loves love.

It is 5 am and you are listening to Los Angeles.

I am going to Los Angeles to build a screenplay

about lovers who murder each other.

I am going to Los Angeles to see my own name on a screen,

five feet long and luminous.

As the radioman says it is 5am and the sun has charred the other side of the world

and come back to us and painted the smoke over our heads an imperial violet.

It is 5 am and you are listening to Los Angeles.

You are listening...

You are listening...

You are listening...

You are listening......to Los Angeles.

I'm unconvinced that M. Doughty's prior incarnation as the NYC-based Knitting Factory doorman would provide him with the deep insights about Los Angeles that he's professing here.
We get it: The name "Reseda" sounds like a grim, soulless place in the same way that say, "Soul Coughing" sounds like a pretentious faux-beatnik band, but it's really no more a place where people go to die than, say... well, any suburb or city in America.

Let's see what else we've got: References to car culture and driving, we sexualize our cars, everyone's a model, the models are so fake you don't even know their names, gorgeous young people flock here (I love the use of "fly," which didn't sound any cooler then than it does now), everyone's here to work in movies, everyone's here to be famous. Where's mention of our dark underbelly?

Then again, according to Wikipedia, the band broke up over years of feuding over songwriting credits. Because wanting "to see your own name on a screen" is such an LA thing, right, M.?

Open Letter to Kanye West

Dear Kanye:

A few people have alerted me to this track from your new album, 808s and Heartbreak. It's a fairly wordy song with a lot of lyrics to scroll through, so I'll just post the relevant part:

You spoiled little LA girl

You´re just an LA girl

You spoiled little LA girl

You´re just an LA girl

You spoiled little LA girl

You´re just an LA girl (you need to stop it now)

You spoiled little LA girl

You´re just an LA girl (you need to stop it now)

Thanks, Kanye. I have no idea if your ex-fiancee was particularly spoiled or not, although I never saw her storming fashion awards shows bawling that she was an award's rightful winner. But regardless, our city is a diverse, beautiful city, and shouldn't be treated as an adjective connoting spoiled behavior. Since you live here, you should know that's just a done-before stereotype. Again, let's see if this works when you substitute another city:

You're just a Portland girl

You spoiled little Portland girl

Meh. See what I mean? It's a tired cliche, and you don't seem to be about tired cliches, so stop it. Plus I'm guessing your lady didn't live this lifestyle before she met you, so perhaps this:

You're just a Chicago boy

You spoiled little Chicago boy

...might be more appropriate. Oh, and also?

That was done before too. Kthxbai.

Love,

Nobody Walks in LA

In the Warm California Sun

I know, it looks weirdly Photoshopped to me too, but it's a real photo of an old race car canopy out in an apparently-shadowless blazing sun of the Mojave Desert (accompanied by heat-impervious dog). It comes from a recent New York Times article on a trip taken with musician Ry Cooder and a bunch of hot-rodders to the outskirts of Los Angeles, intended to promote Cooder's most recent project, a three-album trilogy and novel which take place in the area.

The article's pleasing enough, even if the New York-centric Times staffer engages in more than a tad of gee-whiz marveling over the quaintness of El Mirage and Palmdale -- I half expected him to praise the damn fine coffee and cherry pie during their stop at a museum in Trona. But my favorite part is the essay by Mr. Jalopy, one of the participants in the trip, on his Dinosaurs and Robots blog:

There is the Los Angeles that people imagine of red carpet premieres,Botox lunches, velvet rope nightclubs, Venice bodybuilders and tony boutiques. It is not a fable. That is real. Or, at least, it physically exists.

Then, there is the Los Angeles that I know. Aerospace surplus hardware stores, smoky and ashtray-less Koreatown English hunt club bars in crumbling hotel basements, perfect beer buzz lunches at the Farmer's Market in filtered sunlight, the wild dogs of Pacoima, sprawling thrift stores, trolling junkyards for old diaries and Polaroids, the drag races at Pomona, chrome plating shops, backyards stacked with 300 bicycles, gold miners eager to show their biggest nuggets, fishing for carp in the Los Angeles River, optimists taking over art museums, the nicad battery selection at Electronic City, the metal patination case at Industrial Metal Supply, Kit Kraft Hobby, the gem vault at the Natural History Museum, the szechuan peppercorns of Alhambra, the churlish bartenders at Hop Louie, the sneaker shops of Little Tokyo, the imported coldcuts at Monte Carlo Deli, the Japanese garden on the roof of the New Otani Hotel, the bicycle swap at the Encino Velodrome, the DDR kids at the Santa Monica Pier, the mustard at Philipes, the dimsum carts of Monterey Park, the carnitas at Carrillos, the buffalo at Hart Park, the Kris Special at the Waystation, the netsuke room at LACMA, the Remington Rolling Block at the Backwoods Inn, the coffee shop at the LA Police Academy, the abandoned restaurant with leather walls at Union Station, the yardage of the Garment District, the abandoned fire station in the Toy District with the quartersawn oak lockers viewable through the crack in the door, the first two rows of lowrider history at the Pomona Auto Swap, Abe Lincoln's hat at the Huntington Library, the camillia forest of Descanso Garden,
the bolt room of Roscoe Hardware that is hidden in a kitchen remodeling home center, the genius at the Museum of Jurassic Technology, the chile pepper booth at the Grand Central Market, sneaking to the top balcony of the Bradbury Building, the threadbare and dented Variety Arts Center, the orange groves of the 126 and secret utility salvage yard in the northeast San Fernando Valley.

Ry and I share this Los Angeles and it was fun to show it to Lawrence. He did us proud. Los Angeles tries to throw itself away everyday but we are still gold prospectors, hot rodders and guitarists. Our fundamental awesomeness will not be impinged.

Not only does Mr. Jalopy acknowledge our fundamental awesomeness without first being called out on the carpet about it, but he seems like a super fun guy to hang out with as well. (Thanks to BoingBoing for turning us on to this.)

Lemmings

Oh phew, I was worried that my favorite cliche, "LA's dark underbelly," was falling out of favor since I hadn't seen it in a few weeks. But everyone's favorite crying, car-living American Idol wannabe, Josiah Leming, revives it in today's LA Times:

Despite his success, Leming feels out of place in Los Angeles. "[L.A.] confuses me," he said. "It's all, like, kinda glitz and glam, and I don't dig it. It's like, it's beautiful on the face, but there's nothing underneath. It's money and greed and sex appeal. And just no core values.

Perhaps a kid who, according to the Times, "left his ailing mother, out-of-work stepfather and eight siblings in Morristown, Tenn." because auditioning for American Idol was more important might not be the best person to carpetbag over here and get all judgey -- not to mention his parroting of tired old Los Angeles stereotypes.

Life in the Cliched Lane

There aren't many days that go by without having at least one LA stereotype thrust at me, and today's no exception as I innocently turned on the radio for an hour and caught the new Eagles of Death Metal single, "Wannabe in LA." Here's the video, which is visually kind of cool:



But what the heck are the Eagles going on about? I can't find the lyrics online yet, but he repeats "I came to LA to make rock and roll / Along the way I had to sell my soul." Have the Eagles of Death Metal ever actually seen the Eagles of Death Metal? Singer Jesse Hughes tours around the world looking like a trucker Freddy Mercury and playing what Josh Homme calls "bluegrass slide guitar mixed with stripper drum beats and Canned Heat vocals." That's what passes for selling your soul these days? Sounds like he's doing exactly what he wants to do. Oh wait... you're supposed to say that if you're talking about Los Angeles.

You know what is an egregious sin in the music world though? Being unoriginal:



I'm just sayin'.

I'm So 'Board With the USA

Here's a 2007 single by Collective Soul called "Hollywood" that, if your musical tastes are anything like mine, you had no idea existed until just now. It's really not the end of the world as far as Hollywood cliches either:

Oh summer
It never leaves your face
You’ve got the sunshine bright-eyed California cotton candy taste

Yeah Hollywood
You know I love you more than one man should
Yeah Hollywood
Well kiss me, kiss me good

Oh pretty pretty stars
They love to sparkle for you

You’ve got the hip locked laidback animated groove attitude

Yeah Hollywood
You know I love you more than one man should
Yeah Hollywood
Well kiss me, kiss me good
Yeah Hollywood
You know I love you more than one man should
Yeah Hollywood
Well kiss me, kiss me good
[guitars]
[return of poppy riff]
Yeah Hollywood
You know I love you more than one man should
Yeah Hollywood
Well kiss me, kiss me good
Yeah Hollywood
You know I love you more than one man should
Yeah Hollywood
Well kiss me, kiss me good
Well kiss me, kiss me good
Well kiss me, kiss me good
Well kiss me, kiss me gooood
Well kiss me, kiss me gooood
Well kiss me, kiss me good
Yeah Hollywood
Yeah Hollywood

Of course that's because there are so few actual lyrics other than "Yeah Hollywood" and "Kiss me good" that there isn't room for many stereotypes anyway. We've got stars, being laid back, sunshine... meh, whatever, we've seen worse. Here's the video:

Again, it's kind of bland and inoffensive, much like the song itself. But what struck me as noteworthy here is the visuals feature a strong return of the "billboard" cliche. Is that something people really say a lot about Los Angeles? That we're just so full of billboards? More so than, say, Times Square or Vegas or other billboard-y places?

Apparently it's not just a cliche, but it's true to the extent that we don't just even have regular billboards here, but there's even a black market for illegal billboards, of which there are currently a whopping 4,000 in the city. Plus hundreds of regular billboards are being converted to the moving digital Blade Runner-esque ones. There's even an anti-billboard activist group called the Coalition to End Billboard Blight.

So, okay, I'll accept it and "billboards" are now officially a Los Angeles cliche. It's my own fault I haven't picked up on it anyway, since I blithely cruise around concentrating on the road and ignoring pretty much all the billboards in town.

Well, almost all. I know, I know, these are quite possibly the absolute worst LA cliche of all, but if the Coalition to End Billboard Blight tries to put Angelyne out of business, they're gonna have some serious 'splaining to do.

Put a Fork in It

The Airborne Toxic Event are an LA-based band with one song that I really like, and a new album which Pitchfork thinks I won't like much at all, hence the 1.6 out of 10 review they recently gave it. I haven't heard the whole album, so I don't have an opinion on their other songs, but I sure have something to say about this review:

The Airborne Toxic Event is an album that's almost insulting in its unoriginality; while the sound most outsiders attribute to Los Angeles has been marginalized to Metal Skool and the average customer at the Sunset Boulevard Guitar Center, TATE embodies the Hollywood ideal of paying lip service to the innovations of mavericks while trying to figure out how to reduce it to formula.

Oh my. Reviewer Ian Cohen manages to achieve a truly amazing feat: He admits that what he terms the "outsider" perspective of LA is far from reality, yet in the very same sentence he delivers up a big fat cliche about "Hollywood ideals." Quite ironic for someone who's judging others for being formulaic, isn't it?

Fortunately, the Airborne Toxic Event were smart enough to see this too, and posted an open letter to Cohen calling him out on their website:

...It also seems to have very little to do with us. Much of your piece reads less like a record review and more like a diatribe against a set of ill-considered and borderline offensive preconceptions about Los Angeles. Los Angeles has an extremely vibrant blogging community, Silver Lake is a very close-knit rock scene. We are just one band among many. (And by the way, L.A. does have a flagship indie rock band: they’re called Silversun Pickups). We cut our teeth at Spaceland and the Echo and have nothing to do with whatever wayward ideas you have about the Sunset Strip.

That's what we're saying, Airborne Toxic Event. You are now the official soundtrack to Nobody Walks in LA, at least until we have to take someone to task for writing that you can really hear the sound of angel wings in Castledoor.

Drinking Hennessy With Morrissey

Our good friend Lyndsey Parker is not only a native Angeleno like us, but a kindred spirit of Nobody Walks in LA. She writes the notes-from-the-trenches LA Woman column for British music magazine/website NME.com, and points us toward an edition from a few months back in which she takes on the anti-LA lyrical sentiments found in so many songs about our city:

Whether it's Axl Rose warning that this sinful city will chew up/spit out all the hapless innocents who migrate here by the busload ("Welcome To The Jungle"); the Decemberists singing of the "ocean's garbled vomit" and the "smell of burnt cocaine" ("Los Angeles, I'm Yours"); Death Cab For Cutie questioning, "Is this the city of angels or demons?" ("Why You'd Want To Live Here"); Public Enemy declaring, "Burn Hollywood Burn!"; or even Madonna sharing cautionary casting-couch tales in "Hollywood"...well, it's not difficult to find a good song about L.A., but it's nearly impossible to find one that has anything good to say about the place I call home.

To read the rest, including a sighting of a pro-Los Angeles anthem in its natural habitat -- an occurrence so rare it actually inspired that week's entire column -- click here.

Indie-Yuppies Vs. LA, Part II

Why do the indie-yuppies hate us so? I'd been waffling a bit on whether the Decemberists' 2003 track, "Los Angeles, I'm Yours," really counts as cliched -- mainly because Colin Meloy's language is so flowery, I can barely understand what the hell he's talking about. But a couple people suggested it for this blog, and from what I can tell, he certainly doesn't like us:

There is a city by the sea

A gentle company

I don't suppose you want to

And as it tells its sorry tale

In harrowing detail

Its hollowness will haunt you

Its streets and boulevards

Orphans and oligarchs it hears

A plaintive melody

Truncated symphony

An ocean's garbled vomit on the shore

Los Angeles, I'm yours

Oh ladies, pleasant and demure

Sallow-cheeked and sure

I can see your undies

And all the boys you drag about

An empty fellow found

From Saturdays to Mondays

You hill and valley crowd

Hanging your trousers down at heel

This is the realest thing

As ancient choirs sing

A dozen blushing cherubs wheel above

Los Angeles I love

Oh what a rush of ripe elan

Languor on divans

Dalliant and dainty

But oh, the smell of burnt cocaine

The dolor and decay

It only makes me cranky

Oh great calamity

Ditch of iniquity and tears

How I abhor this place

Its sweet and bitter taste

Has left me wretched, retching on all fours

Los Angeles, I'm yours

Next time tell us how you really feel, Colin. Now there are indeed a few tried-and-true LA stereotypes in here, mainly the cocaine and the hollowness and the iniquity. But most of it just adds up to a general dump of somewhat nonsensical anti-Los Angeles-isms, from the dueling barf references to the affected pronunciation of "Los Ange-LEES" (I'm surprised he doesn't use the hard "g") to the sallow-cheeked underwear-exposing ladies having sex while cherubs sing -- he says that like it's a bad thing. It's all very evocative, but when you get down to it, he's just kind of kvetching without any actual criticism or analysis or even remotely realistic description of our city, let alone evidence that he has any real knowledge of it. And we're the ones who are "hollow"?

Of course, just four years later the Decemberists were welcomed warmly to LA to headline the 17,400-seat Hollywood Bowl, accompanied by the LA Philharmonic. I have to admit I've been called a lot of things in my time, but if someone described me as "an ocean's garbled vomit," I'm not sure I'd be so forgiving.

Ain't No Cliche Bad Enough

Ashford and Simpson don't really get their due around some parts for writing amazing songs like "Ain't No Mountain High Enough," and are instead remembered more for their '80s synth-cheezy hit "Solid" since their names are attached to that one as performers. But they probably should have kept their names off this:

Got off the plane where they say it don't rain
Thought to myself 'this is for me'
Oooh, look all around and everywhere the streets were empty
Checked in the hotel to unpack my things
Gotta get out and find some company
And then it hit me! Ooh

Don't walk around, I heard somebody say
In Hollywood they do things a different way
Don't you be caught cruising on a sunny day
Cause nobody walks in LA
Nobody walks in LA

I had some dreams
I was gonna crack the scene
Thought anywhere I could survive
And there must be a special place
Where the beautiful people hide
Began to wonder what was I doing wrong
Had to pick it out and tell it to me
Then it hit me

Don't walk around, I heard somebody say
In Hollywood they do things a different way
Don't you be caught walking on a sunny day
Cause nobody walks in LA
Nobody walks

I've been around and I like New York and Chinatown
Where rivers of people seem to flow
And being here under the sky so blue
What do you do?
What do you do?

I've been around and I don't understand this town
You got to know somebody
Or be on the party list
And if you're not a big star
You won't be missed

But the most important rule
No matter what games they play

(Fadeout on chorus)

This is the Ashford and Simpson song that Steve Buscemi's date in Ghost World should have played to really send him running. And sure, that film was supposedly set in a nameless Everytown, USA, but we Angelenos know the truth -- its cover was blown the second Enid's bus drove by Mario's Peruvian on Rossmore and Melrose. And all anyone did in that entire film was walk around.

The Thrill is Gone

Two of the all-time classic ways to stereotype Los Angeles are:

1. Band from (England/Ireland/somewhere else with dank weather) blow through town for a show or recording session, think they now know everything there is to know about LA and are compelled to write a song about it; and

2. Some variation on "Los Angeles is such a beautiful place... but darkness lies underneath." (Insert music: Bum bum buuuuuum!)

Enter Irish group the Thrills, with this track from their 2003 album (I know, we're catching up) So Much for the City, called "Hollywood Kids."

Well they're sure keen on dancin'

Those Hollywood kids, those Hollywood kids got it made.

When they act, big doors open.

Those Hollywood kids, those Hollywood kids got it made.

So let's party, Dustin Hoffman.

Those Hollywood kids, those Hollywood kids got it made.

Oh how the sun sets on my Boulevard

But leaves quite a shadow to fill

Oh how the sun sets on my Boulevard

But leaves such a shadow to fill

Oh the death of a fast life.

Those Hollywood stars, those Hollywood stars got to pay.

That's some will you've been drinkin.

Those Hollywood stars, those Hollywood stars got to pay.

Oh how the sun sets on my Boulevard

But leaves quite a shadow to fill

Oh how the sun sets on my Boulevard

But leaves such a shadow to fill

So look closer, do you still think that,

Those Hollywood kids, those Hollywood kids got it made

Take heed, Dustin Hoffman! If I see one more photo of you stumbling out of Hyde, your next production may not be able to insure you... bum bum buuuuum!

Perhaps the Thrills shouldn't have settled down, hanging around in a one horse town, but being sheltered is no excuse to perpetuate this kind of repetitive cliche. I know, they're obsessed with Southern California, but is the above based on their actual experience, or just what they've heard people tell them? Are we to believe that the Thrills genuinely thought "Hollywood kids got it made," but then got accepted into said kids' inner circle where they gradually, spontaneously, and with no preconceptions at all discovered that darkness lies underneath?

Of course not. So Much For the City is actually the result of a summer-long recording session spent down in San Diego -- close enough to hop up on Amtrak to catch a show or hit an occasional bar in LA, but with not nearly enough proximity to truly engage with this city and all it has to offer. Next time I have a layover in Ireland, I'll come back with a neat little ditty about some leprechauns drinking Guinness, and how their shamrock patch may not be all it's cracked up to be.

I can't really blame the Thrills, though, as what they really needed was a better tour guide out here. It would have cost just five bucks for all five Thrills to grab tacos from that truck by the Echo, and that would have been a real revelation.