Jessica Reaves of the Chicago Tribune does a good job in her fun and funny travel piece on Malibu. (And I'm not just saying that because she gave such a nice shout-out to this blog.) Her take on my beloved city stings a bit but I'm afraid she got it mostly right - we're a place of dramatic opposites and not quite like the rest of the world...

This is, after all, a 27-mile stretch of almost unbearably beautiful and ecologically delicate coastline, lined with unspeakably expensive mansions, dotted with shopping malls hawking $80 T-shirts, populated by unreasonably wealthy people with little or no taste and less wealthy people with more taste but less power. It is, in other words, unlike the world most of us inhabit and the quintessential American fantasy: perfect weather, attractive people and capitalism run amok.