Our congenial host Colin has invited me to contribute my observations while drinking coffee around Los Angeles, and while I'm fairly ignorant about coffee, I do enjoy watching the people around me while I'm working on my laptop.

Which leads me to the subject of vanity, Hollywood's #1 export and arguably the primary driver of recent U.S. foreign policy.

This morning I got my coffee fix at a place in West Hollywood.

While perusing the day's headlines on Bush's press conference yesterday --
essentially, Babbling Alcoholic Who Thinks He Talks To God Reiterates Known Falsehoods -- I listened in as two hardbodied twentysomethings in designer sunglasses broke the ice on what was apparently a blind date...
by reading lines from a bad TV medical drama. They had a copy of the script because the multiply-biceped guy with carefully mussed-up hair knew one of the producers.

So I got to feel all superior intellectually, if inferior physically -- a combination of emotions I'd estimate 95 percent of humankind would share in this place -- while enjoying the raw display of talentless superficial vanity.

So that's what I was gonna write about... and then I logged on and saw the picture of myself Colin posted (taken backstage during production of an episode of the TV show CSI I co-wrote), and thought, "whoa -- the light must have hit my head funny... I'm not that bald, am I?"

So I started to write... and apparently I seem to feel the need to announce that
a) I'm not that bald, and
b) I used to work at CSI.

Funny. This entry was gonna be all about vanity and name-dropping... and sure enough, it was.

Yeesh. I need more coffee now.