Again, an item in Ye Olde Facebook Newsfeed set me to thinking. The blurb below was posted by an old schoolmate of mine. I have anonymized her profile picture, and (obviously) blurred out her name. She still lives in the San Francisco Bay Area, where we grew up; I (in case you didn’t know) now live in Los Angeles.
I haven’t taken the quiz, so I don’t know what questions my friend answered. She was puzzled by the result, so I’ve endeavored to develop more in-depth questionnaire to determine how temperamentally well-suited one is for L.A. residency. So here it is: Derek’s L.A.dar, v 0.5.
The LA-dar
No cheating – be honest with yourself. If you aren’t, your results won’t be accurate and you’ll have to go through life burdened by the weight of never knowing how LA you are. So just relax and breathe into it. No one else even has to know what you get. Unless you tell them… which would be kind of LA of you. (one point for each yes) (subtract one point if yes to either of these) (one point each) (one point each) (two points each for both of the above) (one point each) (if yes, subtract one point) (one point each for the remaining questions…) Count up your score as indicated above. Then, lastly, subtract one point for each thing in the test you googled due to your lack of any idea what it was. ___________
1 If you have been both an agent and a manager at the same time, you don’t get extra points. Not because you’re not LA – because you’re a lowlife asshole. My test, I make the rules.
Let’s get a sampling of scores, and then I can figure out the grading curve. Also, post comments and let me know about stuff I’ve left out! The LA-dar is only a beta, after all.
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I got ten points:
1) Yoga and cellphone (2 pts)
2) Politics and Orange County (2 pts)
3) Employed in another capacity in the entertainment industry (1 pt)
4) All EXCEPT tanning salons (+5,-1 = 4 pts)
5) Declined social invites because of parking situation (1 pt)
So, where’s my LA apartment?
I think you shorted yourself by one point: in #4 there are six one-point questions, and the one -1 question. So if you’re a yes on all of them except the fake-bake parlors, that would be five points.
So, 11 points. Eleven?!? Out of a possible 48? …Your L.A. apartment is in Portland.
OK, if you have your heart set on it being somewhere in L.A., then it’s a treehouse in Topanga with a hemp doormat that says “This One Goes Up to Eleven.”
Lolz! Right on. Topanga, here I come!
ummm. i took your quiz.. and received the all-time high score of 9. NINE!
where oh where should i be living?
1. yoga, iphone (2pts)
2. coyotes, precipitation, orange county, overcast skies (4pts)
3. listed on IMDB, filmmaker (2pts)
4. aggressive driver, ask about ingredients, let people merge (1pt)
5. 0 pts
I think the results so far suggest that the LA-dar is has more in common with gaydar than my flippant wordplay even considered. Hypothesis: similar to gaydar, an average, not overly-LA person will possess some — but not a great many — characteristics that qualify as typically “LA.” What the LA-dar does is detect the outstanding cases. Someone scoring higher than say, 20 or so would then be a person about whom you would say, “[he/she] is so LA.”