Signing up to "Nextdoor Los Feliz" is a mixed blessing. It's good for swapping info about, say, where to find a good window cleaner. It's a virtual poster board for lost and found cats and dogs (and on one occasion recently, a rather pretty pig). It's a clearing house for people who want to get rid of their perfectly respectable garden furniture or sideboard. It's where people ask - as a message popped up on my screen right now - why has there been a helicopter hovering over a certain intersection for twenty minutes? Or was that a gunshot I heard?
But it's also the site of much paranoia. "Suspicious black Honda with tinted windows on Amesbury." "Suspicious man with backpack - maybe casing houses - on Cromwell" (I'm not saying these alerts have no utility value, although occasionally I suspect them being planted by local security firms who want to make us sign up for their patrol). Yesterday witnessed a further ramping-up of anxiety: someone who though that a street's trees were being poisoned, because the leaves were all turning brown.
I've got news for that person. Last week the temperature went up to 110F! The sun was hot! It is very Hot and Dry. Leaves Die in these conditions. I'm usually posting pictures of this table top with dead leaves in January, when they've fallen off in Los Angeles's very belated autumn. Yes, it's weird in July, but that's why.
And yes - that is an apple from a USC University Club sandwich box. It's been there for weeks - no . critter has tried to eat it; no sign of decay. That confirms all my suspicions about those apples.
Also - I can still hear a helicopter.
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