Hate New York City, it’s cold and it’s damp

Tonight: dinner at Typhoon in Los Angeles. Appetizer: crickets. And I don’t mean like cucumbers cut in the shape of crickets or any such cutesy chi-chi crap like that; I mean we ate a big plate of deep-fried motherfucking insects. These were little bitty crickets, each one about an inch long or so, deep fried in butter and oil, with a big mound of shoestring garlic fries. After we tried the crickets, we pushed the potatoes aside and fished around with chopsticks at the bottom of the bowl for the rest of the crickets, and we munched them like popcorn. You’ll try crickets for the Fear Factor value, but you’ll stay with ’em for the taste. Crickets: the other other other white meat.

Basically, anything in the world deep-fried with enough butter and garlic and salt is bound to be pretty yummy.

We went to go see the opening night of a black-box production of “That May Well Be True,” a new play by Jay Reiss, who is one of the guys behind “Twenty-Fifth Annual Putnam County Spelling Bee.” At the post party, a drunken industry something-or-other dude named Scott pulled me aside. “You’re an actor?”

“At times,” I said. “Sometimes I write.”

“Anything for TV?”

I rolled my eyes. “Well, I wrote one season for this tiny UPN show you’ve never heard of called Seriously –”

“First rule in L.A.,” said Scott, waving his drink at me. “Never roll your eyes! Hay!” Scott collared all the actors in the show and brought them over to me. “This is John from San Francisco. He’s thinking of coming down here and being an actor. What would you tell him? To encourage him to move down to here from San Francisco? As professional actors? What do you tell him?”

The actors looked a little pained. “Don’t you fucking take any work from me,” said one.