Welcome to Los Angeles, where even the homeless dream of making it big.

Actually, this is Santa Monica. The shopping cart belongs to a homeless woman. She was standing about 50 feet away, talking on her cell phone. (Talking to her agent, perhaps?) You can see that she has her 8″x10″ headshot ready because you never know when you’ll be discovered.

Hooray for Hollywood.

A random encounter with a fire-wielding man in Koreatown.

There are numerous businesses nearby. Plus an alley or two. Any one of them are better choices than letting the boy take aim at passing cars in broad daylight.

Speaking of poor choices, I walk past two young teenage mothers (13 or 14-ish) pushing baby strollers. The younger girl has a blanket draped over her baby’s stroller. “Why you coverin’ yo baby like that?” asks the older girl.

“Shoot, I don’t want mah baby lookin’ like no nigga.”

The two Ebonics-speaking Hispanic teenage moms giggle and laugh. I move on.

A 450-pound woman waddles across the street. She’s got a baby in one hand, and a cigarette in the other. She takes her time crossing, but quickly puffs away. Her massive flabby arms are covered with random tattoos, one of which is a Playboy bunny.

Did she get kicked out of the Playboy Mansion for gaining 350 pounds and popping out a fat baby with a one-way ticket to diabetes? Unlikely. One of the neighborhood gangs commandeered the Playboy logo years ago. Baby daddy is probably a local cholo boy.

I’m done with my tour. I walk into the usual Korean joint and order the usual. A chat with the waitress reveals my Korean is getting worse. Though it seems my Spanish is getting better–I understood most of what that woman said about her little boy needing to go. I think soon, maybe, I’ll know enough to tell her that she needs to work on her parenting skills. But then I tell myself to forget it. This is Koreatown.

Kim Ja Moon wasn’t about to let two men rob her Oak Park dry cleaners in broad daylight, even if one had a gun.

When the men, twice her size, demanded money from Kim, 66, she refused.

When they ordered Kim — all 4-foot-10 and 100 pounds of her — and her husband to the rear of the business, she said she stood her ground.

Finally, when they ran off, she chased them — and the cops nabbed one of them.

Did I ever tell you that Korean women are no joke? Too bad she didn’t have a gun. But she did have some fine parting words for the suspects:

“He [should] study,” she said. “Get out [of jail], he find a job.”

“Don’t go to school, no job,” she added.

Well said, Mrs. Kim. Well said. Too bad your words fall on deaf ears.

It’s a novel idea. I wonder if it will catch on.

The first time I saw this bus bench, I thought, “WTF?” But the more I thought about it, the more I thought: More people ought to embrace this surgery, because there are some folks who gots some jacked-up looking feet that need fixing.

I am, by no means, endorsing Sean Ravael on Manchester Blvd to be the one to fix your feet, if you indeed have some ugly hooves. I don’t know the guy and I ain’t familiar with his work. But if the feet on the advertisement are a result of his handy work, I’m pretty impressed.

Then again, maybe those feet looked good to begin with. They should have used a before and after comparison. But come to think of it, if I saw some Hobbit feet on this bus bench, my commute would have been ruined.

This is my latest iPhone addiction. It took me a while to get through the instructions. They were written in Engrish.

Once you get past the instructions, the game is fairly simple: You’re a zombie in a crowd full of humans. Everyone in the crowd must be turned into zombies before you can progress to the next level. In other words, you must infect everyone with whatever your undead ass has been infected with.

Controls are easy: you can use an onscreen joystick, or the iPhone’s accelerometer, to move your zombie. Move your zombie towards any victim, and your zombie will start chomping away. Once you start indulging in that human flesh, a red button will appear on the lower right portion of the screen. If you ignore the button, your zombie will devour the human and your health meter will go up. Press the button, and your zombie will release the victim, giving the victim the opportunity to join you among the ranks of the undead, and help you spread that zombie infection.

Imagine my surprise, when upon infecting my first batch of humans with the zombie virus, I saw this message:

I thought the point of this game was to infect everyone! Who cleared the infection, dammit? Fear not if you see this screen. What it’s really trying to say is, “Infection complete!”

During each level, you earn money. After each level, you have the opportunity to buy upgrades for your zombie, to make it more bad ass.

I love the art and the game. And I love the Engrish. Keep ‘em coming, Magic Cube! But damn you, Apple, for bleeding me 99 cents at a time.

I’m all for surgery, if it makes a person feel better. But some fools have no sense of proportion. Like these size-zero, anorexic bimbos walking around the Westside with double-D racks. Or this crazy-looking broad with anime-sized eyeballs.

Oh, well. To each their own, right? You’ve got the right to walk down the street looking like a clown. But I have the right to laugh at your goofy ass.

If you want to check out the befores and afters, go for it. The site is in Chinese, but the pictures need no translation.

How about you, dear reader? Is there something about your face or body that you want to fix? How much pain would you be willing to endure to change your appearance?