Here's me:

Winnipeg, Manitoba, Canada

Flat as a pancake. Literally. The only hills we have are highway overpasses, flood prevention dikes and the city dump.

As hot as 40C(105F) in Summer and as cold as -40(-40F)in the winter.
These are extremes, but I have experienced both. It can get colder than -40C if you consider the wind chill factor (that's like a Humidex temperature, except modified by wind speed instead of humidity (not sure if this is common knowledge in warmer places)).

High water in spring is normal, but if there's a lot of snow and the melt happens quickly the Red River floods epically, getting as wide as 65km (40 miles) during the worst recorded floods.

Industries: Agriculture, Hydroelectricity, Mining, Biofuel

Aboriginal People's rights are a major issue.

Most restaurants per capita in Canada (what else are you going to do all winter?)

Frequently the per capita murder capitol of Canada, but I think Saskatoon currently holds that unhappy title.

I mention all of this because LA is a lot about neighborhoods and it is very spread out. All of the bad things they say about LA are true. The people are shallow and self centered etc. But that mostly applies to the main city which includes Hollywood and Beverly Hills. I work in that area. And that is not only where the stereotypes actually exist, it is where thay are perpetuated. But know that there are a lot of nice, real people in LA. We just don't get the camera time.

It is true that in living here it is almost impossible not to speak a little Spanish. It's not uncommon to hear conversations that are a mix of Spanish and English where each party is using what they know of the other to communicate. Spanglish as a second language rules for now, but the vision of a blended language that was presented in Blade Runner seems very realistic in the future. We have people here from everywhere on the globe.

Many ethnic/regional groups have representation here. We have: Little Tokyo, China Town, Little Ethiopia, Little Russia, Olvera Street, Little India, etc. Very authentic restaurants abound, besides the other shops and such. It is easy to get any kind of meal - if you're willing to drive a little.

The weather is great except we get June Gloom where it's summer but it's grey and overcast for much of the day. But we are usually able to go to the beach on New Year's day without a jacket so I guess it's a fair trade.

The city I live in is great. (A lot of smaller cities make up Greater Los Angeles.) We have a lot of ethnic diversity and there really isn't any tension about it. I like it because when I walk to the store, people are out and about. You see your neighbors and know that they would help in a crisis. Where I grew up, I could walk for blocks and not see a soul. (And that's only eight miles from where I currently live.)

We do drive a lot. But it's a necessity. I drive 20 miles (32 kilometers) to work every day. A lot of people drive that, and further. Public transit is getting better within the main city and to some outlying areas, but not mine. Besides, I can always ride my motorcycle to beat the traffic. Bless the ability to split lanes and use the carpool lane.

Oh, and we tell distance by time. If you ask someone in LA how far say, Sunset Blvd. is, they will consider the time of day, the standard traffic flow at that time, give you the best route and tell you it will take twenty minutes; thirty if the light is out on Wilshire and then you should go down to La Brea and cut up north from there. They will also tell you if there is a better, secret parking situation for where you're headed, so be specific when you ask. We almost never say, 'it's about five miles'.

I hope this tells you a little something about LA that you didn't know. There is a lot more here than you see on the vid screen.

I hate the West side (Miracle Mile, Sunset Blvd, etc.) almost as much as I hate the concrete canyons of downtown. Fortunately, I don't have to go to either of those places much at all. EDITED: (BTW, I actually live west of LA, but since I live to the southwest, it's called the South Bay, referring to Santa Monica Bay. The West side is mostly reserved for the area north of the airport. Go figure.)

The city I live in would be considered a good sized-city almost any where else in the world. Here, overshadowed by Los Angeles, it feels almost like a small town.

For a fact you probably didn't know, here's one that still mystifies me.

The actual city of Los Angeles is pretty much landlocked. The beaches are almost all in some other small city or town bordering on LA. But there's this long, thin arm of Los Angeles city that reaches down, through a lot of other cities, to the Port of Los Angeles. Like it was going through some foreign and hostile territory or something. The LA strip. It's about a mile from where I'm sitting now and it's just weird.

I technically live in Rocky Mount, Virginia. But I am closer to an even smaller community called Boones Mill. I am not sure if it was named for Daniel Boone, an American frontiersman, or some other individual, but I have never seen any mills there. It has only one traffic light, resting on a highway that snakes through the Appalachian Mountains and connects Roanoke, VA to Greensborough, NC, where our beloved Mr. Card lives. I live in a subdivision of around a hundred homes a mile off of this highway. We are actually in one of the largest counties of Virginia, and we only have one high school with about 2300 students.

Some of my backyard neighbors on adjacent hills have cows and chickens. I have a long sloping backyard that is great for sledding in the winter. In the summer, it takes me about 2 hours to cut it with a riding mower. At the bottom of my yard there is a fairly decent size stream, but it is not deep enough to catch edible fish. There is a pond in view of my back window, and it is frequented by deer, wild geese, ducks, and cranes.

Despite the nice scenery, I am surrounded by neighbors of various socio-economic levels. Across the street, I have a retired insurance salesman and a sheriff. On one side of me there is young couple who inherited their house and use it as a second home. On the other side are some renters who leave trash in their yard and mow their grass about once a month. Their children run amuck and often appear neither bathed nor groomed in any sense of the word. Unfortunately, they are my son’s primary playmates, and they constantly report that they have no food at home and would like for us to feed them.

Every growing thing is green, except when it's brown.

I've been stuck here for over thirty years, and in that time the population went from about thirty-five thousand to somewhere over two hundred thousand. The roads are wider and more crowded; the increasing population brought a few more stores and fast-food restaurants---and also toll bridges.

Pure chance got me out of there. My buddy, who I moved down there with, is still there. Altho he lives in Ft Myers now. Never did catch a Twins game tho... I worked over at the Sony call center. It was 15 miles from my door and there were 28 street lights.

I'm back in NY (state, not city) near where I grew up. It's nice to be around family, but my goal is to move, asap, to somewhere warmer. My eye is currently fixed on Portland, OR as the weather there is pretty mild and the culture seems to match my philosophies.

Lots of small towns lay sprinkled close by: Bippus, Andrews, South Whitley are the smallest. Larger ones include Wabash, North Manchester, Warren, Marion, and Columbia City. Some of these towns have small colleges and universities.

Overall this area is pretty much a white population with a mixture of Blacks, Mexicans, East Indians, Pakistani, and East Asians. English is the main langauge, though I do here discussions among the other groups at places like the grocery store and Wal*Mart.

Weather tends to be hot & humid in the summer with highs in the 80's & 90's on the farenhiet scale. Winters are usually in the 20's & 30's with an occasional snowstorm. Summer thunderstorms are quite common, and this is considered tornado alley. I've never actually seen a real tornado, and I've lived in this area all my life. The closest I've been to one was when one touched down about a mile and a half away from us and demolished the back half of a neighbor's barn.

I live with my husband in a 100 year old two story farmhouse with a barn for our two Appaloosa horses. Other animals include an assortment of barn cats, and our dog that we found dumped at Salamonie State Forest just last year.

We have a large Amish community just north of us in and about Shipshewana, IN., and lots of State Parks & Forests sprinkled all over Indiana including Hoosier National Forest. The land is rolling around the northern half of the state but gets into some serious hills in the south toward the Ohio River.

We do have some major cities here, but nothing like LA, NY, or Chicago. Try Indianapolis (GO COLTS!), Fort Wayne, South Bend, and Gary (Michael Jackson's home town).

Indiana is mostly farmland with corn and soybeans the main two crops along with winter wheat, and hay fields. Other industries are a mixed bag with the closest to me being GM near Ft. Wayne. And even though I live in the country, I work in Huntington as a production worker for Our Sunday Visitor that manufactures church offering envelopes. It also houses America's largest Catholic publishing house.

It's hot. Friday is supposed to get to 110 and we won't dip below 100 until sometime in October, September if we're lucky. In the summer you just have to stay inside. You can swim a little bit but if you stay out too long you either get burned bad or get sick from too much sun. October to May is nice though. The winter time averages in the low 70's and upper 60's. If it gets to the low 60's then it's really cold. I've lived in Arizona my whole life and I've seen it snow once while waiting for the schoolbus in sixth grade. All it did was dust the rooftops. It couldn't even make it to the ground and was gone in an hour.

There isn't a lot of green. My front yard has rock and no grass. Our summer is like everyone else's winter. The weather is too extreme to go outside, just running errands in the heat is exhausting. Opening the car door is like opening an oven door and any wind feels like a blowdryer on hot. The plants all start to die and turn brown (the wild ones, not the landscaped, irrigated ones) and try to make it to the monsoons in July and August.

It is, considered to be the second most moutaineous geographical locations in the world. (Right behind Afganistan)

It is mostly high desert, due to the mountains blocking the rain, altitudes averaging 5000 feet on the valley floors, yet has vastly different climate spreads. The word "nevada" actually means snow-capped. The term "Sierra Nevadas" means "rugged snow-capped mountains". It is hot during summer, 115 degrees(46 degrees Celsius), and cold during winter,-10 degrees (-12 degrees Celsius). It is one of the toughest climates to live in.

I'm sure we're going to pay for it in September and October. We always do.