Mob rules.  Get a group together and get bulk discount rates for cool stuff.  But what if you don’t have your own gang or posse? No worries Groupon takes care of all that for you.

Groupon is a website with daily deals too good not to pounce on.  From teeth whitening to spa days to dinner deals at your favorite restaurant, Groupon offers discounts from about 50-70% off normal prices.

And Groupon is growing – they are now in almost 20 cities across the US and hope to be in 30 by year’s end.

The Chicago-based company has sold nearly 500,000 groupons, saving consumers about $23 million according to Andrew Mason, the company’s founder.

That is beginning to translate into big money for Groupon. It makes money by taking a percentage of each groupon it sells, and Mason says the cut hovers around 50 percent.

“It’s really exploded in a way that, if I stop and think about it, kind of freaks me out a little bit,” Mason says.

Why am I writing about it? Simply because I signed up, thinks it’s a very cool idea, and am easily entertained by neat, new stuff…plus it really works and you can save a wad of cash!

Check them out, if not for their good deals, at least for their sharp and witty prose. Each day’s write up can be pretty entertaining.

Who hasn’t sidled up to a grease truck on a late Saturday night or bought a tasty falafel-filled pita from a New York City food cart?  But there is a new phenomenon under foot.

Taco trucks are actually nothing new to Los Angeles, but lately they seem to be everywhere.  And their customers are no longer just construction workers or other blue collar Joes. Now, thanks to the social media craze, a truck called Kogi BBQ is causing quite a feeding frenzy. Lines of LA hipsters stretch around the block. People show up from all over just to try one of their Korean-slash-Mexican fusion creations. But what caused it to go from a bit of a buzz to an all out taco tizzy? Twitter, of course. Launched in November, Kogi tweets (under @kogibbq) their trucks’ whereabouts throughout the day and their loyal followers come running. If you Tweet it, they will come.

According to the Los Angeles Times, the operation has become a “social networking juggernaut,” drawing between 300 and 800 people at each stop, with waits of up to two hours. Traditional trucks always parked in the same spot. These new trucks give the air of exclusivity because you have to be in the know to find out where to find them any give day.

My friend Mark and I decided to run down the Kogi truck one afternoon. I found their weekly posting of whereabouts on their site. Then I cross-referenced it with updated Tweets they were making every few hours on Twitter.  There was going to be a truck just around the corner at lunch time. Sweet! We were golden.

We walked over and found no less than 5 imitator trucks dishing out slop to the LA citizenry. But where was our Kogi?  Nowhere to be found. And since we are not so connected and didn’t have a Blackberry or iPhone – we were in a social media black-out.  We asked some other Kogi cravers the obvious question and no one knew where the heck it was.  So, we ate some imitation tacos which were good at $2 a pop, but still not the fusion flavor I had heard so much about.

Okay, cut to two days later. This was it. We were going to track down a truck and shove some tacos down our gullets if it was the last thing we did. We drove to a Best Buy parking lot and…there it was. Actually there they were – two gleaming white Kogi trucks churning out the coveted chow and pumping out some reggaeton (kind of a Latino hip-hop/reggae mash-up) to a small lunch mob that had gathered. I asked for the special – the Blackjack Quesadilla. Mmm, crafty Kogi goodness. It was a crunchy well done tortilla filled with some damn yummy caramelized onions, spicy pork, gooey cheese, and topped with a sesame sauce with just enough kick to make my lips tingle.  It was good, but I think it was the whole manufactured ‘coolness’ of the scene that I enjoyed the most.

Or, as my friend Mark put it, “It was good food and everything, but ya know, it was just eatin’ food from a truck.”

So in-between all the fun and L.A.ery, I was also working, writing articles and found a new career: house and pet sitter extraordinaire. I house sat for 2 poodles, Henry and Charlie, ran with a Sheeba named Ralph, dog sat another pup named Bruce (I get all the guys), and then got the plum assignment: a housesit for Boo the black cat in the Hollywood Hills at the home of a cool couple who work in Television.

I stayed up there in an area famous for its famous inhabitants and enjoyed my new neighbors: Jake Gyllenahal, Will Ferrell, Stockard Channing, KD Lang, Moon Unit Zappa, and sadly, the next-door-neighbor was recently deceased Australian actor, Heath Ledger. He had bought his house a few years ago from Ellen DeGeneres.

I spent many afternoons working and relaxing in their lush, peaceful backyard completely surrounded by towering trees, hummingbirds, and other critters while choppers flew overhead getting shots from the only vantage point of these mansions well hidden behind their tall walls and dense shrubbery.

The only thing missing from my new ‘live like the rich’ life was a pool. Yep, no pool—instead there was a playground for the kids. There’s something about a pool to make you feel like you actually did something with your day;

“What did you do today?’

‘Oh, I went and laid out at the pool.’

‘Cool.’

Even if you don’t go swimming and just work on your tan for a couple hours, it’s still as if you did something with you day, well, in L.A. at least that’s the case.

I definitely had fun house sitting even if I was kind of living a pretend life in my pretend house, with my pretend cats, dogs, and fish. It was all a bit surreal. My surreal life.

After all this star-gazing I saw some real ‘stars’ at the beautiful art deco, newly renovated Griffith Observatory.

And…finally I even experienced a good, LA-style earthquake. It was CRAZY!!!!!! Okay, not really, a few shelves, lamps shook for 10 seconds we felt the floor move. I ran to a doorway and Mark ran to the bookshelf (something is just wrong with one of our positions!) and then it was all over. The news went crazy with coverage and at the epicenter it was around a 5.4 on the Richter scale, but didn’t feel like much at least where we were—plus he lives on the ground floor. Now I’ve felt one in Tokyo and LA.

My last few days in LA were centered on my birthday where I partied like a rockstar (minus the drugs or suicide-like finale of guests like John Belushi) at Chateau Marmont.

My LA adventure has now come to an end and I guess I’ve experienced almost everything here…except the casting couch. There’s always next time.

Hello friends of LLWorldTour! How are you, by the way? This is not a rhetorical question – feel free to leave a comment on my site with you deepest sentiments.

For those of you that read this site on Internet Explorer there was a problem with the last two posts.

Those who use Firefox (much cooler, faster, better web browser) had no problems of course.

So…I wanted to resend these links to my subscribers who did not get the pleasure of reading them.

Livin’ the LA Life: Part Dos

THE Toaster Smash-Up 2008: A Must Read!

Please enjoy and feel free to make comments, suggestions, rants, raves.

Thanks, as always, for reading!

LL

My friend Mark lives in a great apartment complex in LA called the Palazzo. It has a huge pool ringed with plush cushioned lounge chairs, a clubhouse complete with a buzzy little business office and concierge for all your concierging needs, a bright gym and spa full of the tanned toned celebs of tomorrow, and beautifully landscaped grounds full of constantly pruned shrubs, bougainvillea covered trellises, trickling fountains, and swaying palms. And of course he has a fully appointed apartment…and he pays dearly for it. He personally has everything he needs.

And then there was…the toaster. This metal box lived on his granite countertop mocking us daily with its crappy features, non-dinging toast function, and all around crap-tasticness. It was the most excruciatingly slow toaster I’ve ever encountered in all my travels. You want your bread to turn brown and crunchy with just the right crust on top sealing in a chewy center? Good luck. It was uneven at best and ‘es’, ‘el’, ‘oh’, ‘double-you’ – SLOW. You want a piece of bad toast? Well, pull up a chair and wait about thirty minutes. The thing sucks at toast. And, let’s remember what it’s called. That’s right – a toaster.

SO, I took it upon myself to buy him a brand-spankin’ new twenty-first century toaster with all the bells and whistles and dingers. You want it light? You got it. Dark and slightly burnt – a little more your style? Not a problem. All was good in the breads and whole grains world once again.

But what to do with the old piece of crap toaster? Only one thing of course – smash the hell out of it.

I had the genius idea of taking it out and basically clubbing it to death just for fun. See what happens when neither of us is working and we have too much time on our hands? Don’t tell the toaster-lover protesters. We don’t want them picketing outside or pelting us with bagels, slices of marble rye or, even worse, dense flax seed and multi-grain loaves.

Here’s how it all went down:

Operation: Kill the Toaster

• The Tools: One toaster, one hammer, one golf club, protective eye gear (aka swimming goggles)
• The Location: Ross Back Parking Lot
• The Motive: Years & Years of Shitty Toast

It was a total smash-for-all. I took the hammer and wailed as hard as I could at the top of the toaster. The metal buckled and clanged and plastic bits went flying everywhere. Now it was Mark’s turn. He took the 3-iron and did his best golf swing right into the toaster door. The glass shattered with a crunch and shards of glass went flying all around. Wooo! This was fun. IT was like a reality episode of “when toaster’s suck” or “when bad toasters happen to good people.” We were onto something. I know FOX will call soon.

I decided just to let it rip. I went ballistic and start pummeling the damn thing with my hammer shouting with each blow, “YOU STUPID NO GOOD TOASTER. I HATE YOU! SHITTY, STUPID TOASTER!!” Ah, it was cathartic and way cheaper than paying a shrink for the hour.

By now we were making quite a ruckus and I think other ‘would-be’ parking lot loiterers and hoodlums were possibly scared of us. I think I even heard a M63 gang member whisper to his comrade: ‘watch out for those toaster thugs—they’re ruthless.’ Just then a security guard rounded the bend. Were we some thugs wreaking havoc? Were we gangbangers out to get revenge? Were we drug addicts beating up a toaster to score some change to keep our habit going?

No, we were just two white whack-jobs with nothing better to do on a Thursday afternoon. But when the guard saw these two strange casually-dressed Caucasians get out our little dust pan and broom and clean up the mess we just made he turned around and went about his business. I think I heard him mutter, ‘stupid, bored white-folk.’

Just remember friends: Don’t ever take crap from your toaster again. You can have your toast and eat it too.

Go ahead, make my toast. Yippe-ca-yay mother Toaster.

And one more thing…wait for it….that toaster was…toast.

Mission Accomplished.

Yeah Toast!