One of the downsides of having been fortunate enough to live in some famous and/or photogenic places and having travelled extensively in the US is that it's now really hard to watch TV without spotting the geographic errors.

Most notably I lived in Santa Monica for several months (working at RAND), right on Ocean Drive. If you ever see a shot of a road on a cliff overlooking the beach, a narrow park strip with palm trees on the cliff side and some office buildings or apartment buildings on the inland side, 95% of the time that's it. Larry Niven's tsunami surfer in Lucifer's Hammer came ashore about four blocks south of my old apartment.

When living there I never realized how close it was to every other part of LA! You can be up at Santa Clarita (Magic Mountain theme park), downtown LA, somewhere in Orange County, Burbank, wherever, and bam, they turn a corner and there they are on Ocean Drive!

The sad thing I learned living there is that it really is NOT like you see on TV, in that it is not that common for totally hot girls in tiny bikinis to go rollerblading down the street. I lived there when they were filming some lame show about bicycle cops (Baywatch on wheels), and whenever they did location shots on the pedestrian mall they'd bring in a bevy of bikini girls to spice up the sidewalks.

And don't even get me started on how 90% of the planet looks like the San Gabriel Mountains....