And now, L.A. in a New York minute

There’s a new man in town -- the New York Times’ Charlie LeDuff, who’s dusting off his parachute and, like many a transplant before him, discovering the shocking truth about Los Angeles. (It’s in a desert! Traffic’s terrible!) A sampling from the dispatches:

On wildlife: “Across Beverly Hills and the other lush corridors of Los Angeles, rats -- yellow-bellied, pink-tailed, flea-bitten rats -- are wriggling through the woodwork and rooftops. They have come down from the trees and in from the fields, forced into neighborhoods by a strangling drought that has gripped the region. They are eating from dog bowls and drinking from swimming pools and acting in surly ways not normal to the genus.”

On Hollywood Boulevard and the drug trade: “The whole spectrum of the human condition is on display on the boulevard: the homeless, prostitutes, a methadone clinic, the Greyhound bus terminal, neon lights, tourists, the Walk of Fame, Grauman’s Chinese Theatre. It is without question the most famous street in Los Angeles. It hums like an electric razor; midnight shadows creep along just enough to make it feel dangerous.”

On the weather: “The city is uneasy this afternoon. A plague has descended from the sky and shattered the warm, mundane bliss. It is raining in Los Angeles, a rare and frightening thing.... Rain is a dark and destructive stranger to Angelenos, who draw their water not from local lakes and rivers, but from hundreds of miles across the desert....”