Here’s the thing. The California sun will turn your pupils into needlepoints and your skin into French toast. That’s reason enough for me to never go outside as it is, but today I made an exception to go poke around downtown Hollywood.

The first stop was the Paramount movie lot, which looks a lot more like a college campus than a locale for conducting million-dollar business transactions and employing camera tricks to make Tom Cruise look less garden gnomish. Picturesque trees lined the paved drive and drunken sorority girls belittled me.

We were there for a sneak preview of the new Eddie Murphy joint Imagine That. You’ll either like it or hate it. Or you’ll think it’s just okay.

After that we jaunted over the Walk of Fame (Hi, Louis Lumiere!) to the Arclight, one o’ them ritzy SoCal picture houses. Going to see a movie in LA is like buying an apartment in New York City – you pay far too much for a simple, simple thing. But we saw Away We Go and were satisfied.

And that’s all I have to say about that, my day spent in the company of strangers in the dark and cold while we consumed some of America’s chief exports – movies.