Why L.A.? Lights, camera action
LOS ANGELES -- Flash forward to the summer of 2016. You're at the Olympics and you've just finished watching a thrilling day of athletic competition.
Unwinding from all that excitement, you could top it off by lounging on the soft white sands of a Malibu beach before strolling up to a little seaside bar filled with tanned, toned movie star lookalikes.
Or, you could step off the gritty brown rocks that pass for sand along the shores of Lake Michigan and be blown headfirst into the water. (They don't call it The Windy City for nothing).
That stark difference exemplifies why Los Angeles should be the U.S. candidate to host the 2016 Games.
Sure, Chicago is a nice city, with tall buildings, a big, picturesque river they paint green every St. Patrick's Day and a cool downtown stitched together by a cute elevated train.
But Los Angeles has an abundance of what should really matter to the members of the U.S. Olympic Committee who decide Saturday which city is the American candidate for the Games: perfect weather and beautiful people who know how to flaunt what they've got.
Famous people are everywhere in LA-LA Land, making movies, TV shows, recording albums, getting arrested, checking in and out of rehab (sometimes on the same day).
Cruise the streets of Los Angeles and you might run into Tom Cruise. Or, if you're traveling by car, you might really run into Lindsay Lohan, Paris Hilton, Halle Berry, Haley Joel Osment or Matthew Perry, just a few of the famous who have had their share of fender-benders on the streets of L.A. in recent years.
There are so many celebrities here that even other celebs are impressed.
''(Quentin) Tarantino lives here! (Bob) Dylan lives here!'' says Dave Stewart of the Eurythmics, sounding far more excited than should a guy who's sold 75 million records.
Stewart made a 71/2-minute ''Battle Olympia'' film celebrating the eccentric charms of his adopted city. It's been used as a promotional tool by the local Olympic committee.
Los Angeles is so celebrity-filled that walking around it is like being on a giant film set. A set, one might add, where the thermostat never needs to be adjusted because when summer rolls around it's virtually always 80 degrees and bone dry. On any given summer day, Chicago could be 50 degrees or 100. And humid.
What's more, when it comes time to actually host the Games, organizers likely will want some big, muscular guy in a toga to light the Olympic flame. They'll need somebody who looks a lot like the guy who starred in those ''Terminator'' films, someone who can bellow out, ''I'll Be Back!'' in a voice like Conan the Barbarian's.
No problem. That guy actually lives right here in town and doubles as the governor of California. Arnold Schwarzenegger is just one of the many quirky, iconic characters who make L.A. what it is: a place everybody in the world wants to check out.
''We even have Beckham now,'' notes humorist Stan Freberg, a lifelong resident, referring to the soccer heartthrob. ''You notice he didn't move to Chicago.''
No, he didn't, because practically everyone moves to L.A.
Britney Spears? Just a wide-eyed kid from Kentwood, La., before she moved here. Schwarzenegger? A bodybuilder from Thal, Austria. Frank Gehry, the city's resident architectural genius? A former truck driver who, as a kid growing up in Canada, used to build little stick houses in his living room. Mary Kate and Ashley Olsen? Well, OK, they did come from L.A. But no reason to hold that against the city.
Los Angeles doesn't get by on its celebrity cachet alone.
Sports teams? L.A. has more than its share. Downtown there's the Dodgers, whose general manager, Ned Colletti, entertained reporters during his first day on the job by reminiscing that his childhood memories of Chicago included his father getting up in the middle of the night to start his car to keep the engine from freezing.
There also are the Los Angeles Angels, who won the World Series in 2002. They play in Anaheim, which also is home to Disneyland.
Basketball fans have the Lakers and Clippers. And even if the once high-flying Lakers don't win championships anymore it doesn't matter as much when you can hang out at a game with Jack Nicholson and watch Kobe Bryant score 81 points.
There's also UCLA, the greatest college basketball school in history.
And there's USC football, a perennial contender for the national championship.
Extreme sports? Skateboard champion Tony Hawk lives down the road in Carlsbad.
What's more, this city already knows how to put on an Olympics. Remember the 1932 Games? Probably not. But how about 1984? Those Olympics that turned a profit, didn't clog the freeways and sent everybody home with a smile.
Sure, an earthquake could strike this place at any time and topple one of the world's great architectural achievements, the Gehry-designed Walt Disney Concert Hall in downtown LA. But no one here has time to worry about such things, except for maybe a few scientists at Pasadena's Caltech, which by the way has some of the toughest academic standards of any university in the world.
This is L.A., after all, a city of fantasy. And the Olympics, Stewart notes, are ''like something from mythology days.''
So what better place to hold them than a place where myths are made?
Los Angeles-based Associated Press reporter John Rogers and his Chicago colleague, Don Babwin, explain why their respective cities should play host to the 2016 Summer Olympics. The U.S. Olympic Committee will decide Saturday which is the American candidate. The International Olympic Committee will make the final choice in 2009.