Quick California note: I'm from the Detroit area. On my side, my father works for Chrysler/(whatever Chrysler calls itself this year); on my wife's side an uncle is a well-known race car builder. (If you watch racing on TV, you've seen his cars.) Other relatives are in the car industry. I'm from the car capitol of the world.

The last thing I expected was to come out here and hear more car talk than I'm used to.

Maybe it's just because the dot-com engineers make enough to care about the details of various kinds of cars, but it seems like everyone here is a car maniac, even those who aren't anywhere near buying their own yet.

(This is probably another housing price distortion; once you're paying $5k a month on housing, buying a "very nice car" doesn't seem like such a stretch.)