I’m going to e-mail David Icke over this:-)

That’s much less H. P. Lovecraft.

Tragic.

I grew up in Los Angeles, near one of those easily accessible flood drains that seem to drown children each year. The large cement pipe was asking to be explored, but we had the right amount of fear. There are plenty of legends, and I am sure most of them are kept alive by parents as a warning to children, and by children because children tell, keep, and grow good stories. My mother told my sister and I the story of the lizard people, though I think she told it as alligator people. She told us about the deadly Africanclawed frogs, which aren’t deadly, but scary. They were made scarier by seeing them pickled in a museum, along with Pipa pipa, wich are part of the family Pipidae “the tongueless frogs” . A few facts make any legend more believable. In the sewers of L.A. My mother told us about entire stretches inhabited by homeless people and how children die in them each year. The water was far from pure, causing “lock jaw”, blindness and death. Perhaps she was a little over the top, but I can still hear the enormous sound of the storm drain as the creak water entered and disappeared through a maze that not even Theseus could escape from.

I really think these legends give a city character. While the origin of the stories is not as cautionary tales, likely they become one through time. The clawed frogs and stories of alligators, be them people or not, were not as good at keeping my sister and I out of the drain pipe as the evening news, or the fact that we were well parented. These stories would have driven me to look for the lizard people if I had been older.

there’s also some cool information here:
http://la.metblogs.com/2007/03/09/top-la-legends-3-lizard-people-live-under-la/

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/David_Icke

xyzzy.

Los Angeles is the Lizard City.
Jim Morrison is the Lizard King.
Barbara Bush is the Lizard Queen.
Lizardman is the Lizard Man.