For a few days I thought I was going deaf. Then I concluded that it must be a problem with my mobile phone. Why else would I keep getting so many missed-call messages? Why else would frustrated callers keep leaving me voicemails and apologise for having missed me again?

Then I realised what was happening: I was the victim of the latest trend in Los Angeles: “antisocial networking”. In other words: people wanting to give the illusion of staying in touch - while going to great lengths to eliminate the risk of any actual interaction taking place.

It's a symptom, I like to think, of a maxed-out population. After MySpace, Facebook, Twitter and a zillion other ways of remaining interminably connected with everyone you've ever met since birth, people just can't take it any more. They want peace. They want isolation. They want time alone to break wind and feel depressed about the economy. And so the very same software engineers who once brought us closer are now working on new ways to keep us apart.

Hence all those missed-call messages. Turns out they're made possible by a service called Slydial, launched a week ago and already proving to be hugely popular. To make it work, you call a freephone number (it only works in the US), listen to an advertisement, then enter the digits of the person you don't want to reach. It puts you straight through to their voicemail while delivering a missed-call message to their phone, thus creating the illusion that you at least made the effort to have a conversation. As ingenious as this is, however, I can see problems. For example: I used the service on Sunday to return a call from a friend I didn't much feel like talking to. Five minutes later, I received a text message. “Hey, did you just Slydial me?” it said.

Celebrity blank

Chuck Palahniuk, author of Fight Club, agrees that antisocial networking is the latest Big Thing. Over a recent lunch, he told me that he soon expected Americans to give up their MySpace accounts and Facebook profiles, quit their incessant blogging and twittering, and “enter a new burka phase”.

In case you think this is wishful thinking, just look at the news coming out of LA this summer - or rather, the lack of it. Where the hell is Britney Spears? What happened to Paris Hilton? Has anyone seen Lindsay Lohan? Indeed, the only person still banging on about Hilton, Spears et al is John McCain, who believes the empty-headed starlets have a lot in common with his rival, Barack Obama. A fair point, perhaps. Although Mr McCain might have checked his list of campaign donors before deciding on this attack strategy. After all, Kathy Hilton - mother of Paris - recently wrote him a cheque for five grand. From what I hear, that will be last of the Hiltons' generosity.

Rotten eggheads

With no celebrities to talk about, last week's earthquake has been making all the headlines in LA while providing an opportunity for people with overgrown beards and pieces of cheese lodged in their hair to get on TV - ie, earthquake scientists. These eggheads haven't been allowed out of their laboratories since the last serious rumbler in 1994. To be honest with you, I worry about the scientists more than I worry about the earthquakes. After all, look at the case of the anthrax attacker.

If you believe Sunday's newspapers, he was a biowarfare scientist named Bruce Ivins, who found himself twiddling his thumbs after the Cold War and thus came up with a dastardly plan to win more money for anthrax research. It worked. The Government proposed a $877 million contract for a vaccine based on two patents co-invented by none other than Ivins himself. Could the same thing happen in LA? Could an unloved earthquake scientist plant explosives along the San Andreas Fault in the hope of triggering the Big One, just to teach everyone a lesson? Stranger things have surely happened.

Winged gluttony

In an effort to escape the LA summer heat, I took the Ayres family on a trip to the Natural History Museum at the weekend. Trouble is, driving anywhere these days feels like an act of profligacy, what with the energy crunch, the credit crunch and that image of a frowning, tutting Al Gore that recently took up residency inside my head. I was therefore genuinely pleased to stumble upon an exhibit showing that LA's native hummingbirds are actually far bigger energy gluttons than we humans. Flapping those wings is like keeping an RAF Harrier jump jet aloft, after all. And listen to this: on a calories-to-weight basis, the hummingbird stuffs its little beak with the equivalent (in nectar) of 290 hamburgers per day.

Perhaps that's where General Motors got the name Hummer.

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