Los Angeles — where Grantland HQ is located, if you didn’t know — is usually a perfectly nice place to live. The weather, the tacos, the daily chance of seeing Jay Leno jutting out of an antique car like Grimace from a Happy Meal toy as he drives himself to his last sad days of work — we’ll stop there, because you’ve heard these a million times from any transplanted Angeleno defensively explaining his total surrender in the face of perpetual sunshine. But sometimes, you know, it gets a little hard. Sometimes the storm clouds roll in, the carne asada tacos are filled with Hamburger Helper, and you see a disheveled Leno on the side of Laurel Canyon, trying to crank-start a jalopy worth more than your house.

Sometimes you read about people hiring celebrity photographers to take yearbook photos of their kids. From The Hollywood Reporter:

Scrap the blue background: Some L.A. private schools are bringing in bona fide celebrity photographers for portrait day.

Vince Bucci, who has taken wedding portraits for the likes of Kim Kardashian and Avril Lavigne, is gearing up for picture days at Wildwood School and Westside Neighborhood School.

Meanwhile, New York-based Dennis Kleiman, whose subjects have included Denis Leary, The White Stripes and Ozzy Osbourne, founded Stomping Ground Photo with an aim to bring an editorial edge to those Sears-like picture packages. Hollywood Schoolhouse, Temple Israel of Hollywood and The Willows all hire him.

“Last year we had a parent apply to the school just based on the amazing photos in the yearbook,” says Lisa Smith, photography teacher at Hollywood Schoolhouse.

There are, we suppose, worse things than wealthy parents hiring celebrity photographers to make their beloved children’s yearbook portraits look like Annie Leibovitz Vanity Fair spreads. For example: At any moment, Los Angeles could finally succumb to the long-promised wildslidemudfirequake that will render the entire city a filthy, smoldering mass floating off the new Pacific coast, and that would be terrible for everybody. But after that moment of shrugging off the hilarious excess of a small part of the local population, it hits you: Why are they thinking so small? This is L.A.! We can do so much better! Spielberg and Roland Emmerich should be directing video yearbooks with multimillion-dollar budgets, wrapping up in CGI-rendered set pieces of third-graders rescuing their class from a marauding army of Predators riding velociraptors, because this is the greatest city on earth, try the tacos.

Think about all the applications to that school. Better apply now, or else your kids are gonna have to settle for the place where they hire a dude who does the Kardashians’ Instagrams. You don’t want that, as much as the YOLO filter makes the tiger-skin rug pop.