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Ever since a kamikaze shutterbug slammed his car into the Lohanmobile during a high-speed quest for some fresh pictures of the starlet's newly prominent skeleton, the paparazzi vocation has been red-hot. (That sound you hear is the sigh of a Fox executive who just realized that his studio already made a cut-rate paparazzi revenge flick last year.) On Sunday, the NY Times endeavored to better understand the "car-centered...uniquely Los Angeles art" of staking out the Ivy with a telephoto lens, which is "under siege" by reckless marauders from the Continent:

Moreover, he and Mr. Huapaya see their car-centered paparazzi ways as a uniquely Los Angeles art form, one worth protecting, and which is under siege. So, they acknowledge, they have developed a reputation for punishing paparazzi who drive too aggressively - with a particular eye on the French.

"Britney's not going to drive crazy," Mr. Cousart says, by way of example. "So you don't have to be right on her tail. But there's going to be that one photographer on her bumper. So we call each other, the other teams. Whenever we're in a follow with the French guys, we say make sure they don't get in the front. We try to block them out, because they drive like idiots."

Pity the French paparazzi. They chase one beloved British royal to a tragic, public death, and they're forever saddled with the stereotype of being careless drivers.