I can’t pinpoint when I made the separate ascensions. Certainly, when I was in college the brutal Michigan winters precluded any claim to weather godliness. But even then my campus parking prowess was noted by dorm roommates, especially after late-night drunken bacchanals left us frantically searching for the last elusive vehicle space at 3 a.m. To this day, I never fail to find that  parking place, either on the street or in the lot. I knew I had ascended when I found a legal spot on the street midday in San Francisco’s North Beach, one block from my City Lights bookstore destination.

Living in Southern California, I am surrounded by many false weather gods;  people claiming credit for the perfect weather day in and day out that is simply their good fortune to have stumbled into.

The true test is on the road, when that Hawaiian vacation during rainy season hangs in the balance. When that Big Sur sojourn finds the “ever-present” October fog lifting just in time for two days of glorious hiking with abundant views of migrating whales.  When the November Michigan sleet and snow stop the day you arrive, and begin anew just as you pull up at the airport to turn in your rental car on the way out of town. When you defy the omniscient weather.com and its warning of miserable heat, humidity and precipitation and still pay a Fall visit to the folks in Boca Raton.

On that potentially ill-fated trip to Florida with my then-wife and tater-tot of a daughter, my parents treated us to a day at Disney World in Orlando. The forecast was rain. Heavy rain. All-day rain. So we took along bright orange plastic ponchos and some among us prepared for the worst.   The weather was sufficiently intimidating that the usual Disney hordes were nowhere to be found, and the classic long lines were totally absent. And so was the rain. It literally stopped as we arrived and began again as we departed. Best Disney visit ever.

I always prevail. Always. Even when I am in the company of someone like my girlfriend, who has a never-ending litany of weather-driven holiday disaster tales to tell, I prevail.

I used to be shy about flaunting my weather prowess, for fear that I might offend the true weather god — who seemed forever to smile upon me — and be forsaken. I would mention it to people after the fact, but try not to tempt the fates beforehand. However, after years of unambiguous success and an ever-escalating  bravado, I came to the conclusion that I need not fear that god, for He was I.

The danger here, obviously, is hubris, which “often indicates being out of touch with reality and overestimating one’s own competence or capabilities.” It got Achilles and Oedipus in deep doo back when the Greeks were inventing the concept and now has apparently ensnarled President Obama.  (Googling “Obama hubris” turns up 489,000 hits.)

In between, most everyone who thought they got it right and the other side got it wrong, has been accused of having it.

According to HBO, Caesar, when he wasn’t inventing salads and lending his name to resort hotels, said, “It’s only hubris if I fail.” Ultimately, he did fail, but he accomplished so much before the fall that it is difficult to determine how much of his life was hubris and how much was not.

Hitler, of course, had hubris in spades and it is one of the main reasons conservatives liken Obama to him. Genghis Khan, Bismark, Napoleon, Louis XIV and more than a few popes were similarly impaired. You can look it up.

Eliot Spitzer dallied with it.  Peter Beinart has written how hubris caused three 20th Century U.S. presidents to drag this country into unjust wars. And, of course, the original weather god, Al Gore, probably contracted it shortly after he  invented the internet.

Sometimes, as with Rudolph Giuliani or multi-national states, hubris seems to be only one ingredient (or two) in a simmering cauldron of  competing pathologies. Other times, as in the case of John Edwards, it looks like a small part of a larger narcissistic pathology that includes “grandiosity, entitlement, arrogance, hubris and exploitative actions.”

That sounds kinda sick. And according to Brain: A Journal of Neurology, it probably is.  The study disagrees with HBO’s Caesar about hubris being a loser’s affliction (it  “develops irrespective of whether the individual’s leadership is judged a success or failure”) but did come up with 14 symptoms to aid in the diagnosis of your boss at work. None of them are complimentary and you only need three of the 14 to qualify as a douche.

The researchers at Brain studied the presidents and prime ministers in the U.S. and Britain over the past 100 years, but were quick to point out you can also find hubris among artists, religious gurus and bankers. Most of us already had suspicions about the last group. But the key is: no power, no hubris. Which probably accounts for why my first 8 hours of random Googling of hubris failed to turn up a single reference to hubris among women.

The Brainiacs zeroed in on hubris by eliminating all the politicians with serious mental illness. As an aside, they noted that between 1776 and 1974, 49% of American presidents “met criteria suggesting psychiatric disorder: depression (24%), anxiety (8%), bipolar disorder (8%) and alcohol abuse/dependence (8%) were the most common.”

So once you toss out the deranged presidents, you’re left with … who? Well, Nixon was a drunk. No hubris there. Teddy Roosevelt and Lyndon Johnson were bipolar. Cross them off the list.  Woodrow Wilson’s brain exploded, so he gets a pass. And Kennedy was a speed freak. They all exhibited hubristic traits but none of them were categorized as having hubris syndrome.

The rest of the presidents between between 1908-2008 were judged reasonably sane and untarnished by hubris syndrome.

Except for one: George W. Bush. They pointed out that he had once been a drunk, but now was simply a victim of hubris. They desperately wanted to give him a pass because of the pressures from 9/11, but had trouble getting past this:

His appearance in flying gear on the aircraft carrier, Abraham Lincoln, cruising off the coast of California, on 1 May 2003, and then speaking on television with the slogan ‘Mission Accomplished’ emblazoned on the ship control tower behind him, marked the highest point in his scale of hubris. This episode is particularly interesting when one considers that the so-called success in Baghdad was only 10 days later described in a memo to Prime Minister Blair by the then British Ambassador to Iraq, John Sawers, as involving a complete absence of any serious planning for the aftermath of the taking of Baghdad: ‘No leadership, no strategy, no coordination, no structure and inaccessible to ordinary Iraqis’.

Not everyone is as restrictive in their definition of hubris as the Brain researchers.

David Mayatt, in his groundbreaking essays regarding “white hordes of homo hubris“, maintains that there is apparently an entire subspecies of humans with the affliction: “the White, or Caucasian, peoples of Europe and the so-called New World.”

Homo Hubris is distinguished by their generally uncouth, vulgar, behaviour; their lack of manners; their arrogance and insolence; their pride, and their innate, often unconscious belief (or rather, delusion), that they and their kind are ’superior’ and have a sort of ‘destiny’ or duty to interfere in the lives of other peoples, often now by imposing some abstraction on them, by force and killing, but most often, in the past, by occupation, conquest, and imperialism.

In addition, Homo Hubris is in thrall to causal abstractions, and is easy swayed and manipulated by others, lacking as they do any real personal noble character and deficient as they are in both empathy and honour.

In brief, the people of Homo Hubris often act and behave like spoilt children and/or bullies.

Hubris, perhaps better known in some circles as chutzpah, is not a difficult concept to grasp. Even a child can understand it. But what fun is it to have a vice that can’t be construed as a virtue?

Hubris has been suggested as one of the three virtues of successful programmers, according to computer whiz Larry Wall. It is  ‘the quality that makes you write (and maintain) programs that other people won’t want to say bad things about.’   The other two virtues are laziness and impatience.

Spiritus-Temporis.com

Lazy, impatient and filled to the brim with hubris. That sounds like me.

I feel like a god.

“It is so miserable here, I don’t really want to do anything. It’s like seriously, actually, genuinely depressing.”

Caitlin Pence, Manhattan Beach, Calif.

These are, indeed, dark days in California. Unemployment is 12.4% (third worst in the nation), the state faces a $19 billion budget shortfall, the housing industry has hit the wall, the social safety net is being eviscerated and the gridlocked legislature is powerless to act.

Despite the superhuman efforts of Gov. Schwarzenegger and early warnings from former Defense Secretary Rumsfeld about the danger of becoming like “old Europe,” that spectre of gloom continues to envelop us.

“You see what is happening in Greece, you see what is happening in Ireland, you see what is happening in Spain now,” Schwarzenegger said the other day. “We are left with nothing but tough choices.”

However, Caitlin Pence of Manhattan Beach wasn’t talking about any of that.

She was talking about the weather. More precisely, she was talking to the New York Times about the weather along the beach in Southern California.

“Climatic Bragging Rights Are Waning for Angelenos,” the headline read in Sunday’s paper. The party is over. June temperatures were 2.4 degrees cooler than usual, and there were traces of rain four days in July. This disaster was likened to a September frost in Miami.

The Paper of Record was concerned that it might be December before Los Angeles “finds its rightful smug spot in the weather world again.” At least it’s nice to see the NYT retains its snarky, East Coast self-absorption year-round.

I suppose it’s all justifiably just a matter of perspective. Back East, where they’ve been frying eggs on their forehead — or in the windblown, water-deluged Midwest — or down South, where the tarball season is in full swing — any talk of SoCal inclement weather seems obnoxious. But the fact is, there is arguably enough crap going on somewhere in the world every day to reduce the most anguished wail, by comparison, to the wimpiest of whines. And the folks in Haiti probably don’t have much sympathy for Louisiana fishermen.

My first summer at the beach was in 1977.  I had just moved west from Bloomington, Indiana, with my future wife and was looking for an apartment and my first newspaper reporting job. We ended up gazing at the water through picture windows on the Venice boardwalk for $406 a month.

Venice has a storied history. Shortly after the turn of the century, Abbott Kinney built canals and developed it as a resort town just to the west of Los Angeles. Eventually, he turned the city into an entertainment tourist mecca with arcades and roller coasters.  After he died, the city went to seed, its infrastructure deteriorated and it was annexed by L.A.  Many of the canals were paved over and derricks went up everywhere after oil was discovered in 1929. The depression drove a final stake through its heart and Venice wasn’t much to speak of til a young counterculture of artists, poets and writers evolved in its mostly low-rent, European emigre community heavy with Holocaust survivors. The Beats of the ’50s gave way to the hippies in the ’60s and creeping affluence in the ’70s.

By the time I arrived, Venice was still a sleepy, underdeveloped community of artists, artisans and artist and artisan wannabes, but was literally moments away from becoming home to a whirring blur of crazed roller skaters, outrageous street performers and the world’s foremost supply of storefront T-shirt shops.

Robin Williams traded quips with local talent like  Swami X just feet from my door. Actress Stockard Channing used to visit the guy living upstairs. I recognized all the film locations from Cisco Pike.  And the music never stopped.  Ed Brown (the Singing Piano Mover),  Slavin’ David,  Jingles, the Canaligators, Don (the Mad Cosmic Violinist) and, of course, this guy. Away from the boardwalk, where the sand met the sea, the faint sound of drumming mixed with the steady rhythm of the waves in the earliest incarnation of the fabled Venice Drum Circle.

Wet drenched the zeitgeist.

Although Venice was home of the homeless before they moved to the suburbs you wouldn’t really have known it walking around the beach. Maybe that was because they lacked contrast with the heavy influx of tourists yet to arrive. Or maybe they knew better than to get in the way of the Hare Krishnas, who paraded down the boardwalk every summer with elephants and dancers in tow.

All of this was chronicled in the Venice Beachhead, a free community newspaper that foreshadowed the kind of hyper-local online publication championed these days by AOL.

A year later, I was still unemployed but the newly rediscovered enclave was already transformed.

July 4th was a lost scene from Apocalypse Now, with drug-crazed celebrants gathered in circles in the sand firing rockets back across the boardwalk and onto our own rooftops. The atmosphere was so thick with smoke, and our brains so addled by the festivities, that you could barely make out Robert Duvall roaring in the distance about the smell of napalm in the dawn’s early light. OK. The movie was still a year away, but Coppola must have been somewhere nearby.

My girlfriend quickly got a job, but it was 15 months before I found something. Fifteen months of occasional temp work in the city and regular tan work at the beach. When I wasn’t walking my dog or sending out resumes and calling newspapers (you could cold call a prospective employer back then and they remembered who you were) I was learning to skate, jogging up and down the boardwalk, or reading in the wooden pagoda by my apartment, listening to nearly-blind Uncle Bill play his guitar and sing the blues.

It didn’t matter that I didn’t have a job. It didn’t matter that the idealism and hopefulness of the ’60s was giving way to economic uncertainty and that the rank commercialism of the approaching Reagan Revolution was transforming the boardwalk before my eyes. It didn’t matter that Uncle Bill tried to seduce my girlfriend. All right. That mattered a little.

As I approach my fifteenth month of unemployment, I am buoyed by the thought that I’ve been here before.

Perhaps it was being young and in love and on my own for the first time. Perhaps it was the sheer exuberance of finally having a vocation to pursue after years of doubt and pain. Perhaps the passage of time has dimmed my memory of the early struggle to establish a career.  But I don’t recall ever feeling troubled by the prospect of an uncertain future in troubled times.

I think it was the perfect weather.

“Several things I’ve learned: You can’t apply for jobs well under what your previous job was; you won’t be taken seriously and will be considered over-qualifed. You must fall completely to the bottom and get the occasional minimum wage, temporary job. No one will commit to any training for a new position. If you’ve done exactly the job advertised before, you’ll be considered. But you’ll be considered incapable of learning anything new. General experience will not be considered. Stuff learned on your own will be denigrated or discounted. University degree qualification doesn’t matter. Age discrimination is alive and well.”

a commenter on Andrew Sullivan’s blog

Today marks the one-year anniversary of my separation from the Los Angeles Times. I was laid off four months shy of 20 years and joined hundreds of former colleagues at the newspaper in the burgeoning jobless market.

Although my friends who remain there say they miss my news editing contribution, institutional knowledge and technical expertise (not to mention my jovial camaraderie)  as they struggle with a new computer system and an oppressive work environment, others in parent company Tribune’s ivory tower appear to be getting along just fine without me.

I can’t say that I have enjoyed being unemployed these past 12 months, but it hasn’t exactly been time wasted. I’ve  retooled my website; learned a new computer management system (CMS); wrote an e-book I can’t link to until I’ve copyrighted it; started a couple of blogs, including this one; played around with new software (Dreamweaver, Flash and RubyOnRails); explored new hiking trails and paths through my heart after moving from the westside of L.A. to Pasadena near the foothills of the San Gabriel Mountains; rediscovered the joys of participating in home ownership after years of renting; been adopted by five cats; expanded my daily trek through the blogosphere to over 50 sites (admittedly, I have over 1,000 bookmarked); and sharpened my writing skills, churning out 65 cover letters to prospective employers.

By necessity, I apply for a wide range of jobs: university publication writer, museum editorial manager, think tank researcher, editor at a political blog, JPL media relations specialist, film website editorial writer. I’ve even applied for my old job at the L.A. Times, where interns and other former employees now toil in my place for significantly less money and few, if any, benefits.

All the positions interest me and would utilize skills I have developed throughout a varied career as reporter, columnist, editor, staff manager, newsroom tech troubleshooter and designer for web and print .

Nearly each new job application has brought about a flurry of activity to reacquaint myself with the  area of expertise in which I profess to be conversant. Years ago, I wrote a newspaper column on the “new” baseball statistics and ran a baseball fantasy league utilizing a computer program I wrote. Now, I am applying for jobs at Fox Sports and though still a fan am scrambling to absorb stats on the 600 or so baseball players who have joined the league since my heyday. And I’m boning up on soccer.

In my youth, a trip to the central library near downtown Detroit, with its early-Renaissance architecture, marble floors and walls, cavernous ceilings  and room after room containing row upon row of books, confirmed that this quiet sanctuary of knowledge is where the spirit of man is truly at home.

When I graduated from college, it was my fervent wish that I spend the rest of my life emulating the life of a student. Journalism gave me that gift. We used to have a cartoon on the wall at work showing a reporter preparing to throw a dart at a board divided into spaces with labels such as Economics, Urban Development, Transportation, Crime and Pollution. The chart’s title was Today I Am An Expert In …

Now, I include in many of my cover letters a phrase that gives me a large measure of comfort to write:

It has been my great fortune to be associated throughout my career with an institution vital to the community, dedicated to fostering a greater understanding of issues crucial to a functioning democracy …

Hopefully, Andrew Sullivan’s blogster overstates his case and the fate he foretells isn’t mine. But all things considered, it is hard for me to complain.

When a crisis is upon us, lamentations about mistakes made, commiseration for all the human suffering and cries for justice are not enough.

The President must act. He needs to weigh in on the disaster and put the full force of his administration and the public will behind righting this wrong. He needs to own it. He needs to go before the American people and compel the forces of evil to do the right thing.

Or else the baseball umpire’s call that robbed Detroit Tiger pitcher Armando Galarraga of a perfect game will forever be a blemish on his administration’s record.

Major league baseball has long claimed that adequate safety measures are already in place and there is no need for the prying eyes of instant replay cameras. The men in black who call ‘em as they see ‘em, they aver, are highly skilled professionals with proven track records and unimpeachable integrity.  Another bureaucratic layer of decision-making will certainly slow the game, dull the senses and imperil the institution.

Yes, over the years, the occasional corked bat, sign stealing and steroid use have tarnished baseball. But, the game’s defenders argue that our great national past-time still represents the very essence of America. It encapsulates the inventiveness, the toughness, the can-do spirit upon which our country was built. And few can argue otherwise.

When Americans streamed off the farms and into our cities a hundred years ago, we turned to baseball to power the engine of our imagination. When corruption and the chaos of competition threatened to hobble the game, the nation responded by protecting it with an anti-trust exemption . And when the most unruly of our masses attempted to weaken the institution, we came together as a people to protect the purity of our mission. At least until 1947.

But times change. And little by little some have begun to wonder if perhaps there is a better way to represent the American ethos than the enrichment of a small cadre of greedy individualists.  Especially when there are much larger cadres of greedy individualists clamoring to participate. Occasionally the cry goes up that Bobblehead Night is insufficient compensation for overpriced inclusion in the game.  Man does not live by Cheese Whiz nachos alone.

This is not to say that some day we may be compelled to ween ourselves off the need for ball and bat diversion. There are arguably cheaper and more efficient alternative recreational sources, like soccer, being championed by a distinct minority. But they are out of the mainstream of American life and, while some day we may have no choice but to explore those alternative paths, for now baseball is a critical part of what makes America the great international leader it is.

Questions are asked about how far we want to go subsidizing large private enterprises with public money and polluting our landscapes. Privatizing our gains and socializing our losses. And though these questions are, from time to time, asked by powerful public representatives in Congress, the representatives of baseball are not always forthcoming:

July 8, 1958, Senate Anti-Trust and Monopoly Subcommittee Hearing

Manager Casey Stengel: Well, I would have to say at the present time, I think that baseball has advanced in this respect for the player help. That is an amazing statement for me to make, because you can retire with an annuity at fifty and what organization in America allows you to retire at fifty and receive money?

I want to further state that I am not a ballplayer, that is, put into that pension fund committee. At my age, and I have been in baseball, well, I say I am possibly the oldest man who is working in baseball. I would say that when they start an annuity for the ballplayers to better their conditions, it should have been done, and I think it has been done. I think it should be the way they have done it, which is a very good thing.

Now the second thing about baseball that I think is very interesting to the public or to all of us that it is the owner’s fault if he does not improve his club, along with the officials in the ball club and the players.

Now what causes that? If I am going to go on the road and we are a travelling ball club and you know the cost of transportation now — we travel sometimes with three pullman coaches, the New York Yankees and remember I am just a salaried man and do not own stock in the New York Yankees, I found out that in travelling with the New York Yankees on the road and all, that it is the best, and we have broken records in Washington this year, we have broken them in every city but New York and we have lost two clubs that have gone out of the city of New York.

Now on the road we only get possibly 27¢. I am not positive of these figures, as I am not an official. If you go back fifteen years or if I owned stock in the club I would give them to you.

Senator Kefauver: Mr. Stengel, I am not sure that I made my question clear. (Laughter).

Mr. Stengel: Yes, sir. Well that is all right. I am not sure I am going to answer yours perfectly either.

For now, Major League Baseball stands firm. Rules are rules. What kind of a world would we have if honor trumped order. If justice trumped profit. If men were made to answer for their actions and stand judged by their peers.

“While the human element has always been an integral part of baseball, it is vital that mistakes on the field be addressed. Given last night’s call and other recent events, I will examine our umpiring system, the expanded use of instant replay and all other related features.”

MLB Commissioner Bud Selig

The tone may be perfect, but Selig’s pitch is wide of the mark. It’s time for action.  It’s time to think outside the batter’s box and reverse this call. Or we shall forever be tarred by these scandalous proceedings.

It’s been a long season, and in the end my pick to win it all was the same team I had picked in the preseason. But because I had seen them enter the year as a heavy favorite, stumble out of the gate, recover their balance, then hit a long losing streak before getting hot just before the regular schedule ended, I entered the final days hopeful, yet wary.

I’ve seen the Democrats screw up tasks far less challenging than health care.

Wait a second. That was too easy. A sports metaphor applied to a political battle with the intention of entertaining the reader through use of misdirection.

Let me try that again.

I was hiking in the Santa Monica Mountains a couple days ago in unseasonably warm weather. It was nice to break out the shorts and t-shirt and wend my way up the Santa Ynez trail to Trippet Ranch in Topanga State Park.

It wasn’t so nice to wake up the next morning with a bloody thigh where a deer tick, picked up along the trail, had bored his way under my skin, no doubt carrying infectious Lyme disease to my vulnerable nervous system.

All the early symptoms of impending disaster were there. Soreness around the wound where the blood-sucking parasite was munching away, a radiating spiral of red surrounding the spot, headache, joint and muscle pain, drowsiness and, yes, I think my lymph nodes were already starting to swell.

A quick trip to the Internet confirmed my diagnosis and affirmed my notion that I had precious little time to get myself to the doctor for treatment.

Fortunately, I have health insurance and could see a doctor for immediate  confirmation of my worst fears. Unfortunately, I have been unemployed for nine months and my federal Cobra coverage will probably run out just before neuro borrelia sends me to the hospital where I can savor a  “slowly developing destruction of the nervous system, numbing, partial hearing impairment and the development of dementia.”

Too bad the health care legislation the Democrats are pushing through Congress mostly doesn’t kick in til 2014.

That’s better. I like stories that begin with a personal anecdote. I also like stories with a happy ending, but I suspect even if one is written for this saga not many people will read it. They’ve barely followed the plot to this point.

The health care “debate” seems to have been everything but a debate. It’s been a morality tale of good versus evil, with Che, Mao and Stalin lurking in the shadows. It’s been a soap opera of ever changing fortunes in a sad and scary world. It’s been a sporting contest with a never ending supply of subtexts; like a baseball season dominated by talk of steroids, ballplayer bling, egomaniacal owners and financially troubled  franchises.

What people generally don’t know and haven’t been discussing among themselves is whether they want this:

Legislation that covers 32 million people. A world in which 95 percent of all non-elderly, legal residents have health-care coverage. An end to insurers rescinding coverage for the sick, or discriminating based on preexisting conditions, or spending 30 cents of each premium dollar on things that aren’t medical care. Exchanges where insurers who want to jack up premiums will have to publicly explain their reason, where regulators will be able to toss them out based on bad behavior, and where consumers will be able to publicly rate them. Hundreds of billions of dollars in subsidies to help lower-income Americans afford health-care insurance. The final closure of the Medicare Prescription Drug Benefit’s “doughnut hole.”

The single most ambitious effort the government has ever made to control costs in the health-care sector. According to the Congressional Budget Office, the bill cuts deficits by $130 billion in the first 10 years, and up to $1.2 trillion in the second 10 years. The excise tax is now indexed to inflation, rather than inflation plus one percentage point, and the subsidies grow more slowly over time. So one of the strongest cost controls just got stronger, and the automatic spending growth slowed. And then there are all the other cost controls in the bill: The Medicare Commission, which makes entitlement reform much more possible. The programs to begin paying doctors and hospitals for care rather than volume. The competitive insurance market.

Ezra Klein

Thousands of hours and millions of words devoted to the subject, yet poll after poll reveals that while people seem to have a visceral feel for the underlying culture war being waged, they haven’t the faintest idea what all the health care noise is about.

Only 15 percent of Americans, for instance, know that the nonpartisan Congressional Budget Office has said the legislation will decrease the federal budget deficit over the next 10 years. And 55 percent believe the CBO has said the legislation will increase the deficit over that period.

Kaiser poll

But just because you don’t know how to play seven-card Texas hold ‘em  doesn’t mean you can’t go to Las Vegas and place your bet. As long as you can pull the lever on the slot machine, or punch the chad on your ballot, you can play the game.

So now is your last chance to step up to the table and put your money where your mouth is.  The vote is two days away and the betting line at Intrade, the Prediction Market says health care passage is a slam dunk.

The blogosphere overflows with compelling writing,  diverse subject matter and inventive communication techniques.  There are over 100 million blogs, according to Technorati, and surveys show your average blogger is pretty educated. Oh, yeah, I don’t show up in Technorati searches either, though my virus protection program indicated someone thought enough of my presence to  slip me a Trojan horse while I was exploring the site.

There are not only a lot of blogs, there are a lot of prolific bloggers. “The sad truth is the more content you produce the more page views you get,” according to blogging evangelist Duncan Riley. He also once said that no one will visit pages that have ads on them. Riley was wrong about that, but right about the sadder truth.

I don’t really care about any of this. I’m not trying to build an audience, make a statement or earn a buck.

My master plan is to blog infrequently for an audience of one.

And I established forever in the  ’80s my total lack of the entrepreneurial gene when I wrote one of the first computer programs for running a fantasy  baseball league and limited its free use to a small group of friends.  Even when I took it to the web a few years later it was limited, free and unknown, by design.

That’s probably a good thing, because as Riley points out:

“If you want to get rich quick, don’t even bother. There is no such thing as get rich quick. I know everyone goes out there and sells ‘make money from blogging.’ It’s rubbish.”

No money. No fame. Probably not much intellectual satisfaction. I get that by belittling Glenn Beck from my living room couch. So what’s in it for me? Well, now I have some writing clips to show when trying to convince potential employers to end my extended  sabbatical from the workplace. I’m talking to you, Firedoglake.

And I have an activity to help me battle my growing addiction to Malcolm in the Middle reruns.

But it’s not enough. Not nearly enough.

In this age of lists, I want to be on one. And this list doesn’t appear to offer advice that I can, or am willing to, make use of.

So, I’m gonna try this.

Frances Fragos Townsend.

There. I’ve done it. I’ve mentioned the name of a former homeland security adviser to former president George W. Bush. When I searched Google blogs for a monthly mention of her name only 17 links appeared. I want to be Number 18.

I don’t need to be Number 1. It’s not just about me, you know. I’ll be waiting for the chant to go up. “We’re Number 18. We’re Number 18.”

Instant recognition in the marketplace of ideas.

Update: Two weeks later, this blog entry turned up as the ninth entry listed out of 240 on a Google search for mentions of Frances Fragos Townsend during the past month. She seems to have become more popular. I would like to think I helped.

We were being trained how best to survive a nuclear disaster. Or a tornado. Duck and cover. It was drilled into us on a regular basis. Signs on walls and ads on television made sure I knew what to do when the end of the world was near. We all knew what to do.

When I moved to California, I brought my knowledge of how the world worked with me to earthquake country. My wife and I taught it to our  daughter, and  put it to good use when the 1994 Northridge earthquake jolted us from our beds and sent us scurrying to the doorjamb in the kitchen. We cowered beneath it as the walls shook and the floor rocked, secure in the knowledge that we were taking all the proper precautions under difficult  circumstances.

But just the other day, I received an e-mail from a friend who forwarded me an article from “rescue  expert” Doug Copp, who had crawled through 875 collapsed buildings, worked at a high level for the UN and was a member of the world’s most experienced rescue team. He categorically refuted everything I ever knew about surviving the Big One.

He called his method The Triangle of Life.

Falling buildings crush big things and everything under them. Don’t get under things. Lie next to them. Don’t go to the center of a building. Cuddle up to a wall. Don’t curl up under a doorjamb. It will skewer you to death. The only safe place was in the space next to objects, beneath the triangle of wreckage. About all they agreed on was that when disaster struck, it was OK to assume the fetal position and regress back to the womb.

Copp shot a video of a staged disaster that validated all his natural experience.

Once again, the conventional wisdom had proven to be the wishful thinking of people who felt the desperate need for safe, concrete solutions in a world of deadly uncertainty. Like the efficacy of vaccines, the insights of Keynesian economics and the lasting value of a good smoke, yet another unshakable truth was replaced in short order by its diametric opposite.

If only they knew this in Haiti, how many lives might have been saved, I wondered.

But I didn’t wonder for long. Another friend e-mailed that their father, an aerospace engineer, was skeptical of this most unconventional wisdom.  He detailed a number of specific objections to Mr. Copp’s article and linked to a U.S. Geological Survey website that linked to, uh, this.

And just like that, I had yet another new contradictory set of facts.

In a world of diminishing returns and growing uncertainty,  it’s good to know that the unceasing flow of information, streamed at us our entire waking lives, will continue to provide an unending supply of simple truths.

They’re cheap. Help yourself.

Anyone who has seen the British prime minister debate his rivals on the floor of Parliament knows that there is much to be gained from a legitimate exchange of information and ideas. Unfortunately, in this country, the closest we come to that are staged debates, so formal in their structure, that any meaningful exchange is smothered at the outset.

And the substitute dialogue, hammered out hourly by surrogate talking heads on the cable news networks, only serves to emphasize our paucity of legitimate  public forums.

So its no surprise to find that only a third of Americans know what the health care public option is, 39% believe in evolution, nearly half  think the President can suspend the Constitution and a majority still think there were weapons of mass destruction in Iraq when we invaded the second time. Let’s hope that the 50% of Americans who believe we are protected by Guardian Angels are right. Someone has to take care of us.

I would like to see President Obama issue a challenge to the loyal opposition to debate him, one on one, every week for an hour on C-SPAN. Two people sitting across a table having a spirited discussion of whatever issues come to mind. Participants would venture into the seamy world of wedge issues and demagoguery at their own peril. It would be a fine replacement for the weekly presidential radio address and maybe make it up to the TV network for jobbing them on Obama’s pledge to televise the final stages of health care negotiations.

Update: How delightful. Not only did Obama arrange to have televised the final stages of health care negotiations, he sat down one-on-one with the loyal opposition and debated a range of issues.

I didn’t used to notice years being particularly interesting, though I often felt interesting things were  happening in my life and the world around me.

Empires would rise and fall. But there always seemed  to be some continuity in the sweep of my personal history. No one year being all that more significant than another. No one event defining an era.

Though I have grown up in interesting political times, I have never quite felt the pendulum of history swinging between left and right in this country. Watching a culture of Kennedy/FDR worship morph into the veneration of Ronald Reagan always seemed less an ideological gyration than an incremental victory for money and marketing.

People still seemed to have a sense of shared responsibility, a sense of community,  and the knowledge that we’re all in this together.  Even if Tea Baggers, in a bizarre spasm of corporate doublespeak,  wanted government to keep its hands off their Medicare, they recognized the underlying virtue of the government program.

There was still hope that facts, with their distinctive progressive bias, might still somehow inform our world.

But I had little doubt where politics, awash in money in a modern world, was headed. The die was cast in 1975 when the Supreme Court, building on a historically obscure, though monumental, screw-up, equated spending money with free speech.  It was just a question of time before the intended consequence of that decision would be realized.

And now it has.

On Jan. 20, the Supreme Court may have made its most significant decision since  establishing itself as a co-equal branch of government alongside its executive and legislative brethren 200 years ago in Marbury vs. Madison.  This time, the justices brought in a new, senior partner, corporations, and proclaimed them free to spend as much shareholder money as they want to influence and elect politicians.

It’s only 22 days old and the new year has already piqued my interest.

Addendum: A dissent from the left.

They’re right. I wasn’t ready for what lay ahead. And neither were they.

After a week of Thanksgiving partying in Detroit with my large extended family, I spent Sunday evening — and Monday morning — camped out on the floor of the Hartsfield-Jackson Atlanta International Airport, hoping that I wouldn’t get bumped at 7:30 a.m. from yet another standby flight back to Los Angeles.

The day had started out in a promising fashion, of a sort. It took 15 attempts to get the Delta Airlines computer to engage the task of producing boarding passes for my venture, but an hour of banging away finally bore fruit. After having my Southwest flight to Detroit earlier in the week cancelled at the last minute and my luggage lost upon arrival, i was encouraged to find online that the first leg of my flight out of town — the 5:20 p.m. to Atlanta — was only running a half hour late despite the onset of snow flurries an hour earlier and inclement weather in Georgia.

That would barely cut into my two-hour layover before proceeding home.

When I reached Detroit Metropolitan Airport, a dutiful two hours ahead of time, I noticed that my departure had been pushed back to 7 p.m. Uh, oh. That would make my Atlanta connection problematic, but the Delta ticket agent checked his computer and assured me the plane was actually in the air early, would arrive at 5:40 and depart no later than 6:15. Problem solved. But just in case, he gave me a backup standby ticket for the 10:30 p.m. flight from Atlanta to L.A.

My plane did not get out of Detroit until 7:10 p.m. It landed at 8:50 p.m., but sat on the tarmac for 45 minutes waiting for an open gate. I O.J.’d through the airport to my connecting flight, which itself had been delayed a half hour, but stood with my nose pressed to the window and watched as my plane, its doors closed, sat waiting for permission to taxi to the runway.

I dashed down the concourse to my 10:30 p.m. standby flight in time to watch as it was delayed first til 10:45, then 11:15. Not that it mattered. I was 32 on the list, and near as I could tell, only three people had not claimed their seats.

It was the last flight to L.A.

Upon announcement that the flight was filled and the unfortunate bumpees would be processed elsewhere, our hoard careened down the concourse toward what one would-be flyer called the “I got screwed by Delta” line that held upon our belated arrival at least 300 people from other errant flights.

Aggrieved customers, armed with cellphones, called loved ones to relate their plight while Delta agents obligingly handed out yet more standby tickets for Monday and offered to book flights for Tuesday and Wednesday. We were encouraged to blame God for the weather conditions and the FAA for any ancillary evil, but they insisted Delta had no complicity in our fate. We also received a card that offered us lodging at the local Wellesley Inn with the prominent directive: “Bill to customer.”

Although my Monday 7:30 a.m. flight was already “totally booked,” the agent assured me I would be on it and personally guaranteed that he would get me on a plane if I were still there when he showed up for work Monday night. He seemed like a man of his word and I didn’t know enough then to invoke Rule 240.

I decided to spend the night in the airport terminal and save the $127 hotel expense. I wasn’t alone. Mostly individual flyers were scattered about, some stuffed into stiff, unaccommodating chairs; others strewn across the floor. Laptops had replaced cellphones for contact with the outside world. Children in pajamas wandered about the concourse.

Finally, I hunkered down for the night in a cozy corner with my book, The Predator State (How Conservatives Abandoned the Free Market and Why Liberals Should Too), pulled my Delta courtesy blanket tight and tried to block out the incessant chatter from the airport intercom system and the overhead television.

The next morning, I was ready to go home. But was Delta?

I vied with 52 standbys for the Monday 7:30 a.m. flight. I was pulling for the older gentleman with the cane, but when I heard he was 43 on the list, I knew he was doomed. I was number 12 and didn’t come close. Although Delta had assured me that all of the seven flights to LA were booked solid, they offered $600 vouchers to the first four people who agreed to take a flight later that afternoon. I’m not quite sure how that works.

Atlanta has a huge airport, with half a dozen concourses spread out across a mile. Fortunately, they have a train that shuttles people from one end to the other, because I bounced from one end to the other, getting shut out of the 8:30 flight before lining up for the 9:50 plane.

Again, I was low (15) on the standby list, which had somehow grown to 63 from 52 earlier in the morning. But amazingly, they called my name and told me to grab the “last” open seat. I dashed aboard, plunked myself down and sat amazed as the plane departed.

The seat beside me was empty.