Lights and Sirens

Today was a big day for screamers here in L.A. All the way from my residential hotel to the Central Library and back, a record number of shirtless yellers were open for business. An angry day. Sure, there're a few howlers whenever I walk around anywhere downtown, but today was special. Made me homesick for Herb Caen's San Francisco, where normals were turned back at the city limits if they didn't have a return ticket home. Talking about the City by the Bay on this day when the Pope is in the U.S., I was in S.F. when the last Pope was there. The authorities' dire warnings of complete Bay Area gridlock for the visit worked, and nobody showed up. I crossed the Golden Gate Bridge while the Pontiff was right there checking it out, and we whizzed right across, only slowed by the drivers wondering at all the cops on the walkway for no apparent reason. Pictures in the newspapers and on TV showed the Popemobile driving down empty streets, just a normal day. The police said that if their prediction of the mother of all traffic jams failed to materialize, then they'd done their job. Makes sense, crowd control is easier without the crowd.

Leno with his "Headlines" the other night had a quote from some high school gal from one of those newspaper trips where people answer the question of the day. Asked about texting or talking on her cell phone while behind the wheel, she said, "Sure, there's nothing else to do while you're driving."

And today the U.S. Supreme Court ruled that lethal injection is not cruel and unusual punishment. Remember in Lonesome Dove when Woodrow and Gus, the two retired Texas Rangers, were discussing whether to move from South Texas to Montana? A deciding factor was, "Well, we might as well move north. We hung all the interesting folks around here." I worked briefly with a guy whose mother had been executed by the state back in the early 1950s; yikes. I remember a video of a convicted mass-murderer doing life without parole, doing a pile of cocaine and having sex in his cell. He'd said if people saw how much fun he was having in prison, maybe they'd kick him out. Now I see on the news that there is a brain-scan machine that can tell if you're telling the truth or not, 100%, but I don't know if they'd let it count in court. Even with all the wrongly-convicted people getting released after decades behind bars after witnesses change their stories, or it's learned that the cops tampered with evidence, and especially now with DNA proving hundreds of people didn't do the deed, so we know innocent people have been put to death, yet capital punishment is still a touchy subject. Killing somebody for doing a bad thing: killing somebody. Hmmm.......

The library finally put out their computer class schedule for the next quarter. Having taken library computer classes up in Portland in '01 for my own start on the Internet, I always carry a few brochures with me to give to anybody I run into who says they don't go online, and I scatter them around my hotel for people to discover. Well, after years of producing hard-paper four-color schedules, a sudden city budget crunch has caused the city to cut back, and this latest schedule is simply printed on both sides of a piece of colored paper. It doesn't change giving the public the information, it simply saves on printing fees and paper. How many other of our daily use/spending on all levels could be cut with no effect on the actual purpose? Like how about the same concept with cars and trucks? Functional, basic, with interchangeable parts? Do we really need new models every year with personal climate control for each individual passenger and such? Forty years ago we might have gotten away with phasing in reductions in waste and pollution, but now it's kinda urgent, wouldn't you say? Families and households are being forced to deal with such limits, while for years many folks have done it on their own. It doesn't change anything really except cut waste and added debt. And the whole world has to see a leveling of standard of living for it to work. But I don't think international corporations and fat cats will let it happen, so we're done for I'm afraid. Oh well. We all better hope I'm wrong.