Books, libraries still matter a lot

Some of the fondest memories of my childhood came in a library.

I always thought it was an old Carnegie Library, one of the 2,509 built in the U.S. with grants from the richest man in the world. It turns out Crestline, Ohio, wasn't on the list, but the library there -- whoever built it -- was one of the most wonderful places in the world to me.

Whenever I was visiting my grandparents in the summer, I would walk to the library, check out five or six books on my mother's old card and take them home to read them. It usually took me two or three days and then I was back for more.

I loved reading so much, probably more than anything in the world, and I enjoy it as much at 59 as I did at 9. Think about that for a minute. How many things other than eating and sleeping have you enjoyed for your entire life?

I was goofy. I thought all kids loved to read. How else were we supposed to develop our imaginations? How else could we visit any place in the world at any time in history? How else could we imagine ourselves exploring outer space?

Turns out I was wrong. Plenty of kids didn't enjoy it at all, and like me, they grew up and became adults. We live in a country where roughly two of every three adults don't read for pleasure, a country were 40 percent or more are functionally illiterate.

Now I see where Ohio is having big problems. The governor is cutting the budget for state libraries by 30 percent. Shorter hours, fewer days open, fewer people working there.

It's all pretty stupid and short-sighted. We've gone through it here in Los Angeles County and we may go through it again. Since so few people read anymore, libraries are a luxury. Besides, folks who enjoy reading can usually buy their own books.

But what about the kids who haven't discovered the joy of reading yet? If they're to find it, it's probably going to be in a library -- if it's open.

I would imagine if you asked Ohio voters -- or voters in a lot of states -- where the budget cuts should come, they probably wouldn't choose libraries. They might cut raises for prison guards, or ask state employees to pay more on their own health care.

At this rate, the odds are pretty good that we will eventually become a country where very few people read at all, and the majority get their entertainment only from flickering screens, or portable music players plugged into their ears.

There actually was a time before when almost no one read.

They called it the Dark Ages.

Jan Berry and the beauty of summer

"Two girls for every boy ..."

Are there still summer songs?

I don't know, but if there aren't songs that sing of the sweetness of summer, of sunny days, balmy nights and the girls on the beach, it would be a real shame. Because there's nothing like a summer song to help you rejoice in the time that stretches through June, July and August until the evenings get chilly and school beckons.


I think the first summer song I remember was "Surfin' Safari," which I heard in the summer of 1962 on "high-flying WING" radio in Dayton, Ohio. I believe it was 1410 on the AM dial, but it has been nearly 50 years and I'm not sure. I had a cheap little table radio that I had won selling band candy, and I listened to it day and night that summer.

A few hundred yards north of our house, they were building Interstate 70, which eventually would run from Baltimore all the way to the Great Salt Lake. I'd never been to either of those places, but I knew I would someday.

I was 12 in 1962, and I loved those summer songs. The one that was maybe the greatest of all came out the next summer, after we had moved to Virginia. I don't think I had heard much by Jan and Dean at that point, but as soon as I heard the first line of "Surf City," I was hooked.

"Two girls for every boy ..."



I was a huge Beach Boys fan at that point, and "Surf City" was supposedly a song Brian Wilson had given Jan and Dean to record. I remember the record label gave him the writing credit, although at that point I didn't know the politics of such things. I just loved the music.

I had never been near the Pacific Ocean when I was old enough to remember -- I was born in California -- but listening to Jan and Dean and the Beach Boys started a lifelong desire to return that finally came true in 1990.

It wasn't the greatest song musically, even though the melody would be recycled for "Drag City" later that same year, but nothing could match it for exuberance and joy.

Of course, exuberance and joy are pretty ephemeral. They rarely last long, and when I heard in 1966 that Jan Berry had been critically injured in an automobile accident, I thought of "Dead Man's Curve" for a few minutes and then moved on.

I figured that was it, but years later I heard that Berry had made a partial recovery and that Jan and Dean were touring again. I never got the chance to see them, but I just finished reading Bob Greene's wonderful book, "When We Get to Surf City," and it was so poignant it brought tears to my eyes.


You see, Jan never made it all the way back. If you watch the video, you can see him as he looked both after and before the accident. He talked a little slower and he battled all sorts of physical problems from the head injuries he suffered in the accident.

He had to relearn the lyrics of his songs every morning and there were times when he fell in his room and couldn't get up until someone came to help him.

But he toured and he sang. He kept doing what he loved the most and at one point he put together an album of songs all by himself.

Berry died in March 2004, and Greene, who had been touring with Jan and Dean since 1992, wrote of how much he had loved summer. In fact, for 38 years he had lived from summer to summer, battling to keep going. You could probably sum it up with one line from another song, "Ride the Wild Surf."

"Gotta take that one last ride ..."

If you're lucky, you get 75 or 80 summers in your lifetime. Some will be disappointing, others pretty good. If you're lucky, you get a few that are memorable.

Bob Greene has been called "America's poet laureate of summer," which seems to me like a pretty good thing to me, so I'll close this piece with something he wrote.

"If all of life were summer, then our world would have no texture, no context. Summer would not taste the way it does if we thought it would last forever."

"Two girls for every boy."

Medicare is a government success

At a recent town hall meeting, a man stood up and told Rep. Bob Inglis to “keep your government hands off my Medicare.” The congressman, a Republican from South Carolina, tried to explain that Medicare is already a government program — but the voter, Mr. Inglis said, “wasn’t having any of it.”
-- PAUL KRUGMAN, New York Times

This story sounds almost too ridiculous to believe.

The idea that someone covered by Medicare wouldn't know that it was a government program and that he didn't want those bureaucrats in Washington to get involved in it, well, it shows us one thing.

What's that?

It shows us that largely because of all the demagoguery that's being used on this issue, government isn't getting credit for a job it does much better than any of the private insurance companies.

Krugman, a Nobel Prize-winning economist, points out that the only reason as many people are insured as there are now is because of government subsidies -- tax breaks for employers offering coverage. Part of the deal is that to get the tax breaks, everyone has to be offered coverage, not just the ones who are young and healthy.

That's the problem with not having a public option in the current reform effort. If private companies are all there is, then people who are old, unhealthy or have pre-existing conditions won't be able to get coverage.

That's the biggest obstacle to reform. If we can't cover everybody, we come up short.

More great news from great kids

We received a phone call yesterday with some wonderful news.

Our son Virgile, who has been traveling in Europe, told us that his security clearance had been completed and he would officially be starting his job with the Foreign Service in the middle of September.

He's also getting married this fall, and Sterling Miller (shown in the picture with Virgile) will be a wonderful wife for him and daughter-in-law for us.

As difficult as it is to become a foreign service officer, it makes me doubly proud that both of my children have qualified. Pauline had already been employed by the State Department for more than five years and has completed tours in Africa and in China.

Pauline is amazing in some of the same ways her mother is amazing. She's got incredible drive and the determination to do things correctly, and she has developed wonderful people skills. I know from her evaluations that she shows us that she is very highly esteemed by her employers, and it manifested itself in the fact that she has already received tenure in her job.


For all her good qualities, it has been the last year that she has really blossomed as a person. Having a baby and becoming a mother seems to have made my daughter's life complete.

Little Maddie has added so much to all our lives, and the joy I feel from being twice a parent and once a grandparent is more than I could possibly have imagined.

For all my pride in them, and all my pleasure in the times I have been called a good father, I know I am very lucky. I have friends who have done their very best and haven't had the same results. I am well aware that you can't really be called a good parent unless you have good children.

I don't have good children -- I have wonderful children.

Neither one of them has ever done anything really bad, and any parenting I had to do was usually just nudging them in the right direction once in a while.

I am a very lucky man.

Little kids make pool a splashy place

When I was in my teens, my family went to a swimming pool a few blocks from where we lived.

It was a community pool, and we paid a fee each year to belong. I remember many hot afternoons hanging out at the pool, swimming and playing games in the water and getting out for five minutes every hour when the lifeguard called out "Rest period!"

If I remember correctly, I think once kids turned 16, they didn't have to vacate the pool for those five minutes. It was always more pleasant during those few minutes that the little kids weren't in the pool.

I don't live in Virginia any more, and our neighborhood pool is much smaller than the one I used to visit. But it's still wonderful to get into the water in the late afternoon of a hot day and cool off some.

The only problem is that in the smaller pool, even a small number of children can make for an awful lot of splashing. The children tend to be a lot younger -- at least half of them appear to be 5 or 6 years old -- and they get a lot of joy out of making the water fly.

They don't seem to play organized games. In all the times I have gone to our pool, I haven't heard the words "Marco" or "Polo" even once. I suppose I could try to teach them, and as wary as kids are these days, I wouldn't be surprised to hear one of them yelling "Stranger danger!" the first time I said anything.

Actually, I did have a brief conversation with one little boy this afternoon. I was standing in water up to my shoulders at the edge of the pool, trying to keep my copy of John D. MacDonald's "The Dreadful Lemon Sky" from getting wet.

He walked up to me along the side of the pool and asked me a question?

"Can I jump in right here?" he asked, gesturing to a spot about a foot from me.

I didn't pause for a second. "No."

He looked disappointed, so I explained to him that I didn't want to be splashed, but if he went to the other side of the pool, the water was the same depth.

That's what he did, but I still felt bad.

You kids get off my lawn.

Some folks just don't want the truth

When I read Bob Greene's wonderful "Late Edition," which I wrote about yesterday, I was reminded of how newspapers have often been called the first draft of history.

Events are recorded for posterity, and while they may be revised, corrected or expanded at some point, it was reading them in the newspaper that told us they had happened.

That's why two newspapers from 1961, the Honolulu Star-Bulletin and the Honolulu Advertiser, pretty much blow away any possible legitimacy to any claims the "birthers" have about President Obama.

For all the claims that Obama's birth certificate isn't real, or that there have been forgeries (despite the Republican governor of Hawaii saying she has seen it and it is a legal birth certificate), the one thing the birthers can never explain is that within a day or two of Obama's birth, both Honolulu newspapers reported it in their vital statistics sections.

So ...

To believe that there is still some conspiracy, we now have to believe that the newspapers were in on this and that the conspiracy goes all the way back to the time of Obama's birth in 1961. I mentioned this to one "birther" I know, and he came up with a perfect knee-jerk response.

"The newspapers could have been photoshopped to include a fake announcement."

Maybe, but who could ever be sure there weren't other copies somewhere in files or on microfilm that would contradict them?

That's why I believe, as I have from the start, that what this is all about is people who lost the last election trying to find anything they can use to derail Obama's administration. I'm sure that once this fails, there will be people coming out of the woodwork claiming to have been his gay lover, or claiming to have been raped by him, or claiming to have been a member (along with Obama) in a subversive group.

The most disturbing part of it all is that a part of our electorate seems to have taken a very primitive attitude toward the facts in all this. What they're saying, in essence, is that they won't believe anything they haven't seen with their own eyes.

And sometimes, not even that.

Still something special about newspapers

I was 11 years old the first time I had the feeling.

I don't remember much about the newspaper, other than to tell you it was a local weekly in Huber Heights, Ohio. I opened up the sports page, looked at the bottom of the broadsheet and saw my name and picture with a column about junior high school sports that I had written.

I had a 1961 crew cut and the shirt I was wearing had red and white stripes. I looked like someone out of a barbershop quartet.

But I was a newspaper man. Or maybe more accurately, a newspaper reporter.

I wish I could say it was the beginning of a lifelong romance with journalism, but after that one season in Ohio, it was 17 years before I wrote for a newspaper again. That was when the real romance began.

From the fall of 1978, when I returned to college and went to work on the school paper to January 2008, when I was one of the first victims of last year's massive job cuts in the newspaper industry, I was a journalist.

I worked for wonderful people and I worked for people I'm pretty sure will roast in hell. I worked for terrific journalists and I worked for others who had been promoted well past the level of their incompetence. I even worked for people who seemed eager to hasten the demise of America's newspapers.

If I live to be 90 years old, and people ask me what I did, I will say proudly that I was a journalist. I didn't work in the media; I worked in the newspaper business, and if 30 years from now I have to explain to people what newspapers were, I will do so proudly.

I covered almost everything -- sports, business, politics, entertainment. I even got to write a column three times a week for the best five years of my professional life. I wasn't Bob Greene or Mike Royko, but I had a following.

I'm currently reading Greene's latest book, "Late Edition: A Love Story," about the four summers he spent at the old Columbus Citizen-Journal at the beginning of his own career, and the best compliment I could ever pay him is to say that he gets it. He understands exactly what it is -- what it was -- that made so many of us fall in love with deadline journalism.

He understands what we're losing, too.

Says Greene:

"We were not in the 'information business.'

"That is the phrase that newspaper executives often use today, to explain what they do. It is intended to be heard as a descriptive, even boastful phrase, but it can sound vaguely desperate. With the newspaper business in trouble, some publishers seem ever eager to proclaim to the public that they're not in the newspaper business at all. They're in the information business. Web sites, cable television channels, drive-time radio partnerships, e-mail editions, Internet entertainment offshoots ... a newspaper, the implication seems to say, is only a part of it. It's as if the publishers want the readers to translate that as" only a small part of it."

The last boss I had in the newspaper business, the one who ended my employment, gave us a long speech on more than one occasion to tell us we were not in the newspaper business, we were in the information business.

The sad part of it is that he was a frightened little man who covered his fear with bluster and meanness. He was far too eager to write off newspapers, and he even said several times that he didn't care about the print edition at all.

Sorry, Steve, but when I read the New York Times or USA Today on my BlackBerry, it just isn't the same as holding a newspaper and seeing words in print. Probably the greatest non-sexual thrill I ever had in my life was when I walked the campus on Mondays during the year and a half I was editor in chief of my college paper and saw hundreds of people reading my paper and discussing it.

I never reached the heights of a Bob Greene, but I got to be Bob Greene on the local level for five years and there is nothing like writing stories about people and knowing they meant something. Knowing that someone was paying me to use my judgment to choose subjects, research them and write them.

Being a journalist was wonderful, and seeing my picture with my column three times a week was as good a feeling as I ever had professionally.

It was almost as good as when I was 11.

Budget deal bad for Golden State

Will the last person to leave California please turn out the lights?

The budget "deal" announced this week by the folks in Sacramento seems to assure only one thing. Life in our state is going to get a lot worse before it gets better.

Thanks to a Republican minority that absolutely refuses to support tax increases, and the tight collar forced on the state by Proposition 13 in 1978, California has become the first state to basically abdicate the idea of governing.

So much so, in fact, that for all his good intentions, Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger may end up being remembered as the man who destroyed California.

He's the one who was elected in 2003 by promising to cut the car tax, and the revenue surrendered when he did that was the first problem when the economy turned down and there was a revenue shortfall.

Just as Democrats love to spend money on new and expanded programs when revenues spike higher, Republicans love to cut taxes. They're both wrong. The way to handle unexpectedly high revenues is either with one-time expenditures or with tax rebates. You don't want to have to count on those higher revenues year after year.

So school funding has been cut, both for K-12 and for colleges, as well as all sorts of other health and welfare funding. The budget truly is being balanced -- if it is balanced at all -- on the backs of the poorest Californians.

Some folks will whine about illegal immigrants costing the state all sorts of money, but the fact is simple. Californians don't want to pay for the government they want.

It isn't a case of too much taxation.

It's a case of too little intelligence -- and political courage.

California summers getting worse each year

I am no longer a fan of the land of the endless summer.

When I first came to California in 1990, we still had at least a semblance of seasons. I remember a day or two when the temperature actually got down near freezing, and January and February could be counted on for a lot of rain.

Well, call it global warming or climate change or whatever you want to call it, but summer has stretched out to about nine or 10 months a year in Los Angeles now, and summer is getting hotter and more humid every year.

Not true, you say?

You've got facts.

Well, I'm sticking to my story.

It has been a little more than two weeks since I returned from two weeks in Europe, and each day seems hotter than the one that preceded it. I'm pretty sure our local temperature has hit the high 90s the last three or four days, and my energy level is usually a converse relation to the heat outside.

We sleep with an overhead fan in our bedroom as well as an open window, and I still find myself getting up in the morning drenched with sweat. It reminds me of one thing I always loved about Colorado summers -- it might be 95 in the daytime, but it would drop to 48 or so at night.

All we have in our apartment is a room air conditioner, and it's in the living room. Once we know we're going to be staying here for a while, we'll buy a window unit for the bedroom. And for my lovely wife Nicole -- who truly loves heat and hates cold -- to agree to that, the weather has to be truly awful.

We do have a swimming pool at our apartment complex, as you can see from the photo, and it has been a Godsend. In fact, I have spent a total of about seven hours in the water the last three days. If the weather stays this hot, I may double that in the next three.

It makes it tough to get much done, so I don't. But it does make me feel better, and the good feeling stays with me for an hour or two after I'm back in the heat.

Two more weeks and we're off to Seattle.

It had better be cooler there.

Cronkite's journalism no longer exists

The death of Walter Cronkite the other day wasn't really all that significant, just as the death of Michael Jackson mattered a lot less than the media said it did.

Not to equate the two by any means, but just as Jackson hadn't been a significant force in music for nearly 20 years, Cronkite had been retired from journalism for even longer. He was the CBS Evening News from 1962-81, when CBS pushed him into retirement and gave his job to Dan Rather.

The most interesting thing about Cronkite isn't that he was charismatic or a compelling performer. He really wasn't either. What he was, though, is everything our "news" isn't anymore -- he was honest and he wasn't opinionated. For all the sniping from the right about him being "just another liberal journalist," for much of Cronkite's career, Democrats thought he was a Republican and Republicans thought he was a Democrat.

If he was the "most trusted man in America," it was because his viewers knew he wasn't trying to sell them his slant on the news. He didn't want to convince people to vote one way or another, and he really didn't give a damn about the ratings.

In short, he was everything today's news business isn't, and the fact that he isn't around anymore at least means that the folks who call themselves journalists these days will no longer have to be embarrassed by what Cronkite might think of them.

Modern journalism has become a squirmy thing, something neither fish nor fowl. In part because of 40 years of attacks from the right for a so-called "liberal bias," journalists these days won't even call someone out for an out-and-out lie.

An example:

It is fairly obvious that President Obama has a birth certificate that says he was born in Hawaii in 1961. Still, a fringe group of "birthers" on the right are insisting that Obama is ineligible to be president and that the birth certificate may be a forgery.

I'm not sure Cronkite would even have covered this story. If he had, though, it would have been to point out that these people don't really have any evidence and they're just trying to sabotage Obama's presidency.

Our modern-day "journalists" tend to treat everything as he-said, she-said, and no matter how ridiculous someone's point of view is, they treat it just as one side of the story.

Part of that is because the right -- there they go again -- say that telling people the story is elitist, that Fox's "We report, you decide" is the truly egalitarian way to go.

Maybe in an educated society, but when 65 percent of adults don't read, there are an awful lot of people who, as the old saying goes, don't know shit from shinola. The irony is that they don't see the news as being any different from pundits' voice on the left or right. If Katie Couric tells them the news and Rush Limbaugh tells them the "truth," who knows who they'll believe?

Covering the news -- whether in broadcast media or in newspapers and magazines -- has gotten so tied up with the cost of paying for it that we don't even really cover news anymore. If it's a choice between explaining Obama's cap-and-trade plan or reporting the latest gossip on Michael Jackson's death, the Jacko story is going to get 90 percent of the coverage.

My guess is this won't last forever. We may be slouching toward Bethlehem looking for a new way of educating people and keeping them informed, and the rough beast that will come out of this might be something we haven't even considered yet.

It won't be Walter Cronkite, though.

Those days are gone.

Hemingway isn't one of my favorites

"Isn't it pretty to think so?"
-- final line of THE SUN ALSO RISES

I just don't get Ernest Hemingway.

I love the last line of "The Sun Also Rises," mostly because Robert B. Parker has used it in at least five different Spenser novels. But as far as Hemingway's oeuvre, give me Thomas Wolfe or F. Scott Fitzgerald anytime.

When it comes to Hemingway, I tend to agree with John D. MacDonald, who poked fun at the ultra-macho flavor of his work in numerous Travis McGee books.

Other than being male, I guess I don't have much in common with him. I don't like fishing, I've never been hunting and I'm somewhat appalled by the whole idea of bullfighting. That sounds to me like three strikes and out.

It isn't that I don't like the whole "Lost Generation" thing. I love Fitzgerald and plan to read everything of his that I haven't already finished before I die. John Dos Passos and Sherwood Anderson were also terrific writers, but I've been working my way through "The Sun Also Rises" this week and it doesn't do much for me.

I'm sure it's at least in part a question of perspective. When the book was first published in 1926, it was said that readers found the disillusionment of the characters shocking. But I know so many people now who are disillusioned with so many things, Jake Barnes seems like an amateur to me.

In case you're wondering, the picture is of Jake Barnes and Lady Brett Ashley as Lego figures. I was looking for something better, but it seems there's a rodeo star named Jake Barnes and Google has 10 million pictures of him.

I'll finish the book. I do want to read that final line in context, but I don't know if it will lead me to read too many more of Hemingway's.

There are just too many good books to read ... and so little time.

GOP needs to get its Latinos straight

Would you be annoyed if someone made a joke about you that assumed you were Australian?

Or English?

Scottish?

Or maybe they would look at you and say something funny about New Zealand.

If you've ever had any of that happen to you, then you might understand how Judge Sonia Sotomayor must feel in all the discussion of her nomination to the United States Supreme Court. She's a New York native whose parents emigrated from Puerto Rico prior to the Second World War. She was born in the Bronx, and calls herself a "Nuyorican."

She is the first American of Latino descent to be nominated to the Supreme Court, and because of that, a lot of people seem to be confused about what a Latino is. At least one political cartoonist has portrayed her as a pinata, which is part of the Mexican Christmas celebration.

At least one Republican senator, in trying to be humorous, said that some of Sotomayor's statements meant that she had "some 'splainin' to do." That of course is a reference to "I Love Lucy," in which Lucy was married to a band leader from Cuba.

It may be hard for some people to believe, but other than language, the various peoples that qualify as Latino -- or Hispanic -- don't have much more in common than Newt Gingrich does with Crocodile Dundee.

Maybe Republicans need a couple of reminders. Roberto Clemente was from Puerto Rico, for one. Bernardo, Anita and Maria in "West Side Story," they were Puerto Ricans.

Ricky Ricardo was not a Puerto Rican.

Neither were Speedy Gonzalez, Pancho Villa or the Taco Bell chihuahua.

And as far as I know, Newt Gingrich never hunted crocs, although I'm not so sure about Dick Cheney.

A quest for fun in 30 cities

Most of us have at least two different types of goal in life.

We have the important ones that we really want to achieve -- and the whimsical ones that give us pleasure as hobbies.

I have had several friends who have described their lives as the quest for the perfect cheeseburger, and I'm pretty sure my son-in-law is trying to sample every good beer in the world at least once.

I'm not that ambitious, but I would like to see a baseball game in every one of the major league stadiums before I die.

It's obvious I can't see games in every ballpark that ever existed, unless H.G. Wells were to show up on my doorstep. There are a lot of stadiums either no longer in use or no longer in existence. But there are 30 major league franchises, and each one of them has a stadium. I'll settle for completing the rounds in all 30 of them.

I'm actually a little envious of my granddaughter. In the picture above, Maddie is attending her first baseball game, at Safeco Field in Seattle. That's one of the parks I have yet to visit.

Here's where I stand as of July 2009:

AMERICAN LEAGUE

Baltimore -- I haven't been to Camden Yards, but I attended several Orioles games in the '60s, '70s and '80s at the old Memorial Stadium that preceded it.

Boston -- I've been to Fenway Park once in 1997, for a game between the Red Sox and the Mariners. It was in the days when the curse of the Bambino still afflicted the Olde Towne Team.

Chicago -- I've never seen the White Sox play at home.

Cleveland -- I haven't been to Jacobs Field, but my dad and my grandfather took me to Indians games at Municipal Stadium, the old Mistake by the Lake, in the '60s.

Detroit -- I've never seen a ballgame in Detroit.

Kansas City -- All I've ever seen in K.C. was college basketball.

Los Angeles -- I've been a number of baseball games in Anaheim, including a game with the Padres and Angels on the first night ever of interleague play.

Minnesota -- I've never been to a ballgame in Minneapolis.

New York -- I saw numerous games at the old Yankee Stadium, even prior to the 1974-75 remodeling. When I was 7 years old, I walked on the field after the game and saw the monuments in center field. I haven't been to the one that opened this year.

Oakland -- I've been to one ballgame at Oakland Coliseum, Orioles vs. A's in the summer of 1991.

Seattle -- I've never been to a ballgame in Seattle, but I'm hoping to add Safeco to my list next month.

Tampa Bay -- I've never even been to Tampa.

Texas -- I've been to Dallas, but only for the 1986 Final Four. No ballgames.

Toronto -- I've never been to Toronto.

NATIONAL LEAGUE

Arizona -- I haven't been to any games in Phoenix, although I imagine it's doable on a weekend trip from Los Angeles.

Atlanta -- I haven't been to Turner Field, but I did see Steve Carlton shut out the Braves at Fulton County Stadium on Opening Night 1984.

Chicago -- I saw Wrigley Field when I was 9 and in Chicago for a funeral, but it was winter and there was no baseball being played.

Cincinnati -- In 1957, I saw a Sunday doubleheader between the New York Giants and the Reds at old Crosley Field. I've never been to Riverfront Stadium or to Great American Ballpark.

Colorado -- I lived in Colorado before major league baseball, so I've never been to Coors Field. I did see the Class AAA Denver Zephyrs play in 1987, and I saw Minnesota and Toronto play two exhibition games in 1988 at Mile High Stadium.

Florida -- My only trip to Miami was Spring Break 1980, long before there was major league baseball in Florida.

Houston -- I've never been to the Astrodome or to Enron/Minute Maid Field.

Los Angeles -- My home stadium. Counting the two years I covered the Dodgers, I have probably been to close to 200 games at Dodger Stadium.

Milwaukee -- I've never even been to Milwaukee.

New York -- I saw several games at Shea Stadium, including one that Tom Seaver pitched on the Fourth of July in the early '70s, but I haven't been to Citi Field yet.

Philadelphia -- I haven't been to old Shibe Park or to the new stadium in Philly, but I did see the Dodgers and Phillies play at Veterans Stadium in 1982.

Pittsburgh -- I've never spent any time in Pittsburgh.

St. Louis -- I worked in the Gateway City for 2 1/2 years from 1984-86 and I covered about two dozen baseball games, including Game Three of the 1985 World Series, at old Busch Stadium. I haven't been to the new stadium yet.

San Diego -- I haven't been to Petco Park yet, although I covered a number of games at Jack Murphy Stadium, including the 1992 All-Star Game.

San Francisco -- I've seen only three baseball games at Candlestick Park, but they were all games in the 1989 N.L. Championship Series between the Giants and Cubs. I haven't been to the new stadium yet.

Washington -- My home town. I never saw a game at Griffith Stadium, but I saw numerous games -- including the 1969 All-Star Game -- at RFK Stadium. And last year, I saw the Nationals beat the New York Mets at the new stadium.

There's still a lot of racism in America

My guess is the right wing would hate President Obama if he were white, red or green, but the fact that he is a black man is bringing out the worst in conservatives.

A photo of Obama's daughter Malia wearing a t-shirt with a peace sign on the front practically sent right-wing blog site Free Republic into full meltdown last week.

"A typical street whore." "Ghetto street trash." "Wonder when she will get her first abortion."

And some folks on the right have the nerve to say racism is dead in America and that we shouldn't be considering it anymore.

Malia Obama doesn't need me to defend her, and I'm enough of a product of the '60s that I don't see a peace sign as something shameful. But it's obvious that the trailer parks of America are filled with people who still do.

Until recently, a lot of the racism from the right had been relatively subtle. But read some of the other comments in this Vancouver Sun article and you'll see that the Freepers have jumped the shark, so to speak.

You won't find the Malia Obama thread there anymore. After hundreds of racist comments and a few complaints, it has been removed.

Questions that just will not go away

"Omne animal post coitum triste."
-- attributed to ARISTOTLE

I was having a conversation with an old friend the other day and I was surprised to learn that he had never heard this phrase.

If it had been anyone but him, it wouldn't have bothered me. There aren't many people these days who quote Aristotle in Latin, but my friend is extremely well-read and he and I have had many conversations about sex over the years.

He told me that when he was younger, he often had melancholy feelings after sex, wondering if that was all there was. I threw the quote at him, a quote that translates as "all animals are sad after sex," and it made sense to him in the same way that letdowns after big accomplishments made sense.

My friend and I were raised in the '50s and came of age during the '60s and '70s, the very peak of the sexual revolution. He was better looking and more confident around women than I was, so he was far more of a player than I was.

In fact, a number of the women I dated made a point of telling me how good-looking my friend was, which did wonders for my confidence. And on those occasions when I was successful, I was a lot more like Billy Crystal in "When Harry Met Sally" than I was like any Don Juan.

It was always more about love for me, which was one of the main things that caused the downfall of my first marriage. When one person sees it as more of a recreational pursuit and the other doesn't, that's ultimately difficult.

Ironically, my friend who was a player in the early '70s got married in 1979 and has been married -- and faithful -- to the same woman ever since.

Me, I continue to wrestle with the same questions I did as a kid, questions that should have been settled in my mind decades ago. I wonder if I'll ever know the answers.

Look where you walk while texting

What's the first thing you learn when you go out walking?

That's right, watch where you're going.

Wednesday evening in New York City, a 15-year-old girl was walking down the street when she stepped into an open manhole cover. She fell only five feet, apparently landing in sewage. She and her parents are considering suing the NYC Department of Environmental Protection because the open manhole cover wasn't marked with orange cones.

I'm not going to mention the girl's name, even though it has been all over the news in NYC. I just don't see much point to it. There is more to the story, though.

She was texting while she was walking.

For the benefit of readers who might not know what that means, she was using her cell phone to type out a message with the idea of sending it to someone else with a cell phone -- a friend, a relative, a stalker.

Well, maybe not a stalker.

She certainly wasn't paying attention to where she was walking.

Now I remember reading somewhere that age 35 is the dividing line for texting. If you're under 35, the odds are you send and receive text messages; if older, you probably don't.

I have received one text message in my life -- from someone under 35. I have never sent one.

I'm not a total geezer. I do use my BlackBerry to send and receive e-mails, but I admit the small screen and my large thumbs are not the greatest fit in the world.

If I were cynical, I might say that the young lady was lucky, that actually things like this might be referred to by my Social Darwinian friends as "thinning the herd."

Instead, I think I'll just hope she learned from the experience.

There's little better than 36 holes of golf

One of my favorite golf holes ever is the Par 3 seventh hole at Empire Lakes Golf Course in Rancho Cucamonga.

Depending on where the flag is placed and which tee box is used, it's a 160-170-yard hole. If you play it right -- if you attack it -- all but the last 10 or 15 yards is over water.

It's possible to play it safe, to hit up to the left of the lake and not risk a splash, but you won't be on the green. And if your first shot isn't on the green on a Par 3, it's much more difficult to par the hole and nearly impossible to birdie it.

I don't play often enough to be good, and I sort of created my own swing without benefit of lessons. When I play well, I can break 90 once in a while, which was actually my goal when I started playing golf.

Why? I guess because I read in a golf book that only about 10 percent of recreational golfers ever break 90. On my very best days, I've shot 83 and 84. That's very satisfying, since I remember the first time I played nine holes about 17 years ago, I shot a 75.

Golf can be the most damnably frustrating game. Within five minutes, I can top a shot and have it go five yards and follow a couple of shots later by blasting a pitching wedge 100 yards to within six feet of the pin.

I can hit a horrible drive and on the same hole sink a 25-foot putt.

Heaven ... and hell.

Mostly for me, golf is a way to step back from all the things in my life that frustrate me. It's a way to spend eight or nine hours -- we play 36 holes -- in the sunlight and come home with more tan than is really healthy for me.

It's a way to spend a day sharing a cart with my buddy Mick, who remains my closest friend in the world in the 45th summer of our friendship. It's the 2009 equivalent of when we sat on a curb when we were kids and discussed the things we had done and the things we wanted to do.

More often that not these days, the conversation is about our various physical woes. We used to play baseball, football and basketball together, but we're both on the far side of 55 now and pretty much limited to golf.

We discuss our families. He was a father before I was, but I beat him to grandfatherhood, if that's a word.

We played today. On the course at 6:30 a.m. and off at 3 p.m. So-so golf with some highlights to keep us coming back. I blasted my tee shot successfully over the water on the seventh hole both times, but missed my putts and didn't par the hole either time.

Heaven ... and hell.

But mostly heaven.

Media plays Jacko for all he's worth

In April 1945, a week after President Franklin D. Roosevelt was buried, his widow took a train from Washington, D.C., to New York City.

When she reached her apartment in Washington Square, reporters met her outside. They had lots of questions about her future plans, the late president's legacy and all sorts of other things.

Eleanor Roosevelt had four words for them.

"The story is over."

In 1975, on the brand-new "Saturday Night Live," Weekend Update anchor Chevy Chase satirized the coverage of Spanish dictator Francisco Franco by saying week after week that "Franco is still dead."

The story was over.

Of course, things have changed. Stories never end in these days of the 24-hour, Internet-fueled news cycle. Michael Jackson died two weeks ago today, and he is still the No. 1 news story despite everything else that is happening in the world.

For one thing, we are a lot nosier than we were in 1945 or even 1975. Remember the annoying journalist in "Die Hard 2?"

"The people have a right to know everything about everyone all the time."

We're got Perez Hilton, TMZ, the Smoking Gun and a dozen other sites designed to catch every celebrity's most embarrassing moments. We know more about Lindsey Lohan or Britney Spears -- including anatomical details -- than we ever did about any of our presidents.

We attribute qualities to them they don't even have. We ask them what they think about issues, when in some cases they haven't read a book in years or even finished high school.

Michael Jackson made great music, music that touched millions of people and made a difference in their lives. A letter writer to the L.A. Times today said he thought everyone on the planet probably had a favorite Michael Jackson song.

Well, I don't, and I'm pretty sure my wife doesn't either.

I don't think CNN needs to do breaking news updates on discussions of who will raise Jackson's three children, or what his albums are doing on the charts. Those children could be raised by winos and they'd still be better off than most kids in the world because they are rich.

And if Jackson's "Thriller" is the biggest selling album of all time, well, "The Eagles' Greatest Hits" is second and I doubt CNN will go nuts when Don Henley or Glenn Frey pass away.

But as long as there's money to be made and ratings to be won, American television will be chasing every detail of every story -- real and imagined -- about everyone in the world.

It's a shame we can't agree on one thing about Michael Jackson.

The story is over.

Laughter is always a good thing

I actually meant to post this a while back, but forgot. It's from "Pearls Before Swine," a comic strip that has become one of my new favorites.

This particular strip made me laugh out loud, which doesn't happen all that often anymore.

Enjoy.

Is any of this stuff really news?

Some habits are very difficult to break.

When I wrote earlier this week that I was opting out of the news cycle, I deleted a number of news Websites from my Internet favorites. I stopped checking Rush Limbaugh's transcripts and I decided that what news I needed, I would get from my subscription to the Los Angeles Times.

I've been having the print edition of the Times delivered since I came to California in April 1990, and even in decline, it's still a pretty good newspaper. The great thing about print over broadcast is that if I decide I'm not interested in a story, I just skip it.

I read Sports, I read the Calendar section and I consistently read the front section. I figured I'm at least as well informed as somebody who watches hours a day of CNN, MSNBC or Fox News.

As a rule, I don't watch TV news. I stopped watching local news shows in 1994 when I tuned in to the local NBC affiliate at 11 p.m. and watched a half-hour broadcast that didn't include anything other than sex, scandal, celebrity news and a car chase.

Hey, that's Los Angeles.

I did watch the CBS Evening News a few times because of this lust in my heart thing I had for Katie Couric, but as for the cable giants, the only time I ever hear or see them is when someone else is watching.

That's what happened to me Wednesday afternoon when I took my wife to the hospital for some x-rays. CNN was on in the background, and even though I couldn't hear anything, I saw Wolf Blitzer spend the better part of 15 minutes discussing Michael Jackson's children (Who will raise them?), Sarah Palin (What's next for her?) and President Obama's declining approval ratings.

I did the only sensible thing.

I fell asleep.

A promotion for little Maddy

When does a baby stop being a baby?

Since I didn't enter my own children's lives until they were already in school, I didn't get to see either of them as babies, infants, toddlers and whatever else comes in those early years. In fact, just about the youngest kid I ever hung out with was my friend Mick's lovely daughter Kelsey, who was 3 at the time.

My granddaughter Madison, who I christened the Amazing Baby on this blog, is on the verge of walking and talking. She actually stood up for 15-20 seconds the other day before realizing she wasn't supporting herself.

She promptly sat down.

If you look at some of the earlier pictures I've posted of her, she has this sort of goofy happy look in most of them. But if you look at this picture, she seems to have more going on in her mind.

I think she's earned a promotion.

From now on, Maddy is the Incredible Infant.

Jackson's sad odyssey at an end

I never really got Michael Jackson.

I wasn't that big a fan of his music, except for some of the early stuff with the Jackson Five. I was sort of repelled by his apparent obsession with plastic surgery, and I figured he was guilty at the very least of some incredibly inappropriate behavior with young boys.

My favorite story about him -- the one I thought really said a lot -- was the time he invited Elizabeth Taylor to dinner. The table was set for four and the guests were Jackson, Taylor and two chimpanzees.

Jackson himself didn't come to dinner, leaving Taylor to eat dinner with the two chimps.

I felt like the last significant contribution he made to music was at least 20 years ago, yet millions of people have been mourning his death for more than a week now. His greatest album, "Thriller," does nothing for me. I don't think it measures up against albums like "Born to Run," "Sergeant Pepper" or "Tommy," to name a few.

It isn't a black-white thing, either. I think Marvin Gaye's "What's Going On" is one of the greatest albums ever, and Stevie Wonder has made much better music than Jackson over a longer period of time.

Jackson was always a little too androgynous for me, and even though he was never convicted of pedophilia, he bought off at least one accuser with an eight-figure settlement.

I even thought his title -- King of Pop -- was sort of a left-handed compliment. "Pop" music was the stuff that wasn't quite rock 'n' roll or rhythm and blues. Pop music was Neil Diamond and Barry Manilow, Celine Dion and Mariah Carey.

Sort of like being the King of Marvin Gardens.

People are comparing Jackson to Elvis Presley, who died 32 years ago this summer, but anyone who thinks there is a serious comparison wasn't around when Presley was in his heyday. Elvis not only ruled the music charts, he made about two dozen movies whose only purpose was to get Elvis out there in front of his fans.

No, Jackson was no Elvis Presley.

He may have been the perfect symbol of our graceless age, a talented misfit who made hundreds of millions of dollars and spent most of it. A musical prodigy who was mostly spent by his 30th birthday. A man who never really related to women, whose arrested development left him comfortable only with prepubescent boys.

His choice of name for his home said it all.

Elvis had Graceland.

Michael had Neverland.

That says a lot.

Looking forward to an Amazing Baby

I'm going to have a wonderful summer, especially the month of August.

For one thing, it's beginning to look like we will finally complete the sale of our house. We have spent the better part of a year and a half struggling with the declining housing market, but -- knock on wood -- things are coming to a satisfactory conclusion.

Then Nicole and I will be spending the first half of August in the Pacific Northwest and I get to spend 10 days with my three favorite female people in the world -- my incredible wife, my gorgeous daughter and the Amazing Baby, my wonderful granddaughter Madison.

You can't imagine how much I'm looking forward to seeing Maddy. I heard her cry when she was 10 minutes old and she slept on my chest when she was 10 days old.

I've been watching videos of her for several months on Facebook, and she is really starting to develop a personality of her own. She's very close to walking without help and my guess is she'll be talking sooner rather than later.

But what is every bit as wonderful to me is spending the better part of two weeks with Pauline. I have never been as proud of anyone in my life as I am of my wonderful daughter. In addition to doing a terrific job as a mother, she has made amazing progress in her career as a foreign service officer. When I hear what colleagues say about her and I read her evaluations, I am absolutely blown away with admiration.

Maddy, Pauline and Nicole.

Damn, it's going to be a great summer.

Turning down the volume can't hurt

I have decided to do something for my health.

I am opting out of the 24-hour news/talk cycle.

When I returned home from France this weekend, I was surprised by how little it had mattered to me that I had spent two weeks without CNN analysis, talk-radio rants or the various op-ed columnists I had been following voraciously.

To be honest, most of what I used my BlackBerry to keep up with was ... baseball scores.

I did receive a couple of e-mails from my friend Mick that included news or opinion pieces designed to advance a particular point of view. I read them, but I realized later that reading them had only made me angry at what I thought was sophistry.

So I made this decision.

The times when I am at my best -- as many of you have noted in the past -- are times when I promote certain values, not when I try to advance a particular political point of view. In fact, I started this particular blog site to make the point that there are things in our lives -- friends, family and a few good laughs -- that are more important to most of us than politics.

That doesn't mean it doesn't matter who is running the country. Sometimes it matters terribly, and sometimes the people we choose for those jobs are totally unsuited to them. But all we can do is vote and speak out occasionally. The best thing we can do is touch the people around us and try one by one to create a nation of people who will behave ethically and fairly, people who will put reciprocity above self interest at least some of the time.

I don't need to know what Rush Limbaugh thinks about that, and it doesn't matter to me if Keith Olbermann agrees with me. I am not a person whose words will reach millions, but I believe I am thoughtful enough and eloquent enough that they can mean a great deal to the people I do reach.

I intend to be happy for the rest of my life, and I intend to express the reasons for that happiness through the words I write.

Is it enough?

It had better be.

From wonder to reality in two days

It is hard for me to believe that just two days ago, on a lovely Friday in the south of France, I stood on one side of the Lot River and took this picture of this village.

Saint-Cirq-Lapopie is just a little town in the mountains, but the view is truly spectacular and a restaurant known as Le Gourmet Quercynois served us a truly wonderful lunch.

A little more than six hours later, I was on my way back to California and reality. It took me 32 hours to reach California, while reality seems to be a little more elusive for me.

I spent the better part of two weeks in three European cities -- London in England and Nice and Toulouse in France -- and my greatest disappointment was that I apparently brought unseasonably hot weather with me to all three cities.

I would never call myself well traveled, but this was my fourth trip to Europe in the last 15 years, my third to France. I also visited France for nine days in 1977, and I loved the country even before I had a French wife.

I'm actually something of an odd duck, as my French relatives have told me, because I love both England and France. Since those two countries have bad blood between them going back more than a thousand years, it's difficult to like both of them.

I shared a good laugh with a cabdriver in Nice when he told me he liked Americans because Americans think they're the best in the world and the French know they are.

"What about the English?" I asked him.

"I was speaking of human beings," he said.

I actually kept up pretty well with what was happening in the U.S., thanks to my BlackBerry. I read the New York Times, USA Today and news from CNN, and even though way too much of it was about Michael Jackson, I found myself reasonably satisfied.

Through all of it, the person I truly felt sorry for was Farrah Fawcett. She suffered through her years of cancer with true dignity, only to find her death overshadowed by the greatest freakshow the world has seen in many years.

I was actually surprised Jackson lived as long as he did, since his lifestyle seemed to be little more than a series of unhealthy, risky choices. His death at a relatively young age probably cemented his legacy in a way dying in his sleep at age 85 never could have.

I also noted the freakshows that were Mark Sanford and Sarah Palin, and I'm not sure what to say about them other than that there are probably more people like them in politics than we could even imagine.

Stories like this always remind me of the line from Psalm 146:3:
"Put not your trust in princes."

Democrat or Republican, liberal or conservative, I'm not sure any of them can really make that much difference to us in the way we live our daily lives. Too many of them are too concerned with their own power to really stand for anything, so I keep coming back to the question of reciprocity.

If I treat people the way I would want them to treat me, then I am living my life successfully. If I make the decision that my own success should not be built on someone else's pain, then I can sleep at night.

When I walk through villages in France that have existed for hundreds or years, when I see people whose lives aren't based on how big their house is or how fast their car can go, I realize how short I fall of my own aspirations.


But when I see my young son battle for more than 12 hours to compete an Ironman Triathlon, as he did last Sunday in Nice, I am filled with pride. All any of us can do is try and affect the lives of the people around us in a positive way, and my children are my greatest joy.

So France is once again a memory, and California is a reality.

Onward we go.

Long trips and weird keyboards

I feel a little bit like Mickey Mantle, who once stayed out all night drinking because he was injured and didn't expect to play.

Hung over as hell, Mantle staggered to the plate, hit a massive home run and limped around the bases to thunderous applause. Collapsing in the dugout, Mantle said, "They have no idea how hard that was."

Well, you have no idea how hard it is to type on a French-language keyboard. The first line is not QWERTYUIOP. It's AZERTYUIOP. The period is a shift key.

Yeah; I know. Call the whaa-bulance.

It's just a pain to keep typing "a" and getting "q."

Anyway, I'm in France. My son is an honest-to-goodness Ironman after completing the Nice course in 12:10:01, and I'm wondering what's going on in America. Hey, Al Franken is a senator (and Rush Limbaugh is furious), Manny Ramirez is about to return to the Dodgers and Michael Jackson has returned to his home planet.

Jeez, I don't know what else to say about the guy the Fleet Street media in London call "Jacko." He lived, he made some music, he got weird and died. Sort of like Elvis.

I suppose it's sad to see a great talent disappear, but it had been a long time since "Jacko" made any great music.

I do have a lot to say about Europe, but I'm going to wait till I'm back on my own keyboard, assuming I survive the return trip from hell -- Toulouse to London Gatwick to London Heathrow, an overnight in the chairs, London to Chicago and Chicago to LAX. Home late Saturday afternoon.

I'll write again by Sunday.

Wish me luck.