My daughter, watching “Tom and Jerry” in our hotel room: “Oh, Tom. You will never win.”

(About 10 years from now, she’ll be saying, “Wake up. Godot is NOT coming.”)

I’m staying at a hotel on Fisherman’s Wharf with my family through Sunday. San Francisco, being very San Francisco, always gives me strange and interesting dreams. Last night before finally turning in I was reading an appreciation of Timothy Geithner in The New Yorker; I haven’t finished reading it yet, but the main thrust is that Geithner and the Obama administration took the right steps in saving the U.S. economy — and are now paying the price for it. Says Geithner:  “We saved the economy, but we kind of lost the public.” This gives succor to my fear that Tea Party bottom feeders are going to get elected in November.

In my dream, I’m at a State Department function having a discussion with a senior official. I’m telling her that I supported Barack Obama in the Democratic presidential primary not just because I liked him and his views, but because I couldn’t abide Hillary Clinton. “She was running on experience. But what experience did she have?” I asked. “Not much more than he did in the Senate. Before that? First Lady.” Then I went on to say that on top of that, I just didn’t like her:  she seemed brittle and humorless and overproduced and, worst of all, entitled — as though this presidency thing was supposed to be hers, and who was this guy to try to steal it away? Then I went on to tell this state department official that I had to give Clinton credit, though, because she was proving to be a good Secretary of State. But wasn’t getting much credit for her accomplishments. (You see the tie-in with the article I was reading before bed.) She smiled and nodded and then I woke up. And then I realized two things:

1. That this hadn’t really happened — it was just a dream.
2. That the woman in my dream had been Hillary Clinton.

Here’s my feeling when you’re in one of the most glorious cities in the country and you’ve been having a dream about Hillary Clinton:  It’s time to get up and get out into the day. So that’s what I did.

iPhone users get laid more often.

My good friend Doug Hackney emailed me this story. It seems that in Ottumwa, Iowa, where he was born, the town hopes to rebuild its economic prosperity off its new self-proclaimed identity as home to the “International Video Game Hall of Fame.” What is the linkage between Ottumwa, Iowa and video games? Nothing. There is none. Where will the funding come from to build what board vice-chair Dan Canny calls “the most complete archive of video-game history” in this city of 25,000 people? No one knows.

This is a cautionary tale, a parable for our immediacy if we don’t reclaim the aspirational future America has always pursued. Where middle America once produced things, now we produce a lust for the past:  reliving the heyday of Donkey Kong and Pac-Man and Defender.

Something else Mr. Canny misses is this:  When he quotes the “$58 billion global gaming industry,” that is apportioned toward two streams:  platform games like “Marvel Ultimate Alliance” and “Gears of War” that are played at home on console units; and freemium games on social network sites, most especially Facebook, but also on mobile devices.  His hall of fame — to games from the early Reagan era — has no relevance to that industry. And the people who actually work in that industry have no interest in these “Back to the Future” games — they weren’t born yet.

You can’t build the future by focusing on the past.

What we have here is an ad for Starbucks Coffee ice cream, “coffee free.”

Three questions:

1. Who would want ice cream from Starbucks? Wouldn’t you rather have ice cream from someone who is really good at ice cream (say, Baskin Robbins or Breyer’s)?
2. Which is it:  “Starbucks Coffee” (note the logo) or “coffee free”? This is like “7-Up — now with no 7!”
3. Just, overall:  Huh?

Earlier today my friend Max Sparber put this lyric on Facebook, in response to the story of Steven Slater,  the JetBlue flight attendant who quit his job after getting assaulted by a passenger, and who then grabbed a beer, opened the cabin door, and slid off the plane:

THE BALLAD OF STEVEN SLATER

Ain’t we all had a day
When we just had enough
Ain’t it true each one of us
Has been battered, worn, and rough
Ain’t you never felt irate
And won’tcha get irater
Well, my friends, we have a hero now
I speak of Steven Slater

It ain’t that easy to ride the skies
Laboring for JetBlue
A man’s got to keep widened eyes
For terrorists or shampoo
And worser still are the passengers
They turn a kind man to a hater
Won’t nobody stand up to this?
One man: Steven Slater

There was a particular day
And a particular customer
Who grew abusive to Steven
when he instructed her
She was endangering herself
And he didn’t care to debate her
And all at once she struck his head
She struck at Steven Slater

Some will say he made a scene
Or it was a crime
But Steven he had had enough
And if he has to, he’ll do time
Perhaps it’s great to keep your cool
But sometimes it is greater
To bid one final fuck you too
As did Steven Slater

He cursed her on the intercom
So that everyone could hear
And he then bid his adieu
And he grabbed himself a beer
And threw open the JetBlue door
With an escape slide and its inflater
And he slid down, drinking, shouting fuck you
Our hero, Steven Slater

The police they went after him
They caught him in his bed
He was supposed to finish work but he was
In flagrante delicto instead
A hero and a lover now, not a
Circumnavigater
Say what you will, but tip your hat
To a man who had enough
A man named Steven Slater.

To which I responded:  Truly, Steven Slater will be the D.B. Cooper or Jesse James of our time. (Except: worse getaway.)
It didn’t take long for my prediction to come true. Here he is, mere hours later, getting lauded as a “working class hero.”

How long will his 15 minutes last? It depends upon the popularity of the reality TV show sure to follow, and the surrounding social media. And how quickly someone else with an equally interesting story zips into view.

As soon as you take a hiatus — as I did recently for two weeks, partly for reasons I’m hoping to blog about tonight — here’s what happens:  Your readers leave. (Mine came back, by the way, and thank you.)

One more reason to hope that California voters reject Carly Failorina:  The U.S. Chamber of Commerce has endorsed her.

This is a group that is so strident in its opposition to emissions control and even to acknowledging the reality of global warming that Apple, Nike, and other major corporations have famously quit it. In other words, all of Carly’s old pals in the tech sector don’t believe anything the U.S. Chamber says — and neither should we.

This line from a story on LATimes.com, about the reissue of Terry Zwigoff’s exemplary documentary, “Crumb,” caught my eye:

“A habitual crank with a pronounced antisocial streak and an aversion to mainstream culture, the director Terry Zwigoff  has one of the most distinctive sensibilities in American movies.”

The rest of the piece goes on to refer to Zwigoff as someone bethrothed to non-mainstream culture; by extension, Crumb is discussed as someone outside the mainstream. I read this and wondered, does R. Crumb truly qualify as outside the mainstream?

• He’s been well-known in his field for more than 40 years.
• His work is highly regarded by art critics and collectors.
• He created at least two well-known and highly recognizable characters, Mr. Natural and Fritz the Cat.
• The latter was turned into a movie.
• He provided a famous album cover for one of rock music’s most famous albums, “Cheap Thrills,” by Big Brother and the Holding Company. If you’ve ever heard Janis Joplin sing “Piece of My Heart” — that’s the album it’s from.
• He’s a recording artist in his own right, with The Cheap Suit Serenaders.
• Seventeen volumes of his collected works have been printed. All of them remain in print. More are planned.
• He’s a frequent artist for The New Yorker, supplying covers or whole comics-section inserts.
• He’s reached the iconic phase where now he appears in the work of others — referenced in books or films, or appearing as a character (in comics, or in film — in “American Splendor”  he’s played with precision by James Urbaniak).
• His most recent book was a New York Times bestseller. It was widely praised by critics.
• He’s the subject of not one, not two, but three documentaries.

Given this fantastic success, including the sort of success that most matters in the U.S. — financial — one has to ask, what does one have to do to be mainstream? At one time, the response might have been:  appear on a sitcom. But as all mainstreams have splintered into niches, as the broadcast network triumvirate has subdivided into the limitless choices offered by satellite and cable, when shows like “Aqua Teen Hunger Force” and “Ideal” and “The Whitest Kids You Know” are able despite rather small audience numbers to to draw enough sustenance to survive, then the idea of “normal” has left the room.

So why is Crumb, for all his obvious success and enormous cultural impact, still regarded as outside the mainstream? Because 40 years ago, that’s how he seemed. When the counterculture got covered by the mainstream, when straitlaced organs like Time magazine dropped in on what was happening in Haight Ashbury, they said Crumb was out of it. And he was. But that was 40 years ago. The culture has changed. Many of the topics reserved for adult-oriented underground comix are now laugh lines on everyday TV. Given that, Crumb is the new normal.