I’ve mentioned here before that I’m working on the campaign for Proposition 21, an initiative here in California that will support restoring and repairing the state parks. The campaign is popularly known as “Yes for State Parks.”

Please watch this brief newscast and read the emotions on the park ranger’s face about the deteriorating conditions of state parks. Then go to Facebook and “Like” Yes for State Parks. If we want to preserve California’s great outdoors, we need your help.

Salon explains, finally, why men eat meat, while women crave chocolate.

What they need to work on next:  why some crave spicy over sweet.

Hey, don’t despair. Despite the slumped economy, there are still interesting jobs to be found. Here’s one of them:  Perhaps you’d like to be someone’s personal nemesis.

In the 2000’s, someone introduced me to Coppola’s Law. Coppola’s Law was coined by Francis Ford Coppola, and it held that in film production there are three qualitative goals, good, fast, and cheap, and one could have only two of them at any given time. If a film was good and fast, it wasn’t cheap to make; if it was good and cheap, it wasn’t fast to make; and if it was fast and cheap, it wasn’t good. Although Coppola formulated this theory to fit film, people began to apply it to any endeavor and sure enough, in my own use of it in the past 10 years or so, I have found that it is mostly true: You can’t have good and fast and cheap.

Until now.

Because what has happened now is digital technology.

Oh, we had some digital technology before. But the explosion of microtechnology and superfast processors with magnified capabilities, the expansion of bandwidth, the extension of networks, and the ubiquity of consumer offerings have put more power in the hands of more people than ever before. Put personally it’s like this: When I was a boy, I wanted to publish magazines, record songs, and make my own films, and then distribute all of that to other people. And I couldn’t do any of that. The best publishing technology available to me was the Xerox copy machine — and copies were a prohibitive 25 cents a page. (A small fortune in the 1970s. And a ludicrous amount of money, when one considers that 35 years later, copies are two cents a page.) I could play piano and a little clarinet, and I was able to record homegrown comedy tapes on a handheld cassette recorder, but I couldn’t afford a recording studio. Even when I was able to lay hands on things like a Super 8 video camera, the larger problem lay before me:  how to distribute any of this. The costs of printing and packaging and postage and audio or film duplication were enormous.

But now, in 2010, you and I can do all of that. All we need is a personal computer of some sort — a desktop or a laptop or… an iPhone. For $199, you can produce a film, and you can distribute it for free via YouTube. All the barriers to entry are now essentially lowered.

Take a look at the video below, which was shot, edited, and uploaded entirely from an iPhone 4. The storyline isn’t impressive (I could summarize it this way: old fart bores youngster with impassioned recollection of antique childhood passion). But in demonstrating the storytelling capability of the technology, it’s pretty remarkable. Watching it makes me wonder what the kid I was in the 1970s would have done with this. Because, ironically, now that I have access to all these tools — I don’t have time to do any of those things I wanted to do.

File this under parental stupidity:

There’s oil in the surf and on the beach in Florida. (And we all know why.) And there are kids playing in it. With their parents next to them.

Thanks to good friend Doug Hackney of letting me know about this:  Jason Freedman’s post “Become a morning person. How to end insomnia for $520.99.” Here it is.

My response is twofold:

1. Hypnosis worked better than anything else ever has.
2. My hypnotist told me that my problem is that I don’t really want to go to sleep. “You’re right,” I said. “It seems like a waste of time.” I related this to my brother recently and he agreed and in precisely the same words:  “It seems like a waste of time.” Which makes me think that the Wochner family condition certainly runs in the family, and therefore may be genetic (as has always been my assumption), or may be cultural. Maybe we’re just not a bunch of time wasters.

There are other reasons I don’t really want to go to sleep. I’m a playwright, not a novelist. Novelists work in seclusion — they write their novel (inevitably in the mornings), and then they do whatever else it is they do the rest of the day. (Almost all of them:  work a day job or teach.) Playwrights write at night because the theatre takes place at night — that’s our natural timeframe. In fact, we often write after the theatre. So here’s the schedule:

• 8 PM the show starts
• 10-11 PM the show ends
• 11 PM – 1 a.m. drinks ensue, whether it’s your show or not
• 1 a.m. to ??? you’re writing your play

This applies not just to me. It’s the same story I’ve been hearing in my workshop for 17 years now, and one I heard again just last Saturday:  “I didn’t write these pages until 2 a.m. this morning….” We know, honey. That’s when all of us were writing our pages. You’re one of us.

That said, I did download the free program that the gentleman above recommended. It’s called f.lux (and no, I don’t think the wordplay is cute enough). It controls the relative light of your computer (in my case, a 17″ MacBook Pro). It lowered the glow from my screen to a shade of what I’ll call Santa Monica Pier at dusk. We’ll see if I sleep any better. And maybe this vodka-and-cranberry I’m having will help.

At some point in the immediate years hence — i.e., within the next three years — I intend to arrive upon the truly perfect solution for me:  Going to bed at 5 a.m. and awakening at 11 a.m. I did that for years and it worked flawlessly. I don’t need a lot of sleep — I just need it to be in the right timezone for me. In three years, my 8-year-old will be 11 and he can get his own damn self off to school just like his older sister and brother did. I’m counting the hours.

Here’s where to get one.

What would I do with it? Unless the Red Skull shows up in town, absolutely nothing. Except regard it lovingly from time to time.

This morning I attended an event at UCLA called “Millennials in the Next Economy,” put together by The Atlantic Monthly and sponsored by Allstate.  The topic: “the economic prospects of the Millennial Generation (people born between 1981 and 2002) – how they are making their way through this job market, how they are coping with economic uncertainty, and what they can expect in the years to come.” (This link will take you to more information, including the results of a nationwide survey of Millennials.) After about fifteen minutes of the presentation, I texted my 19-year-old to say, “You’re screwed.”

A few key takeaways:

• 24% of recent college graduates have been unable to find a job. For the last two graduating classes, their entry into the job market was “a rout.”
• About a quarter of people aged 26-29 are living with their parents.
• Nationwide unemployment of Millennials is about 16%. In some areas, it’s 28%.

The second speaker was a guy who did market research and polling for Bush/Cheney 2004. Shortly after his remarks — and after I didn’t applaud — I put my hand up. I never got called on, so in frustration I posed my question to the other people at my table:  “Do you think Millennials are really pissed at the cost of a trillion-dollar misadventure in Iraq, when that money could have been invested into our economy?”

Here were the responses at my table:

From a middle-aged Latino man to my right: “You are sitting next to the right guy.”

From two other people: smiles and nods.

From the young woman across from me:  “This Millennial is.”

There’s plenty of blame to go around for the subprime mortgage meltdown (some of it in our collective mirror). But blame for the Iraq war, as well as recognition of the enormous ongoing cost of it, needs to be delivered to a certain address in Texas.

Mike Love is talking up plans for a “Beach Boys reunion” next year to coincide with the 50th anniversary of the band. (Here’s a story about this in the Guardian.) I’ve seen the Beach Boys — back when it was still actually The Beach Boys, and not Mike Love with assorted sidemen — and I’ve seen Brian Wilson, and let me say, this is a very bad idea. Carl Wilson was the heart of the band’s live act; his death, more than Brian’s submergence below the waves of sanity, ended the band as a touring vehicle. Carl is dead; Dennis is dead (and I actually saw him in his last concert performance — he was howlingly bad then); and Bruce Johnston’s health problems have sidelined him. That leaves Mike Love, aka “The Annoying Nasal One,” Al Jardine, and Brian.

To put it generously, Brian Wilson is not really in a state to perform. He’s not really in a state to tie his shoelaces. I saw him perform a couple of years ago and I’m still wondering if I wasn’t accidentally party to someone profiteering off a forced day trip from the home. The concert was a painful experience, with Wilson unsure at times where he was or who he was. My friend and I felt very bad that we were there. (For more on that remembrance, and on Brian’s disturbing appearance on the Tavis Smiley Show, click here.) It was so upsetting that afterward my friend mused long and hard about “the Beach Boys’ mixed legacy.” Ouch!

I love the Beach Boys. “Pet Sounds” and “Smiley Smile” are on constant replay in my car. I think we should leave it at that.

You have to give the City of Santa Monica credit for doing their utmost to protect their resident businesses. Last week’s emergency preparedness seminar covered every likely eventuality — right up to zombie attacks. (See bullet points below.)