It took almost five years, but Arnold Schwarzenegger finally has done something as governor that I can cheer.

You may recall my fury with the California Legislature’s dithering over a state budget while the state economy is falling apart. There’s been no sense of urgency on their missed deadline. Instead of dealing with our enormous budget gap, our (well-paid) representatives are doing things like fining businesses for selling mylar balloons.

Turns out I’m not the only one who’s fed up. Our governor has come up with an ingenious solution: He’s going to cut the pay of about 200,000 state worker back to the federal minimum wage of $6.55 an hour until there’s a budget signed.

I love this plan. I’m sure all of the Sheraton Suites heard my roar of excitement last night when I read this story.

Do I think these state workers are to blame? No. Do I think their intense panic and displeasure is going to force action from the Legislature? You bet.

Schwarzenegger hasn’t been a good governor. I didn’t vote for him, either time. But tonight, he gets a tip of the hat. And I make this prediction, assuming he can legally follow through on this threat: our budget impasse will be magically solved within a week of those new (lower) paychecks going out.

I’m off in 5 minutes to the San Diego Comic Con, my 21st annual attendance. Back in 2008, my then-roommate and I took a drive, so to speak, down to San Diego to check out the Con for a day. We liked it so much we decided that the next year we’d actually stay over and go for a couple of days. Now it’s a five-day affair, with a rotating lineup of friends and allies sharing a large suite. Last year there were seven of us, this year there will be six, and next year there may be eight or nine (depending upon the college destinations and summer plans of my son and his friend, as well as what is a promised “Return to the Con!” by pop-culture-ephemera inspiration Joe Stafford — for whom there will Always be sleeping room on the floor by the window).

As this piece in today’s LA Times (hey, look: They still publish that!) details, the idea of “dropping in” on the Con is now quaint and ludicrous. The Con is now big business. But y’know what? The people running this very large, very sprawling, very economically and culturally important event are doing a great job. Really. That it’s a non-profit run mostly by volunteers makes it all the more amazing.

If you’re going to the Con and things like poker, whiskey, and cigars interest you, drop me a line.

Well… either that’s a clone or a long-lost cousin of the dog owned by my neighbor two houses down. Or, rather, of the dog who owns my neighbor two houses down, because clearly that’s the relationship. Two beings live there: the owner, and the human. The owner, who had the human buy the house about six months ago, loudly proclaims his territory to all and sundry when anyone ventures within a hundred feet. Many have been the times when passing by that I or at least one of my children have wished the dog a slow, painful fate. But then other times it’s the human I (more properly) blame, because she’s encouraging this constant ear-splitting yapping behavior. She gently strokes the dog and says, “It’s all right, it’s all right,” adding names that sound to me like “pookum” and “snookum” but which I, thinking about the dog, re-imagine as “punch him” and “shoot him.” See, it actually isn’t all right; the dog is turning me against a neighbor.

Or, I could blame my neighbors on the other side of us, who actually sold the house to this person. Problem is, I like these neighbors. A lot. They were one of the reasons we built an addition to the house rather than move; we liked the neighbors and the neighborhood. I did say to Brad one day, though, “Oh, that dog!” And he responded mildly, of course, “That’s her child.” Sure. But children who behave like that get disciplined. Or sent away. (Or wind up president.)

So when you watch the video above and come across the neighbor of the yapping dog who says, “I’d like to kill it,” imagine that’s me. Because I’d like to kill it. If not with my bare hands, then at least release it into the mountains so the coyotes could eat it.

So here’s something that my state senator, Jack Scott, has been concerning himself with while California enters a new fiscal year without a budget and with a massive deficit:  the horrors of mylar balloons.

Mylar balloons, it turns out, very occasionally “become enmeshed” in electricity lines and cause outages. Here’s the crisis that has my senator all charged up:

“Burbank Water & Power officials in 2007 recorded that more than 4,600 customers were affected by eight power outages, which lasted an average of 77 minutes per customer. The outages caused more than $10,000 in property damage. Though not the sole culprit, metallic balloons were found to have caused a portion of the blackouts. No metallic balloon-related outages have been reported in Burbank this year….”

In other words, there were some outages last year, but we don’t know to what degree they were caused by mylar balloons, and damage was about $10,000. This year, there are no balloon-caused outages. Clearly, this is a far more pressing issue than the state budget crisis.

The representative from the Balloon Council (no, that’s not your local city council, it’s a lobbying group)  shares my doubt that this is important legislation, but Senator Scott’s spokesperson “dismissed such flippancy, contending that Mylar balloon-cased outages are a serious problem.”

“If you’re in the operating room at [Providence] St. Joseph [Medical Center] and the electricity goes out and you have to wait for backup electricity, it’s a problem,” she said. “If it’s 100 degrees out and Southern California Edison is saying we’ve got six outages and they are all Mylar balloon caused and your fridge goes out, that’s a problem. To say that’s it not a problem, is understating it.”

Perhaps. But if she’s comparing this to the potential of a power outage during surgery, may I compare the impact of police, firefighters, and code enforcers ceasing work because the state can’t pay its bills? If the state doesn’t pay its electrical bill, I doubt legislators will be able to blame the balloons.

Luckily, a compromise was managed so that the balloon imbroglio came to a happy conclusion. Instead of, in the words of my local paper The Burbank Leader, “illegalizing the sale of the shiny, metallic balloons — as the bill’s author, state Sen. Jack Scott, had intended — the compromise will now penalize sellers and distributors of the Mylar balloons up to $250.” One would think that if these electrical outages were so potentially dangerous that the balloons would be banned. But no, I guess it’s enough to fine everyone who sells them — even though the balloons are legal — and thereby let more hidden tax dollars fly off to Sacramento.

One of the projects my company is working on involves training 10 young people (ages 16 to 20) in writing, setting them up on a blog, and having them go out and report on city-funded cultural activities and social service programs in the city of Santa Monica. All this week I’ve been driving to Santa Monica to run workshops with these youths. I like this project immensely: it involves young people, and writing, and getting the word out about arts activities and about programs that help people who need a little help.

What I don’t like is the commute between Burbank and Santa Monica. The distance is about 25 miles, and no matter what time of day I’m going there or coming back, it takes about 25 years. Yesterday’s workshop was actually in Marina del Rey (about 4 miles further). It took me an hour and a half to get back to Burbank. Imagine driving for an hour and a half at 15 miles per hour. I would have pulled over to go see a movie — as I did on this infuriating day — except lately that makes no difference; if it’s daylight, traffic is impenetrable. Plus, I wanted to get home for my daughter’s 10th birthday party. I got home all right, finally, in a miserable mood for being boxed in on all sides by cars and crawling along for ever. This must be what trench warfare felt like. News reporting would have you believe that people are abandoning their cars for bicycles because of high gasoline prices; I haven’t seen that, but I’d like to.

What are elected leaders in California doing about the traffic situation, which is clogging our roadways and choking our economy? Little or nothing.

We also have a little deficit here in the Golden State. It doesn’t matter what the number is (it’s massive); by the time I type it in here, it will have metastasized further. At various times recently it’s been pegged at $8 billion (that’s “billion” with a “b,” please note) or $12 billion, or $16 billion, or any number between, or larger. Here’s your first indication that the people running the state aren’t doing a good job: They have no idea what the size of the budget deficit is. Without an understanding of the problem, how can they be expected to fix it? The deadline for a new budget — one theoretically in balance — was July 1st. They missed the deadline. So here’s what they did: They went on break. That’s right. They left Sacramento to return to their (other) homes. Anyone doing business with the state of California right now isn’t getting paid — except, I’m sure, for the people on the state payroll, i.e., those people who didn’t come up with a budget.

Someone up in Sacramento — not sure who; finger-pointing varies — is proposing raiding embargoed funds. These are the funds that a plurality of voters (not including me) voted as set-asides for specific projects. I almost always vote against these funds because they almost always get raided for something completely unrelated to the proposed project — and this is something I told one of the governor’s emissaries recently when I led a little charge against one of them. And now, here we go again. What are some of the funds being raided? You guessed it: highway funds, originally intended to ease traffic congestion.

Aren’t ironies wonderful?

I don’t think that all problems are easily or well solved. I do think, though, that everything is improvable. Will California, where in addition to other problems 25% of high schoolers are dropouts (while we have some of the nation’s best-funded school districts), ever again earn the sobriquet of “The Golden State”? Maybe, maybe not. I don’t expect a return to the past so many people who have lived here longer than I have are yearning for. But I do expect people who are public servants, and well-paid ones to boot, to do the job they were elected to do. And although I know several of these legislators personally and like them greatly, I’m of a mind right now that all of them across the board ought to be sent packing. And I’m starting to wonder if that isn’t just what voters might finally do.

The slideshow at the bottom of this post may be the single best Powerpoint presentation I’ve ever seen. And it’s on something I care deeply about: the space program. You can look at it now and then come back up here, or read through and then watch it, but please: Watch it.

For those of my generation (either late Baby Boom or early Gen X, depending upon whom you read; let’s just say I’m a fan of both Nirvana and Carl Reiner), the space program was an important part of our lives, something that holds deep meaning and provided enormous benefit to humankind. I remember as a boy in kindergarten being led down to the auditorium to watch the first moonwalk on either of two tiny TV sets hung in the corners of the room. Now, thanks to technology developed to support space exploration, kids would be watching that broadcast on a jumbo screen or, ironically, on a tiny screen held in their hand. The space program gave us LED, LCD, transistor technology, X-ray machines, teflon, smoke detectors, microwave ovens, cellphones, and a lot more. Those of us who were around as these things came online remember life before them. And even if we don’t think about that, we might think about the admonishment of “Star Trek” to “boldly go where no man has gone before.”

The people who came after us, Gen Y, born between 1977 and 2000, care about none of this. These devices already exist. And how did they come to be? They think they were invented by cool startup companies (rather than, believe it or not, a government program responsible for the greatest cycle of invention in history). (And, on a side note, I stopped talking about Kirk and Spock years ago because my students don’t know which is which.)

Evidence of this ignorance and what results from it is everywhere. Who runs for Congress on a platform of support for NASA? Precisely one person recently — a friend of mine in Pasadena — and he lost. What is the level of public support for NASA? About zilch. Even while as a nation we’re concerned that we’re losing our high-tech edge to Asian nations (which we are), and we’re upset about a sagging economy without enough good-paying clean jobs — situations that space exploration would help solve. As I wrote about here, under item #5, I recently got to speak with a couple dozen NASA people in one afternoon. When I shared my enthusiasm for the space program, every one of them treated me like a rarely seen relative from Brigadoon and bemoaned the lack of awareness and respect for space science.

So: Here’s what I love about the presentation below. In 90 slides so simple, direct, and evocative that even one of these easily confused and distracted Gen Y’ers could follow it, four of their own generation lay out for NASA how the new storytelling had better work if space exploration is going to gain new investors. Here are the key takeaways (and take note, because to me they seem useful across the board in dealing with 8-to-31-year-olds):

1. The traditional communications hierarchy is dead. Given the new technological platforms — blogs, YouTube, IM’s, Twitter, etc. etc. — no one awaits Zeus’s thunderbolts. Everyone is part of the static. Either you allow a conversation, or no one is going to listen. This may seem annoying — and on many levels, it is — but it’s factual. In the age of three broadcast networks, some people even watched the Indian test pattern after hours. With all the choices and all the types of choices, no one needs to do that any more.
2. Gen Y is impatient. Even more impatient than I usually am. Even more impatient than you think you are. If they’re reading this post, they’ve probably already stopped because it seems too long.
3. “39% believe that nothing worthwhile has come out of NASA.” Lest you get pissed at Gen Y for this, it’s more appropriate to blame the messenger who delivered no message. And given that the mainstream media is lazy and prone to parrot whatever news it gets, blame clearly lies with a government program that hasn’t put out a good story about itself and is utterly clueless how to do so.

This last point is what cheers me about this presentation, drafted by four of these darn kids working on their own time. They’ve identified the communications problem, they offer advice, and the very nature of their presentation shows the style and impact of doing it right.

Now NASA ought to hire them to do it. Because whatever else NASA has them doing (evidently, they’re young NASA employees), this is more important right now.

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As you’ve heard,  the Feds seized IndyMac Bank on Friday. (And here’s the latest on that, by the way.) It’s the second-largest U.S. bank default in history.

On Saturday, we got a letter from the bank, which holds our mortgage. I assumed it was news of the default, with information about the status of our mortgage.

No. Of course not. How silly of me. It was an offer of an additional $100,000 from the bank, if only we’d fill out the teeny form and return it.

If only the letter had arrived a day earlier! Because, as my wife said, it’s not like they’re going to be around to collect it.

Glad I went to see Ricky Gervais tonight at the Kodak. He was howlingly funny — and helped me forget that I live in a city where the major metropolitan daily newspaper is about to be one without an opinion section, a magazine, or a book section.

Apparently, the last standalone section of the Los Angeles Times Book Review appears this July 27th. (While I’ll be at Comic Con — a place where one can still find books, and hear them talked about.) The Book Review — or, as I’ve been calling it while it existed albeit in a diminished state, The Book Area — was the one section I read every Sunday when I was in town. I also wrote about 10 reviews for it when I was actively freelancing in the mid 1990’s.

Editorial is getting deep cuts. But chin up, says California Editor David Lauter. Here’s an excerpt from his email Friday to the editorial staff:

So, as we move into the weekend, please remember that we’re going to have fewer people, but we’re not going to have lowered standards or baser ambitions. Our readers demand first-rate journalism, our skill and dedication give us the tools to deliver it. And that’s what we’re going to do — now and in the future.

As ever,
David

I believe this is known as “whistling past the graveyard.” It’s beyond me how one doesn’t lower standards, or sacrifice “first-rate journalism” when one suddenly has 150 fewer editorial positions. Let alone no book section.

One could ask, “What should he say?” How about saying, “We can’t continue to operate this way. If they want to have any product at all, the publisher and the owner need to stabilize the newspaper, rather than cut it.” But I guess that’s further evidence of my quaint notion that journalism is about, hey, speaking truth to power. If you’re going down anyway, at least retain your pride.

Just so we don’t lose our humor in the face of the ongoing Bush disintegration (er, administration), as well as all the aiding and abeting our Democratic friends are doing, I share this brief video, which a friend sent me yesterday. Sometimes a little crude humor goes a long way.

A big thank-you to Isabel Storey for sending this in:

“Good news. Cleanup of the Bush legacy is on the way!

A San Francisco group has collected 12,000 signatures to name a sewage treatment plant after the outgoing president.”

According to the story, the White House “is not amused.”

Me neither, most days.