Yesterday I came home from the reading of a friend’s play in Hollywood and traffic was once again snarled. This time Highland Avenue, which connects the city with the valley, was for some reason closed. Flashing traffic message boards advised “Seek alternate route,” which I did. None of them were good. What should have been a 10-minute drive became a 30-minute drive. I was finally able to make my way to Argyle, which connects with the 101. Normally the 101 is not my preferred route — in my 18-year-experience of driving in LA, the 101 is third only to the 405 (at all times) and the 5 (heading south, at most times) in being clogged in traffic. This time the 101 was a breeze, once I actually got on it.

While waiting in the middle of three lanes — the leftmost and center lanes being left-turn only (onto a surface street or the 101) I saw a girl who had just filled up her car at a  gas station on the right pulling her car into the right-most lane, which is right-turn only. I could guess what was coming. Sure enough, she pulled her car entirely parallel to the right-hand lane in an effort to cut in front of me and make a left. This is not only patently illegal, it is incredibly disrespectful to the 20 or 30 cars behind her who would like to make a (legal) right turn, even on a red light. Given my postings of the past three days, imagine my mood at seeing this. She looked at my imploringly, trying to use every ounce of her 20-ish cuteness to justify her behavior.

I rolled down my passenger window and saw her brighten, thinking I was going to accommodate her. Instead, I said, “Do you know you’re illegally blocking that lane, and cutting off about 20 people behind you who’d like to make a right? Have you even thought about that?” Her smile evaporated, the light changed, and not only did I not let her go, no one behind me did either. Maybe next time she’ll think first.

Remember my outrage over the cooked-up panic to immunize pre-teens against STDs (so that Merck can boost its bottom line)?

The state of Texas, of course, has become the first to adopt.

And even the news media has made the connection to the lobbying effort. I can’t resist quoting these few paragraphs:

Merck is bankrolling efforts to pass state laws across the country mandating Gardasil for girls as young as 11 or 12. It doubled its lobbying budget in Texas and has funneled money through Women in Government, an advocacy group made up of female state legislators around the country.

Perry tied to Merck
Perry has ties to Merck and Women in Government. One of the drug company’s three lobbyists in Texas is Mike Toomey, Perry’s former chief of staff. His current chief of staff’s mother-in-law, Texas Republican state Rep. Dianne White Delisi, is a state director for Women in Government.

The governor also received $6,000 from Merck’s political action committee during his re-election campaign

Gee, I wonder how that “Children of Men” future comes about…?

I will be very very curious to see how parents in Texas feel about Britney Ann getting injected so that Merck winds up healthier.

Here’s the AP story about the accident supposedly behind the snarl I just posted about:

LOS ANGELES (AP) – Traffic is finally moving again on the northbound 405 freeway near Sherman Oaks where a construction site crane earlier toppled onto the roadway.

The accident trapped the crane operator and triggered a collision between a big-rig dirt hauler and an S-U-V when the truck swerved to avoid the crane boom.

Firefighters managed to pull the operator out of the crane cab where he was trapped for more than an hour.

Fire spokesman Brian Humphrey says the operator was conscious and alert. A fire helicopter landed on the freeway to fly the victim to the hospital.

The accident, which happened shortly after one this afternoon, brought traffic to a halt on northbound Interstate 405 near the 101 freeway. The transition road from northbound 405 to the 101 freeway remains closed.

(That’s the update; here’s an earlier story from the San Diego Union Tribune. Again — couldn’t find anything on the Lost Angeles Times site.)

Before we get comfortable and attribute this one accident to the endlessness of my pilgrimage home, let me ask this: Why did it require 70 minutes last night, when there was no accident?

The accident didn’t create the snarl, it exacerbated it.

Hurricane Katrina didn’t create all of the problems it left — it exacerbated many that pre-existed. (People without adequate support systems, bad government on all levels, inadequate emergency response, and so forth.)

We’re going to see more accidents of all sorts. It’s past time to get smarter in how we manage our resources.

On that long drive home I realized two things I could do immediately: schedule some meetings differently, and start to use videoconferencing. We’re all going to have to become more clever.

This morning before leaving for my acupuncture appointment I had time to read the lead story in the Los Angeles Times: “No stopping climate shift, U.N. study says.” (As is typical for the Lost Angeles Times, the story isn’t findable on their website, so here’s a link to the San Francisco Chronicle’s coverage.) A quick scan leaves one with this impression: No matter what we do, the glaciers will keep melting, oceans will rise, and everyone — everyone — will pay the price.

The information wasn’t news, but to me the tone was. Just again last week, Al Gore had assured me via DVD that things were fixable. Now all the scientists he is always quoting were making Al seem… naive.

This topic was much on my mind as I left a meeting later that day in Santa Monica that was 22 miles from my office. I left the meeting at 3:20 and 70 minutes later had made only 3.7 miles of headway. (Mind you, I was driving — not walking. Walking would have been faster. Clearly.) Finally, having exhausted phone calls to friends, relatives, and strangers, and having triple-checked my email on my Treo, and having no further interest in being boxed in on all sides by other frustrated people, I pulled into the Westfield Century City mall to go see a movie. And of course the movie that was starting immediately was:

“Children of Men.”

In “Children of Men,” everything I’ve been seeing in the breakdown of our planet and our manmade infrastructure is evidenced in a dystopian future only 20 years from now. The scenes of urban combat look awfully familiar to anyone with a television set, as do the shots of “detainees” and rampaging young adults with guns, and the overall ick of sky and water. In “Children of Men,” pollution has choked the planet, and human infertility has become total. Where watching, say, “The Omega Man” could be entertaining because we had little sense that its future was around the corner waiting for us, “Children Of Men” is a bracing confrontation with a future that seems all too plausible.

I left the light entertainment of “Children of Men” glad for having seen it — glad in the way one is “glad” for having seen Picasso’s “Guernica” (which of course is visually referenced in the film, as is the cover of the Pink Floyd album “Animals,” for reasons that elude me). It was disturbing, surprising and gut-wrenching — precisely like sitting boxed in in L.A. traffic, but less so. I was happy to have made better use of my time. I rode the escalator down, got into my car, exited onto Santa Monica Boulevard —

— and found that traffic had not cleared one bit in the two hours I had been in the movie theatre. No matter which direction or what roadway, traffic was moving with all the speed of a snail on warm tar paper. At one point I called home and left a message saying that if I came across a motel with a lit vacancy sign, I was pulling over and checking in. Eighty minutes later, I finally got to my office. Total travel time: 2 hours 30 minutes to go 22 miles.

I’m not exaggerating.

I know the region had a major traffic and construction accident on the 405, but this is indicative of a pattern that is only going to get worse. Greater Los Angeles is on its way to becoming a city of isolated city-states (if it isn’t already) much like Italy through most of its history. Downtown will have nothing to do with Santa Monica.

But then, I’m not sure what Santa Monica, which is on the coast, will be like. Gore predicts that over the next 44 years the oceans will rise 10 feet, which will turn our Burbank home into very valuable beachfront property. The U.N. report says 7 to 23 inches within 93 years.

Whatever happens, it’s clear that we’re entering a period where great fissures are forming in our civilization. Robert Kaplan wrote about this in 2000 in his book The Coming Anarchy, and I remember thinking when I read it that it seemed the most prescient book I’d read since Alvin Toffler’s The Third Wave. Toffler wrote about our shift out of the industrial revolution and how painful that was going to be; I wonder if he knew how quickly that shift would happen? Now every day I see signs of a fourth wave, a wave of collapse or retreat. If new technology is riding to the rescue, as the quote unquote president and some others believe, I hope it arrives quickly. Because in the meantime, there is often simply no way to get anywhere, and that seemingly little problem is indicative of many many larger problems.

Daniel Radcliffe is going nude and Harry Potter fans are alarmed. Mothers are threatening boycotts of the next Potter film!

Is the actor doing this for purposes of exploitation? No, to play the troubled young man in Equus, a wonderful play that has been with us for 35 years. (And which I saw two years ago in a stunning production at East West Players, brilliantly directed by Tim Dang and starring George Takei. Please note: In general I use the word “brilliantly” only sparingly. It’s a remarkable play, and this was a remarkable production.)

I have no idea if Radcliffe can pull off what is a very challenging role — and do it eight times a week. I don’t believe he’s ever had a stage role before, let alone one that plumbs these emotional depths. But the idea that he is “betraying Harry Potter fans,” which seems to be a recurrent theme in the media coverage, is ludicrous. Perhaps he might like to do other things in his life — like act.

It’s refreshing to once in a while say “over my dead body,” especially when you truly mean it. So here goes:

Over my dead body is my daughter going to get an experimental new drug cocktail just because Merck has succeeded in lobbying some state government to mandate it.

My priorities in life are simple. Here they are:

1. My family’s health
2. Everything else

Given this perspective, you can understand my immediate reaction: Here’s a huge pharmaceutical company looking to enrich its bottom line under the guise of “protecting” my daughter’s health. (No, they didn’t single her out — but keeping her front of mind creates a certain governing perspective as far as I’m concerned.)

By the way, in case you missed it, here’s what this is really about: Merck has been searching for a new drug market that it can completely own with its own patented drug. Click here to see the latest story about their 58-percent profitability plunge. Connect the dots and you get the suddenly pressing issue of immunizing pre-teen girls.

Will any of the presidential candidates stand up to big pharma? Because that’s who I’m newly interested in supporting.

Did you miss me? I’m back. Actually, I haven’t been away — haven’t been anywhere, actually, except up to Santa Barbara and back yesterday (more about that in a few seconds) — but I’ve been swamped. As you might imagine if you’re a regular reader of this blog, I read and write and teach a lot, and every once in a while my Normandy-invasion scheduling collides and the Allies don’t win. (Where exactly was this metaphor going?) In any event, now that rehearsals and my play reading of last weekend are over, and the semester is well under way (meaning I’ve caught up on reading for my own courses) and some things have moved off my desk, I’m back.

What was the highlight of the Santa Barbara day trip? Getting up to 90 mph each way, and boosting my mileage to 15.7 mpg. Still nowhere near the advertised lie, but closer.

That’s the old joke for what “F.O.R.D.” stands for, and given the continuing catastrophe of their sales slump and their mismanagement, it may soon come all too true for the company itself.

As MSNBC.com reports today, Ford lost $12.7 billion last year. That’s almost as much I spent last year filling up my Ford.

What could Ford do about this before it is, indeed, Found On Road Dead?

For starters, it could stop LYING to its customers. As regular readers of this blog know, I just leased a new Mustang convertible. I’ve had it about three weeks and I have to tell you, I absolutely love it. It’s a load of fun to drive, it represents a significant upgrade in every way from the former model (and I’ve had three of those former models), and every morning when I drop my daughter off at school, it wows all the 10-year-old boys out front. (If you can’t wow the all-important pre-teen market in any way, you have zero cool, and I’m trying to hang onto what little I’ve got.) But here’s the one — the one! — thing about the car:

So far, it’s getting 14.7 miles to the gallon.

That’s not only insulting and unconscionable — to me and to the planet — it represents a LIE that I bought. I say that because Ford advertises MPG on this car as 19 for City and 24 for Highway. If Los Angeles isn’t a City with Highways, I don’t know where we’d find one. If anything, my mileage should be in the middle at 21 or 22 MPG, not a full 25% lower than their lowest estimate.

The Ford Bold Moves campaign was all about being upfront with where the company has gone wrong and what it’s doing to fix that.

Misrepresenting its gas mileage makes roadkill of the entire message.

Adrian Belew — legendary studio and touring guitarist for David Bowie, Talking Heads and Frank Zappa, fondly loved (at my house) frontman of King Crimson (especially since Robert Fripp insists on sitting upstage in the dark) — is selling his old effects boxes on eBay.

One minute I’m listening to a podcast from almost- and shoulda-been- rock star Cush about drinking and bad behavior in Hollywood with Belew in full rock-star regalia and entourage, the next I’m looking at boxes that may have been used to record, say, “Once in a Lifetime” up for bid in the thirty-dollar range.

Either Belew has someone else putting these auctions up, or he’s seriously wasting his time. (He could eclipse his scant eBay earnings in about 1/1000th of a second via his guitar.) Or he’s newly pathetic.

In an interview on Salon, notorious word-twister Frank Luntz, whose past counsel has been to push for “tax relief” rather than “tax cuts” and who proposed substituting “personalizing” Social Security over “privatizing” it (and whose biggest success was in repositioning estate taxes as “the death tax”) has bold advice for the quote unquote president with regard to the State of the Union: Be believable.

I realize that when it comes to believability I’m old-fashioned. For the most part I like my believability to be linked to facts, particularly ones I can believe. Only occasionally do I fall back on pure belief, belief unsupported by facts, as with my belief in the inherent redemptive nature of art — even though Picasso was a thoroughly unpleasant person, Hitler was a scenic artist who later got up to some very mean business, and Francis Bacon painted grotesqueries like this. Irrespective of this blind spot — and it looks like one I’m filling in — I like belief to be based on facts.

The quote unquote has never needed the facts. His belief has been pure. God talks to him. I wish He told him better — or truer — things, but there it is. I wonder if now Luntz wants the quote unquote to be “believable” in a factual way. If that’s what he’s prescribing, both men would be better saving their breath, except Luntz is no doubt thrilled for this media opportunity. I’m betting the quote unquote, though, will wish he were somewhere else tonight, like under the covers. At least, that’s what I believe.