Tom Mangan’s home page

Just got it up and running this morning at www.hikehacker.com. The idea is to amass handy tips for trekking, camping, backpacking and general walk-in-the-woods stuff.  Should be great fun.  

So, how good is your cat?

I suppose I could beat the cat at chess.

Newspaper copy editors need to be looking for another line of work. We don’t need worthless Knight Ridder stock certificates to figure this out; just the ability to answer this question: Will they hire somebody to replace us after we leave? If not, it means they can get by without us, and the best thing we can do for ourselves and our employers is get another job. It’s win-win: We save them the expense of our salaries and save our own financial hides by working for somebody who considers us essential.

So, who needs us? More people than you might think — the trick is having a willingness to specialize. If you like nice things like new cars and fine foods, start where the money is: Technical, medical and financial. You’ll see a lot of want ads in corporate communications or marketing — either one is a perfectly respectable way to make a living, but I suspect they’d be soul-killers for the average newspaper hack. There will be openings at universities, where the pay will be lousy, and perhaps government, where the benefits will be good but the fun quotient negligible. Don’t be lulled into online if there’s no path to profitability (exception for Bay Area folks and others who have access to venture capital-funded start-ups).

All that gets us back to following the money:

• Tech: Houses that cost $80,000 in most towns sell for $800,000 in Silicon Valley, a rough measure of the value of high-tech expertise. You won’t make 10 times more money as a technical editor, but if you can score one of these jobs it’s safe to say you’ll do better than you did at the newspaper.
• Medical: There will always be more demand for better health than modern medicine will be able to provide. Medical information providers need editors who can translate how a pancreas works into language the rest of us can understand.
• Financial: As long as there is greed, there will be work in the money industry. Newsletters and financial advisers often have a specialized (and lucrative) customer base, and your knowledge of news will be valuable.

So, where to look?

If there’s a Craigslist for your city, start at the “writing/editing” jobs link. (Here’s the one for the Bay Area). Competition will be stiff in big cities like New York and Chicago, but you might have a competitive edge in a smaller metros because there will be few qualified copy editors (except your co-workers); downside: there won’t be many opportunities. With Craigslist, you often send an e-mail directly to the hiring editor, which can give you a leg up. Impersonal forms at large corporate sites are worthless (as are, I suspect, most of the jobs).

What about JournalismJobs.com? It’s worth a look, but keep in mind everybody else in the industry is watching the same ads. The ACES job board occasionally has non-newspaper jobs and allows sending direct appeals to hiring editors.

One site I really like: Indeed.com, which aggregates openings across several major job boards and allows sorting by keyword and location so you can, say, search on all the “editor” ads in Des Moines.

Also, you can use RSS feeds to aggregate several job searches into an RSS feed reader, so you can always track a large number of openings specific to your needs without having to visit a large number of job boards.

The main thing is to keep trying, and keep trying some more. Mass-market publications like newspapers are simply going away because people don’t want them anymore. You can howl at the dark or move toward the light — the place where there’s still a market value for mastery of the English language.

Now start clicking.

Lots of cool, creative types gathered in San Mateo over the weekend for Maker Faire, a celebration of human adaptability.

My photos are here.

My take on global warming is intuitive rather than scientific, based on information readily available from my brain. It goes like this:

A) There is a fixed amount of carbon on the planet.

B) Burning stored, high-carbon materials releases carbon into the atmosphere.

C) Petroleum is basically the world’s carbon bank — compressed biomatter from jungles that existed on earth hundreds of millions of years ago.

D) In the past 100 years, a very large percentage of all the petroleum that our planet has ever produced has been burned, and ALL that carbon has been released into the atmosphere.

E) Release of that much carbon into the atmosphere has to be unprecedented in at least the last several million years.

F) It’s simply counterintuitive to believe that 100 years of heavy industrial production based on the burning of petroleum would not affect the behavior of the earth’s atmosphere.

G) The way things are going, we will easily burn up every last drop of oil on the planet in the next century or two. In the next century or three after that, historians will call us the most selfish, short-sighted humans in the planet’s history because we were borrowing all that oil from future generations — with no prospect, no plan, no earthly idea of paying it back.

H) We can adapt to life with different weather, but adapting to a world without petroleum will be the far greater challenge.

I) Given all these considerations, the mandate to save petroleum by not burning it all wastefully yields the same result: less carbon in the atmosphere and reduced global warming, and more petro-chemicals for future generations, giving us more time to develop more sustainable energy sources.

Conclusions:

• Billions of humans burning highly concentrated, carbon-based materials are bound to screw with the weather when all that carbon is released into the atmosphere.
• Petroleum is the most powerful, practical component of industrial society. It is, literally, the grease on the wheels. Without it, industry stops. We don’t want that.
• As a matter of moral principle, each of us should reduce our petroleum consumption to ensure there will be some oil left for our great-great-great-grandchildren and their great-great-great grandchildren.

Al Gore overstates the extent to which the Earth is in the Balance. If anything, Earth is looking forward to the day when we foolishly burn all the oil and resort to massive warfare and bioterror and whatever else it takes to cleanse our species from the planet’s surface. Earth gets back into balance when we’re not mucking up the place anymore.

We’re flying through resources under the mass delusion that we have a say in how things turn out, when the best we can hope for is learning to play by the planet’s rules. Cheaters get to sleep with the dinosaurs.

Doctor King mastered the art of using non-violence as a weapon to get what he wanted (and, more critically, what our country needed). A more conventional weapon killed him in Memphis 40 years ago today. It wasn’t the rifle, or the slug, or even the presumably racist motivation of the man who shot him dead on that motel walkway, that cost King’s life.

I think it was the truth — a truth self-evident and yet fundamentally counterintuitive to human nature. Which was: violence is unnecessary and even counterproductive. We’re so captive of our violent nature that the idea of being willfully non-violent — particularly for political means — doesn’t compute.

King wasn’t the first to come up with this idea: Gandhi used it to kick the British out of India; today Indian companies are buying up British carmakers. Gandhi was murdered, too, which might’ve been on King’s mind when he said he’d seen the promised land but didn’t think he’d make it there with his people.

The genius of King and Gandhi was to use non-violent civil disobedience to provoke the inner violence of so-called civilized people. It worked because it created a “shooting an unarmed man” image that exposed how unjust these supposedly just people could be.

I’ve often wondered if the Palestinians would’ve had better luck following King’s model. Can’t say because it’s never been tried (at least not explicitly), but it sure seems to me that every act of Palestinian violence against Israel convinces the Israelis they’re justified in continuing to make life miserable for the Palestinians. Strikes me that if the Palestinians tweaked the conscience of the Israeli nation without killing and maiming its children, they might have a shot at ending the oppression (though that would render the fire-eating fanatics who run things irrelevant, and who wants to be irrelevant?)

Imagine what would’ve happened to King’s followers in Alabama and Mississippi if they’d have fought back at the bigots with baseball bats and firebombs. The lynchings would probably still be going on to this day.

King’s truth exposed the lie that America was a free country in the middle of the 20th century, when skin tone determined which schools people could send their kids to, which fountains they could get a drink from.

The truth got King killed, but he breathed life into an ideal that made America a more truthful country. We all owe him a thank-you for that.

Life is what happened when the planet was busy making other plans. I’m not sure anybody knows exactly how or why non-living bits of matter became self-replicating bits of living organisms that eventually evolved into us. Whatever it was, we’re grateful.

One thing I’ve figured out since I started spending more time outdoors: we’re just one more species on a planet teeming with them. Earth has no regard for our minor hopes and petty ambitions. It’ll live on long after we’re gone.

A lot of humans fret over the damage we’re inflicting on the planet. I have a hard time getting totally worked up over our trivial contributions — it’s not like we can move continents, create mountain ranges, sprout volcanoes. The planet’s always tearing one part down and building another part up. Most of California was ocean bed a few million years ago. There were no activist organizations to protect aquatic species royally screwed by the collision of tectonic plates that created our lovely coastline and left dry land where the ocean used to be.

There’s only one problem with the “stop worrying, the planet’ll be fine” approach: Greedy short-sighted buck chasers use it as an excuse to do nothing about disappearing forests, rivers, lakes and living things that, frankly, the Earth can adapt to losing. Some kind of life will pretty much always live this planet.

The species that really needs clean water, abundant forests and thriving wild ecosystems is us. Wild places store our best hope for survival. Ruining them ruins us.

Blasting the tops off mountains to protect mining jobs or chopping down ancient redwoods to provide a few logging jobs might be good for one generation, but it’s stealing resources our grandkids and great-great grandkids and they’re great-great grandkids are going to need.

There’s no such thing as saving the environment. There’s only saving ourselves.

From this morning’s AP:

BAKERSFIELD - While authorities in two states searched for a young boy they thought had been abducted, 9-year-old Zane Newton was buried under an accidental collapse of dirt near his home. His body was found “completely covered” in dirt in a lot hours after the reported kidnapping, police said.

Newton’s playmate told police that the 9-year-old was abducted midmorning Wednesday as the two were playing outside. A masked man pulled up in a black car and opened fire on them, the boy said, adding Newton might have been wounded before the man took him.

In reality, police said, the boys were playing in a lot when Newton fell into a hole and was buried when it collapsed around him.

I guess it just made a better story.

The New York Times tries to explain the credit crisis, but can’t really, but can at least give an idea of what went wrong. This alludes to the post about leverage and hedge funds I mentioned the other day:

Investors then goosed their returns through leverage, the oldest strategy around. They made $100 million bets with only $1 million of their own money and $99 million in debt. If the value of the investment rose to just $101 million, the investors would double their money. Home buyers did the same thing, by putting little money down on new houses, notes Mark Zandi of Moody’s Economy.com. The Fed under Alan Greenspan helped make it all possible, sharply reducing interest rates, to prevent a double-dip recession after the technology bust of 2000, and then keeping them low for several years.

Joe Sixpack got into the act by borrowing more than he could afford against his house, figuring the price would go up forever. Bad idea:

The American home seemed like such a sure bet that a huge portion of the global financial system ended up owning a piece of it. Last summer, many policy makers were hoping that the crisis wouldn’t spread to traditional banks, like Citibank, because they had sold off the underlying mortgages to investors. But it turned out that many banks had also sold complex insurance policies on the mortgage debt. That left them on the hook when homeowners who had taken out a wishful-thinking mortgage could no longer get out of it by flipping their house for a profit.

Many of these bets were not huge, but were so highly leveraged that any losses became magnified. If that $100 million investment I described above were to lose just $1 million of its value, the investor who put up only $1 million would lose everything.

Hello, Bear Stearns. Well, goodbye. Read the whole thing to fill in more of the blanks.

Remember how Barack Obama said essentially from the get-go that he smoked pot as a teen-ager? Well, the new governor of New York is saying up front that he and his wife both had extra-marital affairs a few years back, but they sorted things out.

In a stunning revelation, both Paterson, 53, and his wife, Michelle, 46, acknowledged in a joint interview they each had intimate relationships with others during a rocky period in their marriage several years ago.

In the course of several interviews in the past few days, Paterson said he maintained a relationship for two or three years with “a woman other than my wife,” beginning in 1999.

The New York Daily News, recipient of this priceless scoop, thoughtfully placed the story above the one about the meltdown of one of Wall Street’s most important investment banks.  Priorities in order, I like that in a newspaper.

Paul Oberjuerge, formerly a sports columnist for a California newspaper, offers 10 suggestions for people who still have their jobs, assuming they want to keep them:

1. Embrace the web.  
2. Get a meat-and-potatoes job.  
3. Suck up.
4. Stop whining.
5. Produce.
6. Stop spending money.
7. Make sure your editor hired or promoted you.
8. Keep your head down.
9. Lose weight, tone up, get a haircut, consider cosmetic surgery.
10. Achieve excellence.

Click the link to check out his comments on each one. Pretty much spot-on.

The big investment bank folded over the weekend and got sold for pennies on the dollar. Basically, Bear was heavily involved in securities tied to the mortgage meltdown, and last week there was essentially a run on the bank. By Friday all of Wall Street was avoiding it like Superman avoids kryptonite.

To understand what killed the Bear, you have to understand — to the extent that this is possible for non-financial types — how hedge funds and derivatives speculators make money. The book about the failure of the hedge fund Long Term Capital Management explains that hedge funds make money by borrowing against securities with a leverage ratio far, far beyond anything the rest of us would ever dare to try.

To wit: if your house is worth 100,000 and you owe 100,000, that’s a 1-to-1 leverage ratio. But the assurance that you’ll pay it off — because you have a strong motivation not to default — means you could, in theory, borrow against the assurance of payback on the note, because that assurance is in essence a kind of collateral. You know, something with market value. Say you talked your bank into loaning you another $100,000, then you’d have a 2-to-1 leverage ratio.

Hedge fund managers, who have billions to play with and the best brains and computers in the business, can find ways to make money off that assurance of payback in ways that would make your head spin. A single security could have a 15-to-1 or even 30-to-1 leverage ratio. These seem like stupendously risky bets when a measly million dollars, say, has 15 million dollars borrowed against it. Thing is, in ordinary circumstances, there’s no realistic risk of having to pay back all these loans at the same time.

To visualize this, imagine the Flying Wallendas with their Human Pyramid: it had four guys on the base, two people in the middle and one on top. Now, imagine the pyramid upside down, with one very strong beefy guy on the bottom and everybody else balanced on his shoulders. Theoretically, such a balance is possible, but it’d probably take a computer and the world’s greatest acrobats to pull it off. A long as everybody keeps their balance, everything’s fine. But if anything highly unusual happens — like, perhaps, one of the biggest investment banks in the world collapsing — the pyramid falls and there’s blood under the Big Top.

Bear Stearns wasn’t a hedge fund, but it was in the hedge fund business, and it had billions in borrowings out there that it couldn’t pay off with cash on hand. Late last week, Wall Street turned on Bear with a vengeance, and everybody wanted what Bear owed them, and they wanted it now.

A bank or hedge fund can survive if it can get its hands on enough cash to survive till the panic subsides. That’s where the Fed came in, offering to stand behind $30 billion worth of Bear securities till Wall Street stops acting like cattle in full stampede mode.

Long-Term Capital Management was rescued by a deal in which the biggest investment Wall Street Banks chipped in a few billion apiece to provide a cash life line to the fund until the run on its securities ended. Bear Stearns refused to participate. Cosmic payback arrived over the weekend.

I can’t help wondering how many leveraged-to-the-hilt securities out there presume the continued existence of Bear Stearns, and what happens to them when it disappears. Then again, I’m not too sure I want to think about that.

Washington Post has the scoop:

In one of the most comprehensive explorations of cats’ origins to date, Lyons and her colleagues spent about five years collecting feline DNA, poking behind the whiskers of more than 1,100 Persians, Siamese, street cats and household tabbies around the world to swab inside their mouths. The genetic samples came from 22 breeds of fancy cats, mostly in the United States, along with an assortment of feral and pet cats in Korea, China, Kenya, Israel, Turkey, Vietnam, Singapore, Sri Lanka, Tunisia, Egypt, Italy, Finland, Germany, the United States and Brazil.

By analyzing 39 genetic signposts in the samples, the researchers were able to investigate a variety of questions, including which breeds are most closely related and where they most likely originated.

The first thing the group did was confirm a report published last June in the journal Science that the domestication of cats about 10,000 years ago appeared to have occurred in an area known as the Fertile Crescent, which stretches from Turkey to northern Africa and to modern-day Iraq and Iran.

Speaking of Iran, Persians don’t seem to be from Persia, the researchers found. So how come people and cats seem to get along so well (mostly)?

Cats probably started living close to humans when people evolved from nomadic herding to raising livestock and crops and started storing food, which attracted mice and other rodents. Cats found good hunting there, and humans surely appreciated the sly little predators’ help protecting their stocks.

“There was a mutual benefit,” Lyons said. “There was a food source of mice and rats all around the grain. So it was beneficial for both cats and humans as the cats came closer to human populations and kind of domesticated themselves.”

That is to say, the cats domesticated the people.

Remember how some folks thought we could use Iraqi oil profits to fund the war? Must’ve been a swell proposition because that’s how it’s being funded — by crooks funneling profits to the insurgents. From this morning’s New York Times:

The sea of oil under Iraq is supposed to rebuild the nation, then make it prosper. But at least one-third, and possibly much more, of the fuel from Iraq’s largest refinery here is diverted to the black market, according to American military officials. Tankers are hijacked, drivers are bribed, papers are forged and meters are manipulated — and some of the earnings go to insurgents who are still killing more than 100 Iraqis a week.

“It’s the money pit of the insurgency,” said Capt. Joe Da Silva, who commands several platoons stationed at the refinery.

You know how the saying goes, there’s no power on earth stronger than a bad idea whose time has come.

Last week a bunch more people left. A few went of their own volition, most were fired. Here’s a complete list. I still have a job, though there were many times when I longed for the nerve (and the financial resources) to walk away and leave the business of putting out a paper to more intrepid types.

While we were in the midst of stewing in our angst last week, a former Merc guy wrote the newspaper’s obituary on his blog. I still detect a pulse, but there’s no denying it’s getting fainter.

I recall thinking back in about 1996 that newspapers had about five years to get their act together before the Internet swallowed them whole. Well, our tail is sticking out of the whale’s mouth but most of our business is working its way through the leviathan’s digestive system. It doesn’t look good.

One forward-looking blogger has created a site called newspaperdeathwatch.com … mind you this guy doesn’t work in print anymore so he can marvel at watching the Titanic sink beneath the icy waves from his online lifeboat. One page at his site explains something that I knew 10 years ago: newspapers were charging higher and higher ad and subscription rates for smaller and smaller audiences, a business that was clearly unsustainable. What did they do about this? Invest billions in R&D to keep themselves relevant in the new age? If only.

What happened was newspapers kept expecting somebody to show them the way in the Internet era but failed to notice that Google and Yahoo were inventing Internet advertising. Now the technology belongs to somebody else.

All this has been hashed out in excruciating detail all over the Web, with new predictions of the newspaper industry’s demise showing up daily — tempered with forced optimism that something better is on the horizon. It’s like that “you’re going to a better place” business people feel compelled to tell the doomed on their deathbeds. The dying know it’s a lie, but it’s such bad form to correct somebody when they’re trying to cheer you up.

Here’s what I think will happen: everybody who bought newspapers in the last three or four years will go bankrupt because they bought the top of a market held aloft by the phony housing boom, and some clever operative like Warren Buffett will come in and buy them up at pennies on the dollar.

Most of us will be forced to get real jobs, like school teachers or dogcatchers.

I have this half-baked notion that I can ride this out from the inside and see how it all shakes out. People still want local news, I figure, and people still want to buy ads to promote their local businesses. Newspapers didn’t have to adapt all those years when they had markets to themselves. Now they have no choice. With our industry’s survival on the line, we’re apt to get more creative, or die trying.

There are plenty of jobs out there for writers and editors. I keep meaning to apply for them. It’s possible these days to create a blog that draws enough traffic to earn a living. I keep fixing to get ready to create one.

Back when I had my first paper route in 1974 — a job I despised, mind you — one of the first things I noticed was how the ink rubs off and blackens your hands when you deliver a hundred of the damned things in an afternoon. The ink on the outside washes off, but the ink that gets under your skin when you build a paper from scratch every day for two decades never goes away.

One thing in my favor: I’ve been a Web junkie from day one, and news and the Web go together. Maybe the newspaper I build in the future won’t be on paper at all. That can’t be a bad thing, really. Think of all the trees it would save.

Most characters are lucky to make it out of a Coen Brothers film alive. For laughs, the brothers run their co-stars’ dead bodies through wood chippers. For yucks, a guy’s hand gets stuck to a window sill with a sharp knife.

It’s dark humor, lost on the average moviegoer, I suppose, but usually funny to those who enjoy it. I’m one of them, so I try to see whatever Joel and Ethan throw at us. We’re the kind of people who appreciate the comic potential of a 9mm slug between the eyes (look, it’s just a movie, all the actors go home without a scratch).

Alas, the “every slit throat is good for a few chuckles” vibe that gave us “Miller’s Crossing” and “Fargo” seems dead and buried in “No Country for Old Men.” The Coens seem to have lost their sense of humor in regards to the inevitability of death. There’s no cheating it, they’re telling us, and the harder you try, the more you hurry it along.

Death stalks the scraggly hills of southwest Texas in the human form of Anton Chigurh, a man with one purpose: to return $2 million in drug money to its rightful owners. Killing anybody who gets in his way is just his quirky way of upholding his exacting professional standards.

Somehow a botched drug deal has turned into a border-country bloodbath. One intrepid (though badly shot-up) Mexican drug runner wanders off with a satchel full of hundred-dollar bills, then dies. About a quarter mile behind him are a half-dozen dusty four-wheel-drive pickups full of yet more shot-dead drug traffickers.

A hunter who can’t shoot straight named Llewelyn Moss happens upon the trucks and their deceased occupants first, then tracks down the guy with the case o’ cash. Right here you want those guys from “Mystery Science 3000″ wisecracking, “cool, he’s from that parallel universe where things go good for the guy when he decides to keep the money.”

Whatever planet Mr. Moss is from, he does defy the common sense handed down by every novel, movie, short story and soap opera episode from the time of Aesop to future media forms as yet uninvented: Keeping the money ruins your life.

As expected, things get increasingly complicated — and violent — for Llewelyn Moss. Death, that is, Mr. Chigurh, is after him with a vengeance you’d think might better be reserved for whoever cures cancer or AIDS.

As cinema, it’s a solid film with strong performances from Josh Brolin (who looks uncannily like his dad) as Moss and Javier Bardem as Chigurh, who carries the trademark Coen Brothers homicidal smirk throughout.

Tommy Lee Jones plays a Texas lawman who should be trying to do something about all the unfolding mayhem, but isn’t. Woody Harrelson is sort of tossed in there for no obvious reason.

The story is based on something by Cormac McCarthy, who writes novels about tough guys who soldier on through ceaseless carnage because, well, soldiering on through ceaseless carnage is just what they do. Against formidable odds — and with a formidable disregard for punctuation — McCarthy’s novels succeed impressively. I’ve read a bunch and liked them all.

His books are usually meditations on the bleak corners of the human character. Not funny, or ironic, or sarcastic. Tough, you might say, like the West itself, where most of his stories unfold.

The Coens, in contrast, make movies about fools and the blood-soaked consequences of their their folly (except for “O Brother Where Art Thou,” which had fools aplenty, but not much blood. It’s my favorite Coen brothers film).

I might need to see the movie again to be sure this coming together of Coens and McCarthy really works. The movie is stylish, beautifully photographed, peppered with authentic-sounding West Texas twang. It has McCarthy’s characteristic rough dudes doing what they must.

For now, though, the movie seems not quite amusing enough for spot in the Coen cannon, and the characters are not quite enduring enough to be authentic McCarthy-esque protagonists.

But if it makes me want to see it twice, “No Country for Old Men” must have something going for it.

(Wow, this pic just won Best Picture).

There might be a $200 balance on my MasterCard. It gets paid automatically every month. My car is 18 months old and paid off.

I don’t have a mortgage because the payment on condos as nice as my apartment is almost double what I pay in rent — and it’s somebody else’s job to mend the roof, replace the carpet and repair the fridge. Strikes me as pretty good deal.

I used to think my dad was a skin-flint because when we were kids, getting money out of him for toys, ice cream and candy was like pulling teeth. One time when I was in my 30s I told him I thought he was penny pincher.

He got a little hurt at the accusation, but said, “Well, I don’t spend money I don’t have. If that makes me a penny-pincher, so be it.”

Later I realized he wasn’t being tight with a buck so much as he was trying to teach us rugrats an important life lesson: if you ask for money you haven’t worked for, one of the most likely replies is “no.” This was good preparation for growing up in a world where asking for money can bring a “yes,” but you have to pay it all back and reward the giver with a bunch more because he has it and you don’t.

I also read something else later in life that stuck with me: Rich people earn compound interest; poor people pay it. I’d rather be an earner than a payer.

It’s strange being out of debt in a society so thoroughly greased by it. I read the other day that because the United States imports more than it exports, it’s in a perpetual state of debt. All those foreigner-bashing Republicans probably would just as soon not admit that China and Saudi Arabia are paid-up partners in the American Experiment. (Interestingly, this actually makes them much friendlier to us, because their fortunes are riding on our continuing to keep borrowing to pay for stuff we don’t need and can’t really afford. See, it’s always good to have partners).

I think the main reason I avoid debt is that it’s just one more complication. I pay what I owe every month and the issue’s settled. I don’t have to worry about my neighborhood going to hell, I don’t have to worry if my roof needs to be replaced, I don’t have to worry about getting fired, getting foreclosed on and having terrible credit the rest of my life.

It’s also nice to have a good rating for all that credit I’ll probably never use.

I had occasion to be downtown on Sunday morning and decided to squeeze off a few frames. Among the highlights:

Thats the skinny tower of the Marriott Hotel reflected in a water puddle on Market Street.

Down the street a ways, a Ferris wheel stands as part of the local Christmas in the Park festivities. Nothing happening this early in the morning, of course. The city’s central park is full of cheesy Christmas displays and gazillion Christmas trees decorated by local school kids. The best parts are the animatronics, which look variously vapid and diabolical. To wit:

Somebody’s cake’s making a run for it.

Keep your children away from this guy.

The most evil of the bunch, if I do say so.

If I didn’t know she was supposed to be singing, well, I don’t know what I’d think. (Well, I do but this is a family Web site.)

Later I wandered over to San Jose’s City Hall, which always has promising photographic possibilities.

Great thing about downtown San Jose: you can take in all the highlights in about an hour’s walking.

Those of us who write headlines for a living share a special reverence for one that topped the New York Post of April 15, 1983:

“HEADLESS BODY IN TOPLESS BAR”

A headline so good you don’t need to read the story, but will because you can’t help yourself. Among the coolest five words ever to appear in large black type on cheap newsprint.

A little-known runner-up for coolest-words-in-black honors appeared in the Peoria Journal Star when I worked there in the late 1990s. It was written in small type atop a crime brief tucked somewhere deep in the local news section on a Sunday morning following a slow Saturday. One of the young wags on the Saturday night crew successfully sneaked this treasure into the paper:

Police find crack
in man’s underpants

I almost coughed up a lung laughing when I saw it in the paper that morning.

The Columbia Journalism Review has a back-page feature called The Lower Case, samplings of heads gone wrong that were best summarized in a small paperback book called “Red Tape Holds Up New Bridge” (another shining example: “Here’s how to lick your doberman’s leg sores!”). News of this feature’s humor potential apparently made its way to the writing staff of Jay Leno, whose headline hightlights became a comic staple.

One of our goals in life as Serious Purveyors of Important News is to keep our headlines out of The Lower Case and off the Leno highlights reel. But I remember the guy who wrote the “crack” headline: couple years out of college, known to read his poetry in public, given to dark thoughts and evil impulses. In retrospect it occurs to me he probably wrote it deliberately to see if he could get it on the Leno show. I seem to recall that he succeeded. An irony pioneer if there ever was one. Back then I thought he was foolish, reckless and devoid of standards of propriety. Today I wish I could say I’d written that headline.

I had one that came close, again at the Journal Star, where pretty much everything had a fighting chance of showing up in print if it didn’t have the F-word in it. I was doing Page One for Sunday’s paper, and my story for the top of the page was a lamentation on the seedy, lurid scandal that got Bill Clinton impeached. My headline:

“Impeachment left fabric of Washington indelibly stained”

I just thought it sounded good and nothing more, till a colleague reminded me about Monica’s dress and its famous DNA evidence of presidential shenanigans. My first instinct was to rewrite it — it’s bad form to make cute, clever allusions on Serious Page One News (particularly when alluding to the messy consequences of oral sex) — but everybody else liked the head and talked me into going with it. My Mercury News colleagues were appalled to learn I’d gotten away with such a transgression, but I assured them I had learned the error of my ways and vowed to never sin again. (Today I’m kind of proud of that headline).

Lately I’ve been thinking that if I ever wanted to write a memoir about my life in the news biz, “Police Find Crack in Man’s Underpants” would be the title. Whether I get around to the memoir is anybody’s guess. But the memory of that headline always makes me smile, so that’s reason enough to memorialize it here.

It’s Van Halen like it used to be. Not better, necessarily, but most importantly, not worse.

VH put out one killer album in the late 1970s, a disappointing one after that, and a couple pretty good ones up to the mid-’80s. Then they got stupid, dumped their insufferable lead singer and spent two decades proving that even with a guitar god like Eddie Van Halen at the helm and his amazing brother Alex on drums, they really, really needed David Lee Roth’s vocals and cock-rock theatrics.

This year they got wise, and went on tour. Anybody who remembers getting a shiver at the base of their spine the first time they heard the thunderous opening to “Running With the Devil” on that first album needs to get out and and see ‘em while they’re hot and before, if their track record is any guide, they implode again.

Eddie is clean, sober and soloing like you wouldn’t believe. Roth is looking old and slightly ridiculous strutting his stuff like he’s 22 and no teen-age girl is safe, but his voice is fresh and strong. He hits those notes he hit in 1978. Maybe he rested his vocal cords all those years Van Hagar was mucking up the reputation of one of the great American guitar bands. Alex is impressive, and Eddie’s 16-year-old son, Wolfgang, does fine on bass.

They’re playing almost every song on their debut album and perhaps a few from each of the ones after that. The first was that much better than the rest, so that’s not much of a surprise. The real surprise came about nine songs in — opening with the Kinks’ “You Really got Me” and ripping through “Runnin’ With the Devil” proved to be mere early-round warm-ups to a rousing “Everybody Wants Some” from “Women and Children First,” their third album. It was my favorite song of the night.

Somewhere in there, they slipped in “Dance the Night Away,” the radio-friendly hit single from the second album that utterly betrayed the promise of the first. It’s better in concert, I admit, but I’ll always associate it with the disappointment of discovering VH’s sophomore effort was a dim shadow of their debut. Hey, in 1979 these were matters of some import to teen-age boys who required songs about sex, girls and the hope of getting some.

After about an hour it was starting to look like they were checking required songs off a list, then everybody left the stage as if it was an encore. Then Roth came out alone with an acoustic guitar and started into a monologue about how he got into the music biz over 30 years ago, how he and his pals got stoned in a Pasadena basement, how he met a girl … it rambled a bit but but the payoff was “Ice Cream Man,” an old blues cover and one of VH’s best songs. Funny, sexy and delivered as only Roth could. All previous excesses were immediately redeemed.

Later, Eddie’s solo moment lasted more like 20 minutes … should’ve gotten tedious, I suppose, but he’s just so damned superior at it. You don’t complain in the presence of greatness. The solo paved the way for a pounding, spot-on rendition of “Ain’t Talkin’ ‘Bout Love,” the most muscular tune from that debut album. They really could’ve closed the show there, but obligingly played “Jump,” their biggest hit before Roth flew the coop. It was passable, which was good in a way because it let folks catch their breath and eased them toward the exits.

I had a free ticket to the show and had to be persuaded to go along. Van Halen isn’t a band I think about much anymore, beyond fond memories of the greatness of that debut album, the first record I ever owned (miraculously, the first stereo speakers I ever owned survived the assault). I wasn’t much much interested seeing an iconic band of my youth hitting the road as an oldies act.

It’s a credit to Eddie’s musicianship and Roth’s showmanship that they did not turn in a by-the-notes, rote recitation of their fans’ faves. They paused in the middle of songs, shifted tempos, improvised, goofed off a bit, and crafted an authentic concert. They know I know how all the songs go, I’m interested in seeing where the band goes with them.

So, yeah, they’re worth seeing on this tour — they’ve gotten raves on every tour stop — if you’re into the signature VH sound or if you’re a fan of world-class rock guitarists. It’s the Eddie and Alex Show, for sure, but something about Roth’s shameless, pile-on-the-ham stage presence completes the scene.

(Here’s another guy’s take on the concert, and here’s a set list).