A century ago, folks with money packed up the whole family to summer resorts in cooler-weather seaside, mountain or lake locales. Women and children got a free pass at a time when even upper-class women were seen as the intellectual equals of children, while dads toiled in the city to pay the freight for those lavish resorts. Where guests were expected to change clothes four or more times a day, and families whiled summers away in outfits that didn’t allow much movement and endless rounds of stiffly formal meals.

That was the upper crust. The idea of a vacation with pay was pretty unheard of for most of the rest that took in the servants, domestics and nannies who liberated upper-class women from the drudgery of running a household or even raising their children — all long before preschools, yoga, Pilates and self-actualization seminars.

Things changed right after World War II, which — as many historians and even pop-sociologist Tom Wolfe pointed out — pumped more money into every level of American society than ever before. Suddenly, a single-family house — accessible by Ford or Chevy — was within the reach of more Americans than ever with a $9,000 new home in Levittown possible with no money down under the GI Bill. Vacations? No problem. By the 1960s, post-war vacation aspirations shifted from the Catskill Mountains for New York City-dwellers or the lake in Wisconsin for Midwesterners to glitzier locales like Miami, Hawaii and the Caribbean. Even Europe was now possible.

Sadly, for lots of folks this brave new world of possibilities somehow got diluted to the twin touchstones of disappointment: Vegas and Disneyland, where the total tally can allow a family of four to blow 1,000 bucks a day without breaking a sweat. Blame marketing and imagination-atrophy.

But living in Colorado means you don’t have to buy into those overpriced illusions. In Colorado and the surrounding West, you don’t need the fake because you have the real within easy access. In lieu of casinos buzzing with bells, whistles and neon lights or long Disney lines, you have outdoors — and wilderness: a couple of entities that Europeans have to travel thousands of miles to get to. Here, it’s almost in our backyard.

Aside from the Alps and Norwegian fjords, there’s nothing in Europe comparable to our Grand Canyon in Arizona and Colorado’s Rocky Mountain National Park or Great Sand Dunes. Not to mention Utah’s Canyonlands and Arches, Zion and Bryce Canyon, also in Utah, California’s Yosemite Valley and redwood trees … the wave-crashing California and Oregon coasts … Montana’s jagged peaks and serene-lake Glacier park north of Yellowstone, with its geysers and hot springs in Wyoming.

Not for nothing is the Bright Angel trail leading down the Grand Canyon to the churning Colorado River filled with young German hikers and called “the Autobahn” because you hear mainly German spoken down and up the trail. Germans and other Europeans also fill Utah’s Canyonlands, with an apparent greater appreciation for the American West than many Americans.

For many of these natural-wonder locales, you don’t even have to fly and endure airline arrogance and TSA security. I prefer driving to Arizona in lieu of flying to catch — depending on my route — canyon and red sandstone vistas, arches or ancient Indian ruins now called “ancestral Pueblo.” Locales like Chaco Canyon (New Mexico) and the Hovenweep ruins (Colorado-Utah border) are spiritual places. And you don’t have to be a Boulder New Ager to sense that spirit.

Notwithstanding what hucksters pimping $500-per-night luxury hotels would have you believe, none of the above needs to cost a bundle. Nor do you need an outfit out of an L.L.Bean catalog. Budget motels abound, and your outfit doesn’t need to impress anyone but you. What you do need is some imagination. The key is to cut out the extraneous bullshit and — as Henry David Thoreau suggested — SIMPLIFY!

Thoreau, after spending two years in a cabin he built by Walden Pond outside Boston, called upon Americans to simplify and to learn how to live from the wilderness in his classic “Walden,” first published in 1849. Thoreau was seriously out of step with an America fast being transformed by the Industrial Revolution. When the notion of embracing and saving wilderness areas seemed absurd. A century and a half before greed-fueled oil spills, Americans mainly saw forests fit only to be cut down and wildlife only to be slaughtered, all for short-term economic benefit in the East. In the West, the post-Civil War burden of expansion fell heaviest on buffalo herds and Native American peoples.

Scottish-born naturalist John Muir also called for learning from the wilderness after Thoreau died of tuberculosis at age 45. At first, few listened to either man. But in 1872 Yellowstone National Park launched the National Park system. Yosemite Park got a top-level boost after U.S. president and wilderness advocate Teddy Roosevelt — an aberrant Republican — camped with Muir in California. In the East, the Adirondacks wilderness preserve set aside nearly a million upstate New York acres in 1885. Despite strong opposition that continues today, the idea of wilderness areas having value apart from private profit was beginning to take hold.

Today, our semi-wilderness parks — national and otherwise — are all out there and within fairly easy reach, even as mounting summer visits and traffic have threatened some with being “loved to death.” But there’s still time. Ours is a grand and magnificent country with natural wonders light years beyond the fakes of Disneyland and Vegas. So savor it while you still can. Summer doesn’t last. And neither do we.

WTF? JUNE already? That means some of you have already graduated. And I missed it while watching reality TV or some other exercise in idiocy. It also means you’re even less likely to be reading this then while going through the motions of being a student.

Passing through the portals of commencement to what’s supposed to follow, you may or may not have heard the soaring speeches and ringing phrases that used to be the staples of commencement oratory — assuming they STILL do that. I wouldn’t know. In a worst-case scenario, you may have been assured of a limitless future — a future that, of course, is in your hands as the guardians of all the hopes for that touted future.

Maybe the hype has been toned down in recent years as a casualty of diminished expectation, not to mention an anemic job market looming like a miasmic buzzkill. But if you were told — with a straight face — by some commencement dignitary that the sky is still the limit, take it with a few grains of salt. And while we’re at it, why not toss out a few more nuggets, or golden apples, of unsolicited and questionable advice from one who long ago realized there’s no automatic correlation between age and wisdom.

1. You can’t possibly screw things up any worse than predecessor generations have managed — whether in politics, finance, business, government, far away and local, or any other domain. So relax and enjoy the ride for a while. You’ve earned it, and trying to make the world a better place overnight can be bad for digestion.

2. The days of buyers’ job markets — when you could pick and choose among eager suitors based on who offered the most perks — are gone. And, to paraphrase Bruce Springsteen in “My Home Town,” they’re not likely to come back. This should hardly come as news.

3. This may come as a bit of a shock, but nobody OWES you a damn thing. Not even your folks, who may have been picking up your tabs — and your laundry — for years.

4. When checking out possible jobs — especially those that won’t get your hands dirty — check your sense of entitlement, if any remains, at the door. In today’s market, a sense of entitlement, however scaled down, isn’t going to fly far. Leave it for the guys and girls already driving BMWs they can’t afford.

5. Ask not what the job-offer person can do you for, but what you can do for them. And it had better be plenty. Hiring cynicism has spawned a “20-20-20” jibe. Which translates to “hire 20 year-olds, work them 20 hours a day and pay them $20 a week.” What a side-splitter! I’m still rolling on the floor.

6. When you get as far as an actual job interview, guys ought to avoid the rumpled jeans/torn T-shirt/backwards hat look seen at Coors Field and most other venues today. Most interview rooms stopped selling hot dogs and beer a while back. Similarly, women would do well to eschew the maximum-cleavage hooker-looks that are also all the rage just about everywhere you look. Those who spurn this advice can always hook up, dressed accordingly, on any weekend night in LoDo — where, outside the Blake Street bars, they’ll find — and deserve — each other.

7. The odds of landing an immediate vice president spot — even vice president of office intrigues — are slim to none. Most firms already have too many vice presidents. And those who’ve survived the last few rounds of cuts are looking over their shoulders, when not knifing colleagues via e-mails or texts. With a big smile, of course.

8. For those still contemplating careers in what used to be called media, keep the following in mind: For TV news — that some say is a contradiction in terms — appearance always trumps substance. So have great-looking hair. For print, or what’s left of it, present yourself as bland and boring as possible, because that’s how you’ll score points. If you’ve read anything, keep it to yourself. Lots of editors aren’t overly fond of folks they suspect might know more than they do — which isn’t difficult. And once you’re on an editor’s shit list, it’s hard to get off.

Since you don’t want to scare people who tend to be insecure and are frightened by fresh air, think of a metal-detector-like device you have to pass through. It screens out anyone with their own opinions or possessed with independent thinking or not in need of a personality implant. Same goes for a sense of humor. In short, ask yourself before the interview “Am I boring enough to be hired here?”

Ten points of wisdom might make for a nice, round number, but ours is an age of lesser expectations. So eight will have to do. And there you have it — capsuled non-wisdom that nobody asked for in the first place. You may think me hopelessly out of touch with the world you’re about to enter, but I’ve been there — long and not-so-long ago. So I know what part of your pain feels like. Remember also that the sleazebags you’ll unavoidably have to deal with have been around, in different guises, for centuries. Today, they simply use different tools. And the decent people — there are more of them than you may suspect — also remain abidingly decent. Find them.

Good luck. But, at a time when it may take more than luck, you might consider staying in school — programs and opportunities abound — in lieu of the so-called “real world.” The real world can be a bitch. It’s also vastly overrated, much like the notion of “growing up.” Some of us have tried to avoid the latter. You can, too. At least for a while.

When the half-dozen or so of you last looked at this space, we talked about my 50th high school class reunion — a topic that no doubt commands widespread interest. What follows is the second half, for those who may still be awake.

During the 36 years I’ve lived in Denver, I’ve been “home” to Brooklyn and New York City in general dozens of times and to Brooklyn Tech, my high school, on maybe half dozen occasions. Like the Grand Canyon in different light at different hours, it’s always different. I’ve also seen the city evolve though ups and downs — it’s been on an upswing since the early 1990s. But little remains unchanged from the memories of youth — seeming centuries ago when Eisenhower was in the White House, the subway cost 15 cents and the Dodgers still played at Ebbets Field in Flatbush.

The Dodgers and Giants were gone to L.A. and San Francisco at the end of the 1957 season when I was a sophomore at “TECH.” Ebbets Field was demolished my senior year. Entire neighborhoods are now home to ethnic groups different from the Jews, Italians, Irish and Scandinavians who were Brooklyn’s backbone during my high school years.

In one of the neighborhoods I lived in, Bay Ridge — immortalized-in-reverse in the 1978 John Travolta movie “Saturday Night Fever” — Chinese have largely replaced Scandinavians, Irish and Italians. The neighborhood looked improved when I saw it in late April.

Amid all that change, TECH has remained and still rises with 1932 art deco lines eight stories over an entire city block and opposite Fort Green Park. When I went to TECH, the Fort Green area was a Puerto Rican slum. Today, gentrification has made it the domain of well-paid professionals who prefer its leafy streets and ornate sandstone town houses to Manhattan.

The morning of April 23 allowed me to stroll TECH’s long corridors and center lobby with its murals painted in 1939 by WPA artists (working under Franklin Roosevelt’s Works Progress Administration). Morning ceremonies gave way to lunch at Junior’s restaurant, four blocks from TECH and famous for its cheesecake. But I go there for the pastrami. After lunch, about 20 of us hung out at the corner of DeKalb and Flatbush Avenues, just as we had on neighborhood corners when nobody had cell phones. Across Flatbush Avenue, in what is now Long Island University, once stood the old, ornate-interior Brooklyn Paramount Theater. There, in the spring of 1958 I caught Alan Freed’s live rock ‘n’ roll show with more than a dozen performers, including Jerry Lee Lewis and “Tom and Jerry,” before they became Simon and Garfunkel — all for the princely price of $3. The afternoon was sunny and bright. So I walked from Junior’s down Fulton Street — once Brooklyn’s classiest shopping venue — past Brooklyn Boro Hall, in front of whose Greek columns and stairs I attended a “Keep the Dodgers in Brooklyn” rally in April, 1957, during my freshman year at TECH. By the following October, the Dodgers were gone to California, taking the Giants with them. Past Boro Hall, I strolled the brownstone streets of Brooklyn Heights and its pre-Civil War townhouses that were New York City’s first suburb, decades before the Brooklyn Bridge opened in 1883. Early in my marriage, we lived there from 1966 to early 68, when the top rent for a brownstone apartment was $125 a month when I was making about $8,000 a year. Today, rent for comparable spaces run at least $2,500 a month.

April 24 at TECH started with schmoozing in the main gym — that seemed to have grown smaller over the years, just as the auditorium seats seemed to have shrunk. Seventy-five guys from my class showed up, some from California, Hawaii and France. I ran into a gentleman who was my assistant editor on the school paper, the TECH Survey. Bob Robins is still an aerospace engineer in Seattle.

Our reunion packets held gold sashes identifying our class as the “golden anniversary” year. We marched into the 3,000-seat auditorium while the organ pealed “Pomp and Circumstances.” I’ve always found that march poignantly bittersweet and was in tears. I expect to always keep that 2010 “Pomp and Circumstance” moment in what Pete Hamill (recalling the Brooklyn Dodgers) called “the treasure house of memory.”

Lunch with classmates in the sprawling 8th-floor cafeteria brought back more memories, not all of them good. For me, afternoon tours of the latest technology labs and shops, where everything is computer-directed, held less interest than talking with old grads.

Lots of us didn’t want the reunion to end that afternoon. It didn’t. Saturday night offered a reception for 1960 alums at the carefully restored (a 20-year job) Park Slope townhouse of Jerry Krase, now a professor of urban sociology at Brooklyn College. Krase used to kick extra points for the TECH football team when kicks were straight-on and not soccer-style. In the Krase’s built-in-1900 home with stained glass and wood craftsmanship long extinct, the smaller-scaled gathering was a perfect coda for a reunion that, for me, had exceeded all expectations at a time when few things do.

There was still a Picasso show at the Metropolitan Museum of Art and a Cartier-Bresson photo exhibit at the Modern on a rainy Sunday in Manhattan, followed by a drive down to Chesapeake Bay to crack some steamed crabs by the water and an Orioles game at the architectural gem Camden Yards ballpark in Baltimore (the O’s beat the Yankees). Then there was the more memorable architecture (Victorian) at Cape May, New Jersey, and at Princeton University (Gothic), before driving back to New York and LaGuardia Airport. After the TECH reunion, some of it seemed slightly anticlimactic.

So maybe you can try to go home again, notwithstanding Thomas Wolfe, who said you can’t. Just don’t expect anything to be the way you think you remembered it. As San Francisco The Examiner columnist Herb Caen once wrote: “Nostalgia is a nice place to have lived. But you wouldn’t want to visit.”

For the half-dozen or so student readers of this space, “back in the day” may mean 2005 at most. And if any are catching high school class reunions, a fifth-year get-together might be a stretch.

My “back in the day” takes in a longer time span and runs, among other things, to videos that used to air on the MTV channel. When they didn’t feature bad-ass dudes talking trash and surrounded by slutty women called bitches and “ho”s in raps launched with catchy lines like “…hey muthuhfuckah…lissen up…”

One of those MTV videos, nearly 20 years ago, was the backdrop for Billy Joel’s “For the Longest Time” tune. It has a group of middle-aged men re-visiting their high school. They go into the BOYS bathroom for a smoke and come out high-school young again. Near the tune’s end, they return to the BOYS room and re-emerge; middle-aged again. I found that video touching – perhaps because, 20 years ago, I was already middle-aged.

That video ricocheted around my head when I went to New York two weeks ago to attend my high school class’ 50th reunion. That’s right: 50th, and I’m still alive. The notion of a 50th reunion was mind-boggling. It made me think of baseball’s All-Star game, two years ago at Yankee Stadium. When a number of baseball Hall of Famers -guys I’d seen as players back in the 1950s –were introduced before the game. And I wondered how these players, that I’d seen performing in their prime when I was in high school, could have gotten so OLD. Worse, where did that leave ME?

It was with these musings that I arrived at LaGuardia Airport and grabbed a cab to the Marriott in downtown Brooklyn; walking distance from Brooklyn Technical High School, where I was one of 1,075 graduates in the class of June, 1960. The size of our graduating class alone should suggest that “TECH,” as it’s still called, isn’t your typical high school. It never was. As one of New York City’s four “elite” public high schools – Stuyvesant, Bronx Science and Performing Arts are the others – TECH’s focus always was engineering while serving the latest generation of children-of-recent immigrants. As with the other three specialty schools, you took an exam to get in – roughly one in ten applicants succeeded – and staying in wasn’t automatic. You could easily flunk out and be banished to your neighborhood high school. Four years of math and four of science were mandatory, along with English, Social Studies and a boatload of technical courses that ran the gamut from the drawing and blueprint stage to finished machine-part product. TECH produced engineers – a field I didn’t go into after finding I wasn’t exactly stellar in math. Neither did lots of other graduates.

The school had 6,000 boys back then – TECH didn’t become co-ed until the mid-1970s – mostly Jewish and Italian with some Irish for atmosphere. Today, the student body of 4,500 is nearly 60 percent Asian, along with black, Hispanic, Middle Eastern and Indian sub-continent students with some Anglos for atmosphere. Although everything from drawing to machine shops to labs have all become computerized, the curriculum is tough as ever.

For me, the fall of 1957 – the start of sophomore year at TECH, and I’d just turned 15 – added up to a perfect storm; grade-wise. With no math or physics that semester to pull my average down and over-my-head grades in World History and English, I ranked fifth among sophomores in overall average. But that fall also brought the trauma of the Dodgers and Giants departing for California. To this day, there are still men of my age all over America for whom that betrayal was the biggest trauma of adolescence; and forget broken romances and lost loves. I still see them at Dodgers’ spring training games in Arizona – wearing Brooklyn Dodgers jackets and baseball caps. For them and for me, the Dodgers – more than five decades later – remain a lost love.

That fall, for Mr. Freeman’s sophomore English class, I cranked out “extra-credit” essays on the Dodgers’ departure. One day, he told me “some of the garbage you’ve been giving me is better than some of the garbage I read in the sports pages. So why don’t you try the school paper.” I took his advice and joined the TECH “Survey” staff that spring; starting on sports with early stories on golf and tennis, that I knew next to nothing about.

The grade-euphoria didn’t last. In the spring, I embarked on a chemical engineering course of study with 15 periods per week of qualitative analysis and organic chemistry. My study habits hadn’t quite jelled – truth be known, they never did – and I failed both; big time. Failed trigonometry, too, for good measure, and my overall average went into the toilet. Switching to a College Prep course didn’t excuse having to repeat Trig. As things worked out, I had to finally pass both Solid Geometry and Advanced Algebra in my final semester at TECH. Otherwise, I might still be there.

Engineering obviously wasn’t for me. But becoming an editor of the TECH “Survey” led me to the summer journalism program offered for high school students, at Northwestern University’s Medill School of Journalism near Chicago. There, I saw a larger world outside the neighborhood, won two writing awards despite not being able to type and gained some direction for what I might do in life.

Despite the warnings of some math teachers that I didn’t really belong at TECH, I stayed and graduated. But I didn’t stay in engineering, and what followed was a nice ride; though hardly history. Two weeks ago, I saw some of the other survivors. We didn’t go into the BOYS room and come out aged 17, but it was great to see them after 50 years.

Hello reader. If we haven’t already acquainted ourselves, I’m the digital age of information. I stream, tweet and tag. I give you the quick and dirty, the obsessive-compulsive and follow-this-link news that gives you more information than you needed – assuming your brain can filter through the pop-up and flashing banner advertisements. I’m here to provide for you the neurotic need of checking three news organizations’ websites before you’re satisfied with the end result, and best of all, I’m free.

In 2007, a group of political editors and journalists working for The Washington Post saw this digital-age persona as a friend. While some writers procrastinated their future requirement of creating video or posting additional content in a blog, the journalists who grabbed the new media and slugged it over their shoulders are now working for the web’s most entertaining political website: Politico.

What’s even more surprising to our morbid opinion on the downfall of print journalism is that this news organization is making money – and I bet that’s making some of the still-employed journalists shift uncomfortably in their seat.

Politico likes to call themselves a web-based news organization that just happens to own a paper. On a recent trip to Washington D.C., I saw most of those papers gone by mid-afternoon; you were lucky to get one at all. Their system’s not perfect (i.e. pushing the Obama administration’s goals to the forefront, inexperienced yahoos running around with cameras), but they’ve mastered the one question print newspapers are struggling to answer: What do you want to read?

What do you want, you spoiled brats of constant-update, breaking-news junkies? How do I make you pay attention to the important stuff you need to know? Editors and publishers are sweating at their neck collars trying to figure it out.

As one of those zombie, need-news-now consumers, I would venture to answer your question with a simple request: stop fighting your readers.

Print journalism cannot compete because it has lost its goals. The few who are still surviving serve a special need, whether it’s a hyper-local daily paper in a small town or an alternative weekly the hipsters turn to for band interviews. But how can you expect to be a daily statewide paper trying to serve the same goal when you’ve chopped up your newsroom and continue to play a pity card how your profession is dying? It’s sink or swim, boys, and if you’re not at least making a splash in the water, how do you expect to overcome the waves?

I’ve talked to too-many jaded reporters who see the internet as the apocalypse of news, and what’s even more ironic, is the man who is destroying unbiased information is the one trying to sustain print journalism. Engrossed in swallowing the New York Times and pushing right-wing pundits to celebrity status, Rupert Murdoch has launched the city edition in the Wall Street Journal for New York.

If you’re feeling unemployable lately, come and hang out with the new journalists joining the jungle with some valuable tools.

Oh, and have you met my new friend, multimedia?

While the semester is drawing to a close at Metro, I still have class until the end of June since New Zealand is entering winter now and like the rest of the world, they get summers off.

When I came down here, I’d had hopes of writing a column for The Met as a foreign correspondent; this hasn’t worked out as I’d planned. While there is plenty of news going on in New Zealand, I’m not sure much of it would be of much interest to anyone outside of New Zealand.

So, for this final article for The Met, I am going to put together a few of my observations, a few of the things I’d have liked to write about, but just wasn’t sure how they would have fit in to the Metro’s news pages.

Health care: It is frequently said New Zealand is a working example of socialist health care. This isn’t exactly true. It is true the government does fund the hospitals and you can go to the hospital on the tax payer’s dollar for whatever your illness, but if you are a doctor in a private practice you don’t receive money from government or insurance companies, your transactions are between doctor and patient, end of story.

Also on health care, the public health care was suffering from too many patients and not enough health care so they allowed private hospitals to take care of the problem. The private hospitals accept insurance, and compete with the public health care and flourish. They have little regulation and the insurance companies have even less so they can compete unhindered. From what I’ve seen, while the system does need occasional adjustment, it serves the people of New Zealand well.

New Zealand does have the distinct advantage of having 296 million fewer people than the U.S. which is bound to make running their health care system easier, but similar changes could be made in the States. Removing regulation from insurance companies and removing insurance companies from the majority of health care transactions would be a good first step. A safety net (socialized medicine) for those who fall through the cracks could still be implemented as long as you can buy better health care if you choose to.

New Zealand has a reputation for being green, and it tends to live up to the reputation. New Zealand has had a dispute since the 1980s with the U.S. over allowing war ships to port in their harbour. New Zealand won’t allow nuclear war ships, the U.S. refuses to make it public which war ships are nuclear (though it is public knowledge). Currently, the Obama administration is reviewing this policy and will likely lift the policy, thus allowing U.S. ships back into the ports of New Zealand so long as they are not nuclear, and it is overdue.

New Zealand has supported the U.S. in Afghanistan; they have not supported the U.S. in Iraq. Their special forces (SAS) are serving in Afghanistan and have done an outstanding job according to U.S. general Stanley McChrystal who has recently requested the SAS extend their stay in Afghanistan. It is quite likely they will extend their stay.

New Zealand has a parliamentary government, their current prime minister is John Key. Their conservative party is currently in power, though one thing I have learned is this doesn’t have much meaning in the context of American politics, in many ways New Zealand’s conservatives are more liberal than the U.S. liberals, and in many ways New Zealand’s liberals are more conservative than U.S. conservatives. Politics here are simply different than they are in the States.

On a tangent, New Zealand was the first nation to give women the right to vote and the woman who worked very hard to give women the right to vote is on the $10 note. New Zealand is also the first and so far only country to have women hold every major office simultaneously.

I’ve often heard the water flows backward down here… I still haven’t bothered to look…

New Zealand is friendly and welcoming to Americans, if you have the chance I’d recommend a visit. While I am on my way back to Colorado at the end of July, my stay in America will be the limited one; I will be on my way back to New Zealand as soon as I am able.

For those not in the know:

On April 19, Gawker Media-owned tech blog Gizmodo published startling photos and commentary of a purported ‘iPhone 4G’ prototype they’d obtained.

Apple is rumored to have been working on the latest update to their iPhone line, but to actually see one dissected prior to launch was unheard of.

Gizmodo initially had no way of verifying whether the device was a genuine iPhone prototype or not, but editors suggested efforts had been made to conceal the phone’s new features, because it was apparently encased in a plastic shell made to resemble an older model iPhone.

Now, Gizmodo claims they’d obtained the phone complete with a back-story. Their source described finding it in a bar, fiddling with it and even attempting to contact Apple to return it. Due to Apple’s famously secret operating policies, however, service representatives the source spoke with didn’t believe him, he said. Then he sold the device to Gizmodo for $5,000.

Editors claim the phone was disabled remotely by the time they received it, but they dissected it anyway. Eventually, Apple laid claim to the phone prototype and it was returned.

Fast forward to April 23. A search warrant was served on Gizmodo editor Jason Chen’s house while he was out to dinner. Police officers seized several computers and a server, among other tech paraphernalia.

Chen’s Gawker-provided legal counsel is claiming the search was invalid because the blogger is covered under California’s state shield law, a law designed to protect journalists from being forced to reveal sources or unpublished news materials.

So at this point, several burning questions arise: Should Chen be considered a journalist and therefore fall under shield law protections? And what effect will this determination have on journalism as an industry?

Let’s just assume for a moment that Chen is a journalist, a journalist who paid $5,000 for a scoop. Even sleazy journalists are still journalists (see: National Enquirer qualifying to be considered for Pulitzer Prizes).

Under O’Grady v. Superior Court (2006), Chen could be classified as a journalist. The ruling stated: “It seems likely that the legislature intended the phrase ‘periodical publication’ to include all ongoing, recurring news publications while excluding non-recurring publications such as books, pamphlets, flyers and monographs. We decline the implicit invitation to embroil ourselves in questions of what constitutes ‘legitimate journalis[m].’ The Shield Law is intended to protect the gathering and dissemination of news, and that is what [O’Grady] did here.”

Ironically, O’Grady also concerned Apple suing a blogger to reveal a source.

If O’Grady were to be applied to Chen’s case, and the state of California can’t prove the Gizmodo editor knew the phone was stolen rather than abandoned, then he would certainly be covered by the shield law and thusly be protected from civil action by Apple.

The wider implications will fall on the journalism industry as a whole. Ethical guidelines would seem to guard against paying for a scoop, no matter how juicy it might be. But that’s the problem with all of this new media saturating the news cycle. These institutions are not traditionally bound by the same standards journalists are.

I’m not saying news coming out of new media is lacking in substance or content, but I am saying they’re beginning to walk a thin line. If bloggers want to be afforded the same protection as journalists, I would suggest they’d need to agree to be bound by the same rules.

Journalism is about seeking and reporting truth for the public good, but not at the expense of long-held values in gathering that truth.

Along this vein, I think it’s time journalism was qualified as a profession. Any contributor would be welcome, granted they agree to follow a set of ethical rules set out by a national organization such as the Society of Professional Journalists.

I’m sad to report however, ideas of journalistic ethics only seem to see the light of day when somebody doesn’t follow them.

So as the line between opinion and the truth continues to blur, I think it is time for the journalism industry to pull itself up by its proverbial bootstraps and get organized. It’s the only way the truth will prevail.

Currently, the top 1 percent of income earners pay 40 percent of income taxes collected. The top 1 percent of income earners make 22 percent of the wealth in the nation, so the percentage they pay is twice the percentage of what they make.

The top 10 percent of income earners pay 70 percent of income taxes collected. Sure, if you are in the top 10 percent you should be paying more in taxes shouldn’t you? They are rich after all.

However, the cut off for people in the top 10 percent is people making more than $113,000 a year. A person or family making $113,000 a year is not exactly rich. The bottom 50 percent of income earners pay 3 percent of income taxes collected. So yes, the rich don’t pay their fair share, they pay much more than their fair share.

If that doesn’t convince you that a lower tax rate is a good thing, perhaps this will. Prior to the 1981 Reagan tax rate cut, the highest tax rate was 70 percent. After the Reagan tax rate cut the highest tax rate was 28 percent. It has since risen to 35 percent.

In 1981, when the highest tax rate was 70 percent, the top 1 percent paid 17 percent of all income tax revenue collected. In 2008, with a tax rate of 35 percent, the top 1 percent paid 40 percent of all income revenue collected.

In other words, with a lower tax rate, the wealthy pay a higher percentage of tax revenue collected than with a higher tax rate.

This may seem counter intuitive, but when you understand, more money in the private economy increases the overall wealth in the economy, it makes sense that tax revenue will go up as tax rates go down to an extent.

If you still are not convinced, here is one more attempt. According to the Department of Commerce from the Census Bureau, in 1972, 32 percent of the population made less than $35,000 (all numbers adjusted for 2008 numbers), 59 percent of the population made between 35 thousand and $100,000, and 9 percent of the population made more than $100,000.

In 2008 the number of people making less than $35,000 a year fell to 27 percent of the population. People making between $35,000 and $100,000 fell to 47 percent. This means the group of people making more than $100,000 a year has grown to 26 percent of the population. Over a quarter of the people in the U.S. make more than $100,000 a year!

Not only is the idea that the rich don’t pay their fair share wrong, those who feel they should be made to pay more will only succeed in making them pay less by raising taxes rates. It is called a conservative issue, but anyone who understands the math will see you can only raise the level of taxes collected so much. But don’t let logic get in the way of your truth.

We were recently and rudely reminded that we could certainly use such a group when a critical technological crutch we’d become completely dependent on was suddenly kicked away; forcing us — screaming and kicking in withdrawl — to go cold turkey. When campus e-mail and MetroConnect services went down on April 9, the disconnect was like an Old Testament plague. Complete with Biblical weeping and gnashing of teeth. Worse, the modern day plague lasted lots longer than anyone had feared.

Classes couldn’t meet, wily students were able to duck exams they were unprepared for anyway and withdrawl sweats approached those that greeted the Y2K fear that gripped the Millenium’s arrival a decade ago. Then, the computers that run everything were supposed to fail worldwide to throw humankind into chaos.

It never happened. But fears — fanned by the very technology that was supposed to shut down — were a modern-day version of the dominant fears when the previous millennium rolled around. They included a dire comet seen in the skies and the Ottoman Turks menacing Christiandom from the East. All of which demonstrated how far we’d come, panic-wise, on the wings of technology in a thousand years.

Technology! Wonderful when it works. When it doesn’t, we’re collectively screwed, or up a proverbial creek without even a methadone paddle.

Whether in or out of control, technology has long held an honored place deep in the soul of our secret fears. Sometimes, those subterranean fears bubble up like magma to appear in literature. In many of his books, novelist William Burroughs wrote about a netherworld of drug addicts and third-world depravity against a backdrop of technology run amok.

Sometimes, the landscape came with giant centipedes and other fearsome creatures. Burroughs’ bleak visions were often aided by the stock character of Dr. Benway; in locales as close to home as Boulder.

Although he came from a prominent St. Louis family — Burroughs’ grandfather invented the adding machine — Burroughs might have had little to say to the scion of another patrician family, Henry Adams, had their lives ever intersected. A century apart, they didn’t. But Adams also shared a distrust of technology and — like other Victorians looking at an 1890s fin de siècle world — welcomed and feared its coming.

Adams was the most brilliant in an American family that had already produced two U.S. presidents. But when his turn came, the political center of gravity had shifted from New England to the Heartland. And rail-splitter Abraham Lincoln and Civil War hero Ulysses Grant seized center stage.

Years later, after seeing an electricity-generating dynamo at the Chicago World’s Fair Exposition of 1893, Adams saw in the dynamo the demise of his era and his class, thrown onto the “ash-heap” of history, as he wrote in his 1907 “Education of Henry Adams.” In that same book, his chapter on “the Dynamo and the Virgin” (Mary) shows early feminist sympathies; six decades ahead of his time.

The Virgin — as the ageless opposite of technology — runs heavily through Adams’ earlier writing on the medieval world and its French stained-glass cathedrals in his 1904 “Mont Saint Michel and Chartres.” I thought of Adams when I finally made it to Mont Saint Michel, off the French coast of Brittany, that had eluded me for years on previous trips to France.

It was 1999, shortly before the turn of the millennium, and visiting that thousand-year-old abbey seemed right. There, in jeans and a sweater among soaring spires and stained glass windows of saints and sages, I scribbled in a journal and tried to play Adams. But Henry, a 19th century Boston gentleman wearing wing collars and wool suits, had lots more time, and money, there than I did. Still, I felt for the man; a monumental misfit. He died in 1918, at age 80.

British author and futurist H.G. Wells — best known for his 1895 “The Time Machine” that was the basis of a recent awful Hollywood version — also welcomed technology while warning of its perils. A prophetic seer of the future, Wells wrote more than simple science fiction. Among other foresights, he had laser beams in his 1898 “War of the Worlds,” predicted the First World War 20 years before the fact in his “A Dream of Armageddon” and foresaw multi-lane highways, in the 1890s, in “Parkways to Utopia.”

Still, Wells was wary and advised caution when harnessing the coming cornucopia. Neither did he buy to the Darwinist doctrine of his time that human progress was inevitable. The horrors of the First World War, whose advanced technology of tanks, mustard gas, machine guns and biplanes led to enormous casualties for miniscule gains, proved Wells correct.

Neither Burroughs, Adams or Wells have danced with the stars or appeared on “Who Wants to Be the Biggest Jerk?” to make them less than relevant in our time. But what they have to do with a technology outage that triggered outrage at Metro is maybe this: Technology can deliver unheard-of benefits, so use it. But resist the unsuspecting embrace. Maybe all those dazzling apps that do everything but flush you’re toilet aren’t the unalloyed blessing TV touts them to be. Let the buyer beware.

“It is good for one thing, though.”

Pausing with my own cigarette, I looked up. This was a few years ago, weeks before the Democratic convention. The idea of journalism had a different paint job on it then, and college wasn’t simply an elusion giving way to an illusion for me yet. It was an answer; I thought it a good one.

Intrigued, I listened.

Now it’s now, and in a month I’ll graduate. And I’m scared shitless. No real plan. No real job. And I’m not even sure I want to pursue what I studied.

“College’ll teach you how much you can bite off and still chew,” he said.

I was interning at a small-town paper up north, and he, Russell, was the veteran reporter, and he looked the part. Gentle, a touch jaded, crow’s feet cupping blue eyes (the result of either smoking or thinking too much).

It would be some time later when I would get an e-mail from a friend informing me Russ had died alone in a car accident on a highway outside of town. Sometimes we keep people in moments, and for me, this is his: this talk, this summer, the taste of cigarettes.

“I don’t remember much of anything from it, but it did teach me how to put my time together. Organization. Understand?”

With a lie and a nod, I told him I did. He stamped his cigarette out and walked away.

Now it’s now, and in a month I’ll graduate. And I’m scared shitless. No real plan. No real job. And I’m not even sure I want to pursue what I studied.

They say before an earthquake, tsunami or whatever natural disaster hits, animals make for the hills. An instinct to avoid peril.

In recessions, I’ve learned, people turn tail for academia. All ages, all races, huddled together to weather the storm.

But I’m going out there to press my luck, and it has me thinking about that conversation years ago. I’m wondering what I will take away from Metro in addition to a piece of paper and a debt load that could cover a low-end Maserati.

Years from now I may forget the Spanish I’ve spent years learning, lord knows I’ve already forgotten the French. Math will assuredly be an afterthought, and Radiolab on NPR will be more helpful with any science questions than any lesson.

In the end old Russ was right. College takes that burning edge and focuses it a little, forcing you to stay up writing papers until dawn. It robs you of every minute of free time until you spend an hour with friends like you’ve got only that one left. It educates you in the art of not-giving-a-damn-this-Sunday-because-I-earned-it-and-I’m-not-taking-any-shit-for-it. College might teach you love; it might teach you passion for a movement; it could teach you a lot of things.

Metro never taught me what I wanted to do — I never took that credit. I’m not sure if I got any real answers, but now I think I know the right questions. And I’ll never forget that.

Most students are bullied at some point in their lives. I remember my peers often bullied me because of my physical, something I had no control over. I learned to deal with it as I grew older, and now the ability to accept myself helps with confidence and proving my abilities. However, some children never get over the fact they are bullied, and will show signs of anti-social behavior or become reclusive. Sometimes the bullying leads to suicide — or in the case of Columbine April 20, 1999 — a tragic school shooting.

The most important question to ask is what schools or parents are doing to help youth understand other people and not bully them, or to understand why they are being bullied. In the case of the Columbine tragedy early reports questioned the motivation behind the shootings. Things like Trench Coat Mafia came up — and were later repealed — but a defining reason was bullying.

Unfortunately, bullying seems to be a part of any child’s life, starting with elementary and middle school. Many researchers have concluded bullying is a pre-cursor for gun violence, whether they are the ones being bullied or bullying others.  Students who show signs of anti-social behavior at a young age often have trouble fitting into social groups at school, and if by high school they are still not accepted they might lash out with gun or other types of lethal violence. Unfortunately gun violence is a problem in the U.S. that can never be fixed.

There are usually two schools of thought when it comes to resolving gun violence in the country, especially in rural towns where lethal violence can be more prevalent.

The first school of thought is to outlaw guns in the country, which assumes no black-market for weapons would exist.

This is one of the worst ways to deter school gun violence. Guns will always be around. Just ask Maryland, who outlawed certain handguns in the early 1990s. The amount of gun violence in the state actually increased after the law to ban small, easily concealed weapons was put into effect. The main reason was an increase in underground trafficking of the guns. Banning guns will not work because everyone knows killing or murder is illegal and immoral — but yet people still commit the crime. If someone was going to commit murder, they would have no problem purchasing illegal weapons.

The other prominent idea and system to reduce school gun violence is to teach youth conflict resolution skills. These are taught in classrooms and auditoriums across the country, from Seattle to Miami.  Programs such as D.A.R.E. have proven to be somewhat ineffective, but new studies have been conducted to improve the efficiency and effectiveness of programs.

The ultimate goal among program coordinators is to teach students they are not alone when they feel bullied, and to offer outlets to express their concerns. This is also true with people who bully others. They will have an outlet to express their feelings or concern or describe their anti-social behavior to someone who can help solve the problem, or at least allow the child to feel less lost and more accepted.

School bullying is always going to be around. Youth are not equipped with the necessary skills to avoid it and don’t understand the full impact bullying can have. Recently a female student in Massachusetts committed suicide because she felt like an outcast and felt there were no other options. If she understood there were outlets for her to have expressed her concerns with how the other students treated her, she may have seen other options besides killing herself.

Thankfully, she did not take out her anger of being bullied like so many have in the past. In Colorado last year there was a man who killed several people at a churches that refused to accept him, or so he thought. The problem is not just among youth in schools — it can carry over into the professional world.

The best way to reduce youth violence and bullying is to educate children about the impact of bullying and that while it’s a natural thing to do; there are other ways of expressing feelings. Bullies often feel that they are not accepted into certain social groups, and will take out their frustration on other people. Bullying at a young age often leads to gun violence or other types or lethal violence, but we can help them at a younger age. While I realize it seems like an easy fix — ban all guns — the problem is deeper than that, and it starts with bullying at a young age.

According to the Center of Disease Control and Prevention, 20-25 percent of women in college reported attempted or completed rape (2008). However, according to AAUW (formally known as the American Association of University Women), 95 percent of victims in college do not report their abuse.

They are scared and ashamed. They feel like it was their fault and no one will believe them. They feel dirty and don’t want anyone to think the same way about them. They don’t want to admit to themselves, let alone a stranger, it’s true.

I know; I’m one of these women.

On June 9, 2006 — I will never forget the date — I was raped by two men in a hostel in London while on a study abroad trip. I did not report it. I went back to my room, closed my eyes and prayed when I woke up the next morning, it would all turn out to be just a nightmare.

And you know what? It worked. For more than a month I went on with my life, never thinking of the event. Then, reality struck. While having a heart to heart with a good friend, she confided in me and told me she had been raped. Of course my heart went out to her and I tried to comfort her. But, at the same time, I felt myself shatter as that night in London replayed in mind, over and over and over. I had completely repressed that memory; it was like it never happened. Then, all of a sudden, I couldn’t stop reliving it and feeling the pain I felt that night.

I didn’t deal with it right away, and because of that, I robbed myself of the opportunity to seek help and begin the healing process. Because I repressed the memory, I do not remember some of that night. Now, close to four years later, bits and pieces will randomly come to mind, making me relive it all over, yet again.

I know it’s hard; I know it’s painful; I know the shame and fear that fills victims. But I can’t stress enough how important it is to seek support.

And while most victims of sexual assault are women, men can be victims as well. According to the Louisiana Foundation Against Sexual Assault, an estimated 92,748 American men are sexually assaulted each year, and according to RAINN (Rape, Abuse and Incest National Network), 33 percent of men will be sexually assaulted in their lifetime.

It was extremely hard for me to admit what happened to me; with society’s gender roles, I can’t even imagine how hard it would be for a male. But based on my experience hiding from the truth, I think it’s especially important for men to seek support.

When I first “came out” about what happened (and frankly, sometimes I still think this way), I tried to downplay what happened by thinking: “It’s no big deal; rape isn’t uncommon,” or “I was drinking; I put myself in danger.”

But it’s important to not think that way. In reality, the fact that it does happen to so many people actually makes it a big deal.

And the effects of sexual assault cannot be ignored either. According to AAUW, college student victims are 13 percent more likely to attempt suicide than those who haven’t been assaulted. Victims may suffer from various emotional and psychological disorders, and according to The National Center for Victims of Crime, nearly one-third of all rape victims develop Rape-related Post-traumatic Stress Disorder sometime during their life.

Other statistics are startling as well. For example, according to Men Against Sexual Violence, only 2 percent of all rapists are convicted and imprisoned.

The issue of sexual assault is too often pushed under the rug, but it’s too important to not address. The first step is for victims to seek help.

Sharing my story like this wasn’t easy, but if I can encourage at least one victim to seek support or at least one person to be an advocate — or even one person to think critically about the issue — it will have been worth it.

Local Resources:

Auraria Campus Sexual Assault Policy

The Phoenix Center at Auraria   Tivoli 257, 303-556-2255                                                                                                                                            

Metro Counseling Center        303-556-3132                                                                                                                                                                                     

UCD Counseling Center           303-556-4372                                                                                                                                                                                        

CCD Counseling Center            303-556-3926                                                                                                                                                                                

Denver Police Department — Victim Assistance Unit           1331 Cherekee St., Denver    720-913-6035                                                                                                                                  

Safehouse Denver              1649 Downing St., Denver     303-830-2660                                                                                                                                                                                            

Project Safeguard (legal assistance)                                                                                                                                                                             815 East 22nd Ave., Denver  — 888-723-3473                                                                                                                                                           15400 East 14th Pl., Aurora, CO‎ — 303- 344-9016‎                                                                                                                                             1100 Judicial Center Dr., Brighton, CO‎ — 303-637-7761

Colorado Coalition Against Sexual Assault

The Sexual Assault Interagency Council           201 West Colfax Ave., Denver
                                                                                                                                                           

The Denver Center for Crime Victims          24-Hour Hotline Numbers:     303-894-8000 (English)   303-718-8289 (Espanol)                                                                                                 

Further list of sexual assault resources and support in Colorado

“… what’s the matter with the clothes I’m wearing? Can’t you tell that your tie’s too wide?

… don’t you know about the new fashion honey? All you need are looks and a whole lot of money”

— Billy Joel, “It’s Still Rock and Roll to Me”

This won’t be about Billy Joel’s music, or even rock ’n’ roll. Rather, it’s about men’s fashion; a big-buck industry whose American products are now made almost entirely overseas. And a topic of only slightly less import in the big-cosmos picture than the upcoming NFL draft that will still rivet untold need-a-lives.

A recent story in The Denver Post’s Lifestyle section was about what has become — in the Post’s pages and elsewhere — a vanishing species: men’s fashion. And it was built around fashion-maven forecasts that men’s baggy shorts will be OUT this year while a snugger-fitting, more “sophisticated” look will be IN. So take note, lest you plan to be on the wrong side of the IN/OUT divide, as I do. Prices, naturally, are up. So we’re talking shorts that sell from $50 to $78; accessorized with $99 flip-flops, $79 to $115 polo shirts and footwear up to $550.

Attention Target shoppers! Forget about it.

In lesser hands, a story like this could have been the usual industry-cheerleader snooze of a read. But Post feature writer Doug Brown deftly wove the requisite industry quotes with his own wry observations on men-trends into a piece that entertained — despite some of the obvious hype from industry spokespeople who tend to be pleasant, but have a job to do. Brown also avoided that damnable excuse for what now passes for journalism: the frothy “Question and Answer” format that maybe should be called Journalism Lite. Still, the underlying message of this “new look” narrative was: be dissatisfied with what you’ve got, because it’s obsoleteand embrace the NEW. As usual, money is no object.

Guess what? For some of us, money IS an object. And we may think twice about paying two or three times what an apparel item is worth — despite being made in Sri Lanka or Thailand — because it sports a designer label.

One fashion arbiter in Brown’s story urges guys to “bring their significant other” with them when shopping. Don’t do it! I’ve seen it happen, and it’s not pretty. Fashion-clueless guys arrive in Macy’s menswear department in Cherry Creek, dragged by girlfriends who know even less. The women think they know what will look good on their guy, who’d rather be watching the Broncos lose. The selections are often a disaster, but the sensitive guy is expected to actually WEAR the chosen ensemble — in front of real people and possibly at work. Aggghhhhh!!!

So where do I come off offering advice like the experts I’m slamming? Oddly, I know a tad about the menswear industry. Unlike women’s wear, where this season’s hot look is next year’s anachronism, menswear moves much more slowly — sans instant obsolescence. U.S. presidential portraits show that — except for collars and the shape of cravats and lapels — your basic men’s business-suit look hasn’t changed that much since Abraham Lincoln’s time.

Franklin Roosevelt made soft collars popular after Herbert Hoover’s that were as stiff as his economic thinking. The Duke of Windsor — deposed from the British throne in 1936 — promoted cuffs and knife-edge creases on men’s trousers. Harry Truman clung to double-breasted suits, but popularized Hawaiian shirts as sportswear. John Kennedy helped kill the men’s hat industry and not even Indiana Jones could revive it.

With “tailored” or business menswear changes moving with glacial speed, sportswear offered faster action. But, even there, many cutting-edge or “fashion-forward” looks fell flat on their asses.

Although you’d never know it from how I choose to dress now, I was men’s fashion editor during my early years at The Denver Post. It wasn’t rocket science and took, as I liked to say, about 20 percent of my time and five percent of my mind. When I mentioned that to a vice president of the Denver Dry Goods department store, he was not amused. When Reagan was president, the “Denver Dry,” as it was known — did more than $1 million a year in print advertising in the Post. So when the exec complained to my bosses, it carried weight.

It was a good run. I did stories on interesting designers (one of the best menswear designers was a woman: Jhane Barnes) and had scored some national awards in a competitive field that included blue-rinse ladies who did menswear full time. I’d do pieces on what a line by Bill Blass meant in terms of Ronald’s Reagan’s America — as in a return to “elegance” (read: snobbery, Republican style) after Jimmy Carter. That was deemed too cerebral when Post management wanted dumbed-down fluff and “how-to” stories.

Fortunately, I was soon after tapped for the Post’s news desk — the domain of “hard news.” There, buddy Tom Graf, also long gone from the Post, greeted me with “welcome to the news side, where deadlines are measured by the clock and not the calendar.” It did, indeed, take some adjusting from the leisurely pace of features to daily deadlines and no excuses at 5:00 p.m.

Men’s fashion was de-emphasized nearly everywhere when the industry itself went into the toilet in the early 1990s. On the women’s side, it took years to acknowledge that the majority of American women were now in the workforce. So the evening-wear-type “fantasy” outfits pushed by store fashion directors remained out of touch. Eventually, they got it.

Now, seldom-seen menswear narratives still catch my eye. But the story on shorts left me wondering why NOT the baggy-ass shorts seen throughout the NCAA hoops tournament. Guys wear them, even on the street. They look like geeks, but it’s a free country. For a real laugh, check out some of the hooker-looks that pass for dressing-to-impress in some ladies’ circles.

But that’s another story.

Two weeks ago I submitted to my editor a racist op-ed about how wrong interracial marriage is. It would have run on April 1 had my editor decided to run it, and the satirical side of the story would have been: my half-Samoan wife helped me write it. My editor chose not to run it, largely because he didn’t want to face the kind of outrage the Advocate and Jef Otte went through with his satirical piece about President Obama’s health care plan. Not wanting to deal with the fallout, I’d say he made the right decision; I personally was looking forward to the fallout.

Luckily for me, the editors at the Advocate had no issues running a racist controversial piece, so now I can make my point from two different perspectives. My first perspective being, I was censored out of fear of backlash by my newspaper, and the other perspective, a view different than the one most people hold, even a satirical one, was met with so much resistance the newspaper had to address an angry mob.

I don’t fault my editor or my newspaper for not running my piece; it is his right and his responsibility to not run pieces he feels are wrong for the newspaper. He also told me he didn’t find the piece all that funny, which I understand; I did work very hard to find arguments that have actually been made, so my piece, unlike Mr. Otte’s, could have been a serious piece.

But the point I wanted to bring up, and Mr. Otte did bring up whether it was his intention or not, was why, at an institution of higher learning where ideas are supposed to flow freely and be respected, did this satire get such a response? My editor is under no obligation to print any op-ed that comes his way, but for anyone to be outraged or offended that the opinion was printed is ridiculous. We are at a center of higher learning to get different perspectives, even some we find reprehensible.

That is not to say if you disagree you should not express your opinion. Expressing disagreement is just as much a part of the exchange of ideas as presenting ideas. The trouble is, when ideas are considered too outrageous to be printed, the forum ceases to be an exchange of ideas. It is difficult to have a discussion if everyone in the room agrees.

I am by no means claiming all ideas are worth presenting. Some ideas, such as the ones I wrote in my piece that wasn’t printed and in Mr. Otte’s piece, are not to be taken seriously. In the cases of our pieces, they were never meant to be taken seriously, thus making them satire. Had either piece been presented to be taken seriously, they may not have been worthy of taking seriously. So don’t take them seriously.

Censoring an opinion because you disagree with it is ignorant and dangerous. If an idea is so dangerous it shouldn’t be spoken or written, it must have something very important to say; perhaps you should look at who has something to lose from the opinion. If an idea is merely offensive, it makes far more sense to recognize it as such and move on. Not all ideas are worth printing, but you should be very wary if someone tells you you’re better off not hearing an opinion.

Welcome to the current climate of American political discourse, disagreement and statecraft.

Time was when a party that lost an election sucked it up, regrouped and came back in the next election with a stronger candidate. No more. Now, they simply vow to oppose and disrupt every proposal and new idea offered by the winner. And they deliver.

No mystery who we’re talking about: the party of NO!!! New ideas? Nil. Candidates for 2012? Palin? Rush? Glenn Beck? What a roster! But it might be interesting to see one of those clowns as the face of the GOP with Tea Party zealots leading the charge with pikes, pitchforks and torches.

Meanwhile, a black man in the White House drives them nuts. Many of them also hate the poor, minorities and anyone not as well off as themselves. But they claim to love Jesus.

Which brings us to the just-concluded Easter season. OMG! I actually said EASTER and not spring break or festival of the Equinox or Druid howling-at-the-moon time or whatever else may be politically correct this month.

Let’s get a few things straight. I’m not a knee-jerk True Believer, although I grew up in a Christian tradition — a standard “mainstream” brand, and not some off-the-wall sub-sect. Nor do I tell Jews, Muslims or Zen Buddhists in Boulder that they’re going straight to Hell. But if Heaven is filled with the kind of people who talk most about it, I might not opt for an eternity with them.

Vatican apologists managed to again ignore a growing crisis of confidence over pedophile priests in official Holy Week pronouncements. But Holy Week, that ended Easter Sunday, is supposed to cause Christians to remember and reflect upon that week’s events that saw Jesus’ triumphal entry into Jerusalem, fall from favor with fickle crowds in less than a week; betrayal, arrest, crucifixtion and return from the dead on Easter Sunday. Jesus himself was a great teacher, but never published – so forget about tenure – and it fell to four of his followers to set down four versions of his life in narratives done decades after the fact.

No mystery who we’re talking about: the party of NO!!! New ideas? Nil. Candidates for 2012? Palin? Rush? Glenn Beck? What a roster! But it might be interesting to see one of those clowns as the face of the GOP with Tea Party zealots leading the charge with pikes, pitchforks and torches.

While he lived and preached and was said to perform miracles for just three years, Jesus hung out not with social A-List types, but with society’s outcasts: prostitutes, beggers, and “sinners and publicans” according to one version. The latter referred to despised tax collectors; not REpublicans. Jesus preached a love of the poor and powerless — hardly a parallel with today’s Republican worldview — and showed them kindness, compassion and respect.

The poor, he said, had a better shot at the kingdom of heaven than the rich or ruling classes. He praised a poor widow for casting two “mites” – coins worth only a few cents – into the treasury while big-ass Pharisees made a show of donating large sums. “She gave all she had,” said Jesus, who posed an obvious danger to the Pharisee elite (under the yoke of Rome) and had to be eliminated.

Jesus also drove thieving money-changers out of the temple with “… my father’s house should be a house of prayer, but ye have made it a den of thieves.” Far from the bland, bloodless – and often blond and blue-eyed – personage of popular images, Jesus, if taken at his word, was a dangerous revolutionary.

Were Jesus to return today, he’d be called a “socialist” by folks who wouldn’t know a socialist if one kicked them. In the McCarthy witch-hunt early 1950s, it would have been “Communist.” During America’s “Big Red Scare” after the First World War, the worst tag you could carry was “anarchist” or “Bolshevik.” Same tactics; different labels.

So how might Jesus handle health care in America? For clues, try reading what Jesus preached in the four Gospels of Matthew, Mark, Luke and John. They lead off the New Testament and you won’t have to spring for a $90 used paperback at the campus book store. But go with the King James version.

Modern-day translations, in “modern” language, not only destroy King James’ language and poetry, but dumb down Jesus’ teachings to vapid-sounding sayings that are perfect for New Age-y digestion.

Now that you’re on a reading roll, don’t stop there. For a hint on how the Party of “NO” got to where it is today — kicking and screaming — scan a bit of American History, starting with the early Republican Party. Its anti-slavery stance and Lincoln’s election in 1860 triggered Southern secession and the Civil War.

Lincoln freed the slaves and pushed the Westward-expansion Homestead Act before 1865, and the Party has had few new ideas since. Lincoln hadn’t been dead a decade when the Party, under President Ulysses Grant, began molting into a tool of big business, railroads and monopoly “trusts.” Two decades later, the GOP established credentials as the mortal foe of organized labor efforts. It solidified into its present shape with the election of William McKinley in 1896. But for a brief blip under Teddy Roosevelt – who supported anti-trust laws and promoted the National Park system – the Party never relinquished its reactionary pedigree.

So try some reading — maybe for a change of pace — and draw your own conclusions. It could even lead to the very dangerous development of critical thinking, which is supposedly why we’re on campus; along with honing job-seeking skills. Far be it for me to suggest how you ought to think. Deep-thinker “celebrities” already hold that job.

“Did I read it? Nah, brah, I’m not even going to open the book.” Insert self-gratifying laughter.

I’ve been thinking about him a lot lately. Nearly a month left to graduate and I have this guy at my left like a sidecar to postgraduate hell, brandishing his pride at accomplishing nothing. An anti-accomplishment.

Apathy: a college art, to be sure, and one it seems with more majors enrolled in the craft here at Metro than there are in hospitality. And we’re building them a fucking hotel.

Students not powering into academic life happens at any college; I get that. But it also makes one helluva case for capping enrollment, don’t you think?

I say we seriously consider upping the guidelines for getting into and staying at Metro, so that it’s more affordable for the students who want to be here for an education.

In February, President Stephen Jordan said, “we have to look at the possibility of constraining enrollment until state policymakers see the consequences of not funding us equitably.”

What Jordan was trying to say is that, as far as higher-ed schools in our state go, we’re getting screwed when it comes to funding (the lowest in Colorado at a little more than $2,000 a student, distantly behind CSU-Pueblo who gets almost double that).

Capping enrollment doesn’t tell the community Metro is unwilling to educate students. Rather, capping enrollment shows the community the state is unwilling to pay Metro to educate students.

Apathy: a college art, to be sure, and one it seems with more majors enrolled in the craft here at Metro than there are in hospitality. And we’re building them a fucking hotel.

We either get state funding or we get higher tuition. Easy like a Sunday morning.

Rather than spending money to re-brand Metro and other projects to expand, the administration needs to find out if there’s more to be saved than lost if test scores and prior academic performance were weighed at the door, and if this would be a way to stave off tuition increases.

But then those damn ethical questions have to pop in, don’t they? Since its inception, Metro welcomed any and all. Give me your disinterested, disenchanted huddled masses — so long as they have a line of credit at the financial aid office.

I’m not advocating capping enrollment to turn students away who want to be in college, making higher education a just-out-of-reach luxury. What I’m saying is that college seems to be the answer for everybody who doesn’t have an answer, and it shouldn’t be that way. Data released last year by the ACT test people show most high school grads aren’t ready for college.

With debt levels rising, why make it easier for them to enroll and drop classes they struggle with and don’t want to be in?

I say this from experience. When I graduated high school, my GPA looked more like my age at the time than anything that would get me accepted into college. I wasn’t ready, emotionally or academically. I waited, enrolled at a two-year community college and came to Metro when I was ready.

If success begins with you, I’m wondering whether or not you shouldn’t wait until you feel like walking before you’re expected to run.

An emergency town hall meeting at Auraria was called March 10 to address the seemingly growing number of attacks on campus. The meeting was meant to inform students of what the campus is doing to protect them, and allowed students to voice their opinion.

There are an estimated 35,000 — 40,000 students, professors and other individuals on campus Monday-Thursday.

It was estimated about 100 people attended the town hall meeting co-hosted by the Auraria Police and the Student Government Association.

I wonder how many students actually knew about the event. No one was really talking about it in my classes, but when I talked to students around campus, most knew about the attacks. Few, if any, knew about the meeting.

The lack of participation leads me to believe there is a lack of communication among students, police officers and Metro officials. I understand most students on campus are usually in a hurry and many were simply too busy to attend the event, but there should have been more than 100 people. SGA President Andrew Bateman proposed solutions, but it seems Metro and the police are reacting to the violence on campus and fail to understand the larger problem.

People I have talked to around campus explained to me several incidents that prove a lack of police presence. There are several pockets on campus where students freely smoke weed, drink beer and who knows what else. Why are there places on campus that students feel confident enough to smoke and drink, without worry of consequences?

The area between North Classroom and the Tivoli seems to be very well patrolled, and I have seen cops pull over cars who illegally turned into the circle where busses idle.  However, when I walk to the Light Rail station on Colfax the story is completely different. If I see a cop or RTD security guard I notice his presence — it’s unusual to see them around there.

The biggest question I have is about the reaction by school and police officials if there were a shooting on campus. What procedure is in place to contain the situation, when Colfax Avenue and Speer Boulevard are wide-open to public use?

Auraria’s urban setting may really be the problem. There are areas on the campus where anybody can walk around unnoticed and do what they please. Pedestrian traffic is heavy around Colfax and Speer, and cops have to deal with students, workers and homeless people.

Metro or the Auraria police needs to address the problems on campus in a pro-active approach to build a sense of safety of campus. If students are not safe on campus, parents will discourage them from attending our school and we will build a poor reputation.

After the January special election in Massachusetts, I thought we’d seen the last of the current health care monstrosity.

I figured the Democrats would see passing health care would lose their majorities in the House and Senate, and possibly even sink their great communicator himself in 2012.

I thought they might try again with a new bill and try and bring some Republicans along with them. I didn’t think they’d dare try to push this beast through.

And yet, here we are, midway through March, and Nancy Pelosi is casting voodoo spells to try to resuscitate the bill while Harry Reid is in talks with the Devil himself.

And the President? He’s still confident he can convince the bill to rise from the dead with his oratory abilities. All three seem, well, quite happy to lose their majority and the Presidency in 2012.

What gives? Why the suicidal hell bent push to pass a bill that Americans dislike nearly two to one on a good day. Why give up control of the country for this one bill?

I know it is a big bill; the Democrats have dreamed about a public health care system since FDR. But why not go back to the drawing board and see if a bill can’t be crafted that the public at least kind of likes, and can at least drag along a few Republican votes — maybe even those senators from Maine.

But that isn’t going to happen; the Democrats have their hearts set on this bill. Not because it is a great bill, it isn’t the Republicans that are blocking it.

The Democrats have majorities in both the House and the Senate. If the bill had the full support of the Democrats they wouldn’t need any Republican votes, they could pass it today. It is Democrats that are blocking the bill.

Why does it have to be this bill? Why are the Democrats willing to lose control of Washington for this bill? Because it would move the U.S. from a center right country to a center left country.

The leadership in the House and the Senate aren’t trying to sell the bill because they believe in it, they are trying to sell the bill because losing Washington, but moving the nation as a whole to the left will benefit them in the long run.

The health care bill would make thousands of jobs currently in the private sector into public sector jobs. It would also increase government bureaucracy to look over and regulate the health care system. People who are in government jobs tend to vote for the party that doesn’t want to shrink the size of government. It would increase the size of government, and it would increase the size of government unions.

I don’t know how concerned the leadership in Washington really is about health care. Maybe they really do believe this bill would improve the system despite all of its many flaws, but I don’t think so.

If that were the case, why not start over and come up with a bill the public approves of? This is the Democrats chance to move America to the left. Losing elections in 2010 and 2012 won’t be an issue if it guarantees Democrat control for the next century.

At the moment, the Democrats are struggling to get the votes they need in the house, and Pelosi will make any deal necessary to get this bill through.

While Republicans celebrate the Democrats lack of foresight that will cost them the next election, the Democrats watch on, knowing it is the Republicans who don’t see the big picture.

There’s still time to go someplace during geek week — aka spring break, that has been in full swing elsewhere for most of March. But where?

Most of the hype that now passes for travel writing would have you believe the itineries they pimp are perfect for your budget and suggest something like: Wake up in your $600-a-night hotel, enjoy your $90 power breakfast and step into the $200-per-hour spa. Now, out of the hotel, you’re ready to start spending REAL money. And that’s just for starters.

But if your spring break budget runs more to Commerce City than Cancun and more Aurora than Aruba, you may not buy into these fantasies. I sure as hell don’t. For me, spring break means baseball. Specifically: spring training games in Arizona’s Cactus League.

There, as in Florida’s counterpart Grapefruit League, spring training offers lots more than pre-season games with veterans sprinkled among the rookies, newly-traded prospects, wannabes and has-beens all fighting for a final-cut spot on the Opening Day roster. Aside from warm sun most of the time, palm trees and cacti beyond the outfield fences, spring training in Arizona is time suspended. It’s Le Sacre du Printemps — the Rites of Spring — when all things are still possible.

As on Opening Day, every team and every player starts with the same clean slate. Any team can, in theory, make it to the World Series,and every batter can hit .350 or better. It’s about watching leisurely baseball in the sun while Northern cities like Boston, New York, Detroit, Cleveland, Chicago, Milwaukee and Denver can look forward to possible snow on ever-earlier Opening Days.

Unless you’re an introvert who’s more comfortable texting on a Blackberry than talking with real people, spring training is also about talking with other fans. Being, on average, a bit older than America’s 18-to-34 demographic darlings, some have long baseball memories and great stories to tell, if you’ll ask and listen. So you talk, enjoy the games and drink beer: Anchor Steam at Giants’ games; Old Style at the Cubs and Coors Light (redundant?) if you’re desperate at a Rockies game. You don’t get quite the same ambiance during the regular season, where everything – especially distance from the players – is on a bigger, big-league, scale.

Baseball iconoclast Bill Veeck — who once owned the Cleveland Indians, St. Louis Browns and Chicago White Sox said, maybe a half-century ago, that fans’ knowledge of and enjoyment of baseball is inversely proportional to the price of their ticket. In an age of luxury boxes and ”club” sections, Veeck’s axiom is more true today than ever.

Veeck integrated the American League by bringing Larry Doby to the Cleveland Indians in 1947, shortly after Jackie Robinson started for the Brooklyn Dodgers. He also brought up Satchel Paige as a 42-year-old rookie (Robinson was 28) to his pennant-winning Cleveland club a year later. Veeck also launched what would become Arizona’s Cactus League. With little patience for completely-segregated Florida in 1948,Veeck relocated the Indians’ spring training to more open Arizona. Some clubs followed but, for years, the Cactus League’s survival was in serious doubt.

The Cactus League no longer has that problem and has 15 spring training teams in Arizona; the same total as Florida. Last year, the Dodgers moved to Phoenix from their long-standing facility in Vero Beach, Florida, to share a facility with the Chicago White Sox. The Dodgers’ new and multi-million stadium is pretty, but surprisingly sterile. Other than manager Joe Torre and overpaid prima donna Manny Ramirez, the Dodgers themselves seem sterile.

Next year, the Rockies and Arizona Diamondback will move from Tucson to Phoenix and into a new, $100 million complex East of Scottsdale. Somehow, the two teams conned the Salt River Pima-Maricopa Indian Community into building the complex on their land – with an assist from the Arizona Sports and Tourism Authority, whose funds are now tapped out.Which brings us to the Chicago Cubs.

The loveable-losers Cubs, who haven’t won a World Series in 102 years and haven’t been IN a Series since 1945, still enjoy the Cactus League’s largest and most loyal fan following. Last year, a record 203,105 fans caught Cubs games at Hohokam Stadium in Mesa, to swell last year’s total Cactus League attendance to a record 1.58 million, despite the economy. The Cubs’ park also has a human feel and a certain patina that’s lacking elsewhere. Naturally, plans are afoot to screw that up.

Ego and money, the twin serpents in any Eden, are at work here. The Cubs’ new and multi-zillionaire owners, Ameritrade, aren’t happy with fan-friendly Hohokam and want a bigger, better and $84 million facility. As usual, taxpayers are expected to pick up the tab, and Cubs’ managements threatens to move — to Florida — if they don’t get what they want. Sound familiar? Any number of teams have pulled the same scam and got away with it — including the Broncos, who threatened to move in the mid-1990s unless they got a new playpen with mostly public money. Compliant voters complied and Pat Bowlen was home free — even if the Broncos’ future on-field fortunes weren’t.

To remain in Arizona for spring training, the Cubs are demanding that the state pay $59 million of the $84 million with new taxes. The plan, in theory, is supposed to spread some of that money among the 14 other teams. In practice, it’s a bad joke that’s fooling nobody.

Despite the snakes in the Garden, you can do lots worse than savoring spring training – when all things are still possible. Reality will return soon enough. It always does.

The NCAA men’s basketball tournament will soon begin and 65 teams have a chance to end the season at the top of the college basketball world. The tournament will hopefully feature some great matchups; perhaps even a Laettner-esque shot.

The Kansas Jayhawks of the Big 12 conference have been in the top five for the entire season, and will likely be looked at as the favorite heading into the tournament. While I think Kansas will win the tournament, the fun is picking the upsets and Cinderella teams.

Here are a few of the teams I think will make an impact in the tournament; and my pre-bracket Final Four picks.

Expect Michigan St. to make a run at the Final Four under Head Coach Tom Izzo.

The Spartans made a great run in 2009, but came up short in their home state. MSU is always a good bet, and the 2010 team is no different. The Big Ten has been very strong this season, and they should have at least five teams in the tournament. Purdue University was looking like a favorite to be the best in the conference, but the Robbie Hummel injury will likely affect the Boilermakers.

Led by junior Evan Turner, Ohio State can make some noise in the tournament. As I said before PU is not going to play as well without Hummel, which leaves the Big Ten open. Wisconsin has been at the top of the Big Ten conference most of the season, and had an early season victory over Duke.

The Blue Devils are a top-five team, and under coach Mike Krzyzewski should make a run at the finals.

They have had no troubles with the weak ACC conference, and should be a number one seed in the tournament. Coach-K will have no problems with the ACC tournament should win the conference tournament.

Some smaller schools will have the opportunity to win three or more games in the tournament. Tickets have already been punched, and teams such as Butler and Cornell are preparing to make a run.

The Butler Bulldogs have made a name playing well in the NCAA tournament, and should continue to surprise teams in 2010. The Bulldogs defeated Ohio State on December 12 and played well against a very good Georgetown team just four days before.

Butler should feel confident playing any team after facing two top-20 teams back-to-back.

Despite playing in the Ivy-League Cornell has played against some tough competition this season. The Big Red lost early in the Season the Syracuse, and played competitively, but were defeated, by Kansas in the beginning of January. Cornell played well against some tough opponents, and if they can learn from their mistakes may make a great run.

Do not be surprised if Cornell upsets someone early in the tournament, and makes a run at the Elite Eight.

I did like Purdue to make a run at the championship until Robbie Hummel went down with a season-ending injury. They still have a great team and will win at least two games.

My Final Four picks are Kansas, Syracuse, Kentucky and Wisconsin.

‘Nova is led by senior Scottie Reynolds, who is averaging 19 points and three assists per game. The Wildcats have played great this year in the Big East, which is probably the toughest conference in the country. They are another team I could see running the table if the matchups are right. Kentucky is piloted by first-year sensation John Wall, but like the Memphis teams of past under Coach Calipari, I believe a freshman-led team will fall short.

Unlike the John Calipari Memphis and Kentucky teams, Kansas develops players over a period of two or three years.

Senior point guard Sherron Collins has been part of a national championship team already, and his experience will likely impact several games. Standout center Cole Aldrich played few minutes his freshman year, but has come on strong in the last two years.

Freshman guard Xavier Henry and his brother C.J. Henry signed at Kansas to play under Head Coach Bill Self after Calipari left Memphis for Kentucky. The freshman’s presence has been felt and he has averaged almost 14 points per game. The Jayhawks have built a strong team, and the core group of players should grab Kansas a NCAA championship in 2010.

If the state gets what it wants, in 15 years half of Colorado students graduating from four-year institutions could be graduating with $80,000 in debt on average.

That might be best-case scenario, too, because if colleges and universities get what they want, going to school could be even more expensive.

Welcome to the party, my name’s James.

March 5, the Higher Education Strategic Planning Steering Committee, the guys the governor charged with finding a solution for higher ed. (you think your job sucks?) gave their recommendation to the Colorado Commission on Higher Education.

Colleges and universities could only raise tuition 9 percent a year. But if they wanted to go beyond that, they would have to go back to the CCHE (i.e. the state of Colorado) to make their case why they need the cash.

Consider it the last wall of defense. Your very own American Gladiator, keeping higher ed. institutions from arbitrarily raising tuition whenever they feel the whim to construct a new building.

Ritter’s already authorized a 9 percent increase for next year.

But those in attendance representing higher ed. said they should have the remote when it comes to raising tuition for students. They need that to ensure their future.

Let’s look at your future a minute.

You’re a freshman at Metro this year? Congratulations, we’re happy for you. But I’d make sure you get your credits quick because if you stick around until 2013, the cost of around $1,800 a semester of tuition and fees now as a full-time student could go up to more than $2,500 if tuition climbs 9 percent and fees keep pace (over the last five years they’ve increased 30 percent).

Got kids? Nine percent over the next 15 years means that Metro will then be $7,000 a semester. Almost quadruple what it is now.

Comparatively speaking, Metro will still be a bargain compared to other schools.

And consider the consequences. Higher cost of schools means more loans. And more loans mean more debt. Right now, half of Colorado students leave four-year institutions with around $18,000 of debt, according to The Project on Student Debt.

If that trend continues (as it has in years past), 9 percent in 2012 means most students in Colorado will graduate with more than $25,000 in debt.

Students in 2025—$79,287

Is that the future we’re talking about?

Nine may not seem like a lot, but from where I’m standing nine is just fine for me, and then some. It should be more than enough for higher ed.

Now, the CCHE has not yet made a decision and no bill is on the floor. But let’s hope more sensible ideas come to the table before then and both sides consider what the future could really mean for students struggling to pay for college, saddled with debt.

In 2004, universities and colleges were trying to limp away from the state.

Because of a lack of independence, Betsy Hoffman, the president of the University of Colorado at the time, said by the end of the decade institutions would be “facing the downfall of public higher education in Colorado.”

By the end of this decade, their independence could mean the downfall for students.

Celebrities!

What would be do without ‘em? They’re everywhere … giving us advice, cues on how to act, dress and even serving as our moral compass.

Are we nearing celebrity saturation? We already have celebrity chefs, “apprentices,” DJs, pawn shop operators and bounty hunters. Now, TV is giving us celebrity “marriage refs” to rate our marriages after doing so well with their own.

Can celebrity jerkoffs be far behind? Or have they been with us all along?

When breathless media outlets need comments on whether Tiger Woods’ public apology for serial affairs was sincere, they go to celebrities of the moment. Julia Mancuso looked great on the slopes, but does winning Olympic silver qualify you to pass judgment on Woods’ private life?

Forget being qualified, or knowing anything. Simply being a celebrity now confers instant certitude, and a platform of authority. Nor does it matter if the celebrity can’t manage less than 20 “you know”s in a 40-second exchange. When you’re a celeb, your comments carry gravitas; no matter how inane.

We’ve already forgotten the “balloon boy” and White House party crashers — whose ultimate goal in both cases was to land a “reality” TV show. But maybe if more of us HAD some semblance of a life, the appeal of that absurdity might lessen — along with those survivor-style obnoxious bastards we’re supposed to CARE about.

The democratization of dumbed-down expectations and blurring the line between “mainstream” and “tabloid” news have made it much easier to bask in the wan glow of what now passes for celebrity. Even if only for 15 minutes, as Andy Warhol predicted years ago. Some of us of a certain age can recall a time when we had heroes. And genuine stars. Now, we have celebrities — and they’re hardly the same, even when we can’t tell the difference.

Those even older than I (if that’s possible) may remember when Walter Winchell was the undisputed king of gossip — both reliable and spurious — in America. Winchell was syndicated in hundreds of U.S. newspapers and said to be a confidante of several U.S. presidents. Mention in a Winchell column — good or bad — could make or break celebrities overnight. Today, there’s no need for a Winchell — or even newspapers, for that matter — at a time when anyone with a cell phone camera can play “citizen journalist” and even enjoy brief celebrity in a limited arena. Meanwhile, forget about bothersome details like accuracy, oversight or fact-checking. If it’s out there on a blog or posted somewhere else, it must be true, right?

What remains of “mainstream” print media now has local gossip wags — desperate for any celebrity-link, no matter how tenuous — telling us what celebrity (never local) was “spotted” dining at what LoDo restaurant. Fascinating fare.

Movies, then shown in opulent dream-like theaters and not cineplex shoeboxes, were never so popular as during the Depression 1930s. With 15 million out of work in a much smaller workforce, people needed to forget their travails and dream – if only for a couple of hours – of the glamorous lives of movie stars. On-screen, they lived in towers high above Manhattan or were closer to the ground in Hollywood. Either way, they wore formal evening clothes all day and imbibed impossible amounts of alcohol.

Today, movies only feed a fraction of a 24/7 information/entertainment (same thing?) maw whose appetite is insatiable. But, aided by an array of electronic toys, we can follow the fascinating lives of celebrities on a 24/7 basis. And if we find this week’s hero is next week’s fallen idol with a drug problem or the old screwing-around standby, so much the better. If they’re not so good, maybe our own lives aren’t so dull and we can feel better about ourselves. Also vicariously.

Entertainment hucksters long ago learned that, when winning the hearts and minds of mass audiences, crap trumps quality every time. American TV has run with this formula for years and that effort has enjoyed quantum leaps since then-president Kennedy’s Federal Communications Commission chairman, Newton Minnow, declared TV “a vast wasteland” in 1962. Minnow, like Ed Murrow before him, sounded a warning and called for improvements that never happened.

Today’s TV pimps role models that aren’t pretty. At risk of sounding elitist, what I’d call a celebration of “white trash culture” was underway before Rosanne Barr, “Married With Children” and its imitators. Now, the genre remains in full force. Usually, offerings come complete with the stock character of Dad-as-anus; a loveable buffoon who’s the butt (no pun) of jokes everyone is in on but him.

TV celebs typically enjoy shorter shelf lives than those elsewhere. But dress up a show – no matter how idiotic – with a real or bogus “celebrity”, and you’re home free. Or at least until shows are scrubbed at mid-season.

What would be do without celebrities? It might force the bleak prospect of getting an actual life. But that may be asking a bit much.

Since its inception in 1993 under President Clinton, the U.S. military’s “Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell” policy has created quite a lot of heat between the gay community and the military. My views in general on homosexuality are fairly liberal.

I have many friends who are homosexual, I have family members who are homosexual, I am for same sex marriage, and believe that in most lines of work someone’s sexuality is no one’s business but their own. Truth be told, I’d just as soon not know.

I was in the military for five years and served with some homosexuals — though none of them openly homosexual — and I saw firsthand the effects of the situation. But in the case of open homosexuality in the military, I make an exception.

I understand the civil rights aspect of it, and in general agree, but don’t think open homosexuality in the military is a civil rights issue. Or more accurately, I feel civil rights are trumped by national security and the safety of our soldiers.

But I would like to be very precise here: homosexuality, as the law stands, is not allowed in the military. The “Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell” policy only states the military will not ask if a member is homosexual. If it is discovered that a person serving in the military is homosexual, they will be honorably discharged from the military.

This policy should be overturned. It is hypocritical to deny someone the right to serve unless they are willing to lie. It is a self-defeating policy.

But nor should an outright ban on homosexuality exist in the military. There are many positions that being homosexual would have little effect on their performance, or more importantly, unit cohesion. In many of the support units, if soldiers are not getting along, or take a dislike to one another, problems can easily be remedied through the chain of command or, in more serious cases, through the military’s legal system.

This is not limited to homosexuality, there are many instances in which soldiers do not get along, and the system simply mitigates the problem. The exception to this solution would be combat troops.

There is now a prohibition against women serving in combat roles, and it exists for numerous reasons. If we can allow women to serve in some areas of the military, but not others, we can do the same with homosexuals.

For linguists, cooks, or communication operators, unit cohesion is not a driving force, and you do not need a tight-knit group for these areas to function. But for a combat soldier, one who is likely going to be facing an enemy on the battlefield, unit cohesion is of extreme importance.

These soldiers need to know they can trust the soldier next to them; they need to get along with the soldiers next to them. This is not to say homosexuals are not trustworthy, I have no doubt homosexuals could serve with the same honor as anyone else.

It is to say it would add a needless complication to an already stressful job. Facing combat with a soldier who’s mind isn’t in the game is dangerous, and admitting soldiers to a combat unit would create the possibility of relationships in the unit. It would also create the possibility of unwanted sexual attention.

This is easily remedied in an office situation, in a combat unit, it creates distractions that could cause potentially lethal mistakes. Introduce any extra stress in a combat unit and you are risking the lives of soldiers who are already in harm’s way. It is true there will be other stresses they create for themselves.

Young men have their share of problems — be it missing wives and girlfriends back in the States, financial issues or normal job-related stress. These men do not need any additional elements forced upon them. The extra stress could get soldiers killed.

The “Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell” policy is a bad policy. There are many positions in the military that a person’s sexuality would have no bearing on, and these positions should be open to homosexuals. But mixing homosexuals in with combat soldiers creates unnecessary risks for soldiers who already risk their lives every time they leave the wire.

Let’s have a history lesson.

Adolf Hitler began his career as a promising member of an otherwise fledgling National Socialist Party (NSDAP). Having served in World War I, Hitler heard of the Treaty of Versailles while laying in a hospital bed suffering temporary blindness due to mustard gas. He, in his delirious state, determined that Germany had been “stabbed in the back,” and it must’ve been “those Jews.”

What follows is the storied climax of a true mad-man: near successful genocide, the debilitation of his own citizens and the complete dismantling of Germany as-was and as-would-ever-be. Hitler’s legacy lives on in memories and nightmares, but to an American, he most importantly lives on our own tongues.

When you, my darling, educated, and hopefully thorough-minded reader, throw the term ‘Nazi’ around like you’re some sort of political idiot savant, you are invoking a powerful legacy of millions of innocent dead. To beat this into your head, because I really want to, because I feel I really must, a good deal of these millions had their ashes scattered through Germany after they were burned alive.

When journalists, pundits, critics and “thoughtful” anarchists invoke this man’s name in comparison with a politician, a political schema or a proposed health care bill, they are indeed invoking the painful memory of millions of people who writhed naked in a gas chamber.

I’d like to make this even more clear. Calling someone a ‘Nazi’ because of their political beliefs suggests that you think this person, in and of themselves, is capable of dismantling an entire history of scientific Nobel Prize winners, suspending every single civil liberty you have and literally stealing the bread from your mouth to feed soldiers who they will not allow to retreat.

When you start to say, “a soldier’s not allowed to retreat,” and want to compare it to the pull-out in Iraq, consider: Stalingrad had hundreds of thousands of German soldiers brutally murdered in the center of a massive battle because it would be shameful and un-German to retreat, according to Hitler.

Try and imagine George W. Bush ordering those deaths. Or Obama.

Or consider this ‘Socialist’ term, that’s been somehow equated to fascist delirium.

Yes, it’s true, socialism is, on more antiquated political scales, one of the steps leading toward fascism. Yes, you could argue that Hitler’s party name, “The National Socialist Party,” includes this terminology. Quickly, though, the rest of your argument will go up in flames, ignorant, petty flames of an insult-throwing, close-minded American infant.

The Socialists of Hitler’s time were a reactionary group, meant to oppose Communism, Marxism and similar agendas. When a Liberal calls a Conservative a Nazi, you are then luxurizing in what we literary types like to call ‘irony.’ Further, Hitler’s socialism was nothing short of a crack-job oligarchy.

The actual socialist party of the day, the SDP, or the Social Democratic Party of Germany, more closely resembled the political structure of say, Denmark. Their party principles called for freedom, justice and social operation, and more fairly distributed market.

These policies were in reaction to a massive depression that occurred in the wake of World War I, and were written in a brief bubble of prosperity — credit had extended their ideological freedom, such as an American might say the credit crunch had provided them a few years of idealsim.

By saying this party, which exists as a part of the Grand Coalition government in modern Germany, is somehow related to the Nazis, you are calling modern Germans Nazis.

You are also labeling Socialists their worst nightmare, as a good deal of people have grandparents who were killed by Hitler’s attempt to take over the Reichstag.

Now, before you say, “this doesn’t happen,” a cursory examination of headlines: “Anti-Obama Protestor Compares President to Nazi in Swastika Sign,” August 9, 2009. “Limbaugh Compares new Obama Health-Care Logo to Nazi Swastika,” Aug. 6.

Leonard Pitts did an excellent article for the Journal News in which he unearthed that for every 10 mentions of Obama, four of them included Nazi. For every 10 mentions of George W. Bush, six of them included Nazi. We are making fools of ourselves, particularly when editorialists in this very newspaper do it as well.

Regardless of political party or creed, I urge you to have common sense. Don’t let these pundits tell you that so-and-so is as evil as Hitler. Don’t let these radical liberals put Bush into the murderous box of history. Don’t let anyone, and don’t you tell anyone, that there is some sort of Nazi consortium in our government today.

You’re wrong, no matter who you’re talking about.

No, really.

I’m not sure what provoked the use of Chatroulette, but I know it came from a cocktail of boredom and social detachment– which can be dangerous. But in what can best be described as a website for schizophrenic speed dating, it turned out to be a match.

Credited to a 17-year-old Russian named Andrey Ternovskiy, the website connects you to a neurotic, international network of chatters provided you have a webcam and an open mind. The second part of those requirements is crucial — Chatroulette has no filters. Once you press “Play,” you’ve opened yourself up to college students hosting a stuffed-animal party, lonely New Jersey plant workers and, more often than expected, pure nudity.

If you see what you like, you stay. If you don’t, click “Next.” This process may take less than a second. It’s an incredibly conceited way of finding someone interesting, even if that conversation begins with: Flash for Haiti! As a rough estimate, a quarter of the chatters are female, which leaves males hunting and ‘nexting’ for their ideal candidate. As a female, you find your cursor on the ‘Next’ button ready to click faster than you’ve ever imagined.

But the almost barbaric cycle through strangers turns out to be thrilling. I’ve had the opportunity to talk with people from six counties from three different continents. I’ve even found a fellow journalist working for a student publication to share woes with.

Not like this type of chatting is necessarily new. We’ve all experienced some form of it – whether it’s iChat, AOL or even a similar-style stranger-to-stranger chat called Omegle.

The best part of Chatroulette comes from the web-cam. Suddenly, the interaction becomes more real than in an environment made from avatars or your capacity of imagination. The connection to a living, breathing human being (even if they call themselves the Chatroulette Psychic and want to read your fortune) is invigorating. It also gives international students the ability to show instead of tell. French students showed me five different vodkas. A designer from Canada showed me his art. An Australian hipster showed me how the toilet flushed.

When you click through the strange and the odd, you may find yourself wondering – what if Chatroulette could be regulated? What if someone took the idea of connecting random strangers but placed filters, maybe even categories, to help us skip the game of dick-dick-goose?

Let’s take an academic perspective and assume you’re working through an English paper about Shakespeare — a pretty ubiquitous author. The chances you will find another English enthusiast would be high in the ‘British Literature’ category. It’s like you’ve walked into a room full of dweebs salivating to have their opinion heard. Sure, you can’t credit them. But at least you don’t have to smell their coffee breath whilst you share a brisk discussion on the theme of love. Just a thought, people don’t get too excited.

But I’m getting ahead of myself. As it stands, the random nature of Chatroulette is one of its more favorable qualities and it’s use is more for entertainment. If I knew I was dipping my hand in a specific type of jellybean jar, it would take away the fun of guessing or grimacing at the flavor. Besides, finding a Strawberry Daiquiri is a lot more rewarding after you’ve had five consecutive Buttered Popcorns.

A few weeks ago, I learned I’d have to deal with prostate cancer; something that’s supposed to happen to OTHER people and to guys who are seriously OLD. Of course, that’s not me. When you’re a smirky undergrad wearing your hat backwards, that prospect is so far into the future – like retirement from a real job – that it’s infinitesimal. But it does happen, obviously, to guys my age. For me, the treatment choices are simple: radiation or surgery. I’m leaning toward the latter. Either way, I’ll deal with it.

At first, it didn’t seem like that big a deal. They knock you out, do the surgery and that’s it. Well, not quite. There’s more, as I found out from the urologist/surgeon who may perform the surgery. It’s a complex area of the body, with all kinds of nerves – very close to the prostate – that control key functions. Even with the best surgery now available, the nerves are still going to be disturbed. Bottom line: In most cases, and for a while after the surgery, there’s an excellent chance of incontinence and impotence. THAT wisdom I had not known.

Not being a stiff-upper-lip type, I was really PISSED! Is this the best they can than bleepin’ do?, I wondered? To emerge, for a while anyway, as a leaky “Depends” user with a Jake Barnes problem? Jake Barnes, for those who may not have read Hemingway’s “The Sun Also Rises” novel, was wounded in the First World War in a delicate area and unable to rise to the occasion. That was in 1926 and long before Viagra.

In that angry state of grace, I two weeks ago boarded a Southwest Airlines flight for a long-planned trip to Los Angeles. The immediate reason was to assist my son, who runs a travel agency that handles custom tours to China at the L.A. Times Travel and Adventure trade show at the L.A. Convention Center, followed by a few free days on my own.

After a long walk to savor downtown L.A.’s old and new architecture, I head for the Pacific Coast Highway in my red rental Chevy, and go north for the healing sun, sights, crashing surf and painfully beautiful vistas of capes and headlands along the California coast. I’ve been driving that coast since the 1970s, and it’s different each time. North of Malibu are vistas of sun-dappled ocean and crashing breakers, floating kelp and offshore oil rigs. After picking up the U.S. 101 freeway that hugs the coast up to Santa Barbara, I’m feeling better already and cancer concerns seem far away. I feel better yet after a morning walk along Hendry’s Beach, where Pacific foam at the water’s edge feels good on bare feet. For me, an ideal day means walking a beach – California, Hawaii, North Carolina, Florida, Cape Cod, Long Island; it doesn’t matter – picking up shells. Not many shells here, but the rocks are great. And with sun-shimmer on the water and curling, translucent breaking waves, it’s glorious. Everybody on the beach looks happy, and so am I.

It’s dark when I leave Santa Barbara, so I take the 101 that runs inland. Next morning, fog lifts as I pass through the rolling, furrowed hills of central California “Steinbeck country” – landscape similar to southern Italy – toward Monterey. Steinbeck, whose memory is being milked for tourist dollars now – he was trashed when alive – wrote, among other classics, “Cannery Row,” set in Monterey. The sardines vanished shortly after World War II, to kill Cannery Row. Today, Monterey’s prosperity comes from tourism and conventions. Steinbeck might not recognize it, any more than artist Georgia O’Keeffe might recognize today’s Santa Fe. But, to me, Monterey still seemed like an old friend.

South to Point Lobos, whose cliffs, coves, wind-sculpted cypress trees, a red-orb sun sliding into the slate Pacific and huge waves crashing like geysers are worth the whole trip. I continue down the twisting coast highway to fabled Big Sur and its majestic cliffs and coastline. After seeing pale blue dawn light over the cliffs, I drive down to Pfeiffer Beach where breakers crash through arch-openings in the rocks. Photographers with serious equipment are there earlier than I am to catch the early light.

Coffee on the deck at Nepenthe – a restaurant landmark since 1949 – offers vistas of Pacific headlands half shrouded in morning mists. Henry Miller, poets Lawrence Ferlinghetti and Allen Ginsberg — with Jack Kerouac — plus photographers Ansel Adams and Edward Weston were all captivated by this magical coast. So was I.

No matter how many times you go to Big Sur, the magic remains. And not even the creeping hand of money in trophy homes and accommodations now geared to San Francisco yuppies has dented the landscape.

On the curvy coast highway south, every bend presents another calendar photo. Later, I scour Moonstone Beach at Cambria for small agates, jaspers and flints. It’s time well spent and good for the soul; as is hunting for sand dollars further down the coast at Morrow Bay.

Next morning, I leave Ventura and do the coast highway from Oxnard to Malibu. The coastal vistas are still beautiful, but after Point Lobos and Big Sur, seem like vin ordinaire. It’s an incredibly clear day for Los Angeles and, as I head toward the airport, snow sparkles on the San Gabriel mountains that are usually hidden by haze.

Up and down the coast, I hit some favorite restaurants; but not one trendy eatery with a “celebrity chef” – a must-have in what passes for travel writing today. No thanks. I’ll stay with the soul-restoring beaches, cliffs and coastlines of the natural world.

The cancer demons haven’t disappeared, but I’ll deal with them.

Fat Tuesday on a swankier part of 14th when my BlackBerry got the message from Metro’s Student Government Assembly Pres. Andrew Bateman by way of Facebook’s “I am higher education” group:

Tomorrow, we start something in Colorado that cannot and will not be stopped. Tomorrow, we raise our voices and demand a change. Tomorrow, the new way begins.

Before now, students have been apathetic. Before now, students have been willing to accept being last in the nation for education spending. But that ends tomorrow … If you go to CU Boulder, wear black tomorrow. If you go anywhere else, wear red.

Like I said, it was Fat Tuesday — I guess we were all entitled to a little embellishment.

So it was with bleary eyes I made it to the “Fund Higher Education” rally the following day at the Tivoli Commons, facing a little over a 100 people, myself wearing blue. I simply forgot and never owned much red to begin with.

But I was there. We were there. Woot.

Fund higher education. We are higher education. It can’t get worse for higher education.

I got that. It’s been a mantra of late. And the March to the State Capitol on March 3 is advertised as “Help save higher education.” But how? What exactly are our options here?

It seems to me, a rally to fund higher education isn’t so much about education as it is about taxation.

You’ve heard about taxation, right, Colorado? Rhymes with Socialism. Other states practice it from time-to-time.

Higher education needs millions of dollars to fill the hole left by the state’s cuts. Right now, stimulus money is the gravy under your biscuit wheels, but it isn’t going to be around forever. So another way to say “fund higher education” might be “put Colorado’s constitutional restrictions to raise taxes (see TABOR) up for a vote.”

You don’t have to be a politico to lick your finger and hold it up to the wind to tell me which way the breeze is blowing.

Ain’t going to happen because unless you can get that Capitol lawn filled with more students than Tea Party animals, now isn’t the time to take up the tax fight.

No, what numerous colleges, Metro included, want is the ability to raise tuition to offset the lack of funds, with their respective administrative boards having the final say as to how much. The state currently regulates this because it’s ‘funding’ the schools.

Currently, Gov. Bill Ritter proposes allowing schools to raise tuition nine percent and is reviewing this policy. Early in his campaign days, Ritter said he wouldn’t let colleges become unaffordable. But he’s also a lame duck governor facing a big lame duck problem with outside lame duck pressures to find a lame duck solution.

Metro Spokeswoman Cathy Lucas said the college wants to ensure that if they need to, colleges won’t have to wonder if they will have the ability or not to raise tuition, adding that Metro still is a bargain comparatively speaking.

I get that too, but what assurances are there that institutions won’t raise tuition beyond affordability or even beyond financial aid? Will there be a term limit that schools will be able to do this? Is this really what’s best for us or just the most realistic option on the table?

Either way, you got to give it to them: they’ve got an honest-to-God plan.

March 3, I am Higher Education is marching to the Capitol. But we’re a jaded generation that isn’t enticed easily. We’ve followed too many parades that took us nowhere. And right now, people are making your decisions for you that will affect your future and the future of others, kids; that’s kind of what happens when you don’t have any real solutions.

What we need now is an agenda beyond vague ideas, Facebook posts and fashion advice.

I hope the students and these pandering organizations can get their shit together to show the Capitol that as students we’re serious about our education when the March goes down, but I also hope we tow in more answers than questions and rhetoric. When we show up to the front door and knock, we need to be ready to say something if they answer.

Hope to see you there; I’ll be in blue.

Unless you’ve been living in a cave, you’ve in the last few days heard a Conservative say something to the effect of “It’s been snowing for a week in D.C., what happened to global warming?” or you’ve heard a Liberal say something to the effect of “Oh no, an increase in snow is a sure sign of global warming; there is more moisture in the air!” The general populace groans, and climatologists shake their heads at the poor layman talking heads.

The truth of the matter is, despite the weather patterns of Washington D.C., or any other single location in the world, a few days of weather is not a trend setting pattern. Despite what use snow is to make political points, climate change, and more specifically anthropogenic global warming requires patterns over the globe over a long period of time. Therefore, a snow storm, even one experienced on vacation in Guayaquil, is still just strange weather.

That being said, whether or not global warming is occurring is not the topic I’m going to write about, just a segue into my real topic of just how best to proceed with global warming after the collapse of Copenhagen. For those surprised that I might believe global warming is happening, I wouldn’t rush to any judgments, I only freely admit that I don’t know. I’ll leave the debate as to if it is happening to those who know far more than me.

For the sake of this argument, those who believe it is happening can read on untroubled, and those who aren’t believers will just have to suspend their belief for the sake of my arguments, I will do what I can to still make it worth your while.

To frame my argument, I assume global warming is happening, humans are causing it, and it is due to our use of global resources. Up to now, the logic has been the best way to address the issue is to cut back the use of fossil fuels, and thus reverse the global warming trend. The trouble with this tactic is we have no other fuels at the moment that can use in place of fossil fuels.

There are other fuels being developed that at some point could replace fossil fuels, but currently none of them by themselves or all of them together could replace our current use of fossil fuels. At the best estimate, to meet the goal of keeping temperatures from rising more than 2 degrees Celsius, according to climate models, it would cost the world $41 million a year.

To put it another way, the goal has been put forward to cut emissions by 50 percent. The last time green house gas emissions were at 50 percent of what they are now was in the middle of the 18th century.

What I’m getting at here is, if you are genuinely worried about melting icecaps and the Himalayan glaciers, the best way may be to cut green house gasses, but the best way to cut green house gasses is not simply to pass a law to force people to stop using fossil fuels. A far more efficient, faster and cheaper way to cut green house gasses would be to improve the technologies that will replace fossil fuels.

Trying to stop the use of fossil fuels before we have found replacement fuels will not only cost the world financially, increasing poverty levels, but will also slow the development of other fuels that could be used to stop warming without the detrimental effect it will have on society.

Whether you believe global warming is happening or not, cutting fossil fuels without an acceptable alternative will do no one any good, but stands to do a lot of people a lot of damage. The U.S. and the world are far better investing in alternative fuels than pursuing caps on greenhouse emissions.

At the 13th annual Colorado Preservation Inc. conference, Colorado Gov. Bill Ritter, Denver Mayor John Hickenlooper and Denver pioneer preservationist Dana Crawford all called for stronger preservation efforts as an indispensable partner of suddenly-chic “sustainability.”

Along with Crawford, Ritter and Hickenlooper both said they were proud to be known as preservationists. Both have backed that claim with a number of pro-preservation initiatives from the Governor’s Mansion to downtown Denver.

Molly and Connor Blakley, of Littleton, at left, verify their train tickets with Assistant Conductor Renee Serratore, of Denver, Feb. 6, at Union Station. Union Station is the focus of Dana Crawford’s preservation efforts. Photo by Jeremy Papasso

At the Hyatt Regency hotel, opposite Denver’s Convention Center, the CPI conference drew 900 preservationists, planners, architects, students, elected officials, historians, archeologists and exhibitors for the biggest turnout ever — despite the sluggish economy — since non-profit CPI launched these conclaves in 1998 with less than 150 attendees.

Keynote speaker Emily Wadhams, vice-president of public policy for the Washington D.C.-based National Trust for Historic Preservation, urged preservationist to step up legislative efforts.

“Not since the 1980s has preservation been under such assault, with federal budget cuts, as in President Obama’s 2010 federal budget,” she said.

Wadhams said the federal funding contribution to historic preservation has shrunk from $150 million last year to $80 million this year and is slated for $55 million in 2011. In view of “job-creation as a top Obama Administration priority,” those cuts are “tragic,” because preservation projects create local jobs, she said.

At a later session, Crawford was elated over approval of a $304 million federal loan for the redevelopment of Denver’s Union Station as a major Front Range transportation hub. But she pointed out that “not one red cent” has been set aside for preservation at the station. The same zero preservation funding held true, she said, for the Carnegie Library in Civic Center Park, “so we have a lot of money to raise.”

Sustainability involves nothing new. Neither does preservation. More than 40 years ago, Italian-born architect and visionary Paolo Soleri promoted what is today called “sustainability.” Nobody listened — any more than they heeded Canadian urban advocate Jane Jacobs, who was fond of livable cities when few others were. Jacobs laid the groundwork, a decade before Soleri, for what is today known as human-scaled and pedestrian-oriented “new urbanism.” Paoli, whose sustainable community called Arcosanti slowly rises in the Arizona desert, 70 miles from Phoenix, is still active at age 90. Jane Jacobs was the same age when she left us in 2006.

Between those two benchmarks, preservation gained ground in America when New York City’s heroic-scaled Penn Station — built of marble, along the classical lines of ancient Rome, and designed to last for centuries — was demolished in 1965 by its Pennsylvania Railroad owner. To add insult, Penn Station’s classic columns, carved eagles and magnificent innards were dumped in the New Jersey swamps.

Outrage over that uncaring crassness galvanized the preservation movement, and preservation was no longer limited to the “little old ladies in tennis shoes” stereotype — but took in the spectrum now seen at CPI conferences. Later, former U.S. first lady Jackie Kennedy used her influence to save New York’s 1912 Grand Central Station from desecration when preservationists scored a U.S. Supreme Court victory over property rights.

In Denver, preservation coalesced around 1970 when the Moffat Mansion was demolished. Shortly after, the Molly Brown house was also threatened with demolition, leading to the formation of Historic Denver, Inc.

Denver’s Union Station, the focus of preservation efforts led by Crawford and a coalition of local businesses, was itself threatened with demolition about 15 years ago. Plans, later defeated, called for replacing the 1916 Beaux Arts monument with a sterile box — on a smaller scale than the sterile, low-ceilinged box that replaced the grandeur of Penn Station.

Last week, conference presenters urged the “adaptive re-use” of historic building — Crawford’s Larimer Square was an early example as good sustainability practice. And D.C. architect and sustainability advocate Carl Elefante commented that “the greenest building is one that is already built.”

Hey folks. Sure is good to be back. I do believe we’ve seen each other here before.

Yeah, I have been out of this business for a while and it is a shame. But listen, I realize space here is short and that some of you are frustrated that I disappeared and, worse, that I was replaced by old men and republicans, so allow me a moment to explain myself.

I have spent the better part of the past six months aboard a dinghy floating in the South China Sea hoping to study the digestive patterns of the various species of booby bird that inhabit the two or three hundred islands, islets, and atolls in the region.

The booby bird is an incredible animal, which is part of the reason I went after it. These seabirds leave precious tons of pure guano caked to the surface of the islands every year, which is an extremely hot ticket, as they say, for any savvy capitalist. Huge fortunes have been made in every market on the planet by people who peddle shit, and this is no different at all.

That in mind, I went out in search of what the guano business could offer me, thinking that if I could find my way to the top of the world of bird shit I could easily nix every other silly pursuit occupying my frantic brain and live out the rest of my days among the North Koreans sipping Sake and wine and laughing at the latest wave of terror caused by random nuclear missile tests.

What I found was less than I had hoped for. It became clear, almost immediately, that the poop industry had already been claimed and corrupted even before I had arrived. And never mind those silly birds. I should have expected it, but I was young then and naive and I believed in the dream.

It was a long journey, loaded with circumstances I would rather not explain, but in the end I saw no difference between the world I was pursuing and that which I had fled, and returned to the United States, the Capital of capital and bullshit, to again take up the purely observational gig of column writing.

So here I am, and it is truly a pleasure to see you again. And for those of you who don’t know me, my name is Braley. But that is quite enough for introductions and explanations. We have serious troubles to consider, and I want to leave you all with a few bits of warning and wisdom with regard to a couple particulars before I go.

To wit:

• Timothy Geithner, the Treasury Secretary and the man in charge of fisting America and manipulating our very own shit market, recently came out with a statement suggesting that the only reason everyone in the United States is not standing in a bread line right now is due to the bailout of American International Group, a huge insurance company. This, after a massive push to stop another form of insurance devilry-that of scalping Americans with health concerns- was suddenly halted by the election of one man from Massachusetts.

I tell you that if this is true, it means that all of our lives are far less relevant than we might have previously thought, and that the next time some Nazi tells you to leave your health insurance in the hands of private interests, you should immediately have him hauled in for treason and questioning under the USA Patriot Act.

Note that.

• Furthermore, it seems that U.S. Bank, in spite of my previous warnings, has further invested its tentacles into this very institution. Indeed, the bank card that the Financial Aid people have been promoting has finally come to fruition here at Metro, meaning that a considerable swath of the student body are now being legally robbed.

Consider this please, and boycott it if you would. But more on these and other dilemmas later. For now I have a few personal matters to attend to.

Just to fill you in, while on my journey I enlisted the services of a Vietnamese seaman for two packs of American cigarettes and the promise of market wealth. He turned out to be a dud of a seaman with nothing to redeem his horrible lack of maritime knowledge but a bottle of strawberry liquor and his beautiful sister, who I quickly discovered was carrying somebody’s child and a host of other germs I could do without.

He is now on the phone asking me to deliver on my promise, and I don’t really know what to tell him. You live and learn, and in the market-even the shit market — there is no room for duds. This is America, not the goddamn South China Sea.