Well everything does seems to be the matter today. That oil spill tops it all off for the moment, spreading a gummy mess through the Gulf of Mexico, polluting the sandy shores and threatening the wildlife. But then there’s that Iceland volcano too sending up clouds of smoke so thick you can’t fly through the damned stuff. The essentials in peril.

Periodic earthquakes up and down the west coast and elsewhere in the world, tornadoes in the Midwest, a recession throughout the land, hatred in Arizona, a bunch of banjo-plucking protestors who call themselves the Tea Party following an emptiness like Sarah Palin to, by God, set things right, and layoffs in L.A. that are going to send hundreds more shell-shocked jobless people to the bread lines.

What’s going on here?

Even fun places like Greece and Italy and maybe Spain that no one takes seriously in the economic strata are causing money problems and what about that nut who pushed the wrong button on Wall Street and sent our own stock market into what they’re calling a flash crash? A chef is charged with trying to hire homeless guys to kill his wife and the mother of a dead girl visits the guy in jail who killed her daughter and says she forgives him.

What? Huh?

Everything Is out of synch. The music’s wrong, the words don’t scan, the beat is erratic. One expects that at any minute Godzilla will rise out of the sea and we’ll all run screaming like the Japanese in Tokyo, dashing blindly through the Ginza, but in L.A. it’ll be down Sunset Boulevard or Broadway in New York, depending on whether the monster rises in the Atlantic or the Pacific. He’ll eat us all.

The feeling of doom is one I can’t shake. Forget the war, that’s penny ante horror compared to everything else that’s going wrong and could go wrong. Our troubles are in the core of the Earth and in the very atmosphere we breathe and no one seems to know what to do about them. We blame each other, we blame God or government, we blame nature, fate, kismet and the radiation we’ve loosed in the air, and the acid rain falling on our heads.

Yesterday the cat bit me. It was a big bite for no good reason and it drew blood. Great, I’ve got a bad heart, bad lungs and a convulsive stomach but I’m going to die of cat fever like some kind of small prey that wiggles into stillness in the last painful moments of life, screaming beyond our ability to hear, a wee cry into eternity.

“You’re just lumping all of the bad things together, which makes the world look terrible and life as bleak as the face of the moon,” my wife says. “It is bleak,” I say, “even my fish are dying. I had six in the tank and now I’ve just got that one scrawny thing staring out at me. He knows, the fish knows, but the fish aren’t saying.”

She used to say that bad things happened in threes. The refrigerator would stop working, the dryer would break down and the car wouldn’t start. Now it’s in far greater multiples, affecting everything around us, damaging our auras and dimming our electrolytes.

Then I look out the window. The rain has stopped. Drops of water glisten on the new green of the oak trees. The world glistens. OK, I say to myself, the oil still leaks, the volcano still rumbles and the wind blows evil circles through the cities and the farmlands, but there’s sunlight too.

Cling to the brighter things, I say with a will. Let a little light shine in.

Almtz13@aol.com

I felt the tap and heard the whisper at home recently as I danced along with the stars on TV and began feeling a tightening in the chest. At first I thought it was just my usual hypochondria telling me to whine a little and be comforted like a child with his mama, but that wasn’t it. I’ve had what doctors like to call discomfort before, but this time it wouldn’t go away. My wife was asleep and I was sitting on the edge of the bed waiting for God knows what when it occurred to me that I might have a real problem here.

I shook Cinelli awake and said I had chest pains, but she’s heard about my pains so many times before that she patted my hand and said I should try to relax and think of puppies and the bad old aches will go away. Puppies won’t do it this time, I said; it was time for me to hustle my old ass down to emergency in the Little Hospital on the Corner. That would be the Providence Tarzana Medical Center.

They know me there. I drop by every once in awhile to check out a new ailment and they welcome me like their idiot brother come home for Christmas. I always feel a little like Norm in the old TV series “Cheers” where everyone greets him as he saunters in and the owner slides a beer down the bar. But instead of sliding a beer at me in the E.R., they rush around hooking me up to an IV, taking tests and declaring that I am there for the night.

I am whisked to a regular hospital room by a guy who pushes the gurney through the hallways like he’s at the Indianapolis 500. When I get to the room I am asked where the chest pain rates on a scale of one to 10. I am lousy at these kinds of estimates but I’ve got to say something other than it hurts like hell, so I say it’s like an 8. I’m thinking maybe I should have said a 9 but it’s too late.

They decide on an angiogram to see what’s going on with my heart. That’s where they run a small tube up an artery, pump some dye in and take x-ray pictures. Just about everyone I know has had one but it’s still no walk in the park. Don’t try it at home.

The cardiologist, a big guy with a puckish sense of humor knows I’m a journalist and says maybe I can get his name in the paper; he’s always wanted that. Then switching moods he says the procedure could cause a stroke or a heart attack or perhaps even, hell, death. Then he says they have to say that but I’m going to be OK, and reminds me that his name is Uri Ben-zur and it would be nice to get it into the paper.

Before I know it I am wheeled into a room as cold as an igloo where a tube is shoved up an artery, a dye released and pictures taken that reveal a 95% blockage. Old Uri isn’t overwhelmed by that at all. He just blows away the blockage, inserts a stent to keep the artery open and back to my room I go, surviving that and three days of hospital food.

They sent me home with a list of things to do and not to do, and what to eat and what not to eat. But the best advice I received came from my Cinelli who said I had to learn to relax and think of puppies more often. She was right so I’m going to quit writing for the day. And the next time someone taps me on the shoulder I’m not going to turn around. I’ll just keep on dancing.

Almtz13@aol.com

He entered our lives some weeks ago in our utility room, which is a room attached to the house, but closed off from it; where we keep the washer/dryer, the freezer and those items we intend to fix or throw away someday.

Murray actually is a rat, not a Mafia hit man who testified against the mob or a back alley gambler from a Damon Runyon story. I named him Murray, I don’t know why, but at least we know now that he has a specific identity.

Evidence of his initial presence was the usual rat pooh-pooh we have become accustomed to after many years of living in Ratville, U.S.A., and also materials that he laid in a line on the utility room floor: a small paint brush, straws from a broom, a plastic candy wrapper, some twigs and a nail.

They were placed in a precise pattern, more like elements of a Druid ritual than scattered debris. After a few days of this, we hired Jose One to search through the utility room and close up any entryway that might be utilized by an outdoor rat. He’s called Jose One, by the way, because he has a brother who is also named Jose who is Jose Two.

This accomplished, we declared our house to be Murray free and celebrated with a martini. Well, I celebrated with a martini while my wife, the non-drinking Cinelli, had the pleasure of lecturing me on the dangers of alcohol and wondering why I couldn’t be like other no doubt wiser husbands who only sipped a little white wine on celebratory occasions instead of those awful martinis.

Reference to such a pleasurable drink in such a hostile manner would have generated a barroom brawl on other occasions but for now I simply accepted the criticism in my usual genial manner and finished off the martini.

It wasn’t the end of Murray. The next night he laid out his usual pattern, which indicated he was either still finding a way into the house or was trapped in the utility room. We put our cat Ernie the Assassin in the room one night and all he did was yowl to get out. Either he was terrified of Murray or had searched for him without success.

Back in the days when our yard was heavy with ground covering vines we had rattlesnakes, but very few rats, because the snakes ate them. We got rid of the rattlers by chopping off their heads and now the rats were back, led by Murray, whom a rodent expert at UCLA determined was a wood rat, better known as a pack rat, a label often attached to women who buy shoes they never wear, hoarding them in a closet the way Imelda Marcos once did.

Since importing dangerous snakes was out of the question, our next effort was to trap the rats but not kill them. We borrowed a metal cage built to trap them alive and move them to a new location, such as near your house. We tantalized Murray with walnuts and peanut butter, put the food near the trap’s trigger and, voila!, the next morning there was a trapped and forlorn Murray, looking every bit like Bernie Madoff in the first days of his prison sentence.

We carted Murray down to another location and figure that was the end of our pack rat problem. Not so. Two nights later, there were the same ritual signs of a pack rat on the utility room floor. Either it was another rat or Murray was back. At a session of my Writers Workshop, members suggested that pack rats always returned to their original territory. They were homing rats, battling larger predators and chaparral to go home again. Asking writers to solve a domestic problem is like relying on Sarah Palin to lecture on international law, but I nodded politely and thanked them for their theory, however absurd it seemed.

We just put the trap out again…and again…and again. Murray is still there. He has figured out how to get into the trap and eat the bait without stepping on the trigger that would have slammed the door shut and thus imprisoned him. We have hired Jose Two this time to search for ways Murray might be sneaking in to the utility room and laying out the holy artifacts of his Druid ritual.

If we ever catch him again, I will ship him cross country to the Pentagon where the military has ways of dealing with undesirable mammals. By the time they’re done with him he’ll think twice about returning to Ratville.

Almtz13@aol.com

We also were able to get past the triangular marriage issue between straights, gays and bisexuals and dismiss as preposterous the idea of trans-species marriage which was proposed by a bloc of reasonably isolated cattle farmers, one of whom fell in love with a cow.

The high court ruled that there was no guarantee in the constitution that upheld the right of a human being to marry an animal, although it understood that deep affection existed between some humans and their pets, such as a man and his dog.

However, the court ruled in Fido vs Bubba that there was no need to sanctify such an arrangement in marriage, either civil or religious, and urged those supporting the issue to practice whatever phase of it in strict privacy.

And now comes word from the Christian Fundamentalist Marriage League that animals should not be allowed to consummate their intimate relationships in public. It is setting a bad example for young, single farm hands who are not only privy to the carnal act but who are forced to assist in the birthings of children that result from the union.

The CFML is calling for a ceremony that unites the two mating animals in a union similar to human marriage which scoffing liberals are calling the cowbell rites.

“It is enough,” thundered the Rev. Bleeden Goodheart, “to expose our young to human fornication without the sanctity of marriage in movies, on stage and in television, there is no need to further pollute their morals by allowing them to continually witness farm and domestic animals doing it in fields and neighborhoods, thereby giving legitimacy to the very random act of sex on the run.”

The whole thing was considered a joke at first because sex is no longer a big issue in 2030. Everyone is doing pretty much what they want to do and we enjoy watching them do it, although there is a good deal of protest when a contest between who was doing it best and with what degree of imagination became a video game.

The protest was so loud that sex as competitive entertainment has been removed from the lineup of videos offered by various manufacturers who have since ramped up the violence in war and murder games in order to take the public mind off the ill-considered sex issue. When blood replaces physical intimacy everyone breathes a sigh of relief.

But the CFML is continuing its drive for marriage among farm animals, with domesticate animals on the horizon. The issue has expanded to include a new ministry dedicated to conducting marital rites among the beasts and threatens to involve animal activitist who consider forced marriages prior to breeding as cruel and unusual punishment for species that have heretofore been using the rutting seasons pretty much as they wish.

It’s beginning to feel that this may be the major issue of the day this summer of 2030 since most of the other matters have been dealt with. I shudder to think what may come next. Already there’s talk of how to prevent cross-breeding on a cosmic scale. I’m not sure how Martians do it but I’m reasonably certain that we’re about to find out.

Almtz13@aol.com

I had seen snow before only in pictures, and the reality was dazzling. This was more than the simple beauty of the revelation’s purity, the gleaming dusting of white on white, outlining the whole day with its iridescence. This was a remaking of the world from war’s ugliness to the natural beauty of things.

I realize that seeing snow for the first time is a child’s delight, but this was something beyond a toddler’s wonder. I was seeing how the simple existence of a snowfall in the night could transform a reality, shifting it into a new perception. I was seeing napalm-burned trees, bomb craters, shrapnel-sliced vegetation, military squad tents and artillery pieces disappear in new outlines beneath the brush of winter’s creation.

It was as close as I have ever come to believing in God.

The year was 1951. I was a young Marine reservist, called to active duty and shipped off to Korea after a year of combat training in the States. The 7th Regiment had been pulled off the front lines after 90 days of brutal fighting in the northeast section of Korea and placed in reserve just a few days before Christmas.

It was to be a melancholy Christmas. I had seen friends die on hills distinguished only by numbers and I had been the hand maiden of death for those I knew only by the generic term “enemy,” round Asian faces that bob like toys in my dreams more than half a century later.

There was a kind of numb joy being in reserve, knowing that the likelihood was we wouldn’t be under attack that far back from the main line of resistance—although an occasional mortar shell, flung from beyond our perimeters, and the shadowy presence of an infiltrator caused moments of alarm.

I along with others who were witnessing carnage for the first time remained numb to the relief of being out of combat, still discussing among ourselves in reverential tones the friends we had lost in blurred instances of a shattering explosion, or the silence of a sniper’s bullet. We mourned them with disbelief as though the surreal nature of death among the young had never occurred.

I awoke early on Christmas morning, the day the world change. There had been no sound to alert me to the alteration outside of the squad tent six of us occupied. Rain had pounded on the canvass of our roof before, and wind had howled through the open flap, but there was only a whisper to the night that had just passed, nature’s restorations offered in silence.

I poked my head from the tent and stared. Everything was white. What had existed the day before, the charred reality of war’s existence, was gone. I have tried many times in the past to describe the beauty and the magic of what I saw that morning in Korea, the absolute transformation of worlds in the space of a few hours.

The sky was an iron gray and the air was still; no snow was falling. But the whiteness was blinding in its reality, transfixing me in an isolation of oneness that in itself was peculiar, feeling alone in a company of men whose involvements were stark by comparison.

I have seen snow many times since then, blanketing the mountains and pine trees from a cabin window; I have played in the snow with children and grandchildren, and have witnessed its churning on mountainsides criss-crossed with sleds and skiers. They slip from memory like a river’s current, rushing away the bits and pieces of nostalgia to be retrieved later, at a place downstream.

But always in the forefront of my thoughts, tucked just a whisper behind the travails of today lie the images of the first snow on a Christmas in Korea where for a breathless moment we had a space in horror where peace and dignity combined to remind us of what was possible, and to give us hope in the midst of a war that beauty was a more enduring reality, if only in a snowfall on Christmas.

Almtz13@aol.com

But I’m here today to tell you that I would rather shake hands than hug men. Women, OK, God created them to be hugged, but men are made to be warriors or at least NFL line backers, more content to bump bellies or behinds in displays of affection or triumph.

I don’t hug back when a friend grabs me in his arms. I stand there as cold and unresponsive as a euthanized anaconda and wait until the hug is done to greet the hugger in a more casual manner. I don’t push him away only because I understand the nature of a liberal to be close to his fellow man; it is an expression of his desire to transfer powerful inner rays of fellowship to the huggee as a way of bringing peace to the world one hug at a time.

Sometimes I wonder what became of the simple handshake among men, including warriors and football players, as a means of greeting or friendship. To huggers the extension of an arm to shake hands becomes a rope to pull you into the embrace, a little off balance and wondering fleetingly whether the man also intends to kiss or grope you.

It isn’t a question of homophobia. In fact, I feel it is more natural for gay men to hug men than for a straight guy to hold you close. Since most of my gay friends are not only liberal but also, well, motherly, the need to hug another man is probably twice as great.

I had a gay proctologist once who after he examined me asked me out for a glass of wine. I declined the invitation and then quit going to him, but couldn’t help wondering whether he came on to all the guys or was it just my behind that attracted him? Either way, I figured that with his job and his sexual orientation he must be in seventh heaven even without me.

I began noticing the liberal hug late in life and wondered what started it. I have a hunch that it emerged from Hollywood, since everything nutty has its roots in the activities of young actors and actresses seeking new ways to express their sexuality. It seems to somehow soothe their libidos for movie heroes to declaim their masculine traits for a hug and occasionally even a kiss on the cheek or on certain festive occasions, God help their perverted souls, on the lips.

Male liberals adopted it as a way of proclaiming the brotherhood of man, ascending over their own masculinity to declare their oneness with humanity. I understand that certain conservatives, mainly Log Cabin Republicans, secretly hug but they otherwise scorn it as a trait of the perverted left.

A friend, Billy Cobalt, a defrocked jesuit, suggests that male hugging has nothing to do with peace or love or even with bonding but is an assertion of one man’s dominance over another. If he has you in an iron grip, patting your back as though you are a small dog, he is trapping you and you are helpless to wiggle free until he decides to let you go. The male hug is a hostile act, Cobalt believes, intended to crack your ribs and crush the breath out of you.

For those who feel my disinclination to hug manifests a misanthropic nature, I say not so. I will hug a woman, as I said, because their hormones are so constituted to require hugs and domination. And I will also hug my son and my grandson because I have true feelings for them. While I may like and respect my male friends, my feelings toward them are more casual. I would rather just shake hands or, hell, bump behinds if, at my age, I can jump high enough to make the bump memorable.

The others can get their intense desires out of their system by hugging trees or high-backed Louis IX chairs or their potbellied pigs. Just don’t try hugging a grizzly bear. Like me, they’d rather you kept your love of brotherhood confined to the world peace movement and leave their furry bodies alone. Makes sense to me.

Almtz13@aol.com

Ambitious and eager for self-aggrandizement, we were equally proud of what we did and what the Times had accomplished in shedding its old reputation of right wing, union-hating, race baiting rag to emerge as one of three great dailies in the country, alongside the New York Times and the Washington Post. It was a time of pride as well as profit, and we all knew that we were a part of something real and meaningful.

Like Camelot, magical kingdoms eventually turn to dusty memory, as the Times, now a shadow of what it was in the Otis Chandler era, struggles just to stay afloat, its advertising and circulation down, its staff pared to an almost skeletal size, observing the future of print journalism with concern and trepidation.

I was a part of that Golden Era as reporter, feature writer and eventually a columnist until last January when I too was downsized. And so I have a special interest in “Inventing L.A.: The Chandlers and Their Times” from Angel City Press, which artfully parallels the growth of Los Angeles and the newspaper under three generations of the Chandlers. Based on the PBS documentary by Peter Jones, complete with more than 200 photos dating back to the 1800s, this is not only an important book but an exceptional book, laced together by ex-Timesman Bill Boyarsky’s faultless prose, the merger of a reporter’s terse observations and a columnist’s insights, jobs he held during 30 years at the Times, leaving as city editor in 2001.

The book isn’t just about Otis Chandler. It begins with Civil War veteran Gen. Harrison Gray Otis who joined the newspaper that was to become the Times in 1882, followed shortly thereafter by the first Chandler, Harry, who later became the General’s son in law. They were not only the founders of the Times but pitchmen for the city itself, seeing it grow almost overnight from a sleepy town of 12,000 to a metropolis of 320,000 in the 30 years from 1880 to 1910, and the growth never ended.

Virulently anti-union, the Times was bombed into debris and 21 employees killed in 1925 by what the General called “anarchic scum,” one of the many epithets employed in the free-wheeling Times by the man Boyarksy regards as “the old master of vitriol.” Two union men, brothers Jim and John McNamara, went to prison for the bombing, saved from execution by the wit and skill of celebrated defense attorney Clarence Darrow, whose fame would increase five years later in the Scopes “Monkey Trial.”

Norman Chandler followed Harry and while less bombastic than his predecessor still lobbied for those elements that would transform a village into a world class city. The Chandlers had gone all out for a deep water harbor, water for the San Fernando Valley and a general development of the urban areas, but their hucksterism included a less appealing side of them, and that was a campaign to sell L.A. to the world as “the White Spot.” Boyarsky points out that the phrase could be translated as a land of sunshine, but more likely was an appeal to those who preferred a city devoid of non-whites, a slogan that might have helped stoke the fires of brutal attacks on Chinese-Americans and Latinos, and later contributed to the hysteria that landed American citizens of Japanese descent into internment camps during World War II.

Otis Chandler followed Norman, and the newspaper that encouraged a neo-conservative agenda, racism and union-busting was a thing of the past. The Golden Age at the Times became the measured voice of a city which by now had achieved world class status, a power on the Pacific Rim that would not be denied. Those of us who were a part of the Golden Age cannot hope to see its likes again in today’s faltering fortunes of print journalism. Perhaps a sequel to this book would be not so much inventing L.A., but reinventing the Los Angeles Times.

Almtz13@aol.com

In the vast stretch of cosmic time, six decades is not very long. When one thinks in terms of Earth’s wrinkled age and all the growth and creatures that have inhabited it, 60 years is about a quarter click on an atomic clock.

But when you’re two fiercely independent, highly emotional people every day is a journey through a dense jungle, a shot into space, a dive to the deepest parts of the ocean, a race without a finish. Nothing is easy in a collusion of spirits.

That’s why the storm on that particular Thursday seemed quite appropriate. I will remember for a long time ducking through the calamity heading toward our hotel, umbrellas offering little shelter from the rain that lashed at us in horizontal gusts. We got to our room drenched, and we laughed.

It is the power of laughter that has helped prolong the drama of our marriage, the willingness to perceive life as an amusing trek, and the two of us as funny little travelers on an unforgiving orb. A shared sense of humor, with its whimsical blend of irony and inanity, has helped carry us past the point where others have failed, the laughter dead in their throats.

So I sing today of the woman Cinelli as the perfect companion, whether it’s getting drenched in the Big Apple or breathing in the perfume of night blooming jasmine on a perfect evening in the Santa Monica Mountains. She loves both locals. Our home in Topanga Canyon with its cool, forestry places to hide is the Eden of her soul, New York  City with its clatter and murmur of human wildlife is the home of her spirit.

We see shows in Manhattan, visit a myriad of art and history museums and dine on fussy little foods at multi-starred restaurants tucked away here and there in the quiet shadows of the city’s imposing towers. My tastes are more gourmand than gourmet and I am rattled by the subtle ambience of a restaurant like Daniel, its décor once described as “the lining of a prim octogenarian’s underwear drawer.”

In such a rareified atmosphere, Cinelli reminds me of my manners by whispering, “Pretend you’re not from Oakland.”

No Oakland guy would pay $513 for a pair of tickets to watch a little boy tip-tapping across the stage in “Billy Elliot.” I wouldn’t pay that much to see Dick Cheney in a tu-tu pirouetting drunk through Grand Central Station. But it was an anniversary so I shelled out the $513 and more to see a revival of “Hair” whose primary contribution to American culture was a celebration of drugs and nudity.

What intrigues both Cinelli and I about New York is the endlessness of it. While movement in the city may slow in the hour when old men are asleep, taxis still roam the main streets and lurk up and down the intersecting crossroads like lightning bugs in a neon forest. Garbage trucks muscle down narrow avenues vying for space with delivery vans. Limos slide through darkness toward hotels and mansions in a weary coda to party and pleasure.

When we talked about a 60th wedding anniversary trip she said New York and I said Paris, both of which we have visited many times. This time, I gave up the City of Light for another season, but I feel no loss of testicular standing in allowing Cinelli to make our decisions. She chose where we’d live when we moved from the San Francisco Bay Area to L.A. and it turned out to be a paradise in the mountains, a place of art and beauty and wildlife rare on the fringes of most large metropolitan areas.

She makes our decisions with honesty, wisdom and a sense of caring that involves more of others than herself. I rely on her to lead the way while I follow with a bag of words and stories that complete my life. She is my muse, my plot, my outline, my syntax. She is my beginning and my ending.

It is unavoidable to link as symbols the storms in our marriage and the storm that day in New York City. We have endured them all, Cinelli often waiting patiently, trusting that I will eventually have sense enough to come in out of the rain. My career in journalism has been a slippery race through a lot of bad weather, but that too has abated and I am free to reinvent myself, with Cinelli, as always by my side.

I asked her as we dried off in our hotel room on the 60th year of our companionship, rain tapping at our window like a nervous stranger, that if she had to do it over, would she still marry me. She thought about it for the briefest of moments and then, turning away, said, “Probably not.” I sensed the teasing quality in her voice and knew that secretly she would. I sensed it in the thunder.

Almtz13@aol.com

While I lack the bombastic charm of the late huckster Billy Mays, I am on a mission to spread the word that Coca Cola is America’s multifunctional beverage. What other cool summer libation can melt the corrosion on automobile battery terminals?

I come by this information through an anonymous mass Internet mailing that explores some little known traits of America’s two favorite drinks, namely water and the aforementioned Coke. I would have included martinis, but I wasn’t a part of the project.

Most interesting about water is that a 2% decrease in one’s body can cause a dip in short term memory, trouble with basic math and difficulty focusing.

I know the first to be true because I don’t drink a lot of water and often find myself lost. I drive along day-dreaming and suddenly realize I have no idea where I am, where I started out to go or where I’ll be when I get there. When it comes to a choice between day-dreaming and destination, I choose the former at the risk of the latter. I am a Walter Mitty of the road.

The email on Coca Cola’s beneficial uses begins with the notation that in many states highway patrol officers carry two gallons of Coke in the trunk to remove blood stains from the road after an accident. While it can’t reanimate the dead, it does keep the freeways clean.

You might notice that I am being somewhat circumspect on how I write about one of the world’s most powerful companies because I have seen enough movies dramatizing the methods employed by giant corporations in dealing with their enemies. The very idea of being tortured by water boarding in a tub full of Coke is, if not horrifying, not very pleasant either.

I offered the Coca Cola Company an opportunity to refute any of the Internet claims, but no one replied to my email. Can’t be bothered with some nut in L.A., I guess. I even told them I liked Coke and drink it even though it supposedly is powerful enough to clean a toilet.

My wise and knowledgeable Cinelli tried to wean me off the stuff but then concluded that if a lifetime of martinis hadn’t rotted my liver an occasional Coke probably wouldn’t either.

According to the Internet mailing, a can of America’s Drink can also remove rust from chrome bumpers, loosen rusted bolts, remove grease from clothes, clean windshields, dissolve T-bone steaks or clean truck engines. I expected them to add that it doubles as a nasal spray, but they didn’t. Multi-functional it may be, but not that multi.

I have no idea if any of this is true. I handed a Coke to our housekeeper to use in the toilet but she looked at me as though I were muy loco, put the can aside and drank it later. I didn’t have a T-bone steak but I did have a bone-in rib eye which I put in a bowl of Coke to see if it would dissolve in two days as claimed.

However, Cinelli saw it and said I was not going to ruin a perfectly good piece of meat by soaking it in what she called chemicals, so she rescued it from the bowl, washed it off and prepared it that night for my dinner. I thought it tasted fizzy.

I suspect that a lot of products, including food, contain ingredients that are probably bad for us. Attention is called to their dangers occasionally when someone dies from ingesting a can of something. This is followed by a lot of outrage and Congressional fist shaking but no action. Hamburger sales may have dipped when mad cow disease was in the news but bounced right back when the furor died down.

I long ago decided that probably nothing was really good for me so it would be best if I had a martini and maybe some Fritos and let the rest of the world roll by, however unhealthy it might be. Let the skinny, water-drinking vegans fuss over their fluids. They just better hope scientists in the company labs aren’t working on a Cola of Mass Destruction. Coke bombs would get the health nuts first.

Almtz13@aol.com

The image of a cheating bastard standing at a podium with the brave little woman at his side looking very much like Grant Wood’s solemn farmer in “American Gothic” is more iconic than anything even Norman Rockwell ever produced and it’s becoming tiresome.

What Mark Sanford, a God-lovin’ Republican, did was take off and get himself laid and he did it with his eyes and his fly wide open. He’s sorry because no one but me believed he was on a hike in Tyrolean shorts, yodeling his way over some of the roughest terrain in the Western Hemisphere and through deserts that kill camels. When he was found out it was tears, forgiveness and move on.

Sanford left the statehouse one bright South Carolina morning on what turned out to be one hell of a long hike that took him through Georgia, Alabama, Mississippi, Louisiana, Texas, down the eastern coast of Mexico through Guatemala, Honduras, Nicaragua, Panama, Colombia, Brazil and along the Peruvian coast into Argentine.

I suspect that he might have hitched a ride here and there but even so it gave him plenty of time to think until he suddenly and inexplicably found himself in a motel bed with Chiquita Banana. Only then did we learn it had been a long-term affair linked by emails dripping with sex and sugar that further ramped up the vomit quotient.

To then drag his humbled wife to the podium while he sobbed an apology was the moral equivalent of wanting his cake and eating it too.

Sanford wasn’t the first American pol to get caught with his pants down. Almost equally as dumb as the Louisiana Gov was former Colorado Sen. Gary Hart who, in 1987, was considered the Democratic front runner for the presidency until he was caught romancing a good friend named Donna Rice.

He might have gotten away with it but then he challenged reporters who, tipped to his marital infidelities, were tailing him. “Follow me around,” he dared them, “I don’t care if anybody wants to put a tail on me, go ahead. They’d be very bored.”

They followed him, photographed him with Donna on his lap aboard a yacht appropriately named “Monkey Business” and that was the end of his presidential dreams.

Even the noisiest Republicans do it. Newt Gingrich was having an affair as he was leading the impeachment movement of Bill Clinton for his affair with Monica Lewinsky, but I’ll bet that if Clinton were to run for president again the women of America would reelect him and possibly arrange to meet him in a motel somewhere, lining up outside from Kansas to New York City just to see if all they heard about him was true.

Locally, we had our own wildly grinning Mayor Antonio Villaraigosa who got himself a little nookie from TV reporter Mirthala Salinas. Turned out he was covering her while she was covering him. When their affair was exposed, they parted, she got canned, he wept and now he’s said to have another female TV reporter, but I don’t care.

Finally, the most pathetic of the mea culpas came from peanut farmer Jimmy Carter who wanted to be a part of the fun but all he could come up with was telling a reporter that he’d lusted in his heart. Huh?

He was talking about the erotic fantasies everyone has but I guess when you’re a born again Christian it’s almost the same as having done, you know, “it.” Maybe he regrets now in his old age never actually having a sexual affair and getting to appear in public with Rosalyn at his side to tearfully confess that while he didn’t actually get laid he thought about it a lot.

Tears, forgiveness, applause, a Nobel Prize for meaningless moral apologies and then on to a mess of pok chops, grits and a down home okra pudding.

Almtz13@aol.com