I’ve read so many frustrating newsbytes this week that I can’t help seeing a pattern emerge. And it’s only Wednesday. In no particular order:

• A politically appointed World Bank President is outed for dictating his girlfriend’s outsized raises, after bitterly disputing a multi-national ethics board’s recommendations
• A U.S. state governor is found to be going 91 MPH just before the crash that nearly kills him, in contradiction to U.S. law and specific guidelines for exceptions
• White House officials are discovered to be improperly using and failing to archive political email, while official email from investigation subjects goes missing, in contradiction to U.S. law and clearly posted guidelines on how to follow it
• Yet another Wall Street darling is under investigation for massive fraud and violation of SEC rules at shareholder expense
• A troubled young student with both a legal record and a campus history recognizing him as a danger to himself and others is able to purchase a gun before going on a shooting spree

It’s enough to make even a bitter old man shake his head. But the sad thread these items share is that they are all took place despite - and not only despite, but is flagrant disregard of - serious infrastructure designed to prevent them.

Publicly debated and democratically constructed laws, transparent disclosure systems, officially monitored and enforced regulations, “fail-safe” IT systems and, oh yeah, common decency and shame are, apparently, not enough to overcome political cronyism and the human ego.

Setting aside the moral repugnance of this misbehavior, the truly disturbing thing about it is that these are key systems designed to protect us. . . from exactly the kinds of corruption noted above. Suppose someone you love were killed by a U.S. state governor on his way to meet a discredited radio personality, in a speeding car driven by a state trooper?

There is a problem here.

On the travel and music front, 2007 kicked off with a terrific trip to Aspen.

Amy and I had hopped the incredibly convenient LAX-ASE route, which at a mind-bending 1 hour and 37 minutes makes Aspen closer than most of the driveable weekend destinations around LA — and at $225 round-trip is almost compulsory. We had blue-ribbon days on the mountain, with great snow, sunshine, some terrific meals, and no serious injuries despite our decision to play with snowboards.

I even got to see Austin stalwart Junior Brown, whom I’d never heard, but who is terrific and apparently well known not only to Austinites, but also to fans of Spongebob Squarepants and the movie version of the Dukes of Hazzard (in which he stands in the mighty big shoes of Waylon Jennings as narrator).

His musical style and stage presence are hard to describe and need to be experienced properly to be fully understood, but here’s his myspace (!!!), on which you can listen to a few choice samples featuring lines like “Cause you’re wanted by the police, and my wife thinks you’re dead”, along with a flickr photo set that captures some of the visual flavor.

There’s still plenty of time to see him on his 2007 tour, so do it!

Cross-posted from Auction for Change

How I didn’t know this by intuition and sense of smell the day it opened is beyond me, but even though they have a still-under-construction website, Pizzeria Mozza is most definitely open for business. Amy & I went last night and were enthusing from the second we walked into the door through the rest of the meal.

Amazingly, the tables were all booked at 5pm, but we were able to get a prime seat at the pizza bar without difficulty - and were treated to a ringside view of Nancy Silverton presiding over a very impressive wood-fired brick oven and pizza station, watching her pull gurgling, smoking pizzas out one after another, only to layer on beautiful ingredients like prosciutto, burrata, fennel, high-end pepperoni & sausage, and grated pecorino, all the while managing her team with the kind of demanding perfectionism you don’t see often enough in LA. The front-of-house service was just as on point and the main attraction, the pizza itself, was gorgeous: a perfectly crisp bottom crust, with edges carbonized on the outside and yeasty on the inside, and just the right amount of savoryness. I won’t even bother to tell you what we had; since we were basically in the kitchen, I can promise you it’s all that good. I can’t believe I’m saying things this superlative about a pizza outside of NYC, but perhaps we’ve debunked a myth as well: it’s obviouly not the water.

We’ll certainly be going back to eat our way around that menu and drink around the selective wine list. As Amy put it, “We finally found a craveable restaurant!”

This morning we were inspired after repeated urges from a friend, to check out a spot called Square One, an unpretentious cafe on an unpretentious street tucked between the Scientology Center and the hospital, between Los Feliz and Koreatown. We were moved to ask again, how did we not know about this sooner? Given that this one’s been open the better part of a year, shame on us! As at Mozza, every option on the menu looked as good as the next, from the fresh-ingredient benedicts (as reviewed by EatingLA here) to the baked-egg skillets to the ox-tail and shortrip hashes. We had an artisanal bacon-and-egg sandwich on beautifully flaky and buttery homemade brioche bread, along with a really interesting lemon-thyme chicken sausage and roast tomato omelet. Even the coffee was perfect: a strong brew of a mildly nutty varietal from (I think) somewhere in Central America.

Once again Amy nailed it by saying “All weekends should be like this!”

I’m apparently not alone among people who grew up in a household celebrating both Christmas and Chanukah - check out this survey on children of interfaith couples. So, after an afternoon taking my mom to see the Magritte exhibit at LACMA, I hosted family and friends for a little “Chranukah” (sounds better than “Hanumas” and a little more modern than “Christmakah”) dinner last night, and I think we all got what we wanted - plenty of family and good food, and gifts sharing love, music, art, science, nostalgia, and adventure - with a little bit of charity for good measure.

A couple of highlight gifts that were exchanged:

• Pickin’ on Modest Mouse
• Tickets to Robert Earl Keen
• A framed Jordan Crane print
• Prints of my brother’s amazing travel photos
• A just-released eStarling(!!!), because my DIY digital frame wasn’t up to snuff
• Flying lessons!! (stay tuned for more on that)
• Locally designed jewelry
• Kiva.org gift certificates

Happy holidays, everyone - may you be similarly wealthy in your non-material fortune.

Andrew Leonard has a perceptive (and funny) piece on Kiva running on Salon.com, chiefly revolving around his discomfort with the fact that donors have to choose from among the prospective recipients. Since these are based on short, online-personals-esque profiles, you have no choice but to make snap judgments about their suitability for loans, and it’s hard not to wonder whether people are primping their profiles to bring down the $25 tranches.

While these wouldn’t be the first sell-side folks in history to try to pretty up an investment, in fact I shared some of the same discomfort. My own moment of truth involved moving past a profile for the proprietor of a “pub” -a going concern - who needed $500 for “inventory”, which see (more…)

Ok, this is the third and last time I will try to write this post - the first was interrupted over the weekend, and the 2nd completed-but-deleted. (And in the meantime, many of my prospective tagees have been spoken for.) Anyway, it went something like this. . .

This game is silly and i routinely delete chain emails without reading them, but it is [was] a rainy day. . . and something about this “chain post” game appeals to me. Maybe it’s the chance to obtain interesting new tidbits about my friends tagged herein, assuming I can think of five fresh victims who blog.

1. Because the person indirectly responsible for my being tagged is apparently a lady who loves cool James, I have to represent: I acquired and edited LL Cool J’s autobiography, spent a lot of time in limos with him, and once appeared in The Source after being photograhed at a party with him (not pictured: Heavy D, Russell Simmons). As a result of that, I became, for one brief shining moment, a go-to guy in the publishing industry for rap autobiograhies, and subsequently signed “Rev” Run.
2. I never ate a hamburger until about 2 years ago. Really. Much of my childhood was spent hoping there would be hotdogs at the barbeque and special-ordering non-apocryphal grilled cheeses at McD’s - which occasionally had to be asked for from strict cashiers as “cheeseburger hold the meat”. In fact, my friends called me Herb, after the mercifully short-lived ad campaign about the only guy in America who’d never eaten a Whopper(tm). Today, I love steak and burgers - but only really really good ones.
3. Speaking of restaurants, my favorite in LA isn’t - it’s a taco stand called Yuca’s. Maybe the only taco stand ever to win a James Beard award. If you don’t believe me, the chowhound review — or $1.79 — will definitely convince you.
4. I discovered my neighborhood - and Yuca’s for that matter - via a home exchange arranged on the internet with a complete stranger, who has now become a good friend. I think home exchange rocks and have spent a good deal of time looking at it as a niche travel business.
5. I am probably the only person you’ll ever meet with a Master’s in Victorian literature who can also adjust the carbeurator and valves of an air-cooled VW (pictured below with my cousin Jarret).
6. As a bonus, I can use all of the above in a true sentence: I am often seen driving my ghia to Yuca’s with my friend Nelson, who sometimes gets a burger (yes, they sell burgers there) - though we rarely listen to LL on the way.

Now the hard part. Ok, consider yourselves tagged: Spencer, Cameron, Sean, Goff, and Scott (who can hopefully do it in photos).

I’ve been thinking a lot about organizational culture lately, given the reorg that Yahoo! has been going through. And I’ve been thinking how important underlying cultures and leaders-by-example are to building successful organizations.

But this line of thought took me on a tangent, as I caught a piece of the news this morning about Senator Tim Johnson (to whom I send my best wishes) — and the flurry of politics his misfortune has already and inevitably set off. And I realized that our politicians, as much as they like to blame the media and game industries for exposing our children to violence, are the true role models and culture stewards from whom we take our cues about public life. They are the leaders of our organizations (in that school boards report to them, etc.) and hold — collectively, anyway — the resources and authority to do great good or harm to our world.

And they’re doing a terrible job of creating a culture that encourages thoughtful debate, sincere collaboration, accountability, and success, instead rewarding insider politics and self-serving choices. (Okay, so I’ve been watching The Wire, too!)

How can good results ever emerge from that, and how can a system that rewards cynicism and punishes idealism ever be “built to last”?

After an unexpected minor windfall, I’m funding another African entrepreneur.  Yao Adjété NOUWOKLO, president of his village development committee in Alinka, Togo, is setting up a well and local water distribution.

I’ve stayed away from politics on this blog deliberately. But I got this in an email today from an emerging LA alt-country musician named Kristy Kruger, whose set I caught a number of months ago at the Mint and enjoyed enough to join her mailing list, and whose email announcements have (until now) always been strikingly upbeat and personal:

. . . my show, Friday, Dec. 8th at the Hotel Cafe, 11pm, in honor of my brother Lt. Col. Eric John Kruger, who I sadly, am reporting was killed in Iraq Nov. 2nd. My brother loved music and the only thing I know to do from here is to share music in his spirit. Please join us if you are free, to see the loving faces of my friends is all I can think that would help me bring a little joy back in my life during this tragic and sad time.

I just can’t imagine. Or understand why this is good for the country, democracy, or the world.