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Speaking of people who may not know when it is time to admit the decision is lost:
Are you sure that Hillary — running in 14th or 15th place — isn’t sneaking into Culver City late at night, after even the Police Chief has gone to sleep, to lend her shaky strategizing expertise to the diehard residents who still are whacking away at the Entrada Office Tower proposal?
I understand the unhappiness of residents of the Westchester Bluffs who are complaining that their panoramic view of the city below will be interfered with.
But the vote has been taken. The lights are out.
Now what?
It is normal to be disappointed. But ladies and gentlemen, unhappiness is not illegal.
They Trod a Legal Highway
Two properly empowered bodies at City Hall, following all legal procedures, have approved the Entrada building plans next to the Radisson Hotel.
No matter how loudly protestors wail, I am not aware of any legal gadget that can be applied to change the outcome.
The seeming red-herring about a methane gas threat near the Entrada building site — a secret known only to development opponents — is an old wheeze that has been dragged out for years, through the 1970s,‘80s and ‘90s over at Playa Vista, as I recall.
I believe it has lost in every court test.
Has everyone in the neighborhood taken leave of his common sense?
Paul Revere and the Raiders?
I still have a vision of a misguided but presumably sincere woman trotting to the microphone in Council Chambers on one of those long, sleepy nights last month when the Councilman Gary Silbiger was auditioning as a No-Doz salesman by filibustering against Entrada.
Armed with the requisite maps, the lady must have fancied herself as a latter-day Paul Revere:
Forget the British. The methane is coming. The methane is coming.
Oh, really?
What magnificent logic she used — and, naturally, the usual suspects fell for it.
Standing on a piece of ground that is surrounded by about 10 million blissfully unaware people, the woman cries out that the world is coming to an end.
Somebody Call the Logic Doctor
For good or ill reasons, she does not want to see the Entrada building go up. So she tells us that deadly gasses, supposedly long unsuspected, lie in wait to eat us up.
Have you heard about the Lincoln assassination? The Lindbergh kidnapping?
You live here, madam. I live here. You work here. I work here.
Shouldn’t one of us be frightened into moving, before lunch, to Charlotte or Tallahassee, or maybe the moon, to escape the dire threat of methane?
I am confident there are savvy liberals out there in Newspaperland who see through the gee-whiz, by-golly methane “threat.”
Rewind the Tape, Murgatroyd
Predictably, Mr. Silbiger said the lady should be taken seriously. He urged his colleagues to forego voting on Entrada in favor of lying down on a couch for a few hours and listening to what the obviously well-grounded Map Lady had to say about methane lurking around your next corner and mine.
Has thinking been outlawed even before He Who Is Without Sin is elevated to the White House?
Is this any way to run a city? Or even a used car lot?
Actually, I only heard about Mr. Silbiger’s response later.
Personally, I had stepped out of Chambers to make an emergency after-hours call on my favorite Westside psychic, a woman named Hillary who laughs a lot. Just as with the Other Hillary, nobody knows why.
