­
Ugh, to be succinct.

Encourage them to be criminals, valets for terrorists, blindfolded spacewalkers, even panhandlers. But please, please, not consultants.

Gore Rhymes with Bore, Right?

Would it be too impolitic to say the star of last night’s joint meeting of the Parks and Recreation Commission and the City Council, a dreadful consultant, in my opinion, fouled the air so badly I was hoping Al Gore would walk in and start declaiming about the life-extending joys of global warming? Or is he on the other side?

Sitting in the second row in Council Chambers, it would have been impertinent to openly giggle while the consultant Jim Pickel held the floor.

If he were unmarried, I would hire this cure for insomnia to date my least favorite ex-wife, which would have sent me off to dreamland with a permanent smile on my happy face.

How to Fill Time — and Life

When you don’t know what you are talking about, or you don’t have any idea of the objective, I was taught to vamp.

In an 11-minute slide-supported, job-justifying speech that got the meeting off to a rock-strewn start, Mr. Pickel, whom I do not know beyond his moustache and slicked-back-straight black hair, provided enough material for a dictionary-thick book. Riveting rhetoric, it was not.

He could cause an empty room to snore.

You Can Say That…Please, Don’t

He must have been an octopus in a previous life, circularly, dizzyingly, wrapping his many arms and his staggeringly repetitious words around himself.

He xeroxed himself so many times that it is a good thing there weren’t any cops in the room. They may have become suspicious.

If it were possible for City Hall to refund to the several of us in Council Chambers the hour we blew on this meeting, I would be grateful and take it directly to my bank.

A Fertile Idea

A rich thought entered my seeking mind this morning at breakfast.

What if last night’s meeting was a practical joke, and only a couple people were in on it?

What if a Master Plan exists only as a bare, minimal, two-word concept, an undefined euphemism for “improving” Culver City parks?

Plan? Plan?

You might be surprised at how many of last night’s participants do not know what the end game of the Master Plan is. They could have been shmoozing about the guest list for their next dinner party.

The Council and the Commission have become so crazed with the notion that every person in the community must be polled, in depth and frequently, on all matters to be voted upon that I believe only Murgatroyd and I shall not receive invitations to join the Jim Pickel focus groups.

What if last night’s meeting was one imaginative person’s notion of a harmless, fun moment to interrupt the stress of daily life?

Where Are You Going? Out. Oh.

Say this person thought up a scenario where five elected officials would face off against five appointed Commission members. They would debate, vaguely, for an hour about how to staff two focus groups to flesh out an unborn master plan.

The punchline would be that there is no objective.

Consultants need to do something between the time they leave home in the morning and return home in the evening, don’t they? Else how could a self-respecting consultant reply when his wife innocently inquires, “How was your day? or “Did you find any
work today?”

“No, dear, I was in Culver City.”