Columnists

In 1957, musical theatre was dramatically changed with the Broadway opening of multi-award winning "West Side Story". Leonard Bernstein's music and Jerome Robbins' choreography raised the bar for musicals forever.

Does anyone remember the chaos some predicted when the calendar propelled into the year 2000? Now here we are 12 years later, welcoming the New Year.

Four years ago, I wrote a column promoting California's high-speed rail project. I believed then, and I believe now, that linking cities throughout the Golden State with a bullet train that travels from San Francisco to Los Angeles in two hours will provide tremendous economic benefits. Unfortunately, a lot has happened with HSR that has tarnished much of my optimism for the project.

David McRaney, author of "You Are Not So Smart," a book on psychology, insists that procrastination is, in fact, not the result of laziness or lack of time management skills, but rather that, "procrastination is fueled by weakness in the face of impulse and a failure to think about thinking." In addition to love, fear and other familiar emotions I am utterly convinced that procrastination is yet another common denominator of humankind. It plagues both the young and the old, the student and the employee, the homeless and the housewife. But, of course, we all know this.

Jon Coupal likes to say his hard-fighting organization, the Howard Jarvis Taxpayers Association, exists to beat back constant attacks on Proposition 13, the landmark 1978 initiative that limits property taxes in California.

Well, it's finally over: The most important, earth-shattering, paradigm-shifting, portentous political event since - oh, gosh, a very long time ago, really - has concluded, and by that I am of course referring to the Iowa caucuses, in the relentless view of the media. Never in the history of a Mongol horde of reporters with nothing better to do has there been such a lengthy, breathless, heart-stopping buildup to a non-binding straw poll among 20 percent of the Republicans in a state whose total population could fit into metropolitan Los Angeles without appreciably slowing down the traffic on the 405.

Earlier this week I was driving down San Benito Street in my 2001 Ford truck unwillingly going below the speed limit behind a distracted driver behind the wheel of a Dodge Viper sports car.

There is an old joke that goes "Christians have their cross; Jews have their Star of David; Muslims have their crescent; and Unitarians have the question mark."