THE BELL CURVE:Easter minus the beans

I messed up my beans on Easter Sunday. I mean they were inedible. See, everybody brings a community dish to our annual neighborhood Easter egg hunt. After the kids — more of them every year; I think they bused a load in from Bakersfield last Sunday — finish scavenging for 1,771 (somebody counted) plastic eggs full of candy and sometimes money, we eat copiously of these dishes. And maybe drink a little.

Over the years, my beans have become a modest tradition — at least in my own head. A recipe right out of northern Indiana for lima beans mixed with brown sugar, molasses and ketchup, underneath strips of bacon that drip in the mix when cooked gently in an oven.

But last Sunday, I didn’t pay proper attention and they cooked too long.

The result was dry beans that looked as bad as they tasted and sat forlornly on the serving table, surrounded by dishes very much in play.

Watching this rejection, I was forced into an extra martini to carry me through.

One high point of the day turned out to be when folks who live several streets away brought their horses over to graze in the uncut high grass in front of the forlorn house two doors down from me. It has a note tacked to the front door that says: “This property has been repossessed and is now bank-owned.” It seemed morosely out of place surrounded by the enthusiasm and neighborhood good feelings the former owners never really explored.

Like, for example, our godfather, Jim Altobelli, and Ron Darling providing clues to the resting place of eggs with money in them for the older kids. Having just paid my taxes, I gave serious thought to joining this search, but backed off when I was told the stakes had been reduced considerably from previous years.

If this modest commercialism seems inappropriate for the occasion and comes off as irreverent, it’s not so. The festivities are thoroughly grounded in a kind of joyous communal togetherness that so well reflects the celebration of this day.

Have you been following the machinations of high finance that have replaced journalism as a driving force in the path to be followed by the Los Angeles Times?

I don’t know who I’m going to be working for when this finally shakes down except that it won’t be the Chicago Tribune, which I found to be a considerable embarrassment for someone who grew up — as I did — under the aegis of Little Orphan Annie and Dick Tracy, both spawned in the Tribune.

Some of the recent administrative gyrations that have come down from the Tribune board of directors to jack up the profit percentage were perfectly in keeping with the legacy of Annie and her Daddy Warbucks.

The most recent, of course, was the cockamamie idea of choosing a series of guest editors to put out the Times opinion section — starting with a Hollywood producer with no visible connection to journalism and including — honestly — Donald Rumsfeld. The idea was mercifully killed, but there will be more like it until journalism achieves at least parity with profits.

In the 50 years I’ve been a journalist, I’ve worked — in addition to the newspaper you’re reading — either on staff or as a free-lancer for the Los Angeles Times, the National Observer, the Christian Science Monitor and the New York Times.

During these years, the only connection I ever observed between the editorial and business divisions was editorial’s responsibility to turn out the highest quality professional product.

Guest lay editors and editorial teams that include business and promotion members — among similar ideas lately dropped on Los Angeles Times editors — would have been unthinkable.

We were badly spoiled during the exhilarating 20-year run of Otis Chandler as publisher of the Times. We can only now hope that the new owners will retire Annie and her daddy and return the paper to professionals with deep roots and pride in journalism.

I was standing in the checkout line at my neighborhood supermarket the other day when a large, youngish man in front of me said jovially, loudly and in my face, “I see you survived global warming for another night,” followed by guffaws of laughter.

I’d never seen him before, but I sensed trouble, so I mumbled something dismissive and turned to unloading my cart.

But he was persistent. He increased the volume and said, “I hope you don’t believe any of that crap about we’re all going to be underwater in a couple of years. We’re not that stupid, are we?”

I was wondering all the while how he knew I deplore the contemptuous attitude of the people running my country toward restricting the human behavior that makes us one of the world’s leading contributors to global warming. I decided that our meeting was pure accident and that his mission this day was to help fellow Americans see through the sham of global warming being foisted on them.

But when his strident tones began to attract attention among nearby customers, I felt my silence was consent.

So I said something like this: “You’ll probably be gone before the waters come. But your kids and mine will be around then. So I prefer to take the word of the 98% of the world’s scientists who are scared as hell about global warming.”

That really cranked him up. He got red in the face and lifted his voice another decibel or two. That’s when the checker hurriedly got his attention with a question, and the moment was deflated. He departed, sending a few final shots over his shoulder.

Our Congressman, Dana Rohrabacher, would have loved him.

We are being asked by our editors to register our view on putting the Newport Beach city hall site question to a public vote.

I think it is a terrible idea.

Unless, that is, we also want to eliminate the City Council, send the members home, and embrace the town meeting type of government that was popular in the 17th century.