This evening I dropped by Henry McMaster’s headquarters opening on Gervais Street in Columbia (and ironically, heard an interview with Ricky Gervais on the radio on my way home).

There was a pretty good crowd milling about in the suite of offices that his campaign occupies. I saw Rusty DePass and Carl Roberts and Crawford Clarkson, and those were just the ones who are in Rotary with Henry and me. There were also Richard Quinn and Bob Liming and Travis Medlock and, well, I didn’t have a pen on me so I didn’t write all the names down, but there was a bunch of people there.

Enjoy the video. Sorry I didn’t have my good camera with me, but for phone video, it’s not bad.

There are funny parts to being unemployed. One of my very favorites are the e-mails I get almost daily from mysterious addresses that announce “West Columbia Vice President/Editorial Page Editor Jobs.”

Then, of course, you follow the link and find that, alas, “The search for Vice President/Editorial Page Editor jobs in 29169 did not match any jobs.”

Welcome to the brave new world of computerized hiring. Apparently, somehow my title from the newspaper got stripped off a resume from one of the many jobs I’ve applied for online, and some service that someone is trying to sell me automatically plugs it into a database and just as automatically sends me this absurd e-mail, over and over again. And wonder of wonders, not once has there actually been a job for a vice president/editorial page editor in West Columbia a single time in the past year. If you can believe that.

You know, if ever an actual human intervened in that algorithm for two seconds, he’d say, Hmmm. There are probably no more than a handful of editorial page editors who are also vice presidents in the entire country, if any. Seems kinda doubtful that West Columbia, which doesn’t even house a single daily newspaper, would ever, ever have one.

But things like that don’t happen. In my experience, actual humans probably only look at applications before the first cut a little under 50 percent of the time these days. And that’s the unfunny side of computerized hiring. If you’re me, if you’re a guy whose specialty is leading a small, talented team in wrestling with the knottier public policy issues of the day (plus dealing with community and business and political leaders), you pretty much know that no algorithm ever written can look at my resume and infer the kinds of conclusions that might lead someone to think, OK, I don’t have any newspaper jobs open, but a guy with this kind of background could probably do this and this for me…

Only a human could possibly do that. So it’s pretty galling to get those notices, about an hour after applying, that say “We’ve examined your resume and concluded that you are not a good fit for us.” When you know it’s a machine.

My all-time favorite was a job that I heard about on the day before the deadline for applications. I rushed to get it in, complete with a thoughtful cover letter, etc. Hours later I got a message saying that my resume had been examined, and my qualifications looked like a good match, and they would be following up with me. This was very encouraging because it was an opportunity I was pretty excited about, and I was relieved to know I’d gotten in under the wire and would have the chance to make my case. It was obvious that the notice was computer-generated, that no human had yet seen my application, but I was thinking, Good software; must have been written by a real genius.

Then, three days later, I get another automated e-mail telling me that on further examination, I wasn’t such a good fit. And mind you, a human obviously hadn’t seen it yet. (Bad software, must have been written by an EVIL genius…)

So I got ticked off and started digging, asking around, getting names that led me to names, until I finally found a human who would sit down and chat with me. (My argument was that I didn’t think they’d want anyone who’d take “no” from a machine.) I didn’t get the job, but I was satisfied that I at least got to a human…

… I could never be lonely on the river. With so many trees in the city, you could see the spring coming each day until a night of warm wind would bring it suddenly in one morning. Sometimes the heavy cold rains would beat it back so that it would seem that it would never come and that you were losing a season out of your life. This was the only truly sad time in Paris because it was unnatural. You expected to be sad in the fall. Part of you died each year when the leaves fell from the trees and their branches were bare against the wind and the cold, wintry light. But you know there would always be the spring, as you knew the river would flow again after it was frozen. When the cold rains kept on and killed the spring, it was as though a young person had died for no reason.

— A Moveable Feast, by Ernest Hemingway

Anyway, that’s what I thought of when I saw this severed branch, covered with doomed blossoms, on the sidewalk along Lady Street in the Vista this morning…

Last night I happened to Tweet:

Just watched a few minutes of West Side Story on TV. How could it ever have been seen as anything but cheesy?

And it started a short thread of empathy on Facebook. The critics supposedly liked it at the time, which just floors me. But a critic more after my own heart, Doug Nye, had this to share:

It was considered cheesy by me. When we were dating, my wife and I are saw it at a theater. We laughed about it afterwards as we recalled the many “funny” scenes. Did like the songs “Tonight” and “Maria.”

One Facebook friend, Spencer Whetstone, opting to pile onto Leonard Bernstein for foisting this mess upon us, provides … a link to the original magazine version of Radical Chic:

. . . and now, in the season of Radical Chic, the Black Panthers. That huge Panther there, the one Felicia is smiling her tango smile at, is Robert Bay, who just 41 hours ago was arrested in an altercation with the police, supposedly over a .38-caliber revolver that someone had, in a parked car in Queens at Northern Boulevard and 104th Street or some such unbelievable place, and taken to jail on a most unusual charge called “criminal facilitation.” And now he is out on bail and walking into Leonard and Felicia Bernstein’s 13-room penthouse duplex on Park Avenue. Harassment & Hassles, Guns & Pigs, Jail & Bail—they’re real, these Black Panthers. The very idea of them, these real revolutionaries, who actually put their lives on the line, runs through Lenny’s duplex like a rogue hormone. Everyone casts a glance, or stares, or tries a smile, and then sizes up the house for the somehow delicious counterpoint . . . Deny it if you want to! but one does end up making such sweet furtive comparisons in this season of Radical Chic . . . There’s Otto Preminger in the library and Jean vanden Heuvel in the hall, and Peter and Cheray Duchin in the living room, and Frank and Domna Stanton, Gail Lumet, Sheldon Harnick, Cynthia Phipps, Burton Lane, Mrs. August Heckscher, Roger Wilkins, Barbara Walters, Bob Silvers, Mrs. Richard Avedon, Mrs. Arthur Penn, Julie Belafonte, Harold Taylor, and scores more, including Charlotte Curtis, women’s news editor of the New York Times, America’s foremost chronicler of Society, a lean woman in black, with her notebook out, standing near Felicia and big Robert Bay, and talking to Cheray Duchin.

Cheray tells her: “I’ve never met a Panther—this is a first for me!” . . . never dreaming that within 48 hours her words will be on the desk of the President of the United States . . .

This is a first for me. But she is not alone in her thrill as the Black Panthers come trucking on in, into Lenny’s house, Robert Bay, Don Cox the Panthers’ Field Marshal from Oakland, Henry Miller the Harlem Panther defense captain, the Panther women—Christ, if the Panthers don’t know how to get it all together, as they say, the tight pants, the tight black turtlenecks, the leather coats, Cuban shades, Afros. But real Afros, not the ones that have been shaped and trimmed like a topiary hedge and sprayed until they have a sheen like acrylic wall-to-wall—but like funky, natural, scraggly . . . wild . . .

These are no civil-rights Negroes wearing gray suits three sizes too big—…

How delightful. A snippet from Wolfe’s heyday here on a dull, no-news day. Ahhhh… it’s refreshing. Particularly after having been subjected to “rumbles” between unself-consciously gay gangs with laughable names and Natalie Wood pretending to be Puerto Rican…

Sorry for the inconvenience, but if you sent me e-mail today, please wait about an hour and send it again. I’ve received nothing since 11:27 p.m. Tuesday.

I’m assuming this is because my mailbox is overcrowded. Every couple of weeks, I have to waste an hour or two of my life slowly, tediously deleting scores or hundreds of messages. This takes so long because, after about five months now, my Outlook is STILL not functioning (and anyone who can offer me help on this would be appreciated — and yes, I’ve tried deleting everything and reinstalling, over and over), so I have to do in on Web mail, and just refreshing the page once, or going from one inadequate 15-message page to the next, takes forever for some reason. The slowness of Web mail is the main reason I don’t clean house daily.

Another great thing about Web mail — it does NOT send you a notice telling you you’re running out of room, or let you know that’s the problem when it does happen. So I’m operating on assumption here.

Soon, I should have deleted enough to make room for whatever you sent, so please send again. Wait until noon EST at least, though.