Mea Maxima Culpa

The closure of another year gives us here at Joe Livernois Column an opportunity to reflect upon our performance, and we must humbly admit that we were not always "on the mark" with our blowhard opinions.

This end-of-the-year column gives the staff and management here at Joe Livernois Column a chance to come clean with some of our most egregious mistakes and to offer up a "mea culpa" while giving our reading consumers an opportunity to reinforce their suspicions that we are a bunch of "bumbling dunces."

For instance, we were just plain wrong to predict in a column earlier this year that a professor from CSU Monterey Bay would this year win a Nobel Peace Prize. Unfortunately, CSUMB was disqualified from any Nobel Prize consideration this year due to its insistent overuse of the word "collaboration."

The most glaring error, of course, was our stated belief that leaders from Monterey County would be able to unify diverse interests in a great Kumbaya moment and finally develop a general plan without caving in the various whining special interests. Sometimes, our naivite surprises even us.

And while we're thrilled to tears that aging and perpetually angry veterans of Vietnam were finally able to extract their measure of revenge, we were wrong in assuming that the American people would dismiss the Swift Boat Veterans for Venal Spite as just a bunch of old coots who have spent too much time stewing at the hall.

And we can't figure out, for the life of us, why the Dennis Miller show on MSNBC isn't a huge hit, what with the monkey and all.

The most surprising mistake we made this year was our Biblical prediction that unquenchable fire-and-brimstone wrath would rain down upon the heathens of San Francisco after the Mayor Gavin Newsom allowed Adam to marry Steve on the steps of City Hall.

By all accounts -- and despite continued insinuations in the Joe Livernois Column -- hell is still a raging inferno and did not become a frozen tundra after the Boston Red Sox won the World Series. As it turns out, hell can now be found in the San Francisco 49ers locker room.

And I suppose we must have been off in some dreamworld when we asserted that this year, once and for all, the greatest superpower in the galaxy would have been able to track down the solitary homicidal kook who masterminded the worst attack on the U.S. since Pearl Harbor. In fact, we errored to assume that finding Osama bin Laden was still a priority.

Also, we turned out to be amiss when we predicted at the start of the year that the collective citizens of California would slap their collective foreheads and wake up to the fact that they had just elected a collective groper for governor.

And who'd have thought that someone could possibly butcher a Hollywood production about Alexander the Great?

For the record, we would like to clarify that we seriously understated reality when we called Humvee owners a collection of "ignorant doofuses."

Finally, the Joe Livernois Column was completely off its rocker when it asserted that people in Salinas were willing to shake off its seething contempt for government by accepting a sales tax increase to keep its libraries open.

Also, we were remiss as journalists not to visit John Steinbeck's crypt to determine, once and for all, if he was indeed rolling in his grave.

We'll try to do better next year.