"A man walks into a ..." Most everyone knows what's coming next, a bar joke that will be predictably short and definitely twisted.

  Bar jokes are so famous, there are jokes about bar jokes: A man walks into a bar. You'd of thought he would'a seen it. Or, more directly, a rabbi and a priest walk into a bar. The bartender says, "Is this some kind of joke?"

  In Eureka the joke's on us. A man walks into a commission meeting. You would'a thought he would'a been smarter. Forty years ago, retired Army Colonel C.C. King was smarter. He regularly flaunted the pithy fine print of city codes.

  How did he do it? "The answer my friend is blowing in the wind." He pumped them full of windys, then "suffered the slings and arrows of outrageous fortune," apologized, and promised not to do it again. [Until he needed to.]

  The modern version of Col. King's gold standard is betting on, if you build it they won't come. If the City does catch on, use the everybody-else-has-done-it defense. If by rotten luck some commission wonk sees through the, "If Johnny jumps off the bridge" defense, then appeal to the City Council, using the Col. King logic of, "Poor me, I've already built it. What can I do?"

  Warning: This kind of defense takes unflinching nerve that can only be described as chutzpah, a Yiddish word loosely dramatized as: A man walks into a courtroom. The judge says, "You have been convicted of murdering your mother and your father. Do you have anything to say that would lessen the penalty?" The man immediately throws himself on the mercy of the court, pleading he's an orphan.

  Actually, for all the ink on this topic, a very smart lodging owner summed up the unending lament of, "What's wrong with this town," in two words: no enforcement.

  Although this unending lament appears to be a closed, circular argument, it's more like the plight of the Swamp Swivet, a mythical bird that flew in an ever decreasing circle at an ever increasing rate of speed until it flew up its own rear end, which graphically explains why "government intelligence" is an oxymoron, and why politicians are easily picked out in a crowd: They're the ones with their heads up ...