Maybe it’s just coincidental that the California Correctional Peace Officers Association has endorsed Jerry Brown for governor. Brown, you may have heard, one of the Golden State’s more independent minded governors in the past, is running against billionaire Meg Whitman, and while the former Ebay CEO has outspent her opponent 100-1, as in $100 million to Brown’s $1M, he still has a good chance of carrying the race.

What that says about either candidate is anyone’s guess, but I remember Brown fondly for his more idiosyncratic policies and associates. He brought Whole Earth Catalog editor Stewart Brand into his administration as a “special advisor” in the seventies and had his mysterious French Zen buddy Jacques Barzaghi (he of the black beret and chrome dome) tour a troubled state prison. Asked his impression afterwards he replied, “We are all prisoners.”

My brother Ethan has been teaching meditation to the inmates of the SF jail lately, part of an prison outreach program that the SF Zen Center participates in. It’s a captive audience no doubt, and he says the classes are always well attended. I recently sent him a link to a story I did on Dharma Punx’ Noah Levine, who has been teaching those kinds of classes for years now. Not that I think Ethan needs any pointers.

He was explaining his practice to some gang girl a few weeks ago when she paid him what he said was probably the ultimate compliment. “Is that why you so chill like that?” she said.

“Well, it’s why I’m so chill like that now,” he said. “But a few hours ago, when I was fighting with my wife and screaming at my daughter, I wasn’t feeling so cool.”

And she got it, he said. He didn’t have to explain any more.

I’ve been taking the Q train a lot lately, courtesy my new job, and as expert as I am at blocking out the ambient sounds of the New York subway system — the strictly-from-hunger doowop singers; the 22-year-old teenagers selling candy bars for their “team” — it’s hard to ignore the automated voices on the new subway cars.

As much as I like hearing any kind of announcement about service and even which stops are next, the friendly, inhuman male and female recordings that fill the airspace on the Q are starting to get on my nerves. I keep expecting them to start bickering with each other, like the man and woman you hear disagreeing with each other in the airport in Airplane!

The stop just before mine is DeKalb Avenue, which everyone in Brooklyn pronounces Dee-Kalb, with the stress on the first syllable and “al” pronounced to rhyme with pal. Not robo Bob and Betty. They keep saying “The next stop is De-Kalb Avenue,” with emphasis on the second syllable and a short a as in awl. Kind of fussy, and not at all Brooklyn sounding.

The city may have done a study and discovered that the original Dutch family after whom the street (and hence the stop) is named may have pronounced it that way. But we’re not in Amsterdam and Brooklyn has a legacy of pronouncing things their way. My neighbor Joe Bellati, who was born here about eighty years ago and seems to remember everyone who has lived in Ft. Greene since then, was telling me about a long-gone doctor once. “His name was Gorse,” he said and then spelled it: “G-O-S-S.”

Tell the subway robots that.

When it comes to television, I live on the sort of time-lag familiar to anyone with Tivo or a DVR. About the only live TV I’ve seen in the last month has been the World Cup games, as painful as the US and UK defeats have been to witness in real time. All my favorite shows linger in limbo until I’m ready.

So I was caught a little off-guard by the conclusion of HBO’s Treme. Like most of the show’s fans, I had been won over by the lacksadaisical pace and ensemble acting. Where David Simon’s previous series, The Wire, had been all land mines and barbed wire in terms of the dangers that befell its huge cast of characters, Treme has been mostly soft landings.

“I keep waiting for a plot to kick in,” a friend of mine grumbled just a few weeks ago. Though the racial tensions of New Orleans have been evident, the real webbing of this series is music and, to a lesser extent, food. Two of my favorite pastimes, and neither particularly fraught with danger.

So [spoiler alert for those waiting to watch the first season! turn back now!] the suicide of John Goodman’s increasingly depressed English professor, Creighton Burnett, sort of knocked me for a loop. It’s a tough topic for me, in general: my father (an English teacher by trade btw) killed himself in his eighties, and I think the subject is often used in a cheap and unconvincing fashion in TV dramas. When in doubt, have someone kill themselves.

But the death of Goodman’s professor seemed earned, as they say in the acting business, and a longtime coming. It wasn’t just the angry tirades against Bush and FEMA that he put on YouTube (anger being the flipside of depression) or the empty screen he confronted when trying to finish his novel (writer’s block being another metaphor for the futility of existence); it was his whole sagging, deflated demeanor as the forced happiness of life in the Big Easy got harder to maintain.

And yeah, I lost it watching his wife and kid (the amazing Melissa Leo and child actress India Ennenga) deal with his death. Before they knew where he’d gone (for one last swim in the Mississippi) the daughter asks mom, “What’s a dependent clause?”

“O don’t ask me!” says Leo’s Toni Bernette (whose character owes more than a little to real NOLA attorney and advocate Mary Howell). “That’s your father’s department.”

Interdependence might turn out to be the true theme of this surprisingly emotionally rewarding drama.

It’s open season on rehab, finally. Rehab has been nigh onto sacred, at least in popular culture, for years now. As one with more than a little familiarity with 12-step meetings myself, I come from a place of complete respect  — but am often disappointed by the humorless, sanctimonious and often just plain bizarre treatment treatment has received.

There have been cracks in the facade all along, of course. In Robert Altman’s The Player (1992) Peter Gallagher confesses he goes to meetings not because he has a problem but because he does business there. And in both The Sopranos and Rachel Getting Married (2008), AA meetings were shown to be places to have sex with hot strangers right after the serenity prayer. (As if.)

Always it was the person who was at fault, who was not literally with the program. Gallagher’s producer was a tool; Michael Imperioli’s Christopher relapsed and was killed by Tony Soprano for his sins; and in Rachel, Anne Hathaway’s addict gives one of the most embarrassing wedding toasts ever captured on film, presumably a result of not working the steps herself.

Now we have the spectacle of drug dealers trying to sell meth to addicts in the final weeks of AMC’s Breaking Bad, and Russell Brand’s rock star Aldous Snow running from his ginormous joneses to greatly comic effect in Get Him To the Greek. (“When life slips you a Jeffrey, stroke the furry wall.”) Could Bill W finally be getting a pie in the face?

Not that he would have minded, I think. As Susan Cheever’s biography of the AA founder revealed, Bill was complicated — one of the reasons the Big Book is so forgiving of sexual infidelity is because Bill himself was a man of legendary sexual appetites, and took a keen interest in LSD late in life. Killing Buddhas is way of life in recovery.

Meanwhile, Marshall Mathers ask Eminem has a new album out entitled (yep) Rehab, recounting his adventures in same. It’s hard being famous in recovery, it turns out. “I felt like I was Bugs Bunny in rehab,” he told the NY Times’s Deborah Solomon. “People at rehab were stealing my hats and pens and notebooks and asking for autographs. I couldn’t concentrate on my problem.”

If Ahab had been in rehab he might never have lost  his ship (spoiler alert!). The captain had a whale of a problem. But then Ishmael wouldn’t have survived to tell the tale, and where would be?

I admit, I’m addicted to the news alerts the NY Times and the Washington Post send out. (I know other papers do as well, but I can only be alerted to so much news.) And it’s fun when it’s a political story to see which paper gets into my Blackberry first. Remember when Time and Newsweek competed, on a weekly basis? Remember Newsweek?

But usually the news is worth little more than a glance, perhaps a follow up later on the paper’s website or even (hey!) its paper edition. Last night was different. The alert I got from the NYT at 9:22 EST slugged “US Discovers $1 Trillion in Afghan Military Deposits” was enough to send me to the Times’ site. (Or send my wife, actually; I was chewing my nails, expecting Boston to blow its 15-point lead.)

Maybe it was that one-trillion number; in the days of billion-dollar bail-outs, it takes a figure that size to get my attention. Or maybe it was just the realization, trumpeted right there in the lede, that this could “fundamentally alter the Afghan economy and perhaps the Afghan war itself.” The scenarios spun out in the article itself included a more corrupt Karzai government; renewed Chinese (as well as US) interest in the region; and a more-determined, high-stakes Taliban, fighting it out with whoever until the bitter end.

Consider the phrase “the Saudi Arabia of lithium”; I may never reach for my Blackberry again without thinking of Afghanistan, and who provided the minerals that make that little gadget go. It’s kind of like the Beverly Hillbillies, or the Bel-Airabs, that ancient SNL parody about some Arabs who found “Kuwait Koolaid” in accidental fashion like, Jed Clampett (“And then one day he was shootin’ at some Jews…”).

It’s amazing to me that this was not the number one story on every news site today. It doesn’t even get a mention on CNN, or Drudge (is it because the Times broke the story?) though Foreign Policy does add a note of caution, if not downright skepticism, about the revelation. (Though the skepticism is reserved more for the timing of the news and Afghanistan’s ability to handle the wealth, though that to me seems much of the the news value…) Still, it could be a game-changer – depending on which game you’re watching.