Earlier this month I witnessed the aftermath of a motorcycle accident here in Brooklyn. It wasn’t fatal, or even that stupendous: the biker was sitting up on the pavement, his bike dumped in the street where he had swerved to avoid an oncoming truck, and a small crowd was gathering, people on cell phones dialing 911. As I hurried past with my dog (“Nothing to see here, folks, keep moving”) a homeless guy came running up to the scene of the accident, yelling: “It’s okay! He’s a trained athlete! Mick Jagger told me this would happen on 666!”

Oh, good, the biker was probably thinking. Crazy man to the rescue.

My friend Charlie Haas has suggested that the mumbling schizophrenics of New York are the best at what they do, just as the actors, con artists, waiters and brokers here are outstanding in their field. but having just spent a week in San Francisco, my old home town, I have to say that the loonies there give ours a run for their money. Maybe it’s because they are revered in a historical context (Emperor Norton still gets a lot of lip service) or because most people there are still eager to show tourists, yes, even folks from NY, that they are more tolerant than thou. The guy with the five o’clock shadow in the miniskirt waving at passersby at four pm may be amusing to the squares from elsewhere but people in SF smile at your concern or outrage, defending the right of people to go crazy in public.

Mayor Gavin Newsom’s once controversial care-not-cash program (which was instituted last year and provides shelter and health care for homeless men and women, instead of the cash outlay the city used to provide) seems to have reduced the actual number of street dwellers while leaving some of the most delusional to roam around town — and visitors from Boise and Brooklyn something to talk about back home.

Walking out of my Nob Hill hotel last week I saw a man in what I assumed to be his karate clothes standing at a crosswalk, giving the air a kick. I hadn’t had my coffee and was disinclined to look too closely but when I did I realized that he was actually wearing a hotel bathrobe and nothing else and that he was young and in good shape. Stepping out into moving traffic he shouted, “The first car that runs into me explodes!”

Need I mention that the traffic all parted for him?

That’s what my favorite bumper sticker on the Big Island of Hawaii said. Surfer culture is perhaps less prevalent there than on the islands with the better waves (Maui, Oahu) and one local even suggested the saying might actually be an advertising slogan for Long Board beer (locally brewed) but the same woman said that Hapuna Beach, where we had stopped to catch the sunset one night, was unapproachable on Christmas day. Kids all bring their new boards, short and long, down for a first spin.

This was my first visit to any part of Hawaii and what I don’t know about local culture would cover the back of a green sea turtle but I honestly couldn’t see much wrong with it. The breeze was balmy, there were no bugs or snakes (the latter were taken care of by the abundant mongoose), and the people were nice. Least ways the ones we met. Since we were staying at the rather plush Mauni Lani Resort, where my wife had spoken at a conference, we were in that tourist bubble most of the time, benignly indifferent to the problems of the people who work in the hotels.

Like ice. Methamphetamine has cut a swath through island culture in the past few years, spurned in part by the need to work several jobs. The parents get addicted, we learned, and pass it on to the kids. On the local HI music station (a rather cloying mix of reggae muzak, most with pro-island messages) the members of a native band told kids to stay off ice, while someone running for local office listed it as one of the Big Island’s biggest problems (after affordable real estate). Why, other than working three jobs, you would want to be wired in that environment is beyond me.

We had ice cream one afternoon in Hawi with science writer Susan Ince and her partner, Andy. They had moved there eight years ago from New Jersey and hadn’t looked back. The biggest challenge, Susan said, was keeping up your vocabulary. They were both in a book group, and seemed keen to talk about everything. The town they lived in reminded me of a few places near SF — Bolinas, Olema, Stinson Beach. Sixties spots that time forgot, a place where you could find a good used book store, excellent ice cream and maybe a vintage Hawaiian shirt but not much else.

Come to think of it, what else is there?

While the season’s final episode of The Sopranos left a lot of people disappointed, it thrilled me with dis-ease. I had all but given up on the series about halfway through the season — the writing seemed tired and obvious, the plot points flat out unbelievable — but the sense of expectations betrayed last night I thought was a perfect commentary on two of the show’s ongoing concerns: therapy and recovery.

By failing to do the kind of thing many fans and members of his extended family think him destined to do (whack rival boss Phil Leotardo for killing one of his capos, or take out his “nephew” Christopher for banging some broad he wanted for his own), Tony is letting them down — but he is delighting his therapist. The scene where he was complaining to Dr. Melfi that he had been a faithful husband and had in general tried to control his impulses only to be rewarded in this fashion was priceless. Anyone who has gone as far into the house of mirrors therapy offers as Tony has knows the feeling: Where is my big reward?

Christopher, meanwhile, met the perfect woman in AA. Except for the fact that he’s married. And his wife is expecting. And she is someone his boss has designs on. So not long after she is fucking him in his car after a meeting (I must be going to the wrong groups!) they are smoking heroin together and congratulating each other because they are not using needles. Like a lot of people in recovery they are frustrated that, after months or even years of good behavior, all they get is their sanity

The dis-ease comes from the sense of disappointment both Tony and Christopher feel in ordinary life. They’ve got to blow — maybe. One of the hints about next year’s short final season (eight episodes remain) may lie in the Christmas party at Tony’s at the end. Christmas is the ultimate disappointment for many adults; you never get what you want, someone else always has more. Bobby Baccala’s son is watching Casablanca on TV and it’s early in the story, before Rick comes out of his shell to fight for the woman he loves, and then for France. “I don’t stick my neck out for nobody,” Bogie says after letting the Nazis haul Peter Lorre away — but what would it mean for Tony to stick his neck out for someone? Would it mean to act or suffer those slings and arrows?

What he fears most is himself, I think, or the worst side of himself. Did you notice that when he left the hospital, offering a truce to Leotardo in the Christmas spirit, that the bodyguard he encountered at the door looked like a miniature version of Tony — same jacket, same hair? “We’ve got to stop meeting like this,” said the doppelganger — in the hospital? At death’s door? Hard to tell if it was meant as a promise or a threat.

The future of New York is pretty scary if you’re to believe the magazine of the same name. In its current cover story, The Horror, I mean Tomorrowland 2016, contributing editor Alexandra Lange posits a great big beautiful metropolis of tomorrow that is chockablock with jagged edgy sky scrapers scraping out what’s left of the sky, not just in Manhattan but here in Brooklyn, where Lange, who must be some kind of expert, considers Forest City Ratner’s “Atlantic Yards” development some kind of done deal.

Consider the headline to the Downtown Brooklyn section: Brooklyn (Like It Or Not) Will Get a Shimmering Frank Gehry Crown”. Because while Lange, who has presumably been to Brooklyn, allows that locals may not like the idea of having 16 skyscrapers rammed up its collective ass when all Ratner was talking about was an arena for his basketball team, those soon-to-be-homeless choke artists, The Nets. But it will be good for us, she insists. It will provides jobs and housing and beauty for us ungrateful wretches.

“We don’t want to build tall for the sake of tall,” she quotes Ratner mouthpiece Jim Stuckey saying. “Frank Gehry can frame the Williamsburg Savings Bank Tower”—the current tallest, at 512 feet, compared with the 620 feet of Gehry’s main tower, Miss Brooklyn—“and make it a postcard with other buildings around it.”

You read that right: a postcard. As in, Wish you were here? No wonder the arrogant Gehry, who says those protesting the development should be protesting Henry Ford for inventing the automobile, is calling his crowned jewel, the building around the proposed arena, Miss Brooklyn. You’ll miss Brooklyn, too, when these carpetbaggers get done with it.

It’s a pity that Lange, who is presumably a reporter, could not have found an actual opponent to the project to quote. She does allow that “there could be a kinder, gentler Brooklynized version of the titanium town” but doesn’t offer much hope for one. And why should she? You can sometimes learn a lot by reading a magazine’s articles online, just by looking at the URL. This one is slugged “real estate” which is all ye need to know.

If you haven’t seen the video of Guy Goma on the BBC, you really owe it to yourself. Goma is the now-celebrated wrong man of the pundit world, a hapless job applicant (he was at the studio looking for a job in data support) who was mistaken for another guy named Guy who was supposed to comment on the verdict handed down in the Apple vs. Apple Corps case. As John Tierney and others have noted, the glory his performance comes not just in the instant, captured on camera, when he gapes at being intorduced as someone he is not, but in the follow-up. Asked by the BBC reporter if he was surprised by the verdict he answers, “I am very surprised to see this verdict becasue I was not expecting that.”

What he had been expecting was a little face time with some tool from HR, no doubt, not to have a mike clipped to his jacket and be asked about a subject not in his area of expertise. And while his game, even authoritative responses, have been touted as a primer in the basics of media-training (answer your question, not theirs — and never say “I don’t know”), I see bigger things for Guy.

Why not president of the US? Sure, there’s that little immigration hurdle — the native of the French-speaking Congo is new to England, and English — but a Constitutional amendment could take care of that. After all, our current president has no problem speaking on matters of which he knows very little indeed, lecturing scientists on science and economists on economics — even explaining to a group of journalists the meaning of “dissemble” (which he flubbed in both pronunciation and definition). What is certain about him is his certitude, and Americans crave that. Being the star of his very own Truman Show, Bush never gets to hear any bad news about his performance because he doesn’t read or channel surf. The look he gave Stephen Colbert at the White House press dinner was not so much one of annoyance as puzzlement: what was this guy talking about?

Barring the POTUS position, I say give Goma his own show, let people bring him questions he knows little of and let him expound on each one for five minutes. Then compare his response with those of the experts and see who makes the most sense. In fact, let the first topic be the war in Iraq: they guy named Goma versus the guy in the coma.