This guy I know, Jamie, plays the ponies. He's convinced he's got a special gift for picking the winning nag.

As evidence, he talks often of a fabled day at the track a few years ago. It was a day of longshot winners. All his buddies had to hit the ATMs pretty hard. They lost every cent, but Jamie managed to come out even.

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A confession: For many years, I got free HBO.

It wasn't stealing, really. We got HBO at no cost for a few months as part of some long-ago promotion.

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Like many Americans, I'm prone to fits of fantasy about our political leaders.

What if they could just level with us, admit error, admit doubt.

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In another sense, they were astonishing. Astonishing and distressing.

The commonwealth's General Assembly ranks as one of the nation's most expensive, corrupt and ineffective legislatures. Yet voters are allowing most of its members to waltz to re-election without breaking a sweat.

Between the two houses, 220 seats are up for election. Yet just four sitting senators and 28 incumbent representatives faced primary challenges. And a whopping 95 incumbents face no challenger in the fall.

It's not like these guys give great service for good price. They're the nation's fourth-highest-paid state legislators, but their most notable product seems to be the conviction for corruption. Just part of the rogues gallery:

Former Speaker of the House John Perzel. Convicted.

Former Speaker Bill DeWeese. Convicted.

State Sen. Jane Orie. Convicted.

Former leader of the Philly delegation Vince Fumo. Convicted.

When not robbing the people blind, these lawmakers often do shoddy work. They've botched gas drilling rules, casinos, charter schools, property tax reform. I can't bear to go on.

Yet we send them back to Harrisburg with hardly a challenge? The apathy this year is odd, given that just six years ago a furor over the midnight pay raise scandal swept dozens out of office.

I saw one cause for hope Tuesday night. Babette Josephs, one of the inert, go-through-the-motions liberals that Philadelphia specializes in sending to the state capitol, lost to a young challenger, Brian Sims. I don't know Sims, but I do know a number of the young Philadephians who worked hard to elect him.

They're smart; they love and believe in Philly. They've figured how to mix idealism with practical politics. They are, simply, this city's best hope – and they managed to elect one of their own.

For too long, Philadelphians have ignored Harrisburg – which holds so much sway over the city's future – to focus on the City Hall sandbox. They let mediocre lawmakers like Josephs treat them like Charlie Brown, falling for the football trick over and over. These pols placate the locals by introducing nice-sounding bills plucked from liberal wish list - bills that they have no intention of passing. But when the real gut check comes, as it did for Josephs on an anti-gerrymandering bill in 2008, they come up small.

On Tuesday, at least one Lilliputian got her comeuppance. And that's a tiny cause for hope.

"Don't be afraid; you can do it."

That was what Steve Jobs would say, as he unleashed his unnerving stare, to Apple staffers whom he'd just asked to do the impossible.

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Today, at an age when many people are plotting their assault on the early-bird special or tooling around snowbird retreats in a golf cart, Tony Auth begins a new stage in a distinguished career.

After 40-plus years of provoking nods of agreement and howls of outrage as cartoonist for the Philadephia Inquirer, Tony joins WHYY as our digital artist in residence.

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Can you tell the difference between a stalk of broccoli and an MRI?

Sure you can. You can distinguish between a medical testing machine and a vegetable.  The person struggling with the distinction, apparently, is Antonin Scalia.

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Medical science has pinpointed its location.

It was in the retina of my right eye. The good folks at Wills Eye Hospital told me a month ago that this "macular hole" was the culprit behind the fun-house-mirror vision  thatI'd been experiencing.

So I underwent what's called a vitrectomy. In this facsimile of medieval torture, the surgeons suck all the juice out of your eyeball so that they can get at and repair the hole. Then, they insert into your cornea a gas bubble that serves as a kind of bandage.

To keep the bubble in place, you have to spend a week or so living facedown, round the clock, never ceasing to point your eyes at the floor.

I recently survived that regimen, spiced by a post-op infection that filled my eye with something resembling pea-soup fog.

This interesting experience taught me five lessons.

No. 1 - People around here should appreciate more what an amazing boon it is to live near one of the world's great clusters of health-care knowhow. No matter how your body goes haywire, chances are that you live near one of the nation's most adept practitioners at fixing what ails you. 

No. 2 - Streaming Netflix is one of the greatest inventions since the horseless carriage. I rented a contraption that enabled me, through an ingenious set of mirrors, to watch TV while facedown. With Netflix (and a little March Madness), the time went surprisingly quickly.

No. 3 - Coffee sipped through a straw loses something in the translation.  It still beats caffeine deprivation psychosis, though.

No. 4 - The love of a good woman is the most precious thing on earth. To battle the infection, I had to put drops in my eye every hour around the clock for several days. Because I couldn't see a thing, I couldn't hit the bulls-eye with the drops. So my wonderful wife woke herself every 45 minutes through the night to help me. If you have someone in your life who will do that for you, pull them close and never let them go.

No. 5 – Friends are a wonderful thing. I was overwhelmed by people's gestures of support during this brief ordeal. Given that many of them are journalists, their concern tended to be expressed in the form of rude jokes about Mr. Magoo and pirates, but that did the trick all the better for coming wrapped in laughter

I'm back at work now, with a much deeper sense of just how lucky a person I am. That's a pretty good tradeoff for a few days spent living with my nose pointed at the floor.

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Exhibit A is how we pay teachers.

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