Not quite a full moon earlier this morning off Point Loma in Coronado, California.

For years, I have loved this quotation, widely attributed to Calvin Coolidge.

Nothing in this world can take the place of persistence.  Talent will not; nothing is more common than unsuccessful men with talent.  Genius will not; unrewarded genius is almost a proverb.  Education will not:  the world is full of educated derelicts.  Persistence and determination are omnipotent.

But it turns out these are not the words of Calvin Coolidge.

In her gushing and agenda-driven biography of America’s 30^th President, “Coolidge,” Amity Shlaes reveals the still somewhat shadowy source of these lines.

“These words were printed as filler in newspapers as early as 1910, often without an author, but they sound so much like Coolidge that people assume he wrote them.”

In 2000, butchers at a Walmart in Jacksonville Texas voted to join the United Food and Commercial Workers International Union.  Less than a month later, Walmart closed 180 meat counters and limited shoppers to pre-packaged cuts.

In 2003, the U.S. Bureau of Immigration conducted raids and arrested 250 suspected illegal immigrants who were working on contracted cleaning crews in 61 Walmart stores in 21 states.  Walmart paid the government $11 million in penalties.

In 2006, a Pennsylvania jury ordered Walmart to pay 187,000 employees $78 million in damages for failing to pay for off-the-clock work.  Walmart appealed, and a judge raised the award to $188 million.

In 2008, Walmart paid a $54 million settlement in Minnesota courts for failing to pay employees who were working off-the-clock.

Less than a month after the Minnesota case, Walmart paid $640 to settle 63 different class action suits relating to its failure to pay employees.

In 2010, Walmart agreed to pay up to $86 million in settlements in a Calfornia class action suit for failing to pay 232,000 of its workers overtime and vacation wages.

As of December, 2012, Walmart has paid close to $1 billion in damages related to six different cases tied to its failure to pay employees.

Walmart is America’s largest private employee.  1.4 million people work in Walmart’s 4,602 stores.

Tickets to the fights, the track, and hockey games.  Tom Waits opening for Buffy Sainte Marie.  A bar car coaster from a train ride to New Orleans on the old Southern Railroad.  Vegas meal tickets.  Artifacts  that don’t need to be hauled around any more, but I’m not quite prepared to entirely part ways with.

Paris in November can be so gray that the sky simply goes away.  There is nothing to take its place, but because this is Paris, nothing needs to take its place.

In the morning, when it is barely above freezing, the first dim light arrives with a delicate reluctance. These are sour-looking days of chilly mists and snug scarves.  The man playing the clarinet outside the Grand Palais for the crowds lined up to see the Edward Hopper exhibition is wearing his cutout gloves.

The plastic has been rolled down and heaters glow in the exterieurs of the cafes.  Fallen leaves scud across the Tuileries and the Christmas decorations are up in the big windows of Galeries Lafayette.

Late at night the soft currents of the Metro rumble up to our hotel room.  They fade in and out while we read, and they are all we can hear in this soft neighborhood, even with the big door that leads out to our terrace kept wide open.

I still adore wire copy.  It came jerking up out of those big metal machines which shivered and shook and kept clattering away with dispatches from distant bureaus.

Those machines were a proud connection to the rest of the world long before the internet, long before CNN, and if you were fortunate enough to spend your days with them, you had this feeling of being on the inside, living ahead of everyone else.

Wire copy takes you back to the newsroom, where you would check the machines, roll up the paper, lay it down on the desk, tear it up with a metal ruler, and stack the stories in appropriate piles.  Some went in folders, some on clipboards, and some were shoved on nails coming out from the wall.

In Ottawa, there were big metal trash cans in the newsroom where we’d toss dated copy or material we wouldn’t use.

They’re where we also emptied the heavy glass ashtrays.  We all smoked.  The tall windows looking out over Parliament Hill were coated with pasty yellow tobacco smoke film.  Now and then, when an ashtray with a still smoldering cigarette was dumped in, our discarded wire copy would flare up.

You never wanted to be the guy in the newsroom who was considered to be too good to change a faded ribbon.  There was no way to do this without staining your fingers with ink, not that I ever discovered.

Somehow, we never ran out of ribbons, never ran out of paper, and those workhorse machines, the size of a small refrigerator and as heavy as a large one, always seemed to pound away.

If you were lucky, you would get the hear the bell ring.  In those days the bulletins seemed sparse, rationed and reserved for what was important rather than what was noteworthy.

The more wire machines the better.  In Ottawa, we had five, each with different content, stuffed into a closet away from the main newsroom.  Heavy cartons with rolls of paper were stacked up beside them, each twice as large and twice as heavy as a case of beer.

In Toronto we had six machines lined up right in the newsroom. Teletype keys pounding, other typewriters chiming in, tape being edited, audio feeds being recorded, tunes blasting, guys on the phone, two-way radio crackle, tape speeding across the heads of tape decks screeching through rewind or fast forward, conversations, all in a mix rising and falling with its own mysterious cadence, and none of it ever seeming like noise.

That was how it was in Toronto, the soundtrack of a newsroom in perfect pitch, anchored by the reassuring rumble and clatter of those big old wire machines.

You know those birthday wishes you get from Facebook friends?

I received one yesterday from my old friend Mike Slayter, a mate of mine at the Halifax Grammar School in 1965-6.

Sadly, I haven’t seen Mike since 1966.  I would love to see him and need to do something about this.

So, in his belated birthday greeting, he writes…

My first memory of you is your ability to play the drum intro to the turtles’ You Baby’ on an HGS lunchroom bench or table. dead groovy !!

I don’t remember this at all.

I remember the room, the table at which we sat, the benches we would tilt.  That room down in the basement, no windows, one way in and out passing by the furnace room which never must have bothered the building inspectors.

And I remember the tune and the wonderful drum intro.  I’ve never stopped loving this tune although there a few other Turtles’ tunes I prefer.

“You Baby” was written by Steve Barri and P.F. Sloan.

Barri, born Steve Barry Lipkin, later produced John Sebastian’s “Welcome Back” and Alan O’Day’s wretched 1977 #1 single, “Undercover Angel.”

Sloan, born Philip Gary Schlein, created a remarkable rock and roll pedigree.  Guitar lessons from Elvis, falsetto vocal on Jan and Dean’s “Little Old Lady from Pasadena.”  Along with Barri, he invented the Grassroots.  He wrote “Eve of Destruction” for Barry McGuire and “Secret Agent Man” for Johnny Rivers.

And up in Nova Scotia this twelve year old kid, drumming on a table and a bench which must have had superb tonal qualities.  That was me?

“You Baby” first entered the Billboard Top 100 Chart on February 19, 1966.

It would have been the same time, perhaps the same day, or even the same moment, I was working the table and bench, down in the firetrap with Mike Slayter, when the Beach Boys used a similarly unorthodox percussive instrument, an empty Sparkletts water bottle, for a track on their “Pet Sounds” album.

Not quite.  It was January 31, 1966 Hal Blaine hit that upside down Sparkletts bottle on “Caroline, No.” But both “Caroline, No” and “You Baby” were recorded at Western Recorders in Hollywood.

Eight years later, I spent a month living in Hollywood, a few blocks away from Western Recorders, just down Sunset on the other side of the Hollywood Freeway.

I wasn’t thinking much about the Halifax Grammar School that spring on Kingsley Drive, just below Sunset, that spring when Joni Mitchell  captured everything worth knowing about Hollywood.

I have a hunch that Grover Cleveland is about to make a comeback, and will find himself as America’s most talked about ex-President.

In the 1888 Presidential election, Cleveland wound up with 95,713 more votes than Benjamin Harrison.  But losing the Electoral College vote moved him out of the White House.

Andrew Jackson, Rutherford Hayes, and Al Gore also won the popular vote while losing the electoral vote.

But Cleveland ran again and won.  Granted, the 1892 election was rather muted.  President Harrison, whose wife was dying of tuberculosis, did not campaign, and out of respect, neither did Cleveland.

So we can’t help but wonder, given the polling numbers of 2012, if a similar scenario might unfold.  President Obama loses the electoral vote  in 2012, runs again and wins in 2016.

If indeed Grover Cleveland finds himself enmeshed in the news cycle in 2016, let us make sure we remember one of his more challenging moments.

It came during his 1870 campaign for district attorney in Erie County, New York.  Cleveland and his opponent each agreed to limit their beer drinking to four glasses a day.

It didn’t take long for the two to agree that this was not working, and their pledge was abandoned.

Riva del Garda that fall was glistening  just enough.

But like all the lake towns I have been in, I wasn’t quite sure what to make of it. Because little of my life has been spent on lakes, I tend to judge their towns unfairly, and dismiss them as dull substitutes for ocean towns.

Kafka came here.  So did Nietzsche, when Riva del Garda belonged to the Austro Hungarian Empire.  It has been Italian, or rather, a part of Italy, for almost a century now.

It is hard for an outsider to measure the fading gloss of more glamorous years.   There is nothing diffident about the place.  Just a moody elegance.

Times come when, fairly or unfairly, towns turn.  This can happen instantly, as with the end of a season when summer people pack up their belongings, shutter their cottages and drive their cars with sandy floor mats home to the suburbs.

Or the turn can bend through any one of a number of slow fades, brought on by boredom or fleeting fashion or even political fear.  The patina a tourist town holds is never a sure thing and, as people in Niagra Falls would remind us, can oscillate violently.

Whatever oscillations Riva del Garda has been through, whether mild or harsh, seem to have left the town in fine shape.  A speckled veneer, chipped and flecked with more than a century of the comings and goings of fashionable and not so fashionable visitors, can be as charming as the town itself.

It was good that fall afternoon in Riva del Garda where the indigo sky let you know that whatever winter was like here, it was not far off.

We all know that it won’t end well for Vladimir Putin.

When you start your third term by ordering troops to fire tear gas at protesters, shut down thirteen subway stations to keep fresh waves of protesters from rolling in, and ignore your nation’s swelling crescendos of disgust, Vladimir Putin’s future can’t help but absorb Russia’s bleakness.

This bleakness has already settled in on Putin’s marriage.  His wife, Lyudmila Putina, appears to be hidden away from any meaningful public view.

Rumors swirl in the absence of definitive information on the whereabouts of Lyudmila Putina and her precise role as Russia’s first lady.

Perhaps she is under virtual house arrest, closeted away in a mansion on the grounds of the Yelizarov Monastery on the outskirts of Pskov near the Estonian border.  We don’t know.

Rarely does Lyudmila Putina appear in public.  The former Aeroflot flight attendant was last seen on March 4th.

Perhaps the rumors of her husband’s dalliances come into play.  Vladimir is said to be smitten with former spy Anna Chapman.

Another object of Putin’s affections may be Alina Kabayeva, a former Olympic gold medalist.

While Ms. Putina’s situation is awkward, it is not unusual.

During the 28 years Leonid Brezhnev ruled the Soviet Union, his wife, Viktoria Petrovna Brezhneva, was kept under similar wraps, and endured the pain of her husband’s mistress and child living under the same roof.

Nikita Kruschev’s mistress was somewhat more visible.  Yekaterina Furtseva served as the USSR’s Minister of Cultural Affairs.

Josef Stalin, according to his biographer Simon Sebga Montefiore, was “a promiscuous and faithless serial seducer and libertine.”  At one point, while in his 30s, Stalin cavorted with a 13 year old mistress.

During his two years as Chairman of the People’s Commissars of the USSR, Vladimir Lenin probably couldn’t handle the physical challenges of a mistress.

By then he had suffered two bullet wounds and three strokes.  But in healthier days, starting in Paris in 1911, Lenin’s mistress was the Bolshevik feminist Inessa Armand, who died in 1920.  Lenin’s wife, Nadezhda Konstantinovna Krupskaya, passed away in 1939.

And so, Vladimir Putin carries on this dictator’s unctuous tradition, tarnished with infidelity, buttressed with cheesecake, and careening toward the classic denouement.

Vladimir Putin can arrest political opponents such as Sergei Udaltsov, Boris Nemtsov, and Alexeri Navalny.

He cannot quiet the dissonant whispers.  And he cannot forestall the inevitable solution to the mystery of Lyudmila Putina.