I'd deliberately stopped watching the news late Thursday evening after being overwhelmed by the horror out of Ft. Hood and the daylong tsunami of news in general. Sometimes, you've got to switch brain hemispheres.

I thought comedy and fashion would do that for me. So I skipped over to ''Project Runway,'' now with extra added fun in the sighting of L.A. landmarks, inasmuch as this season was shot here.

Lo and behold, there on the Lifetime channel was one landmark I didn't expect to see. Beaming bright in the sunshine, on a hillside above the 405 freeway -- yes, that was indeed the Getty Center, But it was also Mayor Antonio Villaraigosa, immaculately suited, with a smile measurable in lumens, welcoming the designers to Los Angeles. Then, boom, faster than you could say ''auf wiedersehen,'' he was gone. As cameos go, though, it was probably more air time than he's used to getting on the six o'clock news..

And then, on Comedy Central, a little more than 90 minutes later, William Bratton, who just left the job of L.A. police chief on Saturday, was in the ejector seat on the "Colbert Report." He was a bit more subdued than we're used to seeing him here, maybe because Colbert only really asked about policing New York, a city Bratton characterized as ''a hellhole'' of broken-window offenders like squeegee pests and turnstile jumpers before he was able to work his police chiefly way on the Big Apple. I'm sorry Colbert didn't ask him anything about L.A.; I already miss Bratton's pungent observations about the sundry scofflaw ''knuckleheads'' and ''loony tunes'' of California.

And then I turned off the television and went to bed. I don't think I could have handled the surprise of seeing Sheriff Lee Baca in a guest spot on the SyFy channel.

-- Patt Morrison

This won't take long to spell out. How long it'll take to fix, I don't know.

Spinning around the radio dial Wednesday, I alighted on a news story about the water deal reached in Sacramento. The announcer said something to the effect that the deal balances both ''human and environmental'' concerns.

What? Stop! When are we going to get it through our still-insufficiently evolved craniums [crania, if you like] that environmental concerns ARE human concerns, that we are only as healthy and as likely to survive as are our fellow species and the land and water and air on this planet?

For years, we've been shoved into accepting the false, manipulated choice of jobs versus the environment; now there's the insidious manufactured either-or of "us versus them,"'  the `"them'' being a balanced water system and the habitat and creatures that are part of it. Well, here's some breaking news that should be old news: We ARE them.

-- Patt Morrison

Comedian Craig Ferguson pretty much got it right Friday night at the Beverly Wilshire Hotel, when he told the folks at the Jane Goodall Institute’s global leadership awards:

"It’s nice to be here with people who actually do things rather than just tell jokes on television."

Or who just throw dinners congratulating one another for being so darned swell.

I’ve been to a few dinners at the BW that fit the latter description; the Goodall event fell  into the "do things" category, certainly when it came to two particular honorees. They were sitting at my table, and they’re so young that they drank juice while everyone else drank wine.

Shadrach Meshach lives in Tanzania, where Goodall began her seminal work with chimpanzees. In grade school, he joined up with Goodall’s Roots and Shoots program, grassroots work for animals and the environment. Eventually he began bicycling to Tanzania’s refugee camps for Congolese, persuading hunters to stop killing endangered chimpanzees for meat and showing them how to raise chickens and vegetables instead. He has been breaking other cultural norms, too – he’s an African young man, a teenager, trying to improve women’s lot in life in the belief that that that will improve the world.

He sat quietly on my right, taking in the plush ballroom and the lavish table settings. He has been out of Tanzania twice, once to Orlando, Fla.,last year, for a Jane Goodall young people’s summit, and now here, to Beverly Hills -- not the average visitor’s experience of the United States.

Erica Fernandez came here from Michoacan with her farmworker family when she was a child. Now she’s a full-scholarship sophomore at Stanford; her family still works the fields in Oxnard, she told me, where, as a high school student, she campaigned to keep an LNG facility from being built there. She’s studying matters related to her commitment, environmental justice, and hopes to go to Harvard Law.

Among the grownups honored by Goodall was John Zavalney, already an award-winning LAUSD teacher and science advisor who became a kind of "stand and deliver" hands-on instructor, teaching biology, ecology and environmental science at Foshay Learning Center.

Working with wild creatures rescued by animal welfare workers or confiscated as they were being smuggled into the U.S., Zavalney introduced inner-city students who had never even visited the beach to the wider world of forests and jungles and tidelands and savannas, using these living classroom lessons.

Of course, such awards have to feature some celeb names among the winners – in this case, actress and animal lover Betty White and super-green guy and actor Ed Begley Jr., both of whom delivered the kind of funny remarks that everyone counts on to provide a bit of leavening to other speakers'  serious stuff. 

The public policy award went to mayor Antonio Villaraigosa, "the greenest mayor" L.A. has ever had, announced Begley, who is a big public transit user. Villaraigosa’s was to have been the evening’s first award, but the mayor evidently arrived late, and it was pushed down to later in the program. [Small-world department: The terrific waiter at my table had been a Cathedral High School classmate of Villaraigosa’s.]

The mayor, as I reported in July, met Goodall on his trip to Africa, accompanied by Lu Parker, his girlfriend, KTLA-TV anchor and former teacher and Miss USA pageant winner. On Friday evening, he arrived solo to accept his award. Parker, he said, wasn’t there because she was working.

If you’ve never been to one of these dinners, the silent auction is a regular pre-dinner fundraiser and curtain-raiser. This time, along with the usual wine and hit-DVD and spa packages being offered, guests bid for artwork by chimpanzees.

Later, once people had been softened up by the wine and the vegetarian meal – Goodall told me a few months ago that cutting back on meat eating is one of the most significant things humans can do to improve the globe’s health and survivability -- bidding opened on a one-off item.

For a bid of $25,000, Goodall Institute board member Addison Fischer won the right to name the next primate refugee to arrive at Goodall’s chimpanzee rehab center in Congo. He wasn’t spilling the beans on his choice, but the buzz in the ballroom was weighted heavily in favor of "Jane."

-- Patt Morrison

California's "three-strikes" law is about truly heinous crimes. But in politics, it's a serious breach of behavior and self-interest to commit a ''do as I say, not as I do'' violation.

Maria Shriver is not an elected official, but she is married to a renowned one, Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger, and was born into an even more famous family of them, the Kennedys.

So the inevitable outcome when hubris meets hypocrisy can't have been lost on her. Why should the hoi polloi of us feel we need to obey the laws the politicians pass, if the high and mighty themselves won't observe them? It undercuts the repute of politics and the public regard for the rules and regulations we are all supposed to adhere to.

At least twice, Shriver has been photographed using her cellphone without a hands-free device -- a violation of a law her husband signed. When he made it law, he noted that if he ever caught his teenage daughter breaking it, ''she'll be taking the bus.''

After his wife was caught by a gossip site driving while chatting on a cellphone sans legally required device, Schwarzenegger promised, ''There's going to be swift action,'' and Shriver apologized. I wonder whether her daughter, the one who was threatened with the bus if she broke the law, gave her mother a piece of her mind.

But Shriver was not aboard a bus -- although a Cadillac Escalade is certainly of long and lumbering proportions -- when she was seen parking said SUV in a red zone in Santa Monica for nearly an hour. She was reportedly at a doctor's office, which I can't imagine to be official business.

Everybody screws up once in a while, sometimes in bigger ways than not. But a red zone is a big unmistakable crimson no-no that drivers learn even before they're old enough to get behind the wheel. How could she not see it? And if she did see it, what little voice told her, ''It's OK, go ahead,'' especially on the heels of her cellphone transgressions?

It's a shame that paparazzi follow her hither and yon, but one definition of morality is doing the right thing even when no one's looking, isn't it? I am pretty sure that if I'd tried to get away with the same thing, I'd have come out of my doctor's office to see my car on the way to the tow yard.

What ''swift action'' will her husband insist upon this time? Another apology will ring a bit hollow on the heels of the other one. In the meantime, maybe we should all chip in and buy her a bus pass.

-- Patt Morrison

I had surgery not long ago, and the actual surgery itself didn’t take a fraction as much time as all the insurance wrangling and worrying did.

At one point, when I was trying to negotiate the massive gap between what the out-of-network anesthesiologists charge and what my insurance would pay, I finally said that I’d just bite down on a wooden spoon during the surgery –- and I’d bring my own spoon, so I wouldn't get charged for that, too.

Whatever the doctor thought, I figured I couldn’t get the surgery until I’d figured out how much I’d have to pay, and whether I could afford it –- or whether I should just wait until things got so bad I’d just check into the emergency room, and they’d have to pay for it.

But all of it gave me an idea.

"House" is a rare TV show I’ve watched with pleasure, in part because there’s the splendid Hugh Laurie, and in larger part because it’s so much like my beloved Sherlock Holmes: House/Holmes, aided or on occasion challenged by Wilson/Watson, solves the most mystifying conundrums in the world of medicine/crime.

But the series is starting to get a wee bit stale, and I think I know how to fix it, and fix it in a way that will illuminate the problems of our present healthcare system, too.

Every show involves massive amounts of medical diagnostics and treatment –- MRIs galore, CAT scans, arcane tests I’ve never heard of, as the patient lies expensively tethered to monitors and tubes for weeks at a time.

And I don’t think I’ve ever heard any test the doctors have ordered not being done because of how much it costs.

TV isn’t supposed to be realistic, but even a good drama could use a little more drama. So here’s my idea: a new addition to the regular cast. The head guy in the hospital's insurance office.

What insurance policy would pay for all that treatment and hospital time? What hospital could pick up the tab for all of that platinum care? When the opponents of healthcare reform moan about "rationed care," all I can say is that it’s already rationed: I have a lifetime dollar-figure cap. When I hit that, they unplug me and roll me out the door, unless I can pay the tab myself.

So if "House" is going to treat us to real diseases and diagnoses, it ought to show us some real insurance controversies. The cast-member naysayer and House could mix it up, fight over that third MRI in a week, come to blows, make up over beers -– all about deductibles and out-of-network coverage. And you’re welcome, Fox TV –- you can send the check to me right here.

[While I have the attention of the health-minded, I’d like to quibble with the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention websites exhorting the potentially flu-stricken to "cough or sneeze into your elbow." This, as the good doctors know, is physiologically all but impossible. In a world where eardrops have to come with instructions to users to put the drops in the ear, better they should be telling people to sneeze or cough into the crook of the arm. And, yes, that either arm will do.]

-- Patt Morrison

She was a woman who ''moved mountains in those Manolos'' -- one of the many words of praise Carol Biondi had to say about her old friend Nancy Daly at a memorial celebration on Wednesday evening.

Hundreds of people filed into Royce Hall to honor Nancy's life and her work on behalf of children and the arts. Out in the darkened rows sat the movers and shakers of Los Angeles, from the police chief to a number of City Council members and major philanthropists and arts leaders, as well as some kids from MacLaren Hall, whose lot she worked for 30 years to improve.

It's a testament to how highly Nancy was regarded that for an hour and a half in Royce Hall, you didn't hear a peep or a bleep out of a single Blackberry or cellphone.

Nancy died on Oct. 2 after a long struggle against pancreatic cancer -- a feat in itself, because ''long struggle'' and ''pancreatic cancer'' are usually contradictory.

I call her Nancy because I'd known her for more than 10 years, first as a civic force and then as a friend. Former Assembly speaker Robert Hertzberg got smiles of recognition across Royce Hall when, in his remarks, he noted how many of us have opened our e-mail in the morning to find something from ''lovekidsla,''  Nancy's e-mail address.

''Pom Queen'' and philanthropist Lynda Resnick reminisced with humor about the first time she saw the petite, blond Nancy in the foyer of her house, and how she knew at once that they'd become great friends. LACMA director Michael Govan reflected on what so many had felt: Nancy's persuasive powers. In his case, she showed up on his doorstep and even followed him to Arizona to get him to leave his ''perfect'' life in New York to come to L.A. to head the museum.

And another speaker -- I didn't write down who -- pointed out that one of Nancy's great skills was being able to put forward an idea and not only get some powerful allies but convince them it had been their idea all along. Even Karl Rove, the speaker said, ended a meeting with Nancy believing that the concept of making foster kids' records electronic so they could be immediately accessible as they moved from foster home to foster home and school to school ... had been his own.

Children, art and music were her devotions, and almost every speaker emphasized that she made a national impact, from her United Friends of Children group and the Children's Action Network, which she helped to found, to serving on the President's Commission for Children.

And ranking above all of those pursuits, the audience heard time after time, was her family. Her three children by her first husband, entertainment executive Bob Daly, and her grandchildren listened to plaudit after plaudit, and added their own. Like how she didn't say a word when her daughter got a tattoo, or one son got his ear pierced. Lyricist/songwriter Carole Bayer Sager, now married to Bob Daly, remembered with humor one family dinner with Bob Daly at one end of the table and Nancy at the other -- an extended-family get-together..

The evening began with a slide show of photos of Nancy's life narrated by Alan Alda -- childhood pictures, wedding pictures, mom pictures, Hollywood pictures, pictures of her after her cancer treatment, when her fair, straight hair grew back in as curly as a lamb's. "Do you really like it?" she had asked me, after I told her how becoming it looked.

It ended with a video put together by Nancy's kids of her last days, as she traveled with them in an RV from a visit to John of God in New York, on a ''road trip'' on the way back to Los Angeles.

She died in St. Louis, just one day after a videotaped visit to her old New Jersey home, where she walked around in front of the clapboard house. It's a first home that looked a lot like her last home here in L.A. She reminisced on the tape about growing up sledding on the streets and getting fired from her job at an ice cream parlor for giving away the goodies to her friends.

Onstage, below a screen with a large black-and-white photograph of Nancy, were banks of flowers and a grand piano. Its purpose became clear when Sarah McLachlan walked out and slipped onto the piano bench, where she performed the achingly poignant ``[In the Arms of an] Angel.'' By the time she was finished, some in the audience were dabbing away tears, me among them.

Tenor Placido Domingo had hoped to be there but could not get away from singing commitments, so he sent a video tribute, in song and in words, to the opera-loving Nancy.

As for who was there -- as I said, Police Chief William Bratton and his wife, Rikki Klieman; council members Bernard Parks, Tom LaBonge (and their wives, Bobbie and Bridget,), Bill Rosendahl and Jan Perry, L.A. County Supervisor Zev Yaroslavsky. Hertzberg said he saw Mayor Antonio Villaraigosa, although I did not, but former Mayor Richard Riordan, Nancy's second husband, was there, and I think I did see Richard Zanuck come in.

Lyn and Norman Lear were there, and Robin Kramer, once the right-hand woman to both Villaraigosa and Riordan, and Nancy's right-hand woman, Rita Brown, who had broken her left foot a few days earlier, slipping in the rain as she worked on preparing Wednesday's tribute.

Also there were philanthropists Eli and Edye Broad and Peg Yorkin, and actor Michael York and his photographer-wife Pat, both of them members of the book group that Riordan and I began about 15 years ago. Nancy's friend Wallis Annenberg wasn't there, but her tribute to Nancy was a million-dollar donation to Nancy's children's cause.

And there was Luis. He works with chef Michelle Gan, who had dished up scores of dinners at Nancy's homes and her fund-raising events over the years. He hadn't known this was a memorial for Nancy until he showed up for work on Wednesday, he told me, and his eyes were filled with tears as he talked about her.

Cooking was one of the memories Nancy's daughter, Linda, shared with the hundreds. The Thanksgiving after cancer surgery, Nancy insisted on prepping the turkey all by herself, and stood in the kitchen making the stuffing and basting the bird -- with an IV line running in her arm.

Classic Nancy.

-- Patt Morrison

Inasmuch as the Los Angeles County Board of Supervisors seems incapable of embarrassment at its own actions, I’ll have to do the blushing by proxy.

My colleague Garrett Therolf is one of the two or three reporters left who regularly covers the five enormously powerful supervisors and county officialdom. As he reported, even those few are too many for the Supes: they’re being banished from the hallways and back rooms where they have been able to buttonhole the county officials and department heads who buzz about there.

The reason for the ban?  Those two or three reporters are creating human ‘’traffic jams.’’

The noive. The sheer brass.

The county’s backstage is chock-a-block with, as Garrett wrote, ‘’the lobbyists, union representatives and other advocates’’ to whom the memo did not apply....

The new LAPD headquarters won't be dedicated until later this month -- more about the name of the building in a bit -- but when it is, the first official shift to show up for work will see some sadly familiar names.

The identities of the 200-plus LAPD officers who've been killed in the line of duty over 102 years are graven on brass plaques in a 5.5-ton memorial wall dedicated Wednesday night; replicas of their badges fill cases that visitors will pass to walk into the new building. Well, not quite fill; on the memorial wall and in the badge cases, there's room left for more names, more badges, as will in time follow.

For decades, a memorial fountain outside Parker Center did the honors for the dead officers -- it was dedicated in 1971 by Richard Nixon's attorney general, John Mitchell, who later served prison time for the Watergate coverup.

But that monument fell to pieces when it was being moved to make way for a new jail. The Los Angeles Police Foundation raised nearly three-quarters of a million dollars for the new memorials. 

The reception and the speeches before the dedication had to be moved inside because of unexpected rain. It was, said departing chief William Bratton, as if the memorial had been ''washed by God.'' When the crowd moved outside for the final ceremonial, and the families of the dead officers laid white roses on the monument, the evening skies had cleared and, across First Street, City Hall looked like an enormous white votive candle.

The dedication is the latest in a whole lot of events jamming into October before Bratton lays down his shield at the end of the month; the formal dedication of the building is on October 24.

Within the building's half-million square feet is a huge space for the COMPSTAT data tracking and management system Bratton introduced and swears by, and the tenth-floor offices taking the place of the sixth-floor command staff offices in Parker Center. Those halls are hung with pictures from the department and the city's history: Charles Manson in custody, actress Thelma Todd slumped in death in her car, a copy of a bank robber's cheery stick-up note, a somber black-and-white photo of investigators reenacting the ''Onion Field'' murder of officer Ian Campbell.

The chief's suite, with its own terrace, has a huge LAPD badge with four stars instead of a badge number carved into the double wooden doors of the chief's inner office, soon to be occupied by ... well, that's another big end-of-the-year event for the department: the naming of a successor to Bratton. Of the two dozen applicants for the job, about six will be interviewed by a civilian panel, which will give the names of three finalists to Mayor Antonio Villaraigosa, who is expected to decide by mid-November which one will walk through those double doors as the next LAPD chief.

At least that successor will have a name. I'm still thinking the new building needs a good handle. The old building was called the Police Administration Building for its first eleven years, until Police Chief William Parker died suddenly, and the city put his name on it. "Parker Center'' has some history and resonance; even if you don't like that history, it just sounds less drab and cumbersome than ''LAPD headquarters,'' which is why we need to do better than a name that sounds like it came out of a kit. C'mon, LA -- New York has ''One Police Plaza,'' and even though it sounds like a name dreamed up by a studio production design team, it's a whole lot better than ''police headquarters.''

Mayor Tom Bradley was a cop himself, but with his war with Chief Daryl Gates during his mayorship, he's  too contentious a figure to have his name on the LAPD's building. ''Parker Center'' is out of the question; the city would sooner name its new edifice after Pretty Boy Floyd. It's possible that in time, the city might name the building after Bratton, but I expect City Hall is pretty wary of going that route.

In the meantime, you know that if the city doesn't come up with a name, Angelenos will, on their own, find some nickname, and nicknames, once they stick, are almost impossible to get un-stuck.

Suggestions?

-- Patt Morrison

Photo: LAPD Captain Daryl Russell examines the Los Angeles Police Foundation Memorial to Fallen Officers in August. Credit: Robert Gauthier / Los Angeles Times

Maybe you wouldn't think a photographer whose subject matter was mid-century modern California architecture could become a cultural icon of immense appeal.

You'd think wrong. If it surprises you, it certainly surprised him. At Julius Shulman's memorial Sunday at the Getty Center, Shulman fans from California Supreme Court chief justice Ron George to actress Lily Tomlin and DA-turned-photographer Gil Garcetti paid their respects to the man who died in July at age 98 after a career of re-introducing architectural California to itself through the dazzling clarity of his camera. His lapidary photographs of homes by renowned architects, in the Hollywood Hills and Palm Springs especially, prove that black and white photography is an exceptional genre with composition and esthetics of its own -- not just something that photographers did while they waited around for someone to invent color film.

In the way of these things, it was more celebration than mourning, especially at the Getty, where his archival work, according to Getty Research Institute director Andrew Perchuk, is so popular and so often requested that the Getty has had to reconfigure its policies about reprints and requests.

Julius was a character -- charming, focused, occasionally cantankerous -- ''a handful,'' said his daughter, Judy Shulman McKee. But he was always mindful of how his seminal images of California houses crafted a larger message and image to the world, and cemented LA as a place where the architectural gold standard is, unlike other cities, is most often found in private houses, not public buildings.

McKee talked about her father's relentless optimism and how it reminded her of her dog, who always sat looking at the doorknob, expecting that at any minute the door would open. For Shulman, it did. Architect William Krisel, assigned to work as Shulman's assistant photographing Richard Neutra houses in the 1930s, assured the hundreds in the auditorium that Shulman invariably made the houses look even better in photographs than they did in real life.

And one speaker recalled a recent event at the Arclight -- that's the Cinerama Dome to longtime Angelenos -- featuring that dealt with the work of the LA Conservancy. Shulman announced, ''This book is crap.'' A bit later, at the same event, LA Conservancy supporter Ben Stiller was asked to name his favorite photographer. ''Well,'' he said, ''it WAS Julius Shulman.''

I interviewed Shulman for print and broadcast several times, and last saw him at at the opening of a Gagosian Gallery showing of the work of the French photographer Francois Marie Banier. That was almost exactly two years before Shulman died, but from his wheelchair, he was, as always ,trenchant and peppery and cracking wise.

When a man gets to be as old as Shulman was, you tend to assume he'll just go on forever. And as Sunday's ceremony affirmed, in the most important of ways, he will.

-- Patt Morrison