My television pretty much stays dark during the week, so it took until the weekend for me to twig to it.

The Sci Fi channel has vanished.

The same shows were there, but the name wasn't.

In its place is something called the Syfy channel.

Whose dopey, dumbed-down idea was this, anyway? 

Do the network honchos think this is the next, hip iteration of the texting-literate generation? Or that we R 2 dum 2 no betr?

Sci fi. the venerable shorthand for science fiction -- a noble genre of literature and art and entertainment in its own right, with giants like Arthur C. Clarke, Ray Bradbury, Ursula K. Le Guin -- has been reduced by this phonetic and simple-minded un-word to something that looks like it's traded on the stock market.

I read that the execs who thought of this say it will allow them a ''broader range of content'' in programming. Terrifying words, those. Don't think for a minute that they mean more original programming, or more film classics like ''2001: A Space Odyssey'' and ``Blade Runner'' and even ''Barbarella.'' More likely infomercials. The slick thinking must go that spelling it  ''Syfy'' absolves them of any responsibility to the spirit of ''sci fi.''

The Syfy channel exhorts me to ''imagine greater.''

All right, I will:

I am imagining Rod Serling siccing the Kanamits on whoever thought this was a great idea. ``Let's do lunch,''  they'll say. ``You be lunch.''

In today's Los Angeles Times editorial pages, race. Aren't we past all that? No. Even if the U.S. Supreme Court wants us to be.

But it's not clear how long this conservative court will hold off. In the Austin case, the court noted ominously that "we are now a very different Nation" and hinted that a new look at the constitutional issues surrounding race might be coming. In the New Haven case, Justice Antonin Scalia wrote that the court "merely postpones the evil day" when these issues will be taken up.

Your editorial writers also find themselves wondering what the folks at the Orange County Museum of Art were thinking when they flouted art-world protocol and did a quickie and quasi-secret sale of California Impressionist works.

Though OCMA officials may have meant well -- and Szakacs is a respected director who deserves credit for returning more than 3,000 works to the Laguna museum -- they have done their institution few favors with the sale. At least one museum in addition to Laguna's is miffed at not being offered a chance to outbid the mysterious buyer.

Lots to think about on the Op-Ed side today. Start with Times columnist Meghan Daum's look at Sarah Palin's resigna... -- no, wait! Come back! This is new and different! There's some good stuff here -- Daum checks out Palin through the lens of her Christian conservative Palin-fan friend, and offers some insight:

* Photo: Karen Bleier / AFP / Getty Images

Here's a look at the blogosphere's reactions to the work of the Times' Opinion Manufacturing Division this week:

The Real Clear World blog responds to Andrew Bacevich's op-ed on the White House's overlooking of strategy in Afghanistan and Iraq in favor of tactics:

Musings, a blog discussing culture, politics, and education, took offense at the Opinion L.A piece about Amnesty International's recent report that accused Israel of "wanton destruction" and Hamas of "war crimes" in the December conflict in the Gaza Strip. The writer disagreed with the post's assertion that both sides were blamed, saying that the report's full text put much more blame on Israel for the war.

The Oy Vay blog, featuring the voice of a self-proclaimed Jewish conservative on various issues, liked Patt Morrison's post on her disgust with the cash-strapped city of Los Angeles' commitment to using taxpayer money to pay for the security detail for Michael Jackson's funeral.

And the Opinion L.A. poll urging fans to boo Manny's return to Dodger Stadium on July 16 made it onto the Major League Baseball's Fanhouse blog:

Pamela Geller's Atlas Shrugged blog praised John Bolton's op-ed piece that stated the only way to fix Iran is to institute regime change in the country:

The War Victims Monitor blog re-posted, sans comment, Ahmed Rashid's op-ed on Pakistan's more serious commitment to getting rid of the Taliban and its influences, and the need for strong international support to complete a successful campaign against the militants.

Ron Radosh of Pajamas Media was not a fan of the L.A. Times' coverage of I.F. Stone, both in the op-ed section and the book reviews, implying that the paper overlooked the unsavory parts of the journalist and radical's past.

The Guardian UK's Haroon Siddique included Michael Carey's op-ed on the beginning of Sarah Palin's end in a wrap-up of skeptical articles regarding the Alaska governor's motives for resigning abruptly.

Finally, a few blogs picked up on Jonah Goldberg's column about the Washington Post salon, which charged $25,000 a ticket for dinner at publisher Katharine Weymouth's home and promised networking with top Obama administration officials and the Post reporters who cover them.

The Open Secrets blog linked to Goldberg's piece in their rehashing of the Post's response that claimed they would amend any business practices that weren't clear.

And Chicago Boyz, a blog composed of many different voices, said the following about WaPo after linking to the column:

The Opinion Manufacturing Division squeezes one more piece out of the Michael Jackson Farewell Tour: columnist Tim Rutten's rumination on celebrity. He contrasted Jackson's recent treatment with that of Sarah Palin (Jacko and "Caribou Barbie" in a single piece: double columnist gold!), arguing that the alleged sins of the former were washed away even as the latter was overwhelmed by the scrutiny. My own sense is that Jackson's death actually led to two competing lines of commentary about the man: he was a genius (the sentimental meme), and he was a pedophile (the "you can't libel the dead" meme), as famously enunciated by Rep. Peter King). That's not washing away sins, it more like carving them into his grave marker -- albeit underneath the "King of Pop" banner and the silhouette of Jackson hovering on his toes.

Elsewhere on the Op-Ed page, columnist Doyle McManus says don't hold your breath for another economic stimulus package. And economists Alan J. Auerbach and William G. Gale fret about the fiscal problems that are likely to be caused by the growing federal budget deficits:

The deficits projected over the next 10 years will accelerate our arrival at a debt-to-GDP ratio that for most countries would signal impending fiscal collapse. Indeed, Britain, with a debt-to-GDP ratio not appreciably worse than ours, was just warned by Standard & Poor's that its creditworthiness might be downgraded. The United States has traditionally enjoyed a favored status in this regard, as the supplier of the dollar, the world's reserve currency, and as a perceived haven in times of financial stress. But for how long?

In the editorial stack, the board expresses chagrin about the recent return to prominence of Mexico's Institutional Revolutionary Party, whose corrupt dominance of Mexican politics in the 20th century were so damaging to that country. (And by the way, how can you be both "institutional" and "revolutionary"? By advocating change so gradual, no one notices?) It urges the new General Motors, which may emerge from bankruptcy this week, to take lessons in openness and innovation from the computer industry. And it suggests a simple solution to the funding problem at the Maxine Waters Employment Preparation Center in Watts, which has run afoul of a new House Appropriations Committee dictum against grants for projects named after sitting members of Congress (in this case, Democratic Rep. Maxine Waters of Los Angeles): the center should drop Waters from its name.

A name change would involve some cost and inconvenience, but the investment would qualify the jobs center for funding now and in the future, while preserving a congressional rule that sets reasonable limits on pork. When Waters retires from public office, the program can honor her permanently.

Credit: Patrick O'Connor / Special to The Times

Today's memorial service for Michael Jackson at the privately owned Staples Center reminds The Times editorial board of a sad fact of life in Los Angeles: It's a city without a public square. Though the backers of LA Live once promised that the downtown entertainment mall would become L.A.'s version of Times Square, the fact remains that it's a private space whose owners can bar the public anytime they choose.

We also weigh in on President Obama's trip to Russia, which isn't expected to accomplish much -- but even a small thaw in relations between the two countries, and the modest improvement represented by the nuclear weapons pact concluded Monday, is better than the chilly status quo.

And we ponder the lessons to be learned from the example of former Defense Secretary Robert McNamara, who died Monday at 93. Though many see parallels between the mistakes made in Iraq and the mistakes made by McNamara in Vietnam, we think the larger lesson is that using yesterday's solutions to today's problems is often the pathway to failure.

Over on the opposite page, columnist Jonah Goldberg thinks all the sturm und drang over the canceled "salons" by the Washington Post, in which lobbyists were invited to pay heavily to attend get-togethers with the newspaper's journalists and top politicians, amounts to little more than posing. After all, many publications offer similar meet-and-greet opportunities, Goldberg says.

The hand-wringing over genetically modified foods, meanwhile, reminds author Tom Standage of another food-related hysteria from a few centuries ago -- over the potato. When the tubers were first discovered in the New World, Europeans feared they were a dangerous, unholy poison. They got over it, just as they'll probably eventually get over their irrational fears about improved crops.

And psychiatry professor Sander L. Gilman cautions against jumping to conclusions about Michael Jackson's cosmetic surgery. True, the King of Pop clearly was fond of surgical reshaping, but that doesn't necessarily indicate self-loathing.

* Illustration by Bob Daly / For the Times

No. Nonononononononononono. Ab. So. Lute. Ly. No.

The city of Los Angeles is a half-billion dollars in the hole. Layoffs. Furloughs. Potholes unfilled, trees untrimmed. Animal services, the ethics commission, whack whack whack.

So why, why, in any rational universe, should the city of L.A. pick up the policing tab for Michael Jackson's obsequies at Staples Center?

For the Lakers' victory parade -- certainly a more civically significant event than the excesses that follow Jackson in death as they did in life -- the city found private donors because of the pushback of public opinion over subsidizing the athletic triumph of, as they say, millionaires working for billionaires.
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So why is there now any thought at all of dipping into a city fund for ''extraordinary events'' to subsidize this one -- which, if a ''public viewing'' becomes part of the memorial, will turn the whole thing into a Michael Jackson corpse carnival?

An earthquake is an extraordinary event. But Michael Jackson's family deciding, gee, let's invite the world (or at least something above 17,000 members of the world) to mourn our relative -- extraordinary to them, and to Jackson fans, certainly, but hardly enough to stick it to the taxpayers of LA.

Council member Jan Perry said the city would ''deeply appreciate'' any private citizen coming forward to pick up the tab. ``Any company, entity, individual who would have such great love, the city would welcome the support,” she told the New York Times.

I nominate the Jackson family to pay the bill, perhaps going halfsies with AEG, which owns Staples (and was the promoter on Jackson's planned comeback concerts). The Jackson estate stands to benefit enormously from this. The undoubted live, free, worldwide news coverage of the memorial, the frenzy of 10, 20, 30 times more fans clamoring outside than can possibly cram into Staples, will generate mind-boggling sales of MJ music. The Staples name will figure into every video clip.

So why should the Jacksons' private arrangement with Staples to commemorate the passing of a man who was almost pathologically averse in life to the public's gaze become, in the end, a public burden?

Hint: that's a rhetorical question.

Photo: Kevork Djansezian / Getty Images

I'm not a doctor, and the guy who tried to revive Michael Jackson is. But it's hard to avoid having questions about how Dr. Conrad Murray went about administering CPR to the pop star.

Why did he perform the chest compressions while Jackson was still in bed rather than move him to a firm surface? On a bed, the victim is simply pressed deeper into the mattress. According to reports, Murray tried to overcome this by bracing Jackson's back with one hand, which left the doctor only one hand to do compressions. Usually, the rescuer uses two hands, interlocked, pressing down with the heel of the lower hand. It's hard work to get a compression deep enough.

Murray also, according to his lawyers, performed the technique for 25 minutes or so before having an ambulance called. But according to the CPR classes I've taken, the procedure seldom revives a patient; it's more a technique to keep blood flowing until an ambulance arrives. Rescuers also generally aren't supposed to try to do CPR for such a long period even if an ambulance isn't immediately forthcoming. They're supposed to show someone else how to do it as they do it, and have that person spell them for awhile. It's exhausting to give CPR properly, and studies show that rescuers, without noticing, start to let up on the speed or depth of the compressions after a few minutes.

It's early for anyone to be passing judgment on how things were handled in Jackson's particular situation, but it would be helpful to have some top experts come forward to comment on how people should handle CPR in an emergency. Given the phenomenal interest and concern in this case, doctors and public-health officials have been presented with a teachable moment that might be used to save other lives.

Photo: A July 2006 photo of Dr. Conrad Murray. Credit: AP Photo / Houston Chronicle

The long-distance reporting about Michael Jackson’s death, and the swarm of press people soon descending from elsewhere, inevitably made for some goofy geography. The mansion Jackson rented was in Holmby Hills, but who in most of the rest of the world knows Holmby Hills?

So the exact location of the Jackson house that appeared on the TV screens and Web sites ranged and changed, almost all over the map. It was the broadcast version of rushing frantically, like Keystone Kops, from Bel-Air to Hollywood to Los Angeles to … what’s that place again? Holmby Hills?

The default assumption by some out-of-towners seemed to be that a) all rich people live in Beverly Hills, and b) Michael Jackson was rich, therefore c) Michael Jackson lived in Beverly Hills.

L.A. is so vast that even some residents admit they don't know what city they live in. Even harder for outsiders to appreciate is just how much territory L.A. actually encompasses, from poor neighborhoods of the northeast end of the San Fernando Valley, to the harbor at San Pedro, to Holmby Hills, which is just one more neighborhood -- albeit a very rich one -- within the limits of the City of Los Angeles. Would it help to know that Walt Disney lived there? Or this hint -- the Playboy Mansion is there. But Beverly Hills, its own city, is not part of the city of L.A. Perfectly clear now?

Our elusive geography makes for some amusing mistakes. After the space shuttle landed at Edwards Air Force base in October 1994, the New York Times headline was "After Detour to California, Shuttle Returns to Earth." The newspaper’s magazine asked a month later whether the new place to rival New York’s 42^nd Street as a world capital could be ‘’the intersection of the Hollywood and Santa Monica Freeways.’’ Maybe -- if that intersection existed. (The closest you could suggest to it is the East L.A. interchange, where, somewhere in the complex, the 101 Freeway slides into the Golden State/Santa Ana Freeway, the 5, as the San Bernardino Freeway takes flight to the east -- but not to the west, to Santa Monica.)

The most egregious Michael Jackson geo-error of the story: A colleague watching one of those instant canned network documentaries the night of Jackson’s death heard Neverland Ranch, in Santa Barbara County, relocated by the magic of network television to ‘"Northern California."

As the California State Assembly adjourned around 11 a.m. today (that's, what, a 3 hour workday?) with no apparent progress made in crafting a budget the Governor would sign by the Tuesday deadline, Assemblymen Sandré Swanson (D-Oakland) and Mike Davis (D-L.A.) suggested it was time to buckle down and figure this out.

Er, no, wait. They stood to honor Michael Jackson as the King of Pop that he truly was, and Farrah Fawcett as every man's favorite pin-up girl, before taking the rest of the day off:

It's all well and good to honor notable Californians who have passed away. Still, I would have preferred to hear such tributes at the end of a normal business day -- or, in the case of this group of legislators, an extraordinary day -- in which some movement were made toward enacting a new budget. Especially considering that the alternative is California issuing IOUs for the next fiscal year.

Photo: Assemblywoman Noreen Evans, D-Santa Rosa, chair of the budget conference committee, left, consoles State Sen. Denise Ducheny, D-San Diego, chair of the Senate budget committee after the Senate fell short of the necessary two-thirds vote to approve a package of budget related bills at the Capitol in Sacramento, Calif., Thursday, June 25, 2009. (AP Photo/Rich Pedroncelli)

Allow me to post a column I wrote back when Michael Jackson was, as the Sixth Amendment of the Constitution says is his right, ''confronted with the witnesses against him'' in the child molestation trial in Santa Maria. That was a little more than four years ago -- March 23, 2005, to be exact.

Remembering everything you've written is beyond most of us who write for a living, but this one had kept haunting the halls of memory, and came back to me again today, as I thought over what sort of man it was who had just died, a man who had been both so public and so elusive.

California Dream's Peaks and Valleys

Michael Jackson, like so many others, paid dearly for a Golden State utopia.

Could there be a bigger story under the great big California sun than the trial of Michael Jackson?

Could anything top the topsy-turvy fortunes and misfortunes of a brilliant pop star who has sold about as many albums as there are people living in this country? A black man with moon-white skin? A former child star accused of child molesting? A multimillionaire with penury said to be snapping at his heels?

Yes, absolutely. This latest trial of the century will also pass off the front pages in time. Jackson will go to prison or go free. If reports of his financial straits are founded in truth, he may go broke too. And that is where Jackson becomes a part of this larger story, the story of California, the blank-slate state that has room enough for every utopian and dystopian who has a notion to put himself at the center of his own universe -- and room enough to swallow them all up again.

Michael Jackson and William Randolph Hearst would understand each other. Hearst was an amateur tap-dancer, and I imagine a moonwalking, tap-dancing pas de deux with the Chief and the King of Pop. Hearst's San Simeon land holdings were nearly 100 times larger than Jackson's, almost a quarter-million acres, but each dreamily called his place a "ranch."

Both would speak the language of acquisitiveness: Jackson totted up a $6-million tab in a televised shopping spree in Las Vegas; Hearst emptied the great houses of Europe one linenfold-paneled chamber at a time. My favorite Hearst story has him lusting after some antique he saw in a magazine, sending his buyer out to track it down and bag it. Some time later, the buyer reports back: "Mr. Hearst, you bought that three years ago."

The newspaper genius and the musical genius would be in perfect sync with their determination to be creator and master of their utopian kingdoms, to create a bubble of perfection amid vast imperfection, insulated from the buffeting world by a moat of money.

Hearst spent millions on La Cuesta Encantada (Enchanted Hill), and it came close to beggaring him. Jackson now may find Neverland beyond even his enormous means.

Neither man invented the California utopia; they only planted their flags on its peaks. Nearly five centuries ago, in about 1510, a Spanish writer who had never seen the place willed into being a paradise ruled by an Amazon queen in golden armor and guarded by flying, male-flesh-eating griffins. "Las Sergas de Esplandian" wielded so powerful an influence on poor old Don Quixote that his friends burned it because of the "mischief" it wrought by giving wings to the old man's dreams.

California, half a millennium later, is still an assembly-kit paradise to every newcomer, from the first little R-1 tract house toehold to the topmost tower of San Simeon. California history would not exist without the handiwork of its extreme dreamers, secular and spiritual. Death Valley Scotty and his desert compound ... Simon Rodia's scrap-heap turrets, the Watts Towers ... Jim Jones and the exaltation and isolation of People's Temple before it moved fatally to South America ... the Topanga nudist colony founded by a refugee from Chicago winters ... the Llano del Rio cooperative in the Antelope Valley, briefly home to Aldous Huxley, who wrote of it as a place where "everything that ought not to have been done was systematically done."

A prosecutor has said Jackson is arguably "on the precipice of bankruptcy," a "spendaholic" with a billionaire's tastes and a millionaire's income. A bankruptcy on Jackson's scale would not be a mere reckoning of red ink and black. It would be a magnificent bankruptcy, a not-a-whimper-but-a-bang bankruptcy.

California history is full of those too: Oliver Morosco's, the theater impresario whose name burned in lights and who was in the end run over by a Los Angeles streetcar, with barely enough money in his pocket to pay a streetcar fare. Thomas Thorkildsen's, the early 20th century "Borax king" whose cleaning products were in every kitchen. Carol Burnett would later buy one of his houses, and Brad Pitt bought another, but Thorkildsen died a pensioner in a La Puente nursing home.

Alleged child molesters have no doubt come to the bar of justice in Santa Maria's courthouse before, and they will no doubt again. What becomes of Michael Jackson at trial will occupy a footnote in criminal history, but in his reach and his grasp at that singular utopia of his own invention, he will have written another chapter in the saga of California, a place that exalts and destroys with equal dispassion.

Top photo: Michael Jackson, arriving at the courthouse in Santa Maria in March 2005, Credit: AP Photo / Kimberly White, Pool. Bottom photo: William Randolph Hearst in 1935. Credit: AP Photo.