THE BLUNDER OF IT ALL

Is there anybody out there who hasn't pulled a real bonehead move every so often? I mean a real beaut, a whopper of a mistake (first marriages don't count, that's only practice.). Sure, we've all been there, even the geniuses who built the Hubble Telescope and sent it into space to take all those great pictures of the Universe we keep seeing in magazines and on the internet. When they first sent it up, they realized they had installed the lens backwards and had to send up a guy with a tool kit to flip it around. Boy, his bill must have been pretty steep, with probably a nice tip thrown in to keep the snarky comments to himself. So even to the smartest among us, these things happen.

Mistakes are part of life. Usually they wreak havoc in our lives but once in a great while, they work out just fine. One that worked out quite nicely is in Italy. Would anybody ever go out of their way to visit The Tower of Pisa? Hell, no! Not when there's so much else to see in Italy. But you make a fundamental engineering mistake and Bingo, you've got the world famous tourist attraction The Leaning Tower of Pisa. And it's handily located a not-too-long tour bus ride across the top of the boot of Italy to their other great mistake, Venice, the city with canals for streets that tourists just have to see before it inevitably sinks beneath the waves of the Adriatic Sea one of these days.

Built atop 118 small islands, it wasn't meant to be such a watery place but the engineers apparently neglected to factor in the laws of gravity, the nature of the underlying soil and the corrosive workings of the tides of a major body of water. The city as the world knows it today was built after the Roman Empire and their superb architects and engineers went south, otherwise it would just be another quaint Italian city that wasn't half flooded and sinking a few inches a year and as such would not be able to compete with the grandeur of Rome, Florence, Naples and Genoa for the tourist dollar. But let the place start to sink, flood the streets with sea water, add some singing Gondoliers and voila, you've got Venice, a must-see romantic destination raking in the dough.

The Great Wall of China is another huge mistake that is paying off big time centuries later with heavy tourist traffic. Stretching 4,000 miles long and built over a thousand year period starting in the 6th century B.C., The Great Wall was designed by various Chinese Emperors to keep out Mongol invaders. That didn't work out so well for China as Mongols over the centuries pretty much invaded, pillaged and looted China at will, much to the chagrin of the various Chinese Emperors and really pissing off the non-royal Chinese workers who spent untold thousands of lifetimes building the damned thing. But there it is, the only man-made object visible from outer space, and a huge mistake.

Then there's mistakes that don't work out so well. Take New Orleans, for example, one of America's great and most unique cities. Well before Hurricane Katrina tried drowning it and President Bush the Younger (speaking of huge mistakes) tried to declare it the Venice of the South, New Orleans was struck by another devastating storm. The year was 1721 and it was still a relatively small settlement under French control. When the town was destroyed, the governor of the colony, a Frenchmen with the impressive name of Jean-Baptiste Le Moyne de Bienville, showed himself to have not so impressive decision skills when he ignored the urgent pleas of everybody else that lived there to rebuild New Orleans on higher ground right nearby. He figured that he had the longest name and so the decision was his to make and New Orleans has been living behind levees ever since, just waiting for the Gulf of Mexico to engulf it. So much for impressive names. It's a better deal to settle for impressive common sense any day of the week.

So, be thankful that the blunders we make are not of the leaning tower variety or the huge-mistake-visible-from-outer-space category, to say nothing of building a couple of cities destined to be drowned sooner or later. Okay, so you drank too much at the Christmas party and told your boss what you really think of him. Big deal! There's other jobs out there. So what if you thought it would be a great idea to get the name "Spike" tattooed on your butt and your husband Fred isn't so crazy about it? Happens to the best of us. And that time you found out that the captain of the football team was every bit as tough as he looked? Well, that was all part of the learning process in life's rich pageant, and you learned to keep your big mouth shut too, didn't you? Stands to reason, what with your jaws being wired together for 3 months, no? Well, at least we didn't put the lens in backwards on a multi-billion dollar space telescope. Ah, the blunder of it all!