“Men who write minutes, who make professional assessments, who are never attacked face to face, who dwell in the Sargasso Sea of the Civil Service and who love the seaweed that conceals them.”— William Connor, on the topic of Civil Servants 

Government sometimes does things right and government sometimes does things wrong. Quite wrong.  I remember a while back, 100 houses in Baghdad were accidentally bulldozed. Not by the U.S., but by Brazil. You see, there’s a place (at least there used to be) called Baghdad, Brazil.

Of course, the 100 houses the South American government accidentally bulldozed were in Baghdad, Brazil.

It was a simple tale of governmental ineptitude. A mob of angry villagers marched on their state capitol to complain. It seems a judge had ordered the demolition of several illegal lean-tos in a place called Formigueiro. Police and construction workers manning 70 bulldozers went to the wrong village of Baghdad five miles away and pretty much flattened everything. Adding insult to injury, the cops reportedly beat the tar out of several Baghdadians.

We had our own government bulldozing here in Santa Clarita about 40 years ago. Granted. It was on a smaller scale.

There used to be this lovely grandmama named Ida Edwards who lived in Val Verde. Like many of the older houses out in the uncountable finger canyons of the SCV, her house was put together in frontier-fashion, a right angle here, a not-so-right-angle there.

Somehow, she was lit up on L.A. County’s radar and a flock of building inspectors plagued her for many years. Her sons and family worked hard to finally bring her home up to code and at long last, she had the blessing of the county.

NOT having the blessing of the county can be a bad, bad thing. Poor Ida. In her case, HAVING the blessing of the county was a bad, bad thing.

Ida went off to visit relatives in Oklahoma for a few weeks. She came home to a scraped yard. L.A. County sent in a couple of bulldozers and dump trucks, leveled her house with everything in it and carted away the rubble.

Her family produced all the proper paperwork for the improvements. A spokesman for the county issued a rather braindead apology.

Now no. Don’t get all upset. It wasn’t all bad.

The Boy Scouts quickly donated the 70-something grandmother a pup tent to sleep in.

I’m sure the government was horrified, and, at the same time, being the government, frozen. Supervisor Warren Dorn stepped in. The much-maligned Newhall Land & Farming Co. and The then-Mighty Signal immediately organized a charity and built Ida a new house.

With all the right permits, of course.

And, looking on the bright side, at least when Ida returned home to find her shaved lot, there weren’t any police waiting to beat her up..

John Boston was named Best Humor Columnist in America by the National Society of Newspaper Columnists. Again. This goes along with his 117 other major national, regional and California awards for writing excellence. Look for his new web page, thebostonreport.com, coming, fingers crossed, next week! (OK. Cripes. We’ve been working on all sorts of stuff and life’s happening and the new and improved Boston Report IS coming out right around the corner.)