I climbed the hill Thursday evening to watch the sun slink down over the earth’s limb. Santana conditions blazed record breaking heat and the hot wind blared off the blue body of the sea as the orange fire sunk into the water. The temperature inversion over the channel projected an inverted reflection of Santa Barbara island in the sky, like an upside down castle in the air. I’d not seen the like of it before. And I wondered about the other inversions, less rare, that we see everyday.

We see the upside-down mirror effect in the people charged with our children’s education, who are paid less than a delivery truck driver hauling 20,000 pounds of hair scrunchies, and that men who bounce balls make enough in a year to build four new schools.

What inverted sense of self-importance is it about federally funded artists who believe that the taxpayers should subsidize their tawdry filth? The Brooklyn Museum of Art has had its funding suspended by the City because Mayor Giuliani doesn’t believe the government should sponsor blasphemous content. Not that there’s anything inherently wrong with blasphemy, so long as you or I aren’t footing the bill for the snook cocking. At issue is $7.5 million in public funding. At question is an exhibition at the Museum which includes a black Virgin slathered with elephant shit surrounded by photos of naked butts cut from pornographic magazines. Dissected animals suspended in formaldehyde and a frozen head made from nine pints of the artist’s blood round out this elegant tour de farce. As with all slight-of-hand misdirection, the Museum directors and the “artists” are crying censorship and First Amendment rights. The First Amendment to the Constitution protects the creation of moronic banality, but it doesn’t say taxpayers are responsible for paying for it.

Inversion or conversion? For those of you who may have missed the news from outer space this week, the burn-up of the Mars Climate Orbiter, lost because it plunged too deep into the Ares atmosphere, was due to a tatty little math error. The kind of math error that made you smack yourself in the forehead in junior high algebra. Lockheed Martin provided systems parameters in feet, JPL thought they were in meters. Tiny little discrepancies like that add up over a 461 million mile flight. But instead of you missing an A because of your little slip up, planetary science has been docked $125 million.

As regards the inversion of diversion, the Compton Cricket Club was one for two, besting a team of homeless from Charing Cross, but losing to a Northern Ireland civil service squad at Hambledon. The match against the Windsor Castle staff was rained out. The Compton (yes, THAT Compton) team, Homies and Popz, is composed of former gang members and the homeless, all of whom for the first time wore the same colors: white.

The In Version of tort these days in California has the distraught now being able to sue gun manufacturers for crimes committed with their product. The California Supreme Court has okayed a suit by the relatives of 8 people slain in a San Francisco law office in 1996. I predict that in the near future, you will be able to sue Sears and Black & Decker for pain and suffering when you hit mash your thumbnail with a hammer.

Retro reversion in the city of Santa Monica has brought back Muscle Beach. Just against the old pier. Muscle Beach, born in the Depression and popularized in the late 1940’ and ‘50’s, was the haunt of Jack LaLanne and Steve Reeves, and spawned a generation of Charles Atlas wanna-be’s before the city evicted the weightlifters, posers and gymnasts in 1958. What was once a tourist draw, then thought to be a nuisance is now seen as a tourist draw, mostly because of the popularity of the Venice version, a couple of miles south on the sand. And so part of a $10 million beach front redevelopment bond has put back the sand pits, the rings and the weights, showing us once again that yesterday’s aversion is today’s reversion.