It seems to me not so long ago when most every Second World War veteran I met looked hale enough to still wield an M-1 Garand or drive a Sherman tank.

But that era, however near it might feel to me, has passed us all by, inevitable as the tides.

There is nothing to be gained from pretending otherwise.

Although I’ll bet some of those aging fellows still get their buck.

The math is simple, and blunt.

The war ended in August 1945.

Even allowing for those soldiers and sailors who turned the military’s flank, as regards the minimum enlistment age, it’s unlikely that any veteran is younger than 82.

Which means even those men, who probably took up a weapon before they ever handled a shaving razor, have already been defying the actuarial tables for all of half a decade.

The inventor who figures out how to manufacture snow tires with retractable studs is going to make a real pile.

In the meantime we’re left to argue about saving lives or keeping Oregon’s highways rut-free.

The debate over the use of studded tires is hardly a new one, of course.

Every now and again critics dredge up ODOT’s estimate that studs cause $40 million in damage to the state’s roads each year. Studded tires are blamed specifically for wearing ruts into the asphalt.

The current anti-stud spokesman is Jeff Bernards.

He wants to get an initiative on the ballot in 2012 that would let Oregon voters decide whether to ban studded tires.

“Our state is in trouble financially and I think it’s a small sacrifice to ask that handful of people to forego studded tire use,” Bernards said.

We’re not sure what, or who, he means by “handful.”

Finally we can put some dollar figures on what Oregon ranchers stand to lose because their Legislature keeps failing to do something about wolves.

Or perhaps our lawmakers don’t follow the news and so aren’t aware that lobos, some with a taste for lambs, have returned to the state after being absent, at least officially, for more than half a century.

But then again the Legislature did accomplish some vital business when it convened for a special session in February.

For instance, specifying that foreign exchange students who live in a dorm run by the school district are residents of that district.

Nice of them to clear that up.

President Obama’s seemingly sudden affinity for offshore oil drilling makes tempting fodder for charges that the president is a hypocrite.

But we will resist the urge.

Not that it’s a particularly strong urge, come to that.

The reality, at any rate, is rather more complicated than those “Obama’s a flip-flopper” allegations going around.

Yes, the president did accuse John McCain, during the 2008 campaign, of pandering to conservative Republicans by calling for Congress to overturn the federal moratorium on offshore drilling.

But Obama also pointed out that doing away with the moratorium then, during the $4 gas crisis, probably would have little immediate benefit.

And he was right.

But he was also wrong.

We must use the Earth’s resources

To the editor:

Some people seem to think the worst is over, and I hope they are right, but I’m very skeptical. There appears to be very few people in government who have any concept of what has caused our problem. As a result, most government actions have had very little benefit to the overall problems; in fact many groups are working hard on projects that will hurry the breakdown of what’s left of our economy.

To get down to basics, we cannot continue to spend more than we earn forever. Printing money won’t solve the problems, it only postpones them. Someday there will be a day of reckoning.

I keep waiting for Charles Manson to get involved in politics.

Yes, the old lunatic is still around, although he doesn’t make the news much these days.

Manson is 75 now. And judging by the most recent photograph I’ve seen, he probably has to strain to achieve anything like the wild-eyed glare that earned him such infamy during his murderous heyday, when even a president, without provocation, once mentioned him during a press conference.

Yet the Manson mystique — his brand name, if you will — could still carry a certain cachet, I think, if only Charlie would cast his lot with one side or other of the political spectrum.

As a villain, Manson has few peers among the living or the dead.

And villains have rarely been as valuable, when deployed as political pawns, as they are today.

Hitler, for instance (who was, by the way, Manson’s favorite world leader), is launched so often as a propaganda missile that it’s hard for somebody who is at all deficient in partisan zealotry to figure out just whose side the fuehrer was actually on.

Or would be on were he still alive.

We had a feeling those “Furlough Fridays” for state workers would devolve into a fiasco.

It looks as though our skepticism was well-founded.

The idea, promoted by Gov. Ted Kulongoski, was that the state could save $40.8 million over two years by requiring 26,500 state employees to take 10 days off, without pay.

But rather that mimicking private businesses, most of which require employees to treat furlough days as unpaid holidays that must be scheduled in advance, the state mandated that most affected workers stay home on pre-determined Fridays.

As a result, many state offices, including DMVs, have been closed on the three “Furlough Fridays” since the program started last October.