How can you tell that your co-worker has been to a Tea Party rally?

-- His cubicle smells like pork rinds and beer.
-- He uses beef jerky to stir his coffee.
-- His hard drive sounds like a '52 Chevy pickup.
-- He has a flag pin on his wifebeater.
-- His ringtone is "God Bless America."
-- His Sarah Palin poster has yellow stains all over it.

The Escalade is coming to surpass the Mercedes as the vehicle of choice for road bullies. And I say that even knowing the old bus driver joke: "What's the difference between a Mercedes and a porcupine? With a porcupine the pricks are on the outside."

It isn't just the sticker price. Porsches are expensive too, but too small to compete effectively in NYC traffic, where bulk and balls rule. You know what, though? Continuing the German theme, I've noticed that a LOT of Volkswagens are driven by assholes. To me that's counterintuitive. BMWs cost a buck or two, but don't seem as bad as Mercedes drivers. Maybe it's because BMWs are marketed for quality and Mercedes' are marketed for prestige.

SUVs in general are horrible, but the Escalades are the worst.

You have to understand Manhattan traffic. There's a kind of grace to it. Most everybody understands the flow, that three lanes of traffic, all kinds of vehicles, will move as one, flowing around potholes, misplaced manhole covers, and terrified New Jersey drivers in Toyotas. Praying, maybe, that the accelerator doesn't get stuck while behind a large and grumpy cabbie from Central Asia.

Funny. Even cabbies just off the boat from Kazakhstan seem to understand the flow of Manhattan traffic. The SUVs disrupt that with their bullying. I'm surprised that SUVs drivers aren't occasionally dragged from their vehicles and beaten to death.

I'm not into violence. But I bet that Escalade drivers will be after their charming General Motors vehicles fall apart after 65,000 miles and the parts department had been outsourced Kazakhstan where the cabbies come from.

Here's the reason that the iPad has been getting such bad press: the reporters and bloggers who have written about it like computers. The iPad isn't a computer. It's a coffee-table book that lights up. It's a Christmas gift for your parents and others who don't want and/or don't understand computers.

It's not isolating. You can check your email at your parents house without getting off the couch, leaving the conversation, and standing apart. It looks like neither a work thing or a kid thing.

It's kind of attractive, like a coffee table book. You can leave it between the Rembrandt anthology and the L.L. Bean catalog. And when company comes over and if they notice it at all and ask what it is, you can push a button and bingo, there's the pictures of the grandchildren. Or the movie listings. Or a map and directions to Starbucks. Or a book.

Or even the email. Everyone understands email. Even people who don't like computers.

So that's what the iPad is -- a coffee table book that lights up. What's the market for that? It may be very small and the iPad will fail. Which is why Apple introduced it a few hours before the State of the Union Address. Hoping that the flaws won't be commented on before Obama occupies the news for a couple of days. Apple will get a stock market bump before the market has the chance to absorb the negative comments.

Or maybe it will create its own market and be wildly successful. After all, Sharper Image sells fancy electronic stuff that does less and costs more than $500. And if you think about if, $500 isn't very expensive for a computer. It's about what you would pay for a mundane PC laptop and half the price of a basic MacBook.

Which is what I'm buying.

I mean, I love the environment as much as the next guy, but I really don't want to see Smokey laying a loaf under the old apple tree.

And I sure ain't gonna be doing any tree hugging anytime soon.

Last night I saw one spot ... er, commercial ... where this big ole bear hung his hairy brown ... hmmm ... butt over a tree limb and plucked off bits of toilet paper that had gotten stuck there. I thought, does this commercial come from a company that in 2012 will be throwing millions of dollars at family values candidates?

Here comes the Doctrine of Unintended Consequences again. You know that one. It’s like Murphy’s Law.

When you’re up to your ass in alligators it’s hard to keep in mind that your initial objective was to drain the swamp.

The Supreme Court ruling that corporations may pay for as many lies as they like come election year means that liberal bloggers and commenters will be working overtime to get in their distortions, exaggerations, revolting fictions and outright lies early and ugly and that no holds will be barred.

They will try to poison the air surrounding any potential GOP presidential candidate so thoroughly beginning right now that no amount of corporate money will be able to undo it in 2012.

Mel Brooks’ avowed life’s work is making Hitler look as ridiculous as possible, the idea being to assure that no one will ever take him or his ideas seriously again. The Supreme Court’s unintended consequence has prompted the same thing, only for American presidential candidates, some of whom have comparable ethics.

As for me, I spent much of 2008 on Rudy Guliani and Sarah Palin and now am retooling for Scott Brown, who I’m sure will be presented as the Great White Hope to send Barack Obama home to his little mosque in Kenya.

Did you hear that family values candidate Scott Brown posed nude for a magazine, his wife appeared topless in a video, and his eldest daughter was photographed covering her breasts with scallop shells (which, sadly, were more than enough for the task).

Oops. That’s true. Forget I mentioned it.

I can't forgive Harry Reid for making it so that we will never hear Barack Obama's famous impression of Redd Foxx.

Or his impression of Mr. T. -- "I don't hate Dick Cheney, but I pity the fool."

Seriously, wouldn't you love to hear Obama say "my prediction for the 2012 election? Pain."

Obama health reform death panel terrorists are responsible for the earthquake on the California coast, according to a report on ClusterFox News.

Their scheme is to create a large number of casualties to be denied medical care, especially critically ill grannies who then can be consigned to their eternal fates by Obama death panel bureaucrats.

The first official reaction by patriotic Americans came from Rudy Giuliani, who pointed out that no earthquakes occurred during the Bush administration.

So there I was working on a bottle of vodka with Paladin, who was wearing a purple muu muu and who was trying to get Liberty Valence on the phone so we all could go shark fishing in Hawaii.

I wrote a syndicated column that the New York Times distributed to every major market except Washington, D.C., which apparently didn’t like me, which was fine with me. Richard Boone was in New York for one reason or another, and a bright-eyed young publicist called me to come meet him in his room at the New York Hilton.

Boone famously played Paladin, the educated, sophisticated and cultured Old West mercenary who hired out to settle disputes, often with a sidearm, in the 1950s series “Have Gun -- Will Travel.” You’ll know the theme:

“’Have Gun -- Will Travel’ reads the card of a man
A knight without armor in a savage land.
It’s fast gun for hire he’s the calling wind
A soldier of fortune is the man called Paladin.”

The lyric ignores the fact that Paladin’s home base was a posh San Francisco hotel, where he had a Chinese lackey named Hey Boy and who was sometimes seen as being a dandy. Not that many gunfighters lectured villains on their “rough way of talking” and left calling cards with the chess knight on them and the legend “Have Gun -- Will travel. Wire Paladin, San Francisco.”

I don’t remember why Boone’s young PR man invited me to meet him. I only remember the man looking terrified when he opened the door to let me in.

He sat me on the couch. After a few minutes of rustling around in the other room, Boone appeared. He was wearing a floor-length purple muu muu and looked like he had just spent three days in a San Francisco hotel, this one in the Tenderloin.

He said hello and faced me, squinting through a haze, the famous lines on his face looking like trenches. He asked, “Are you a drinking man?”

Those days I was and said so. He trudged back into the other room, and after bit of rustling around, he appeared carrying a bottle of vodka. He slammed it down atop one of those shoulder-height dressers that hotels must buy by the trainload. He stared at the bottle for a minute, then turned back to me and raised an index finger and flashed the “help me out here” look.

I said, “Glasses?”

He said, “Glasses,” and went back into the other room.

After more rustling around he reappeared carrying two glasses. He slammed them down atop the dresser next to the bottle and turned me again. Again came the index finger and the look.

“Ice?” I said.

“Ice,” he replied and went back into the other room. More rustling around. Then he reappeared. He said, “No fucking ice” and poured two glasses of room-temperature vodka.  He downed his, a half glass of it, in one blast. I did the same. I could do that in those days.

Over the lips and past the gums, look out stomach, here it comes.

The PR man went into stage three cardiac arrest.

Anyway, most of the afternoon and most of the bottle later Paladin and I were the best of friends and we were talking about fishing, which I hadn’t done since moving to New York but remembered well enough from having grown up by the sea.

Boone lived on Oahu, explaining both the muu muu and the fishing. He had bonded so closely to his island Pandora that he was offered the role of McGarrett in “Hawaii 5-0.” He turned it down and Jack Lord got the part.

I don’t know why Boone turned it down. Maybe because he would really suck in a pompadour.

Back to fishing. One of his fishing friends was Lee Marvin, who among many roles played the villain in “The Man Who Shot Liberty Valence,” with James Stewart and John Wayne. Not too shabby. Marvin was so fond of fishing that he was offered the role of Quint in “Jaws.” He turned it down, and Robert Ryan got the part.

We know why Marvin turned it down. He said "What would I tell my fishing friends who'd see me come off a hero against a dummy shark?"

Well, there’s Paladin on the phone trying to reach his fishing buddy Liberty Valence to introduce him to his new friend Mike Jahn so we all could get on his boat, docked in Oahu, and go shark fishing.

I saw myself adrift in shark-filled waters with the two biggest drunks in Hollywood. I don’t remember the rest of the Richard Boone episode except that I went home to write it up for my column. I didn’t wind up eaten by a shark and neither did Lee Marvin. What happened to Paladin I don’t recall.

I hope he found ice.