Still Wondering

From time to time, we are reminded of the $80 million UCLA spent acquiring the campus of a defunct Catholic college in Palos Verdes. We are reminded of the difficulty in reaching it from Westwood, although it was "sold" to the Regents as a way of increasing enrollment capacity. Of course, given recent UC budgetary pressures stemming from Sacramento and Washington, we are reminded of all the nice things on which $80 million might otherwise have been spent.

Finally, the LA Times recently reminded us about the landslide area that developed not all that far from the defunct campus making homes uninhabitable:

After almost two years of unprecedented landslide movement that has upended life across much of the picturesque Portuguese Bend area of the Palos Verdes Peninsula, officials want to permanently ban new construction in the landslide zone. The proposed ordinance, which has drawn backlash from some property owners, would prohibit construction of new homes or additions in the area — even on vacant lots, of which many remain. However, it would permit repairs, restoration efforts or even the replacement of existing homes within a residence’s established footprint. The measure will be considered next month by the Rancho Palos Verdes City Council...

Full story at https://www.latimes.com/california/story/2025-07-18/ban-homes-rancho-palos-verdes-slide-zone.

So, we're still wondering. It occurred to yours truly that maybe there are some lessons from history. So he looked for some and found this  from the History Channel: 

“The Oxford Dictionary of American Political Slang” defines a “boondoggle” as “an extravagant and useless project,” but behind the funny-sounding name is actual history. During the late 1920s and early 1930s, Boy Scouts at summer camps spent their days not only swimming and playing games but participating in the latest scouting craze in which boys braided and knotted colorful strands of plastic and leather to fashion lanyards, neckerchief slides and bracelets. According to the March 1930 issue of Scouting magazine, Eagle Scout Robert Link of Rochester, New York, coined the term for this new handicraft—“boondoggling.”

While scouts continued to craft “boondoggles” during the Great Depression, few Americans had heard of them until they suddenly became front-page news on April 4, 1935, when the New York Times reported that investigating city aldermen had discovered that the federal Works Progress Administration (WPA) had spent more than $3 million on training for unemployed white-collar workers that included instruction in ballet dancing, shadow puppetry and making boondoggles. Hundreds of unemployed teachers, who were paid $87 a month by the WPA, received two hours of boondoggling instruction as part of their training to establish recreational programs that showed children in poorer neighborhoods how to transform old cigar boxes, tin cans and other discarded materials into useful gadgets and ornamental crafts. “These projects are not carried on in Fifth Avenue,” insisted WPA official Grace Goselin, “but in sections of the city where the children who are benefiting would otherwise be in the streets.”

Republican critics of President Franklin D. Roosevelt’s New Deal pounced on the frivolous-sounding boondoggling activities as indicative of what they saw as the WPA’s wasteful spending, which included everything from operating a circus to eurhythmic dancing instruction. “It is a pretty good word,” Roosevelt admitted in a January 1936 speech before adding, “If we can boondoggle our way out of the Depression, that word is going to be enshrined in the hearts of Americans for many years to come.” The word indeed became part of the American political lexicon, but not in the way Roosevelt had hoped. Ironically, an activity that was part of an effort to encourage children to reuse waste materials has become synonymous with waste itself.

Source: https://www.history.com/articles/where-did-the-word-boondoggle-come-from.