Speaking of people getting all up in Steve Jobs's face and stuff, we're starting to wonder if maybe his Reality Distortion Field might need some sort of recharge, because the man appears to be having a little bit of trouble bending mere mortals to his will lately. Case in point: faithful viewer Riverwalker tipped us off to a quick blurb over at CNET which reports that Uncle Steve has been trying to get permission to knock down his own house for a couple of years now, to no avail. It just goes to show you that money and power can only take you so far. Forget the RDF for a second, since it doesn't seem to be working anyway, and let's pretend that Steve is just like any other run-of-the-mill, utterly ordinary billionaire who is CEO of two hugely influential high-tech companies. You'd think a guy who'd made it that far up the ladder of life's successes should be able to lob a few sticks of dynamite into a house on his own property, right? But noooooooooo.

So here's the deal: Steve has owned a 17,000-square-foot house in Woodside kindasorta near the Apple campus for the past twenty years, he's now decided that it's "a dump," and he wants to knock it down or blow it up or reduce it to its component subatomic particles or something. Unfortunately for him, local planning officials have decided that the house is a historical monument of sorts. Apparently it was designed by George Washington Smith (who, we're guessing, would never have been nearly so famous if he hadn't stuck that "Washington" in the middle there all the time) and happens to be "an authentic example of the Mission Revival style of architecture," which is historically important to the area. The upshot is that the locals are looking to block the demolition and even force Steve to shell out several million smackers to restore the place.

See, this is where it gets interesting, because while Steve now describes the mansion as "a dump," apparently he actually lived there for a while, so it couldn't have been too bad all that long ago. Then-President Clinton had stayed on the grounds occasionally while Chelsea was attending Stanford, but that may not mean much, since he stayed in the guest house and stuck the Secret Service in the alleged "dump"-- and we assume those guys are trained to withstand harsh living conditions. The really juicy stuff in this tussle takes the form of veiled accusations that Steve let the house fall apart on purpose so that he'd have an excuse to torch it; faithful viewer David Triska notes that The Almanac quotes the History Committee's report as saying that "the present condition of the house is a result of willful neglect," and that Steve had actually removed doors and windows from the place in order to "expose the house to the elements." Oooh, intrigue!

The planning commission's going to meet on Wednesday and is expected to vote to block demolition, which will prove that Steve can't always get what he wants. Now that we think about it, actually, we're starting to suspect that town planning commissions are somehow RDF-immune. Remember all that goofiness over signage that Apple had to deal with when it was trying to open its retail store in Germantown, Tennessee? That dragged on forever, too. So if you were wondering who's going to lead the resistance movement when Steve attempts world domination in 2007 to enslave the human race and sell us all as livestock to the Lizard Warriors of Arcturus 4, now you know. Buddy up to your local planning council today.