Thursday, November 6, 2003

Step Right Up!

This is great. William Saletan over at Slate has devised a little game you can play to find your candidate for the next presidential election. You'll need the latest edition of Macromedia Flash installed on your computer but you can get that over there. Go play Whack-a-Pol...and don't be surprised if, like me, you wind up with no one to vote for.

• Posted at 7:05 PM · LINK

Recommended Reading

I haven't made up my mind about the Terry Schiavo case, except that I know too much of the public debate is directed by folks who don't have a clue as to the true medical condition of Ms. Schiavo. For a passionate defense of those who would keep her alive, read this piece in The Village Voice by Nat Hentoff. I'm not convinced he's right but he makes some good points.

• Posted at 3:38 PM · LINK

Recommended Reading

If you're interested in how accurate the Reagans mini-series might have been (or still might be when Showtime airs it), here are articles by Eric Alterman and another by Timothy Noah.

And I am amused at a point that some are making about the outcry against the project. One of the big complaints of the far-right is that the film makes Reagan out to be insensitive to the plight of AIDS patients. But he would have been an even bigger hero to some in the far-right if he had been insensitive (or more insensitive) to the plight of AIDS patients.

• Posted at 1:11 PM · LINK

Winning Without War?

There are reports (like this one) that say representatives of Iraq tried to make a last-minute deal to avert the U.S. invasion of their country but that the U.S. "rebuffed the overture." We may hear a lot more about this even though it seems unlikely that the Iraqi offer was sufficient. What I find troubling is this sentence in the story, referring to presidential spokesguy Scott McClellan...

McClellan refused to say whether the purported Iraqi effort to avert the war was brought to President Bush's attention.

It seems to me that if any sort of offer was made, even by agents whose authority was suspect, only one response is acceptable: That it was conveyed to George W. Bush and that he made the final decision not to pursue it.

It may well be that as a State Department rep is quoted as saying in the article, "We never received any legitimate or credible opportunity to resolve the world's differences with Iraq in a peaceful manner." That is entirely possible, maybe even probable. But if I were George W. Bush, I'd be royally pissed if someone decided to bypass me in that decision. I'm the Commander-in-Chief, let's remember. I would find the guy who decided to cut me out of that decision and fire him and anyone else who knew about it. If I'm about to send American men and women to war, knowing full well that some will come back maimed or not at all. A last-minute offer may be a ruse or a bluff but I'm the guy who ought to make that call.

And maybe he did, in which case he should be taking responsibility for it, right off the bat. One of the many reasons I wasn't a fan of Mr. Reagan was this notion that somehow, if things go wrong in the White House, we can't blame the president if he didn't know about it. That should never be an acceptable excuse. I doubt Bush will wind up making it in this case but there shouldn't even be the possibility that the President of these United States was "out of the loop" on such an important matter.

• Posted at 1:02 PM · LINK

Fighting Terrorism?

A lot of folks say that The Patriot Act and its curtailment of civil liberties have not been helpful in the war against people who plant bombs and fly planes into buildings. I don't know about that...but it seems to be working just fine to prosecute strip club owners. One suspects Mr. Ashcroft considers them the greater threat.

• Posted at 10:45 AM · LINK

Also for Comic Fans

My pal (for longer than either of us can believe) Tony Isabella has a good column on inflation and the price of comic books. When we look at the downturn in our industry, where the definition of a "good seller" has gone increasingly down, we tend to talk a lot about distribution and retail access. But as Tony notes, the price of the product is a big factor, as well.

• Posted at 10:36 AM · LINK

All About Don Perlin

For comic fans: Here's a nice interview with long-time comic artist, Don Perlin. It's a nice overview of his career, and he even says something nice about Vince Colletta.

• Posted at 10:20 AM · LINK

My New Toy

For about eight hours now, I've been playing with Pioneer's combination TiVo and DVD burner. This is a wonderful invention that will record a show off the air just like a plain ol' TiVo but it will also copy that show to a DVD-R or DVD-RW disc. You can also take your old tapes, import them into the TiVo and then copy them onto a DVD. I have a lot of old 3/4" U-Matic videotapes of TV shows I wrote in the seventies and eighties and I've started dubbing them over to DVDs since the tapes are starting to rot, plus they take up a lot of room. I also have a few things that are on Beta that I want to keep — and who knows how much longer my Betamax will hold out? So this is a cool thing.

Rummaging through my shelves, I just found a show I totally forgot I'd written. It was an episode of the Plastic Man cartoon show that only aired once — in prime-time on a Sunday night, opposite 60 Minutes and some blockbuster event on NBC. Our show was a preview of the new ABC Saturday morning cartoon lineup for 1979, co-starring an animated Plastic Man and an equally-realistic gent named Michael Young, who was then hosting a Sunday morning show called Kids Are People, Too. Plastic Man has an adventure which gets interrupted as Young introduces clips of that year's new ABC cartoon shows. There's also a long plug for a prime-time sitcom called Out of the Blue, which starred Jimmy Brogan and was cancelled around halfway through the first episode. The only thing I remember about the special I wrote is that its Nielsen rating was close to a negative number and at the time, I felt like the only human being on the planet who'd seen it. I may now be the only person in the world who has a copy of it, at least on DVD. Or wants one.

• Posted at 12:02 AM · LINK