Wednesday, October 12, 2005

Recommended Reading/Viewing

So here's the premise: Any time the news is bad for George W. Bush, federal officials up the Terror Alert Level and say they have evidence of "credible threats." This is intended to distract us and to perhaps scare a certain kind of person into being more loyal to the White House occupant.

Do you buy that premise? I don't know that I do, but I also don't believe it's inconceivable. In my lifetime, I've never seen a presidency that I was sure wouldn't do something like that, and the timing of recent alerts is making it more difficult to disbelieve about this presidency. I'm especially conflicted because I just watched a strong case made for the premise by Keith Olbermann this afternoon on his Countdown show on MSNBC. He didn't convince me completely but...well, he went through a list of ten instances where something occurred that the White House probably wanted off the front pages and then, by apparent coincidence, terror alerts (which were not followed by terror attacks) bumped the bad news over to Page A-17 where nobody sees it.

You can see Olbermann's presentation at this site. It's a bit over 13 minutes so don't click 'til you're comfy. And you can read a weblog posting that he made about it here. Unfortunately, I can't find a link to the interview that Olbermann did immediately after on the program. He talked with Homeland Security Undersecretary Asa Hutchinson and it was a very refreshing and rare instance of a TV news/commentary host giving airtime to an opposition viewpoint and discussing matters with him like a gentleman. I think I respected Olbermann's view a bit more because he allowed Hutchinson to deny it and didn't try to shout him down or put him on the defensive.

If you're as unsure about this as I am, you might want to watch and/or read Mr. Olbermann's editorial. We link...you decide.

• Posted at 9:55 PM · LINK

Walk a Little Prouder...

I promised a week or two ago to post more about "official" comic book fan clubs but then I got distracted by a bevy of great comic actors dying on us. There will be several more posts beyond this one about the Merry Marvel Marching Society, which Marvel Comics threw at us around the close of 1964. For a buck, you got a membership card (seen here), a button, a welcome letter, some stickers, a button, a memo pad and — best of all — the "Voices of Marvel" plastic record in which Stan Lee and most of those then creating Marvel Comics welcomed you to the club. I'll write about the rest of the kit later but that record was and still is wonderful. One of the first times I interviewed Jack Kirby, I asked him about it...

ME: That record seems so weird. Was it recorded in the office like it sounds?

KIRBY: No, it was in a recording studio. We rehearsed in the office. Stan treated it like he was producing the Academy Awards. He had this script he'd written. He'd written it and rewritten it and rewritten it and as we were recording it, he kept rewriting it. We all went into the office, more people than there was room for. When you weren't rehearsing your part, you had to go out in the hall and wait. No work was done that day on comics. It was all about the record. We rehearsed all morning. We were supposed to go to lunch and then over to the recording studio, which was over on 55th Street or 56th. I forget where it was. But when lunchtime came, Stan said, "No, no, we're not ready," so most of us skipped lunch and stayed there to rehearse more. Then we took cabs over to the recording studio and we were supposed to be in and out in an hour or two but we were there well into the evening. I don't know how many takes we did.

ME: On the record, Steve Ditko isn't heard. They say he slipped out the window. I assume he just refused to be part of it.

KIRBY: Steve was much smarter than we were about those things.

ME: Have you listened to the record lately?

KIRBY: No, and if you try and play it for me, you'll be out the window with Ditko.

It was quite a relic of that era in comics. In 1967, they put out a "new, improved" Merry Marvel Marching Society kit with a different pin and a different membership card and other different items...and a different record. This one, alas, didn't feature more Abbott/Costello banter betwixt Lee and Kirby. It just had the theme songs — opening and closing — from the Marvel Super Heroes TV cartoon show that had recently debuted.

As you may have guessed by now, we're going to let you hear both of these classic recordings. Marvelite Maximus Doug Pratt has transferred them to MP3s and he says it's okay if I post links for you all. You can hear the "Voices of Marvel" recording by clicking here and you can hear the second record (entitled "Scream Along With Marvel") by clicking here. Face front!

• Posted at 9:20 PM · LINK

Cookie Jarred

We all hate "spyware" on our computers, spyware being those annoying files you probably accumulate as you surf the web and download porn your e-mail and such. I assume we all use at least one program periodically to scan our computer for spyware and eliminate it.

Well, there's SPYWARE!!! and then there's spyware. A "key-logger" program that installs itself secretly in the computer's memory and records everything we type and which then transmits this data to an outside party is quite a bit different from a cookie that tracks some little thing you did online. I'm no expert but it appears to me that the competition between spyware-eliminating programs has caused some to define "spyware" down to a useless level, flagging cookies that are sent to us for some harmless purpose. They seem to want to be able to say, "Our program caught X pieces of spyware that the others didn't." That may not be because the program in question is better...just that it has broader (perhaps, too broad) criteria as to what constitutes spyware.

Example: Every morning when I get up, Giant Spyware has swept my system and it usually catches three or four cookies, all of which are probably harmless but I eliminate them anyway. Giant was acquired by the Microsoft company — as we all will be, sooner or later — and is now being rebranded as their spyware software. It's not necessarily the best. It's just the one I use.

First thing this A.M., I ran the free version of Ad-Aware, as I do every week or so. Ad-Aware is the granddaddy of spyware snaggers and it caught eleven pieces of what it believes to be spyware on my computer. In other words, Ad-Aware flagged as spyware eleven cookies that Giant felt were harmless. (And we're only talking about cookies here. A key-logger or some other kind of malicious program is another matter.)

After I ran Ad-Aware, I immediately ran the free version of A-Squared, which tracks spyware and "malware." It marked nine cookies, including one from comedycentral.com, one from comicbookresources.com, one from mediamatters.org and one from mediaputfile.com. You may have some of these on your system right this minute. That last one is the site that has the Smurfs video I linked to in the previous message. Giant and Ad-Aware think these cookies are fine. A-squared thinks they're spyware.

I'm suspicious of the A-Squared findings because all of the cookies it fingered are together in my Cookies directory in two groupings by alphabetical order. That is, when I look at a listing of all my cookies in alphabetical order, I see five of them together in one sequence of the listing and the other four together in another section. I think I'd like to get a fourth opinion here so I'm going to leave all the cookies that A-Squared wanted to delete and I'm going to run Spybot - Search and Destroy. I'll be back to you next paragraph with the results.

Okay, Spybot wasn't alarmed at any of the cookies that A-Squared didn't like but it did catch three that were overlooked or deemed benevolent by Giant, Ad-Aware and A-Squared. What can we learn from this?

That the word "spyware" can cover a multitude of intrusions, some so miniscule that they shouldn't worry us. Still, I wish I could set some sort of "level" of protection and tell my chosen spyware sweeper that I don't care about the ones that all the other spyware detectors thought were so unintrusive as to not be a problem. This review over in PC World tested all the leading spyware-nukers and says that the most instances of spyware were caught by Webroot Spy Sweeper. I'm not sure that's what I want.

• Posted at 3:52 PM · LINK

Smurf and Turf

Yesterday, I linked to this video of a French newscast on the "Smurfs get bombed" commercial. Today brings this message from Charles-Emmanuel Ouellette...

About the Smurf newscast and bombing, well, I'm French Canadian and happen to understand French (and speak and write English a bit awkwardly, sorry). I thought that you may be interested in a little English synopsis of the whole thing.

The newscaster at the start warns the audience that the new UNICEF campaign uses strong images that can be considered shocking and warns the audience about what follows. The off-screen News Lady then narrates the Smurfs sequence, saying it starts with images of joy that summarize young age, and then all hell breaks loose. It then jumps to the text on the blue background, saying: Don't let the children's universe be destroyed by war (well, that's how I put it in English, but I'm sure you can make it sound better). In all, since it's against war and for children's right, even if the Smurfs' little blue butt get kicked hard in this, I understand that Peyo's family agreed.

I'm pretty sure a lot of people who worked on Smurfs product just liked it at the first degree. Still, it's interesting that it's more than just cute character bashing (they're an awful lot of this on the net) and it delivers a message.

I don't know..."Don't let the children's universe be destroyed by war" sounds like a pretty good way to put it to me. It's sad that anyone felt they needed to make a commercial to "sell" that idea to people but I suppose the point is fund-raising. I'd be curious to know if the ad succeeds in that respect. Thanks for the translation.

• Posted at 11:36 AM · LINK

Burger Time

I usually don't like it when you go to a website and they have an "intro" page with music and Flash animation. Makes me immediately go diving for wherever you click to "skip intro." For some reason, however, I enjoyed the noisy intro page on the website of In-n-Out Burger.

If you live where there are no In-n-Out Burgers (i.e., anywhere but California, Arizona and Nevada), that's pretty much what it looks like at one. They have great fast food burgers, fresh fries, sodas and creamy milk shakes...and nothing else.

• Posted at 2:10 AM · LINK