Friday, March 30, 2007

Soup is Good Food

This is from a blog called The Hipster Dad...

Well, last night, we took Mark Evanier's advise and went to Sweet Tomatoes — known on the West Coast as Souplantation — for their creamy tomato soup. Holy anna, it's fantastic! Honestly, the only soup I've had that's better is the gazpacho at Mean Bean. Unfortunately, this appears to be a periodic, rather than a regular fixture. So you have THREE DAYS to find a Sweet Tomatoes near you and get some of this yummy soup before it vanishes again.

Just to make sure you understand: The Creamy Tomato Soup at Souplantation (and Sweet Tomatoes) is a March special and March is darn near over. Based on my past experiences, I know they sometimes have a soup like this for a little past the end of the month. For instance, I'll bet some outlets have it on Sunday, which is April 1. April 2 is very unlikely since Monday is when these places get in a lot of their new supplies. But it's also entirely possible that tomorrow will be the last day in some places.

So give it a try and if you like it as much as I do, call them and tell them you'd like the Creamy Tomato Soup to be a permanent part of their repertoire. Here's a toll free number you can call and it's supposedly open 24 hours a day so you can call right this minute. Just tell the person that you love the Creamy Tomato Soup and that if they will only have it there all the time, they'll have you there all the time. The person in their Customer Service Department will ask you if you'd like to leave your name and address but that's not necessary. Just calling will do. It also wouldn't hurt to call or tell the manager of your local Souplantation or Sweet Tomatoes restaurant. Together, we can make it happen.

• Posted at 9:58 PM · LINK

Friday Evening

This will only be of interest to people who live in Los Angeles. Currently under consideration is the idea of turning Pico Boulevard and Olympic Boulevards into one-way streets. Olympic would be only westbound whereas Pico would be only eastbound. I drive a lot on both roads and oddly enough, I probably am more likely to be westbound on Olympic and eastbound on Pico...but I still think it's a sucky idea. It may not be quite as sucky as allowing those streets to get even more sucky at rush hour than they already are. That, however, does not make the idea unsucky.

What bothers me is that those streets are actually quite easy to drive on when it's not rush hour. Four or five hours per day, they're rough in some sections to the point where some of us have learned not to be on them then. So we're talking about making it less convenient the rest of the day for everyone in order to make it more convenient during the busiest hours for those who must drive then.

Another question that occurs to me is what kind of parking they're thinking of retaining on these streets. The above-linked article talks about moving some parking meters but perhaps eliminating some to allow for bus lanes going in both directions. There are some areas where eliminating a lot of street parking would cause major hardships. And if they're talking about leaving the street parking but switching directions...well, I'm guessing there are less than a hundred people in Southern California who know how to parallel park on the left hand side of the street. Don't believe me? Just go to Beverly Hills where there are a few such avenues and watch the attempts.

I think they're missing the obvious solution which is to make all the east-west streets westbound and leave them that way. Eventually, the traffic crisis will be Santa Monica's problem and we'll all know not to go to Santa Monica.

See? I have answers to problems. But somehow, they never call on me.

• Posted at 9:38 PM · LINK

Today's Video Link

I wish whoever writes these songs for the JibJab guys owned a rhyming dictionary. "Ensued" doesn't rhyme with "boobs" and "news" doesn't rhyme with "food" and "map" doesn't rhyme with "puddy-tat" and you'd think that if they were going to spend the weeks and weeks it must take to animate one of these, they'd lavish the same care on the lyrics. Anywhere, here's their latest...

• Posted at 8:51 AM · LINK

DC History

Several folks have written me to ask about a series over on the Comic Book Bin website in which Philip Schweier is serializing a history of DC Comics. Here's a link to Part One and you can find your way to subsequent parts through that...but I don't recommend you do that. The three parts posted so far have just too many inaccuracies and misleading statements. For example, in Part Three, Schweier writes...

In 1971, Carmine Infantino was named publisher, overseeing the entire line of comics, holding court in matters ranging from animated cartoons to toy production. Seeing a need for a more visual approach to creating comics he named a number of artists — Joe Kubert, Joe Orlando, and Dick Giordano, among others — to assume editorial positions with the company.

Infantino was named publisher in 1971 but that was just a change of title. He'd been overseeing the entire line of comics for several years by then. He named Joe Kubert an editor in 1967 and Joe Orlando in 1968. Dick Giordano began editing in 1969 and was ousted in 1971. Here's another paragraph...

Under Infantino’s leadership, new titles were introduced, such as Tarzan and The Shadow. However, whatever financial success they may have enjoyed was offset by licensing fees. Another financial leak came in the form of rising freelance fees. To reduce the impact, the company chose to send work to the Philipines to be drawn.

The financial problem with Tarzan and The Shadow was not licensing fees, which were rather modest, was that those books didn't sell very well. Neither did a lot of non-licensed books of the period which were also cancelled. With the licensed books, the problem was not that the company had to pay fees but that they didn't share in any licensing of those characters. It's not so bad to lose money publishing Wonder Woman when you're taking in money from Wonder Woman toys...but DC received no part of the merchandising cash from Tarzan. Also, the Filipino artists were cheaper but their employment had nothing to do with rising freelance fees since DC didn't raise those fees much, if at all, during this period. Matter of fact, this was a way of trying to cut them for everyone, using the Filipino contingent as a threat.

I haven't the time or inclination to go through the whole series but there's an awful lot that's like the above. Sorry to say.

• Posted at 8:48 AM · LINK

Talkin' With Al

Here we have an interview with Al Feldstein, the man behind E.C. Comics and Mad Magazine. As I usually say when I interview Al — which I seem to do at half the conventions I attend — if he'd just done Tales from the Crypt and Weird Science and quit there, we would still be hailing him as a legend of the comic book. That he also took over Mad and ramped it up into the best-selling humor magazine in the history of Mankind is kind of an added bonus.

• Posted at 7:40 AM · LINK