My friends Anthony Tollin and Will Murray recently made an amazing and important discovery about a piece of comic book history. As we all know, Batman debuted in Detective Comics #27, in a story entitled "The Case of the Chemical Syndicate." It was signed by Bob Kane and much of it may even have been drawn by him. It was written, sans credit, by Bill Finger, who later acknowledged a lot of inspiration from the pulp magazine character, The Shadow. As it turns out, "inspiration" was putting it mildly.
Anthony and Will are both experts on The Shadow and are involved in the production of new facsimile editions of that pulp and also Doc Savage, which Tony is publishing. Based on some leads from Will, Tony managed to locate a Shadow story that was clearly the template for that first Batman story, even to the point of it being about a "chemical syndicate." Here's the first part of a two-part interview with Anthony all about it.
If my mail is any indication, an abnormally high percentage of folks who read this site are TiVo owners. If you are one such critter, I have a recommendation you should keep handy. If your TiVo breaks...or if you want to upgrade it to a larger harddisk...or if you just need new accessories, check out the folks at WeaKnees. I don't understand the name either, but they upgrade TiVos and they fix them and their site is full of tips and tricks.
You will be especially beholden to them if you have the HR10-250 DirecTV model and it stops working. This page will tell you what to do about that. Generally speaking, if these people can't fix your TiVo, it can't be fixed. They upgraded one of my many TiVos and it's worked flawlessly since then.
Whenever I've had time to read in the last week or so, I've been back in the past with two new books: The Conviction of Richard Nixon: The Untold Story of the Frost/Nixon Interviews by James Reston Jr. and Reclaiming History: The Assassination of President John F. Kennedy by Vincent Bugliosi. The first is Reston's account of the famed 1977 Frost/Nixon debates which are now the subject of a hit play. He was a key member of Frost's research/support team. The second is a major work by the famed Prosecuting Attorney, making the case that Lee Harvey Oswald was the lone assassin of John F. Kennedy and that there was no, repeat, no conspiracy.
The Reston book covers much of the same ground as Frost's (obviously ghost-written) 1978 book, I Gave Them A Sword: Behind the Scenes of the Nixon Interviews. The main bit of "new" info is Reston explaining in some detail how he located a previously-overlooked and highly-damning conversation in a transcript of Nixon's infamous tapes. That bit of surprise evidence in the interviews helped Frost "nail" Nixon...or at least to keep him on the ropes for much of the Watergate conversation. Another interesting revelation is that Nixon's deal with Frost specified that during the taping, the ex-president could mop sweat from his face any time Frost was asking a question, and that footage of him doing this would not be included in the broadcast. All in all though, the book didn't tell me much that I didn't already know.
The main problem with the Bugliosi book is that it's unreadable. I don't mean it's badly-written. I mean it's unreadable. The book is over 1600 pages...and it's actually even longer than that suggests because it comes with a CD that includes all the endnotes and sources, plus the book is set in a rather small, uncomfortable font. I have terrific vision and I found my eyes glazing over every 10-12 pages. This is a shame because it's an important, exhaustive book...I think. I'm basing that on as much of it as I've been able to read so far.
I am of the mind that Oswald did act alone, that the single-bullet theory is solid, that Jack Ruby was exactly what Jack Ruby seemed to be, that there was no squadron of Cuban marksmen on the grassy knoll, etc. Once upon a time, I did not believe this and thought other, craftier forces had done the deed. I read many a work that claimed this or that, and even attended a small convention of the kind of folks who write such books. Continued exposure to the "buffs," as many call themselves, drove me back towards the official answer, not because it was official but because it was the only one that made any sense at all to me. The more I've read about it, the more convinced I've become.
Bugliosi spends much of his book demolishing some of those alternate theories. I met Bugliosi a few years back and we talked about the fact that there are 8,000 versions out there of who killed JFK and how...but none of them involve two or three people. You have the scenario that it was just Oswald and then all the rest involve hundreds of co-conspirators, all of whom have done a great job keeping mum about some pretty incredible things they did, like stealing Kennedy's body for surgical alteration before the autopsy or — and this may be my favorite — bringing in and then artfully removing phony trees that were placed on the grassy knoll to hide additional shooters. Without anyone noticing.
You may not want to tackle this book and I couldn't blame you if you didn't. Between the thick spine and the thin type, it can be rough going though I intend to keep trying in spurts. This also means wading through a frequent feature of any Vince Bugliosi book, which is the frequent reference to what a great prosecutor and investigator Vince Bugliosi is. The man's very smart and I agree with just about all his conclusions in as much of his book as I've been able to manage to date. I just wish he'd tone down the self-approbation, if only because without it, he might have gotten the thing down to a trim 1200 or so pages. Just for comparison, my copy of The Warren Commission Report is a little under 900 with a much larger and more legible typeface.
Here are two commercials produced by the Jay Ward studio, both for cereals I never ate — Sugar Jets and Wheat Hearts. I'm not even sure they were sold in local markets...because I was once of an age where if Bullwinkle J. Moose told me to eat Sugar Jets, I'd have been eating Sugar Jets. Anyway, here are the spots. The voices of Bullwinkle and Mr. Peabody are from Bill Scott, the voice of Rocky is June Foray and the voice of Sherman is Walter Tetley.
Not sure exactly why you're pointing out, however accurately, that Ron Paul and the other so-called "second tier" presidential candidates won't carry a single state in the 2008 presidential elections. Is the message that we should switch our support from someone who may represent our positions but has no chance of winning to a candidate with good odds but whose positions we deplore?
Though I'm aware of the (let's call it) "Ralph Nader effect" on the 2000 elections, I could never sanction with my vote or otherwise any candidate who opposes civil rights to the extent of the Republicans or property rights to the extent of the Democrats, even if it means the greater of two evils winds up in the White House, a la the current occupant. Morally, I believe it's worse to vote strategically than to vote your conscience.
Still curious, though: What prompted the unreferenced item?
Just watching a story on MSNBC (I think it was) that showed Ron Paul mobbed by supporters and made it sound like he has a huge groundswell of support. The guy's still polling at around 2% in polls with a margin of error of 3% so I thought the piece was misleading. One of the many downsides of this long, long primary season is that reporters have to gin up a lot of stories where there aren't any. In Paul's case, I think it's great that he's out there, saying things that will never pass the lips of anyone who thinks they have a shot at getting elected. But let's not pretend he's going anywhere. What little support he has is mostly for representing "None of the above."
I would never suggest anyone vote for a candidate whose positions they deplored. On the other hand, there's something to be said for the lesser of two evils. There'd better be because that seems to be all I can do. I'd love to vote my conscience but I haven't seen it on any ballot. Maybe I should put it down as a write-in vote.
June 23, 2007
