Saturday, October 25, 2008

Briefly Noted...

The late Bill Everett was a giant among comic creators, widely admired by his peers and popular with the readers. His name is invariably linked with his greatest creation, the Sub-Mariner...but he also drew the first issue of Daredevil and claimed to have come up with the basic idea behind the character. Here's a piece on another "creation" of his...his daughter Wendy Everett.

• Posted at 12:49 PM · LINK

Saturday Morning

Last evening, I was napping — or rather, trying to nap — when I heard someone pounding on my door. Turned out, it was a McCain volunteer working the neighborhood, trying to convince folks to save the world from the inexperienced commie-terrorist on the ballot.

We have a simple policy here at Casa Evanier: We don't buy anything from or give any money to anyone who comes to the door that way. Ever. If you were going door-to-door handing out free hundred dollar bills, we'd slam said door in your face. Especially unwelcome are those who think a brief porch visit will prompt me to change my religion...and the McCain worker was perilously close to that category.

Still, she seemed like a nice, sincere person...nice enough that instead of scolding her for waking me up or mocking her for thinking she could possibly make one bit of difference, I talked to her for a few minutes. She admitted that California was a lost cause and even told me that she'd been ringing doorbells all day and didn't think she'd flipped one voter from blue to red. The few positive notes had come from other McCain backers thanking her and encouraging her...but also, she told me, declining to donate cash to a lost cause. I did say to her, "John McCain has written off this state. Don't you think it's about time you did, too?" (For some reason, possibly because I was still half-asleep, I forgot to tell her that I'd already voted. As bad as the odds of her convincing me seemed at the moment, they were actually worse.)

One of two things she said that made an impression on me came when she admitted her efforts wouldn't change the outcome but explained, "I just couldn't sit and do nothing." In other words, she was standing on my welcome mat, not so much for the nation's benefit as her own...and y'know, I could almost respect that. She's not going to swing California's 55 electoral votes over to the McCain column but she might make herself feel a little better for having tried. In a like situation, I think I'd feel like I was compounding the loss, adding a colossal waste of time (mine and others') to all the other bad things I believed to be occurring. But obviously, she and I do not see the world in much the same way.

The other lingering impression was not something she said so much as the urgency in her voice. She's scared...scared Obama might be a secret Muslim and/or radical who'll destroy America with a socialist agenda. (I said, "Yeah, he might even start partially nationalizing banks," but she didn't hear me or didn't get it.) On the one hand, I think the current McCain-Palin crusade to make people feel as she does is great — great because it isn't working. Every day, their campaign demonizes Obama by another notch and every day, another state that formerly seemed bright red moves to pink or even light blue. On the other hand, it's a shame to scare people like that. They panic, they get ulcers, they divide our country and spread apocalyptic visions of the future...and worst of all, they knock on my door and wake me up when I'm trying to sleep. That kind of thing — the waking-me-up part — has got to stop.

• Posted at 11:57 AM · LINK

Huge Pie News

Thinking of sending out for pizza? Well, if you're really hungry, Big Mama's and Papa's Pizzeria on Hollywood Boulevard in Los Angeles will send over a 54-inch square pizza for "only" $199.99 plus tax. That's just for your basic cheese. Toppings will run you fifteen bucks apiece. They say it'll feed 50-70 people.

The pizza comes in a 54-inch box and I guess if you order one, you have to have a doorway that can accommodate it. After all, you can't exactly turn the box vertical to get it inside.

I was at a party a few months ago where they brought in Big Mama's and Papa's pizzas but in the less awesome 36-inch round size. They came cut into slices, most of them square, and I remember thinking it was very awkward to reach the ones near the top. People ate the slices at the front of the box and then someone had to elevate the back of the box a little to allow the hard-to-reach slices to slide down to the front where they'd be accessible. I also remember thinking that if you'd spread tomato sauce and melted cheese on the cardboard box, it would have been tastier. Bigger is not always better.

• Posted at 9:53 AM · LINK

Face Front

I don't know how many of you have been following this story but the other day, a low-level McCain campaign worker named Ashley Todd reported that she'd been assaulted at an ATM in Pittsburgh. A tall black man (she said) had noticed the McCain bumper sticker on her car and this had led to him blackening her eye and carving a backwards "B" on one of her cheeks. The "B" apparently stood for "Barack."

There was a brief period when some bloggers and McCain's Pennsylvania communications director tried to drum up outrage in a way that might make people mad enough to vote for McCain. But most people seemed to sense that there was something amiss with her story...and sure enough, she has confessed it was a hoax and that the damage was self-inflicted. (I don't think, by the way, that this reflects in any way on Senator McCain except, of course, for the fact that his Pennsylvania communications director is kind of a sleazeball.)

Police reportedly knew instantly that the young lady had done this to herself. It was because of the backwards "B," which suggested Ms. Todd had applied the damage in a mirror. When I heard that, my mind flashed back to another unscrupulous fraud who tried pretty much the same scam and made the same mistake.

Some of you probably remember Morton Downey Jr., who had a loud and shrill talk show back in the eighties. He was like Jerry Springer but without the class. Downey was a right-winger who was hated by right-wingers for making them look like screaming maniacs and by left-wingers for what he screamed. His show was popular for a brief period — about fifteen minutes, as I recall — and was cancelled after two years.

Soon after, Downey was in the news again. He reported he'd been assaulted in a men's room at the San Francisco Airport. A bunch of neo-Nazis beat him up, shaved his head and painted a swastika on his face...or so he said. Police noted that the swastika was painted in reverse...and Downey eventually admitted that he'd applied it and that the whole thing had been a publicity stunt.

Moral of the story? When you fake getting assaulted by someone who wrote on your face — and you will; I know you — don't look in a mirror. See what valuable things you can learn from this website?

• Posted at 1:05 AM · LINK

Today's Video Link

Got 46 seconds? Let's watch the opening to The Bugs Bunny Show. What? You say you've seen it a million times? Maybe so. But have you ever seen it in German?

• Posted at 12:36 AM · LINK

October 26, 2008 • Current • October 24, 2008