Monday, October 27, 2008

Where I'll Be

I'm going to be a guest-type person at the National (the big Big Apple Con) in New York, November 14-16. Wonder of wonders, I'll be hosting a number of panels...probably a Jack Kirby panel (there's a first for me) with Joe Sinnott, Dick Ayers, Stan Goldberg, Herb Trimpe and maybe someone else. I'm also hosting a panel about Sgt. Rock and war comics in general with, among other folks, Russ Heath and Billy Tucci. There may be other panels. Details on the con can be found here. It was a lot of fun last year and I see no reason to believe this one will be any different.

And then, probably no conventions until February. I'll be guesting and moderating at the Wondercon in San Francisco, February 27 through March 1. This is also a fine convention that is well worth your attendance. Details on it may be read on this page.

• Posted at 7:37 PM · LINK

Soup News

Well, the one unexpected week of Creamy Tomato Soup at Souplantation has come to an end. I went over on Sunday and had a bowl and a half, which is about all my reduced-size stomach will accommodate. I also bought and froze a quart for later consumption. It isn't quite the same that way but it's something.

Basic Blogging Ethics require that I make full disclosure here: The Souplantation people decided I was responsible for much Internet chatter about their Creamy Tomato Soup, as well as the mention on The Big Bang Theory. As you all know, we are wholly susceptible to bribery here at newsfromme.com. Send me a big enough freebee and I'll start agreeing that Barack Obama is a Socialist with a fake birth certificate and that our nation's only hope for survival is to elect the McCain-Palin ticket, preferably with Palin in first position.

At the moment, I'm selling out for free soup. They're sending me coupons for lots of it and I shall redeem them next March when, they assure me, Creamy Tomato will reappear as Soup-of-the-Month. There are also apparently ongoing discussions of having it in the lineup more often, which would be nice.

That's all the Soup News for now. Stay tuned to this weblog for late-breaking developments in the soup world.

• Posted at 3:51 PM · LINK

Update, Update!

In the last half hour, the Zogby folks have done some correcting to their site and the numbers now make more sense. I think there was a problem where they'd updated some parts of the site and not others, and now they all match up.

Kerry won 252 electoral votes in 2004. He wound up with 251 because one elector didn't cast his ballot properly but that's irrelevant. If Obama starts with the exact same states plus he wins Iowa (7) and Virginia (13), he's at 272 and he gets to live at 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue. There are obviously other scenarios that get him there but right now, McCain has pretty much conceded Iowa, and all the polls seem to have Obama ahead in Virginia by 7-11 points.

Zogby presumes Obama has a lock on all the Kerry states but one. He has New Hampshire (which Kerry carried) in the "probable" column. But he also has New Mexico (which Kerry did not win) as a safe state for Obama. New Hampshire has four electoral votes and New Mexico has five. So that explains why Obama is at 273 in the Zogby poll. Before the update, that wasn't evident.

I still think Zogby is unreliable but in this case, their findings match what almost all the other pollsters are saying. And Mr. Zogby is still contradicting his own polling when he suggests that McCain can win if he sweeps all six states where Obama's lead is within the margin of error. Right now, Zogby has Obama at 286 even if McCain wins all six.

• Posted at 10:53 AM · LINK

Monday Morning

I get a steady stream of e-mails from readers of this site who favor John McCain and seem to think they can swing the election his way if they can only flip my (already-cast) vote. One has been bombarding me all weekend with news that the race is tightening; that "the polls" show McCain gaining to within four points of Obama. I finally took the time to write back to the guy and inform him...

The poll he's citing is the Zogby Poll and it doesn't say four points. It says 4.8 and it's headlined "Obama Lead Holds Steady."
This is the Zogby Poll, which is about as reliable as a fishnet condom. You know, a lot of election watchers cheat and when a pollster tells them what they want to believe, he's the only pollster that matters...but when he has bad news for them, he's biased, full of crap and not to be taken seriously. Not around here. Do a search. We consistently think Zogby is useless. This is the guy who told us halfway through Election Day of 2004 that Kerry would win with 311 electoral votes. Getting it that far wrong a day or two before would be bad enough...but this was with exit poll data!
Even Zogby has been up and down this time, with wild swings in many races that are inconsistent with the other polls.
Zogby has Obama winning handily from an Electoral College standpoint. He says, as all the polls do, that Obama is sure to win all the states Kerry won, plus Iowa's seven electoral votes. That alone puts Obama at 259. Then Zogby also awards him Virginia, which has 13. That works out to 272 votes and a win for Obama, even without all those other states in which Obama presently leads.
But Zogby doesn't seem to read his own polls. He says, "McCain is well within striking distance in each of the six states in which he trails. None of Obama's leads are outside the margin of error. However, unless McCain can take one of the big states won by John Kerry in 2004, such as Pennsylvania, he needs to win these six states. He might be able to survive the loss of Nevada, but probably not any of the others." Yeah, but Zogby's own electoral map has Obama at 273 without any of those six states (Nevada, Missouri, Ohio, Florida, North Carolina and Colorado). McCain needs to win most of them plus something like Pennsylvania.
Why 273? If you go to that map right now, you'll see that 252 electoral votes (what Kerry won) plus Iowa's seven and Virginia's thirteen all add up to 273 votes! Anywhere else, those numbers would add up to 272 but this is Zogby.

Polls are going to be all over the place this week and everyone will seize on any possible outlier if it's what they want to believe. Look at the big picture. It's a big election and a big country. It deserves a big picture.

• Posted at 9:31 AM · LINK

Today's Video Link

Here's another episode of Garfield and Friends that shouldn't be on YouTube. I'm told the lawyers will get around to getting them all taken down any day now. Of course, they've been saying that for months so you probably have plenty of time to watch this and the other clips before they disappear.

Quick story...or maybe not so quick. Season Five of the show, I wrote an episode called "Picnic Panic" which was one long song/adventure about Garfield and his chums getting bested by a colony of musical ants. I did the lyrics and a brilliant music guy named Ed Bogas did the tune and also sang for the ants. The episode aired and drew a ton of mail asking when it could be seen again and if the song was available on a record. (Answer to the latter: Nope.) This was unprecedented.

Saturday morning cartoon shows, back when we had such things, almost never got mail; not unless you count the occasional "I love you, [character name]" in Crayola...and there weren't even that many of them. Once in a while, there'd be what seemed like an outburst of complaints about something but even that would only be like twenty letters. Some very fine, long-running shows never drew one bit of written viewer response and even most episodes of Garfield and Friends received no mail whatsoever, positive or negative.

Until the ants. "Picnic Panic" (which you can view here) got a sackful or three, all of it enthustiastic, which caused many at CBS to take note. One day soon after it first aired, I was over at the network on an unrelated project and I was introduced to that week's Vice-President in Charge of Programming Until He's Fired. He shook my hand, made the connection and said, "The man who gave us the singing ants! When are you bringing them back? You have got to do another episode with those ants!" I got the impression it was not only his favorite episode of our show but also the only one he'd seen.

The producer I was with had no idea what we were talking about and he got even more confused as the Network Veep began singing — out of tune and from bad memory — a little of the ants' song. I told him we had talked of bringing the ants back but nothing had been written. "Please," he said. "You've got to do one as soon as possible. When are you doing more episodes?" I told him we'd try to get one ready in time for our next recording session, which was a few weeks away.

The day before that recording, I was finalizing the scripts when I received a call from someone at the studio. "I understand we're recording a sequel tomorrow to that singing ant cartoon of yours," said this person. I said no, I hadn't gotten around to writing one yet. Back came a worried response: "Well, you'd better get around to writing it, right away. The network called to make sure and we promised them there'd be one in the next batch." A brief argument ensued and I finally decided it would be prudent to postpone one of the scripts I'd planned to record the next day and quickly whip up the return of the ants.

I called Ed Bogas in San Francisco and told him what I wanted to do. I had to write the lyrics and work out all the actions to accompany them, and he had to write and arrange the music and record a temporary music track for the actors to sing to...and since we both had plans for that evening, we had to do it late, after we'd returned from our respective engagements. Ed said he was up for it. I think I started writing about 11 PM, e-mailing chunks of script to Mr. Bogas, and he'd phone me back every hour or so and play sections of the music for me. Around 4 AM, I received from him an MP3 of the temp music track...and five hours later, I was at the studio to direct the actors in the following song, as well as other things we recorded that day.

Here's what we wrote that night: "Another Ant Episode." Lorenzo Music is Garfield, Thom Huge is Jon, Gregg Berger is Mr. Crater the Bug Eliminator, and that's Ed again singing for the ants. This YouTube video is a tad outta-sync at times but I think it's still watchable. You'll notice that what was on my mind was that we were doing this story only because of viewer response...

By contrast, the ants' return did not yield a flood of complimentary letters or even a trickle. I believe CBS did receive one complaint that a cartoon show had used the word "butts" — as in "kicking butts." The people over at CBS Standards and Practices (very benevolent, non-destructive people, by the way) later told me that since they couldn't think of another word to go in there that would rhyme, they'd decided to pretend they hadn't noticed it. Not for that reason, I prefer this one over the first ant episode. We never got around to doing a third one.

So there you have it. And just in case Sergio Aragonés (or someone else who understands Spanish) reads this posting, here's the same cartoon in that language. I have no idea what they're saying but I think I like it even better this way...

• Posted at 12:30 AM · LINK

October 26, 2008 • Current • October 28, 2008