Thursday, October 29, 2009

Recommended Reading

Joe Conason tells us why Joe Lieberman and Evan Bayh just might be interested in scuttling Health Care Reform. It has to do with how their spouses make money.

• Posted at 8:07 PM · LINK

Recommended Reading

Hey, I link to Conservatives once in a while. I probably don't agree with Rod Dreher about how Liberal some newspapers are or were. Right-wingers have a tendency to see bias every time the news doesn't go to their liking, and to see plain, old-fashioned bad reporting as deliberate sabotage. But I agree with his main thesis, which is that there's probably nothing newspapers could have done to avoid the massive drop-off they've had in importance and circulation...and it isn't just the Internet. It's paper that's the problem.

Print media is atrophying in this country and has been for a long time. As I keep pointing out in panels about the sales decline in the comic book industry, Playboy has nose-dived in sales and it's not because men have lost interest in photos of beautiful nude women. Interest in Spider-Man, Iron Man, Batman, etc., has never been higher but it doesn't translate into hordes storming the comic book shops and buying their adventures in that format. The Iron Man comic sold a lot better back when most people had never heard of the character.

Dreher says that at one time, he thought newspapers could thrive by being less Liberal and more Conservative, as witness the success of Fox. I think they might have done a bit better to go more in either direction — to become truly Liberal newspaper or Conservative newspapers. This possibility probably didn't occur to Mr. Dreher because from his vantage point, anything to the left of The Washington Times is ultra-liberal. (In other writings, he seems to think the Public Option is a far-left idea. No...Single-Payer is the far-left idea. The Public Option is the compromise from that.) But I think he's right that it wouldn't have helped much. People these days just don't want to spend money on things on paper.

• Posted at 11:29 AM · LINK

Humbug on Tour

I kinda feel guilty covering this. Earlier this year, my friends Paul Dini, Misty Lee and I attended a live production of A Christmas Carol at the Kodak Theater in Hollywood. For those who enjoy theatrical disasters — and I don't — it was the Super Bowl times ten. Advertised stars did not appear and the ones who did didn't know their lines. The stage crew didn't know which order to bring the sets in. There was much laughter where there should not have been laughter. We ended up cheering the performers at the end of it for just getting to the end of it. Later, there were reports that the endeavor had lost tons of money and that folks who worked on it had yet to receive pay.

The same producer-director is now attempting to mount a new tour of the Dickens classic with a different set of stars, some of whom have already disappeared from the advertising. The show was to have opened in Philadelphia, then moved to Boston, Baltimore, Minneapolis and Chicago but it's being reported that no theater has yet been booked for the first two cities...and Minneapolis has now been cancelled. These are not good signs.

And another not-good sign: Reporters around the country are writing about the problems and digging up ominous things about the producer's past...including the fact that he apparently wrote the script for this version while serving time in prison. Here's a report in the Chicago Reader that even quotes this blog. Like I said, I feel a bit guilty to be following this. It's like watching a train wreck from afar...painful to experience but difficult to ignore.

• Posted at 10:44 AM · LINK

Today's Video Link

Remember how I said that the power had been going on and off in my neighborhood yesterday? Well, I live a few blocks from where Craig Ferguson tapes his show and it seems he got hit with the same blackouts...

• Posted at 2:00 AM · LINK