Many Democrats, Liberals and Progressives (those are not all exactly the same thing) are unhappy with the Health Care Reform bill not because it changes things but because it doesn't, in their view, change them enough. Hendrik Hertzberg has an interesting way of looking at the situation.
Ah, I seem to have more jobs from Marvel I didn't know about. Their site also has me down as the letterer of the upcoming X-Men Forever #19 and #20 and also Avengers Vs. Atlas #3...and I've apparently gotten better at this because I no longer need John Byrne to work with me.
Nate Silver discusses the charge that the Rasmussen Poll, which is generally favored by Conservatives, is too biased to trust. I think it is...but I agree with Silver that the real bias may be in how selectively it's quoted. I don't think any one poll has a monopoly on the truth but if you only quote one and not a range, you oughta consistently quote just that one and not switch pollsters because you like someone else's outcome better one moment.
Silver, who knows more about this stuff than anyone I've come across, says that Rasmussen did a pretty good job of calling the 2008 election. My impression is that he's measuring their final polling against the final results...and that Rasmussen showed a much more favorable picture for McCain/Palin until just a few days before we all filled up those ballot boxes. Then, suddenly, they "noticed" a huge rush of Democrats who abruptly became Likely Voters and their polls suddenly fell in the line with all the others. Was this not the case? I seem to remember Mr. Zogby — whose polling is so far off that I don't believe it even when it yields results I like — on some news show arguing once that, based on the outcome of some election, his poll was "on target." And in rebuttal, someone else noticed that it was off for weeks before and only became "on target" about halfway through Election Day.
There's apparently a fierce ongoing debate in elite circles as to who it was who first decided to put character heads on Pez dispensers. A likely candidate is the gent who recently passed away...Curtis Allina, who was the vice-president in charge of United States operations for the firm for nearly three decades. Whoever's notion it was, it was a brilliant idea.
It's kind of interesting what's going on with Las Vegas. The fragile economy has sent grosses plunging and the casinos are coping with it by galloping off in all directions. Most are dropping prices on rooms to the point where you can pick up some incredible bargains, especially if you go mid-week...but they're still building new hotels with higher prices. The base prices of show tickets have never been less affordable but there are more and more "half-price" ticket booths around. Cirque du Soleil has recently begun offering deep discounts and they're like half the shows in the city. Low-minimum games are disappearing and it's costing more and more to eat in that town...but if you hunt a bit and stay out of the megaresorts, you can easily find affordable slots and grub. My last trip there, my friend Tom Galloway and I had darn good steak dinners for seven bucks each.
Due to low occupancy, some hotels are literally closing down floors or whole towers. The Mirage, which is a pretty big and usually-successful place, has closed down more than a dozen floors due to low occupancy. The Sahara and I think the Riviera have closed some of their floors, as well. Binion's has shut down all their hotel rooms and is just operating the casino part of its operation. But at the same time, Planet Hollywood just opened a new 1,200 room tower while the Hard Rock, Golden Nugget and Caesars have all added new towers and a brand-new hotel/condo complex called City Center is opening incrementally. It will soon have added nearly 6,000 rooms to the game. Other expansions and new casinos are still planned. This is at a time when airlines that fly in and out of Vegas are cutting back on the number of flights.
Several other major condo projects are under construction but quite a few have been aborted. They announced, sold some rooms, perhaps started building...and then plans collapsed, leaving buyers scrambling to reclaim their deposits. That whole market is in chaos. At one point, I somehow got on the mailing list for a new condominium complex a mile or so off The Strip and they were sending me messages, urging me to purchase a one-bedroom condo for $350,000. The same folks are now trying to get me to buy the same condo for $125,000. Less than half. That's gotta make the people who did buy at the old price feel grand.
So I don't know what's going on there and you kinda get the feeling that the companies building (or not building) all these projects don't know, either. There's a casino term for a gambler who's mindlessly throwing out — and therefore, generally losing — money in the desperate hope of getting some outlier of a lucky break. They call that "streaming" and that seems to be what's going on with the financiers in Vegas these days. They're streaming.
If you aren't insistent on staying in the newest hotel to open, you can get some decent bargains there these days. Low-to-mid-range hotels will sell you a room for $25-50 a night if the night isn't Friday or Saturday. Some of the nicer places will take you in for $75-100. You just have to shop around a bit on the Internet...and here's a little tip if you think you might want to take a trip there soon...
Get yourself a special "junk mail" e-mail address at some place like GMail or Hotmail — an address you'll use only for this. Then take twenty minutes and go to the websites of all the major hotels (this page will get you to them) and sign up for every promotional e-mail list you see. Most of 'em have such a list and when they get desperate to fill rooms, that's the first place they offer the deals they maybe don't want to advertise too blatantly. I'm on some and I've received some amazing bargains, including package deals that basically give you back your entire low room fees in promotional coupons.
It's been so long since I was much of a gambler there that I don't think these offers are to get me there in the hope that I'll be wagering serious bucks. I think they're now anxious to get anyone there. It might as well be you.
I have no idea why the "coming attractions" section of the Marvel Comics website has John Byrne and me listed as the letterers of an upcoming Hercules series. I haven't lettered a comic book in twenty years, it's probably been longer than that for John...and, well, there's gotta be an explanation for this. If you run a comic book shop and you get stuck with any unsold copies of this book, tell them that you only ordered it because you saw that John and I had lettered it and then demand that they accept returns.
I've always liked Paul Shaffer. Matter of fact, one of the things I miss about the Letterman show is when they used to let Paul be funny for more than one quick interjection every other night or so. Whoever thought of him to be Dave's sidekick and bandleader had a darn good idea, if only because of the clever play-ons he invents for guests. It's also kinda nice watching this guy, who literally wallows in show biz schmaltz and history, become a pillar of it. He's worked with everyone in music and it shows.
That said, I was a bit disappointed in his recent autobiography, We'll Be Here for the Rest of Our Lives. It reminded in a semi-distant way of Ed McMahon's autobiography and his other books, all of which were rendered shallow by Ed's stubborn insistence that everyone he'd ever met in show business was the greatest, most talented human being alive — except, of course, for Johnny Carson and Frank Sinatra, who were much, much better than that. The difference is that with Paul Shaffer, you kinda get the idea that the guy really feels that way about everyone.
Ed's books also read like he had a dread fear of saying anything — anything! — that might by the wildest stretch of the imagination not delight his employer, Mr. Carson. You wouldn't expect him to trash the guy but it's almost as if Ed (or the person who ghosted his books for him) said, "Okay...Johnny told that story on the air once so it's okay to include it in the book." It was disconcerting that Ed McMahon, who worked side-by-side with Johnny Carson for 35 years, didn't have any anecdotes about the guy that we didn't already know from watching The Tonight Show.
Paul Shaffer doesn't have much to tell you about David Letterman that you couldn't pick up as a steady viewer. The best parts of the book are about Paul's early days working in Canada with folks like Gilda Radner, and being around for the formative years of Saturday Night Live. And you might well enjoy the sheer excitement he radiates as a guy who worships various superstars of music and comedy gets to meet and work with most of his heroes. Here's an Amazon link if you'd like to order a copy.
You can also learn a lot (and a lot more) about Mr. Shaffer if you feel like watching the three-and-a-half hour interview he did for the Archive of American Television. It's online and in the parts I've sampled, he's a bit more candid...though he still loves just about everyone he's ever met in show biz. And I still believe he's almost sincere. Here's a brief clip that was taped at the same time of him ad-libbing a little musical commercial for his book...
January 4, 2010
