Nate Silver over at fivethirtyeight.com (soon to be a part of The New York Times) is doing some lengthy analysis of the accuracy of the various pollsters. If you head over there, you may find yourself pretty deep in the weeds and I'd be fibbing if I claimed that I know exactly what he's talking about every moment. My math skills are about on a par with my talent for Kabuki Dancing.
But I do understand some things and one is that when pollsters brag about their accuracy level, what they're talking about is how close their final polling came to the final outcome. They can be wildly off until a day or so before the election and still claim they called it within the margin of error. Silver cites this example...
In the 2008 Democratic primary in Wisconsin, for instance, which Barack Obama won by 17 points, American Research Group had released a poll on the Saturday prior to the election showing Obama losing to Hillary Clinton by 6 points; it then released a new poll 48 hours later showing Obama beating Clinton by 10 points. (It is very unlikely that there was in fact such dramatic late movement toward Obama, as most other pollsters had shown him well ahead the whole time).
In other words, I can now confidently predict for the next two years and five months that in the next presidential election, there will be a massive write-in vote for the robot from the old Lost in Space show and he'll win with 99% of the vote. Then a day or two before the election, I'll switch to whatever Gallup says and I'll probably be able to claim a pretty good batting average for that contest and boast of my accuracy.
A lot of folks claim that certain polls are slanted to please certain clients that subscribe to them. Sometimes, that's just a childish way of denying that the election does not seem to be going your way. Now and then, there may be some level of validity to the charge, which I especially see made against the Rasmussen Poll. It often (not always) looks like an outlier in giving far rosier forecasts for Republicans than all the others.
When Rasmussen is called out for deliberate bias, the answer is usually to point out how accurate their polls have been lately, meaning that they were on target just before the actual voting. I'm not interested in debating that. I'm just pointing out that you can be wildly off — deliberately or not — until very late in the game and still claim vindication 'n' victory when the final numbers are tallied.
The man at left in the above photo is our friend/idol Stan Freberg. He's seen with his fellow guest stars, Jack Cassidy and Ann Sothern, in a still from an episode of the sixties' spy TV of The Girl From U.N.C.L.E. In particular, it's "The Carpathian Killer Affair" and it originally aired on February 14, 1967.
Do you, perchance, have a copy of this show? Stan doesn't and I'd like to find one for him. A link to my e-mail address can be found over in the right-hand margin somewhere.
A major "thenk yew" to Glenn Hauman, who's the Vice President of Operations and the Production Manager over at the fine comic news blog, Comicmix. What did Glenn do to deserve our enduring gratitude? He volunteered to fix the RSS feeds on this blog and it looks like he dunnit. Let me know, folks, if you have any further problems with it...and Glenn, I owe you one. I don't know one what but I owe you one of something.
Veteran comic book and strip artist Tony DiPreta died Wednesday at the age of 88. This obit in a Connecticut newspaper notes that he grew up in Stamford, Connecticut and got into comic art while still in junior high school, which would have been around 1939...about when the comic book industry had its first boom. His first job was working in color separation and engraving for one of the many companies then that prepped comic book art for publication, and he also picked up lettering work on Lyman Young's newspaper strip, Tim Tyler's Luck.
The engraving work was mainly on material for Quality Comics and this led to a string of jobs for that company — lettering at first, then inking, then drawing. His first published solo work was probably a one page gag in National Comics #8, published in 1941.
The obit says, "Eventually, DiPreta made his way to New York City, where he met legendary comic book writer and editor Stan Lee, who gave him Porky Pig to ink." Actually, it was Ziggy Pig and from there, DiPreta segued to Hillman Publications, where beginning around 1942, he was one of their most valuable artists, working on all their comics but most notably, Airboy. He also worked extensively for Lev Gleason on that publisher's character called Daredevil and on the firm's popular crime comics. Around 1950, he returned to Timely Comics and Stan Lee where he was put to work on mystery comics and westerns.
All this time, he had also assisted Lank Leonard on the Mickey Finn newspaper strip, at times drawing more of it than Leonard. In 1959, he got the job of producing Joe Palooka and he handled that strip for 25 years until it ended in 1984. DiPreta promptly took over drawing Rex Morgan, M.D., which he worked on until 2000. Though continuously involved in newspaper strips for more than forty years, he also found time to assist his neighbor Mort Walker with some Beetle Bailey projects and to draw occasional comics for Charlton Press, mainly on their early 70's Hanna-Barbera comics. The comic art community mourns the passing of such a fine, prolific talent.
My friend Laraine Newman is the exact same age as I am to the day — almost to the hour, I believe. It's a great argument against Astrology since our lives have diverged in so many ways. One, which she writes about in this article, is in the kind of music that has underscored her life and inspired her. She grew up in this city and saw (among others) The Beatles, The Rolling Stones, Muddy Waters, Howlin' Wolf, Willie Dixon, The Ike & Tina Turner Revue, Big Mama Thornton and Jimi Hendrix. I grew up in the same city at the same time and saw none of those. I did, however, go watch them film The Dick Van Dyke Show, watched them tape Laugh-In, watched Johnny Carson do The Tonight Show...
June 5, 2010
