Monthly Archives: October 2012

Carolyn and I just received an advance copy, hot off the press I suppose, of Pogo: The Complete Daily & Sunday Comic Strips, Vol. 2: Bona Fide Balderdash. Beneath the lovely cover which she painted, we found, right where we left 'em, two more years of the superb creation of her father, Walt Kelly. Some have called Pogo the best comic strip ever and…well, if you prefer another, fine. More power to you. But Pogo is really quite wonderful. Its characters are alive and witty and everything they do is irresistible. The material in the first volume was great and in the years covered in this collection, Kelly was really beginning to be as good as he could be. Which was better than just about anybody.

There's a foreword by Stan Freberg and articles by R.C. Harvey and me…but never mind us. It's two years of Pogo, daily and Sunday — with the Sunday pages in full color. If you got Volume One, no further sales pitch is needed. (And if you didn't get Volume One, or maybe if you did, know this: You'll soon be able to buy the first two volumes in a slipcased set, and you'll also be able to buy the slipcase separately. The slipcase was expertly designed by Carolyn Kelly, as well.)

I'm not sure when Volume Two will be in stores. Amazon gives its official publication date as December 21 but we have a finished copy here so they should be available everywhere long before 12/21. You can advance-order Volume Two at this link or wait until I post a link for the slipcased set. Either way, you're gonna love this book.

In 1955, science-fantasy author Theodore Sturgeon was experiencing a severe case of Writers' Block. What did he do about it? He wrote to fellow s-f writer Robert Heinlein for advice. Immediately, Heinlein wrote back with a letter that you oughta read.

This is kinda political but it's not about Obama and Romney. As Matthew Yglesias explains here, American Airlines is a mess. Late and cancelled flights. Bad service in other ways. An increasing reputation as the airline you fly only when no one else can you get you where you need to go…and then there's only about a 50-50 chance that American will be able to get you there on time.

Lo, how the mighty have fallen. American used to be a great carrier. Yeah, and O.J. Simpson used to be a football hero, too. Anyway, American is in understandable financial trouble that has probably been made worse by attempts to cut losses by screwing over employees. It's been theorized for some time that its only hope for survival is a merger with U.S. Airways. Okay, so why don't they just do that?

Because, as Matthew Yglesias explains here, the financial configuration of the company is such that execs at the company can personally pocket somewhere between $300 million and $600 million if they don't do that.

And right there, you see an awful lot of what's wrong with American business these days. So much of it is not run for the benefit of the customers or the employees or even the stockholders. It's run for the CEO and top executives to get in, get rich and get out. That they leave the company being kept alive on a ventilator is not a concern.

Recently, I declined to testify as an Expert Witness in a lawsuit involving a publishing firm that was filing for bankruptcy. The thing I was asked to be an expert about — and I wasn't, which was one reason I said no — was about executive compensation. A senior exec was hired away from another firm. He did almost nothing at the new firm — and what he did do was by his own admission, wrong. They fired him and he left with a $20 million Golden Parachute. (I told them I could make bad decisions for them for less than half that salary.) The suit was about that he thought he deserved more.

The smartest person who ever inhabited the same room as me was probably Akio Morita, the co-founder of Sony. More than twenty years ago, I attended a lecture he gave and one of the points he underscored was this: American industry was in trouble because it did not reward its managers for long-term health, only for short-term results. He said (approximately), "There are things I could do now that would boost Sony's grosses for the next two years but destroy the company within seven. If I was hired on a typical American executive contract, there would be financial incentives for me to do just that."

As he was explaining this, all I could think of was Leo Bloom telling Max Bialystock that under the right circumstances, a producer could make more money with a flop than with a hit. And we all know how that turned out.

Fifty years ago today, Johnny Carson took over as the regular host of The Tonight Show. The video of that historic broadcast is lost but here's a few minutes of audio from the opening, starting with an intro by Groucho Marx..

I'm going to try to limit the election stuff here in the coming weeks. This isn't for you, it's for me. This blog reflects a lot of what's on my mind at any given moment…leaving aside, of course, certain topics that don't belong here. Sometimes, it's hard to tell if I'm posting it because I'm interested in it or I'm interested in it because I'm posting it. Anyway, it's not like you will suffer for articles about how the race is going if I don't post a lot of them. And I need to spend less of my life reading about 1% shifts in the polls in possible swing states.

I've been very busy for about the last month or two and I know I haven't posted a number of things I said I'd post. I will try to rectify matters soon. Thank you for your patience. At least, I like to think it's patience. Sometimes, what appears to be patience in this world is just neatly-concealed indifference.

Ezra Klein has what seems to me a pretty solid article on why Mitt Romney ain't doing a whole lot better. Bottom line: Under Obama, things are getting better slowly…and Romney's proposals don't convince enough Americans he can do a better job.