In 1974-1976, the folks at Marvel Comics ran a promotion which was amazingly successful when you consider that it hinged on getting devoted Marvel readers to deface their comics. It involved something they called Marvel Value Stamps, which weren't really stamps. They were just little stamp-like pictures of various players in the Marvel Universe. You […]
Those of you who are following the sordid tale of Stan Lee Media (a company for which I once worked) may be interested in this article in the L.A. Times. And you might enjoy this one in the New York Post and this one in the Miami Herald. And…oh, heck. You might as well read […]
At least, that's what some folks — eager to avoid another "gate" nickname — are calling the issue of whether someone in the Bush White House committed a prosecutable crime by blowing the cover of a C.I.A. agent. This story didn't really interest me until someone compared it favorably to my all-time favorite scandal. Incredibly, […]
A few months ago, I got hooked by a clever little game on the Garfield website. It's called Garfield's Scary Scavenger Hunt and in it, "you" (as Garfield) walk around a haunted house avoiding monsters and looking for donuts. It took me about forty-five minutes to solve it and I apparently got a lot of […]
A scant six days before the election, a number of women have come forward to say that Arnold Schwarzenegger groped them or otherwise committed improprieties of personal etiquette. As with similar charges against Bill Clinton, we really don't know how true the charges are…and it almost doesn't matter. Those who are already politically committed to […]
Paul Krugman on the way the White House deals with those who say things they don't like. […]
Given how many hours of how many cable channels are given over to rerunning old TV cartoons (about half of them, Scooby Doo), it's interesting how many good-to-great shows of the past are unavailable. One, which is almost forgotten, is the 1966 Lone Ranger cartoon series produced for CBS by Herb Klynn's Format Films. Format […]
I think the redesign of this site is completed. But I've been wrong before. […]
Michael Kinsley poses some hypothetical questions. […]
This staying up 'til all hours writing has got to stop. […]
You'll need Adobe Reader to read it, but you might want to read this. It's a two-page chart prepared by Congressman Rahm Emanuel (D-IL). For those who don't have Adobe Reader, here's the concept: Page one is a list of proposed spending in the effort to rebuild Iraq. Page two is a list of cuts […]
John Dean discusses the laws against government officials leaking the kinds of things that it looks like someone in the White House leaked. […]
I was spectacularly unimpressed with Howard Dean last night on Mr. Leno's program. Politicians go on a show like that, well aware that they need to be glib and funny and human, and I suppose he did that part okay. But they also need to be able to get a tad serious there for a […]
Since I'm recommending books by liberals today, I also wanted to mention the new collection of Paul Krugman essays, The Great Unraveling. If you don't want to spring for it, I can basically summarize it with the words, "Just about everything the Bush administration is doing is going to bite us all on the ass." […]
Some strips are acquired tastes. I'll admit the "clip art" look of Tom Tomorrow's strips put me off at first. And at second and at third. There was something about the rubber-stamp style that put me off and the few times I forced myself to actually read an episode of This Modern World, it didn't […]