My friend Bruce Reznick just wrote me that he's signed up to be notified when John McCain announces his vice-presidential pick. He's going to be notified by telegram.

Just found the negative of the photo I scanned for the previous item here. It's from the 1975 San Diego Con.

Here's a photo I took of Jack Kirby at some early San Diego Con (I think) back in the days before it was even called Comic-Con International. I seem to have a lot of photos of Jack in one of his two natural habitats, the other being "seated at his drawing table." This one is "surrounded by admirers," which he always was at any gathering of folks who knew anything about comic books.

At cons today, I meet a lot of people who feel a genuine sense of loss that they never got to meet Jack…never got to shake the hand that drew some of their favorite comics, never got to tell him that they were their favorite comics. When fans first started telling me this a few years ago, I was a little startled. It was like, "How could you not meet Jack Kirby?" He was always so accessible, so approachable. For a couple of decades, all you had to do was show up at a San Diego Con (or one of many others he attended) and be willing to wait in line for twenty minutes. Or if you had his phone number — and everyone did — you could call up, talk to him and maybe even get an invite to drop by the house for coffee.

And then I remind myself: Jack died in '94. Since then, an awful lot of humans have discovered his work, which remains increasingly in print. There's something about it that grabs readers in a way that few comics can. He drew stories that radiate, as Jack himself did, a certain energy and excitement. Larry Lieber, who wrote scripts for Jack at one point, has said, "If Jack drew a rock, it was fascinating. It was like the rocks had personality." And as someone else (I think it was me) pointed out after Larry said that, at one point, Jack drew a whole pile of personality-filled rocks which they called The Thing and it was one of his most personal, enduring characters.

Jack would have been 91 years old today. Of all the personal, enduring characters he was involved with, the most personal and enduring is turning out to be Jack.

The bidding for that Batmobile listed on eBay ended at $110,000 with the reserve unmet. My guess it was Alfred the Butler trying to sell it without Master Wayne's approval. I never trusted that guy.

If you don't want to buy a used Batmobile, you can pay to have someone build one for you. Thanks to Brent Cleever for the link.

The class I teach at USC had its first session today so I missed most of the convention and have been catching up via TiVo. It's not a bad way to view it since you can speed through an awful lot of nothing.

My overwhelming impression of the evening was annoyance at myself. I half-believed all those pundits and talking heads who said that Hillary and her supporters would fracture the party, driving a wedge that could never be healed. I don't know to what extent that possibility was exaggerated by wishful Republicans and/or reporters hyping a possible story…and to what extent skillful negotiation prevented a train wreck. But it sure turned out to be a lot of worry about something that didn't happen.

I was disappointed in Joe Biden's speech…a couple of good lines but it didn't sound like him. I'm also a little tired of speeches where the idea is to end each sentence with a catch-phrase and encourage the audience to join in on it. There was also another thing about it that bothered me but I want to think about how to phrase what I'm feeling so I'll save that for a later post.

Bill Clinton was great. He's always great at this kind of thing…but you know who surprised me? John Kerry. I never thought of him as a great giver of speeches but tonight, a mere four years too late, he seemed to have learned how it's done. It didn't get a lot of TV coverage so I decided to embed it here. If you have thirteen minutes, give it a look.

Okay…so when she was running against him, Hillary Clinton faulted Barack Obama for a lack of experience. Now that she's supporting him, she has to backtrack from those statements and also watch as the McCain forces use them as a club against "her" candidate.

And when Rudy Giuliani was running against John McCain, he called him unqualified for having a lack of experience in the executive end of government. Now that he's out stumping for McCain, he's decided McCain's experience makes him utterly qualified to be president.

I guess it's always been like this in politics. I'm just wondering if the era of YouTube and digital video libraries is going to cause candidates to start realizing that the words they say today, they may have to eat tomorrow.

In our discussion here the other day about sexual harassment at conventions, I ran an e-mail from Juli Thompson and she mentioned something called The Open Source Boob Project. I received a few e-mails, all from folks who wished to not be quoted by name, telling me that she had misrepresented The Open Source Boob Project and that it was not as she described. Frankly, I think that if you start something called The Open Source Boob Project, you're kind of begging to be misunderstood, no matter what you intend. One person wrote, in part…

At the very least, in the interest of fairness, you could point out that the description of the OSBP was not quite accurate, and post a link to the blog article written by the person behind it.

I hereby point out that Ms. Thompson's explanation may not be the best one but I'm not going to post the link. You can probably find it easily via Google if you care…which you shouldn't. Actually, the founder's explanation makes it sound even stupider and more sophmoric than what Juli described.

The preceding has been the last mention you will ever see on this blog of The Open Source Boob Project.

Well, she didn't cure AIDS. But she did just about everything else.

Now through the end of September, TwoMorrows Publishing is having a helluva sale, marking down all sorts of magazines and books, including mine. The three collections of my silly essays depicted above are now available for 50% off the cover price, which was already a bargain. And while you're at it, there are plenty of other things you'll want to order. So what are you waiting for?

I'm kind of half-watching the Democratic convention. Everyone's waiting for Hillary Clinton's big speech and saying that it has to accomplish this, it has to accomplish that, etc. If it does anything less than cure AIDS, it will be a disappointment.

Mitt Romney is going around saying that John and Cindy McCain deserve all their mansions and riches because of all the "hard work" they've done to get them. Damn straight. Do you think it's easy to inherit a fortune from a rich father or to marry a woman who did?

I've decided to become a "values" voter. I'm going to throw my support behind politicians who can speak for one whole minute without using the word "values." I could do without all the strained Olympics analogies, too.

No one ever refers to Barack Obama except as Barack Obama. He's never Senator Obama, Mr. Obama, Obama or Barack. He's always Barack Obama. It's the same way with Charlie Brown. Always the first name and the last name.

The best line so far today has come from Senator Robert Casey from Pennsylvania. He said, "McCain likes to call himself a maverick but he votes with George W. Bush more than 90% of the time. That's not a maverick. That's a sidekick."

That's all for now. I'm going back to work until it's time to half-watch Hillary.

Once upon a time, my e-mailbox was jammed with messages from folks in Nigeria who wanted to cut me in on huge inheritances. It was clogged with ads from people who wanted to loan me money. It was inundated with mail from those who wanted to sell me medications that would shrink or enlarge key portions of my anatomy.

Thanks to the expert Spam-filtering efforts of Time-Warner Cable, those have slowed to a trickle. What I get now is a different kind of unwanted e-mail…

People — an odd array of friends, casual acquaintances and total strangers — want me to join Facebook. They want me to join LinkedIn. They want me to join Grouply. They want me to join Ning and Friendster and MySpace and Plaxo and various Yahoo newsgroups and all sorts of personal networks that don't seem to amount to anything else than me getting more unwanted e-mail.

I gather that in many cases, these are not personal invites. The person did not say, "Oh, my Facebook group would not be complete without the valuable participation of Mark Evanier." They just dumped their entire address book into the service and I happened to be in there.

An amazing percentage of these invites are from people whose names I do not recognize. Someone named William Keefe keeps writing, "I want to add you as a friend in Grouply so you can see my profile with my pictures, my groups, and my favorite group messages." I'm not joining, Bill. I mean, it's tempting because if I see your profile and your pictures and your groups and your favorite group messages, I might get a clue as to who you are. But I'm not joining.

These groups are supposed to bring people together, I guess, and cause us all to be friends. I find they're having the opposite impact on me. I'm starting to figure that anyone who wants me to be his friend this way is no friend of mine.