Up over nine million.  This is getting exciting.

This is kinda interesting. On January 3, an eBay seller called "xtci" posted a listing for 92 comics — most of them, #1 issues — with a minimum bid of eight million dollars.  That's right.  I said eight million dollars.  Let me type that one more time, real slow, so we all understand what we're talking about:  Eight.  Million.  Dollars.

Of the 92 comics, three are genuine treasures — Action Comics #1, Detective Comics #1 and Detective Comics #27.  Or, at least, they would be treasures if the issues being offered were genuine.  The evidence suggests they are not.  The listing includes photos of the Action #1 and Detective #27 — both in cheap plastic bags, both looking an awful lot like facsimile editions that have been issued in recent years.  (There is no photo of the Detective Comics #1.  There has also been no facsimile edition that, in a picture, would look even vaguely like the genuine article.)  The other #1 issues being offered are all fairly recent and not at all of the same scarcity.

Over on www.comicon.com, the offering is the subject of much derisive chatter.  A couple of the folks there have done some math.  One figures that, if the three vintage issues were genuine and in excellent condition, the value of the whole magilla would be a little under $600,000.  That's going by the Overstreet Price Guide.  Take away the three classics and the rest of the stash is worth less than twelve grand by any measure, possibly a lot less.

So, you figure, this thing is never going to get any bids, right?  Wrong.  At the moment, as I write this, bidding is up to $8,000,300..  A couple of other bids have been made and retracted.  Folks are bidding just to go along with the joke and perhaps to tweak the nose of "xtci" or something.

What I find intriguing about this is to wonder what was on the seller's mind.  Obviously, he couldn't have thought there was a chance in hell that anyone would bid eight million bucks for this bundle — especially sight-unseen, buying from a person who has no history on eBay.  So it's a joke, right?  (It only cost him $3.30 to list it, plus the time and trouble.)  But why eight million?  How did he come up with that figure?  Why not fifty million?  The joke would have been greater and the chances of selling, the same.  Or if he thought there was a zillion-in-one chance that some addled billionaire would bid, why eight?  Why not seven?  Or five?  There'd be a helluva profit in one million, even if he had to go out and buy real copies of the three Golden Age issues to fill the order.

The auction is set to close January 13 if eBay allows it to go the distance, which they may not.  If you want to check on its status — or maybe even put in a bid — the link is right here.  Frankly, I might pay six million but eight is ridiculous.

And some people just seem to born to draw.  It poured out of John Buscema, a lovely man who passed away this morning following a long, brutal bout with cancer.  John was best known as the man who did it all at Marvel from the mid-sixties right into the nineties: Fantastic Four, The Avengers, Thor, Silver Surfer, Tales of the Zombie, Sub-Mariner…wherever they needed him.  He hated the character but, when they didn't have anyone else who could draw Spider-Man, he drew Spider-Man.  Matter of fact, John hated most super-hero strips…but he was of a time in comics when that didn't matter much.  So he drew an awful lot of them.

He was happiest during his many years drawing Conan the Barbarian…and frustrated, as we all should have been, that the exigencies of production rarely allowed him to do finished art.  When he did, he was wonderful…and even the main body of his work, doing pencils or "breakdowns" (half-finished pencils) for others showed a solid, dependable craftsman at work.  His heroic figures had strength and stock, his beautiful women were truly that, and other artists stood in awe of how naturally it all seemed to flow out of him.

He was a guest of honor at last year's Comic-Con International in San Diego and I got to chat with him on four panels, one of them a lengthy one-on-one.  He struck me as enormously conflicted about his work — proud of all he had done, regretful that so much of it was spent on strips he didn't like, doing half a job that would be finished by someone else.  He belittled most of his work and, in some instances, had the audience booing in disagreement.  I think that's because he knew that The System didn't usually allow him to do his best.  But the fans still loved him because, after all, John Buscema not at his best was still better than most artists at the top of their games.

I'm so embarrassed to be (apparently) the only professional writer in America who has not been plagiarized by Stephen Ambrose.  And on the subject of such crimes, let me relate one quick anecdote…

Years ago, a team of comedy writers caught a show I'd written on TV and realized that it had almost the exact same plot — and even many of the same jokes — as a show they'd written.  Leaping into high dudgeon, they engaged a lawyer who dispatched a highly-outraged letter to the producer of my show.  In grueling detail, it itemized similarities — so many, it concluded, that coincidence was inconceivable.  The only rational explanation was that I had shamelessly and without question seen their show and copied down its every word to palm off as my own.  The letter concluded by noting that theirs had been conceived, written and aired a full eight months before mine and, therefore, I had "more than ample time" to pull off this daring, daylight burglary.

The producer of my show wrote back a terse note, which was basically a cover letter to what he enclosed.  It was a copy of a CBS program log that he'd highlighted to note that the episode of mine they'd seen was a rerun from two years earlier.  Mine had, in fact, aired four times by the date they said they'd written theirs.

From their lawyer thereafter, there was silence.  From the writers eventually came a personal note saying that they'd fired that rotten attorney who had insisted on sending that inexcusable letter.  There was, obviously, no similarity between the shows.

That does not seem to be the case with Mr. Ambrose's lifts.  I think the reasons his have the press so intrigued are that, first of all, they can't seem to figure out how anyone — Ambrose or some ghost-writer, if that was the culprit — thought he could get away with it.  Stealing from an obscure source in the belief that no one will ever see where you got it is, at least, a bit understandable.  Stealing from a book you acknowledge as a reference is like telling everyone where you hid the weapon and hoping they don't notice there's been a murder.  Ambrose's "crime" seemed so illogical that the early theory seems to have been the ghost-writer one; that it was perpetrated by someone who knew his own name would not get tarnished and perhaps wished to embarrass his employer.  As further instances of theft come to light, the Ghost-Writer Explanation seems increasingly less likely.

The second reason it all has reporters so up-in-arms and paying attention is that they can't believe this wasn't exposed long ago.  But then, most of them didn't know before September 11th that the Taliban wasn't a new model of Chevrolet…

• Enron As Whitewater by Jacob Weisberg, Slate
• It's All Bill Clinton's Fault by Gene Lyons, Arkansas Democrat-Gazette

Real pundits – the kind folks listen to, whether they should or not – all seem to be predicting that our President's new "over my dead body" tax pledge will bite him in the behind as "read my lips" harmed his father.  Perhaps.  My own suspicion is that the idea here is not to not raise taxes but to make sure that, if and when taxes are raised, Bush can blame it on the Democrats.  I seem to recall that when Ronald Reagan was governor of California, one of his aides — presumably, a disgruntled, former one — told reporters that Reagan's fondest wish was for a huge tax increase (which he got) to be passed with his hands clean (which he didn't quite manage).

In any case, here's a thought: The two times that the older George Bush ran for the White House, he somehow got away with a very fuzzy definition of "tax increases."  It didn't seem to matter how much a tax increase was or even how many folks it applied to; it was the number of tax increases.  If the Dukakis or Clinton administrations had instituted five one-dollar fees on a few denizens of their states, that was FIVE TAX INCREASES, whereas if a Republican administration presided over one huge one that affected everyone, that was only ONE TAX INCREASE.  For some reason, a certain amount of Americans never got past the concept that five tax increases are always worse than one.

What's more — and this is the thing that could give our present Chief Exec some woes if anyone ever makes a big issue of it — his father defined any government-mandated collection of money as a tax increase.  Somewhere, there's videotape of him arguing that a new "booking fee" that was being charged to folks who were arrested was a TAX INCREASE; that a two-dollar license fee for greyhound racing was a TAX INCREASE, etc.  There were many of those and, if one buys his definition, then the current Bush Administration is already planning several.  The new "security fee" — or whatever they wind up calling it — that one will pay when one boards an airplane is certainly a TAX INCREASE by the definition that the last Bush campaigns sold to the country.  I thought that definition was hooey then.  I suspect that if anyone tries to apply it today, both George Bushes will feel likewise.  (Not that I expect anyone to mention it.  We always seem to let politicians skate on this kind of thing…)

This morning, I attended the unveiling ceremony/press conference for the new poster with which the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences is promoting this year's Oscars.  The poster was painted by Alex Ross, who has been dazzling folks in the comic book industry with his paintings…particularly with his ability to take characters designed in simple line and to render them in fully-painted, three-dimensional splendor, as he did in Marvels, Kingdom Come and some recent special albums of Superman, Batman and Wonder Woman.  I couldn't help but marvel, not just at a "comic book" promoting an artist to this status (especially at a time when comics sell worse than they ever have) but at all the media turning out to cover him.

Once upon a time, Jack Kirby said that comic books would someday be recognized as the greatest source of American popular art.  And even as aware as I was of Jack's incredible track record for describing the future, I don't think I was prepared to accept it until I saw it for myself.  The poster's tag line — "The Gold Knight Returns" — even testifies to the impact of comic books on popular culture.  So how come so few comics are selling…and the ones that are selling aren't selling more?  Beats me.

Anyway, you can order your own copy of Alex's splendid poster at www.oscars.org if you are so inclined.  I like the design but I think I'm even more amused that, in the world of Oscar as a super-hero, his "bat-signal" is promoting a subsidiary of the Walt Disney Company.  There's a call of distress if ever there was one.

Brief but nice obit in The Los Angeles Times for veteran animator Ray Patterson, who I knew, though not well, when I worked at Hanna-Barbera.  Here's the link…and this thought: The last time I spoke to Ray was at Bill Hanna's memorial.  The last time I spoke to Avery Schreiber was at Lorenzo Music's memorial.  A good purpose for funerals is to remind us to stay in touch with people while we still can.

The following thought is probably not worth the amount of time I'm about to devote to it…but that never stops me.  The common Internet term for junk e-mail is spam.  It's a noun ("I keep getting spam in my mailbox") and a verb ("Someone's been spamming me") and I've even seen it used as an adjective ("He's been operating a spam campaign").

Just where, I've wondered for some time, did this slang come from?  Presumably, someone started using it on some computer bulletin board, even before the Internet made those quaint, dial-up entities obsolete, and it caught on and spread.

But why spam?  Of all the silly things in this world that could have been picked, why spam?  What is there about the concept of electronic junk mail, I wondered, that led someone to associate the name with a certain brand of canned luncheon meat and inspired others to seize upon it?  Someone I asked said it was because Spam (the stuff in cans) is awful and so is unwanted e-mail.  This, I cannot accept. I've never tried the product but it's been around for two-thirds of a century.  It can't be that terrible…and, even if it is, there are a lot of awful things around.  Why don't we refer to e-mail ads as "Cole Slaw?"  Or "Ingrown Toenails?"  Or "Rob Schneider's last movie?"

Why, I wondered, did spam come to denote someone sending you an unwanted e-mail ad for money-making schemes or penis enlargement?  (Almost all the spam I receive presumes I am short on either funds or something else.)  True, its silly name and lack of connection to "real" food may well make it the butt of jokes.  It's actually a cut of ham that's been spiked with preservatives and spices.  The name is short for Spiced Ham but I don't think most people know that.  Seemed to me, it's widely considered to be some kind of artificial, canned mystery meat…but, again, I didn't see the link to e-mail.

It only began to make sense when I thought of the Monty Python routine in which a greasy-spoon diner serves "Spam, Spam, Spam, Spam, Spam, Spam, baked beans and Spam."  Perhaps, one day, someone found their computer inbox filled primarily with unwanted e-mail solicitations.  Instead of muttering, "Ad, ad, ad, ad, ad, ad, ad, ad, message from Phil, ad," etc., they started imitating the Pythons, likening the pattern of junk mail to the constancy of Spam in that cafe.  Add to that the concept that the Hormel product is innocuous or perhaps that it's a meat that seems to come from no known animal — just like Internet ads seem to do — and the nickname kinda, sorta applies.  Maybe.

I have since stumbled upon The Official Spam Website…which I guess means that there is now nothing on the planet that does not have its own Official Website.  Anyway, the Hormel company has its own explanation which you can read at www.spam.com or you can go by my summary, which is as follows…

They claim that it's because, in the Python sketch, a chorus of Vikings start singing, "Spam, spam, spam," etc., and it drowns out the dialogue, the way spam messages stifle dialogue on discussion forums.  I'm not sure I buy this.  It sounds to me like the Spam™ People (wasn't that a Roger Corman movie?) are reaching for a spin that casts no negatives on the dignity of their product.  In any case, the point of the sketch is that Spam (the meat) is constant, that it turns up ad nauseam, that it's something you'd be stupid to welcome but, in this eatery, it's forced on you.  Surely, whoever first applied the name to electronic advertising regarded it as an insult.

Perhaps I'm overthinking this matter.  No, I take that back.  I know I'm overthinking this matter.  But if anyone reading this has any better explanation, I'd love to hear it.

• Ex-Newsman's Case Full of Holes by Tom Shales, Electronic Media
• Liar's Poker by William Saletan, Slate
• Who's Home, Who's Not by Thomas L. Friedman, New York Times
• Let Down His Rich Pals?  Over His Dead Body by Robert Scheer, Los Angeles Times
• The Long Arm of the Single Actor by William F. Buckley, Jr.
• The Critics Are Wrong by John W. Dean
• Bush Donors Prepare Another Wish List by Jim Vandehei and Tom Hamburger, Wall Street Journal

The above links are to articles that the operator of this website believes contribute to the national debate.  He does not necessarily agree with all or any of what they say…and you won't, either.

The Shubert Theater in Century City is, as mentioned here a few months ago, closing…and, alas, it's closing without doing a great idea that several folks all had at the same time: Wrapping up with an all-star production of the James Goldman-Stephen Sondheim musical, Follies.  The place first opened in 1972 with a production of Follies, so it would have been a neat bit of bookending plus, of course, that show is all about the closing of a theatre.  But no.

The last tenant (a touring company production of Tommy) has vacated and the next booking — way off in November — is of the wrecking ball.  In the meantime, there's a nice article in The Los Angeles Times about its closing party, mentioning my friends Brad Ellis, Eydie Alison and Jason Graae who participated in what will probably serve as the last performance ever on that stage.  Here's the link and you'll have to hurry because the Times charges to read articles on-line after they're 14 days old.

As some of you may know, I have a strange, difficult-to-explain interest in weather forecasting.  It predated my brief experience, auditioning to announce predictions on the local news (described here) and had something to do with my leaky roof…but that's not the whole story.  Anyway, the Internet affords me — and you — an interesting means of getting perhaps the most accurate weather forecast that is humanly possible…moreso than listening to any one TV weatherperson or dialing the forecast on the phone or reading any newspaper.

There are several outfits that predict the weather, starting with the National Weather Service and continuing through private companies like AccuWeather and The Weather Channel.  Consulting all of them is like getting opinions from a number of doctors instead of just one.  If they all agree, you can have great (though not absolute) trust in the verdict.  If they don't, you can get some idea of the parameters. That is to say that if one says there's a 20% chance of showers and another says 40% and another says 60%, you can figure on 40% but with a lower level of confidence than if all said 40%.

More useful though are the sites where the forecasters explain to other forecasters, how they arrived at their forecasts, how much confidence they have in them, when they think they may have to modify them, etc.  As far as I know, only the NWS forecasters supply this and perhaps not all of them.  The one for Los Angeles can be read at this link and since it changes several times a day, it may have changed by the time you click over there.  Right at this moment though, it reads, in part…

BY WEDNESDAY, ALL BETS ARE OFF AS THE ETA AND CANADIAN MODELS HAVE MOVED TO A MORE PROGRESSIVE PATTERN WITH THE TROF WHILE THE AVN, MRF, AND ECMWF CONTINUING TO INDICATE MORE OF REX BLOCK PATTERN WITH THE LOW CUTTING OFF WELL OFFSHORE AND EVENTUALLY MOVING WELL SOUTH INTO BAJA. SUCH A HUGE DIFFERENCE IN THE HANDLING OF THIS PATTERN IS RESULTING IN A VERY WISHY WASHY FORECAST AT THIS TIME. MY GUT FEELING IS THAT THE LOW WILL BEHAVE MUCH LIKE THE AVN SUGGESTS AND LEAVE US HIGH, DRY, AND MILD. BUT I FEEL LIKE I CAN'T COMPLETELY IGNORE THE ETA/CANADIAN SOLUTION. EVEN THE 18Z MESO ETA CONTINUES THIS MORE PROGRESSIVE SOLUTION. SO HAVE DECIDED TO ADD A 20 PERCENT POP FOR WEDNESDAY IN ALL ZONES WITH THE CAVEAT THAT CONFIDENCE IN ANY ONE MODEL SOLUTION IS EXTREMELY LOW. CONCEIVABLY SPOTTY SHOWERS COULD ARRIVE ALONG THE CENTRAL COAST IN THE PRE-DAWN HOURS WEDNESDAY BUT WILL JUST INDICATE POPS FOR THE DAYTIME PERIOD THERE. IN ALL LIKELIHOOD REALITY WILL BE SOME COMBINATION OF THE CURRENT SOLUTIONS, BUT THE RESULTING WEATHER COULD BE JUST ABOUT ANYTHING. IN FACT, IF THE ETA WAS RIGHT ON TARGET THUNDERSTORMS WOULD NOT BE OUT OF THE QUESTION WEDNESDAY.

THE GOOD NEWS IS THAT ALL SOLUTIONS AGREE ON A DRY AND WARMER PATTERN FOR THURSDAY THROUGH SUNDAY SO THE ONLY REAL QUESTION MARK IS WEDNESDAY.

Some of that may seem unduly technical but all you really have to know is that they use various computer models, and that the gent who wrote this is trying to decide which one is giving the more accurate projection.  There's a low approaching the coast and it may dip down and move inland over Baja, or it may come straight on in through Southern California.  He's using the different computer projections the way I suggest you use the different services' forecasts — going by the majority opinion but allowing for any dissenting voices.  (You usually find, as a given weather-maker nears, diverging forecasts slowly merging.  That is, NWS will say a storm is coming on Thursday evening; AccuWeather will say Saturday morning and, as the front grows nearer, both will amend and inch over to mid-day Friday.)

I don't know about you but I find this kind of thing enormously helpful.  The forecast I can read in the paper or on any public site right this minute will tell me that Thursday and Sunday will be dry and warmer but they won't tell me that there seems to be great confidence of that.  (And not only do all the NWS models point that way but so do the AccuWeather and Weather Channel projections.)

The NWS public forecast tells me there's a 20% chance of showers on Wednesday but it doesn't tell me they're saying that because, essentially, they're hedging their bets.  Most of their computer models think the storm will come nowhere near us but one says it will hit L.A.  It would be quite a different thing if all indicators were saying that the storm would definitely come our way but there would only be a 20% chance of it yielding precipitation.

If you'd like to "triangulate" this way and read the various weather services' opinions, you can get your local NWS forecast at http://www.nws.noaa.gov and with that as a starting point, you may be able to find a "discussion" page for your local forecast.  The AccuWeather forecast may be obtained at www.accuweather.com and the Weather Channel forecast is over at www.weather.com.  There are several other services on the 'net that offer predictions — some, arrived at via still other computer models; others, disguised versions of one of these — but I tend to think that the three I recommend should do it for anyone.  My experience has been that, on occasion, all are wrong…but that by consulting them all, you get a much more accurate forecast than by consulting any one.

A prediction: Enron may be the news story du jour but it will never become a scandal of Teapot Dome, Watergate or even Whitewater proportions and will not directly harm George W. Bush.  A few Enron execs — though not those who had a lot of direct contact with our president — will be sacrificed, pleading Guilty or No Contest to some plea bargain.  They'll pay fines they can easily afford, and perhaps one will do some token prison time, and some token amounts of cash will be ostensibly returned.

Then it will all be over and forgotten.  (Note that I am not writing here what I think should happen but rather, what I think will.)

Why do I think this?  Because too much money has been spread around.  A Democrat with clean hands — assuming there is such a thing — is going to wound a lot of fellow Democrats to pursue the matter too far.  Yes, Teapot Dome — which this scandal most resembles — tarred all parties, but that was then, when partisanship was not as rabid and control of the House and Senate did not hang so precariously on a handful of elections.  Watergate and Whitewater were only about folks from one party doing wrong; the other could pursue them with grand outrage and talk of higher roads and morals.  The American public does not buy the distinction of, "Yes, we took money we shouldn't have but they took a lot more."

It'll all go on for a few months…or until some terrorist-related victory or disaster pushes it off the CNN website.  Bush, Cheney and several of their buddies will squirm a lot and make excuses that would have been called blatant, character-defining lies if uttered by someone named Clinton.  There will be much talk of campaign reform and no effective action.  And then it'll all be forgotten.  I think.

Terry Jones of Monty Python fame has authored a piece about Mr. Bin Laden, and it seems to be riling some of the Conservative websites who perceive it as anti-American.  I don't think it is but I'll let you judge for yourself.  Here's that link…know what I mean?  Nudge, nudge…

A term is awaiting invention.  Just as "McCarthyism" and "Willie Horton" entered the political vocabulary to denote long-standing tactics, someone is going to coin a term to identify something that now can be described by phrases like, "Moralizing based not on morals but on political advantage."  It is exemplified by Republicans who felt that Whitewater was a scandal of epic proportions that demanded full investigation and prosecution, especially of those in the Oval Office, whereas Enron can be explained away as an acceptable aberration of the Free Market.  It can also be typified by Democrats who thought the affront of the decade was when Republican congressional leaders would not allow bills that might pass to be voted upon, whereas Tom Daschle is a hero for blocking a vote on the so-called "stimulus package."  We could all name another dozen examples on both sides of the aisles.

(Another term we need is for when they give a bill a name like "The Economic Stimulus Package" or "The Patriot Act" so they can argue that anyone who opposes it for any reason is against economic stimulation or patriotism.  I forget his name but, years ago, some Congressguy was suggesting that he might name every bill he proposed, regardless of contents, "The Act To Stop Puppy Slaughter."  The premise was that no one would dare oppose it, thereby giving their opponents the chance to run ads that said, "He voted against The Act to Stop Puppy Slaughter.")

Getting back to the first one: Is there a person in this country who doubts that Democrats look the other way, or come up with tortured rationales when Democrats misbehave?  That Republicans adjust their indignation according to whether theirs political capital to be made?  Of course not.  (When I asked that question once on a panel discussion, someone in the audience proclaimed that his party didn't do that but the other guys did, all the time…thereby proving my point.)

So how come we don't have an easy, one or two word term for this?  I'm nominating "Bennetting," in honor of lawyer Bob Bennett, who did it constantly for his client, Bill Clinton, and also for his brother, public scold Bill Bennett, who never met a Democratic lapse that wasn't an outrage or a Republican mountain of immorality that couldn't be made a molehill.  I think it's a good name because it reminds us that no party has an exclusive on the practice, but I'm open to other suggestions.