Tell Bugs that if he doesn't say "Of course you realize this means kinetic military action", we'll hire Roger Rabbit instead.

They said if I voted for the Presidential candidate who sang "bomb bomb bomb Iran", I'd get a President who started dropping bombs on nations that never attacked us and pose no threat. They were right.

It's not that regime change is the wrong choice. It's that this is absolutely the wrong way to go about it. 'Drop bombs [or send in the Marines] until Qaddaffi is dead' is a perfectly sensible decision, whether the US does it, France does it, NATO does it, Israel does it, Saudi Arabia does it... Whoever does it, it has to be done, so get it taken care of.

This clusterfuck is completely the wrong way to go about it. All in the name of avoiding looking like GWB, the administration - and Western Civilization in general - is doing exactly what they (falsely) accused GWB of doing. Frankly I think a convincing argument could be made for seizing the oilfields, although it would require bribing China, anyone with prior contracts, locals, etc.

Many have noticed how the Obama administration has - without a pretense of explanation - kept or even expanded rendition, indefinite detention, the Patriot Act, Gitmo, military tribunals. I forget which Muslim terrorist got read his Miranda rights an hour after they caught him, but that seems to accelerated their reversal.

Long days after the bombing started, Obama gave a brief message to the American people. But Qaddaffi's still in power and there are no plans to make him go. The rebels still have nothing to offer except rebellion. The coalition is falling apart like the failed Russian coup of the late 80's. Nobody knows who's in it or what they're doing or for how long.

Syria is now consumed with riots. It's not clear yet if these are comparable to Europe in 1848 or Eastern Europe in 1989. The global Islamic extremists are in the best position, but it's not clear if the people will ultimately be on their side.

Resource consumption is a crucial part of any economy, especially modern industrial ones like ours. That's why I'm half-convinced a genuine "war for oil" might be prudent at this juncture. I don't think anybody on earth could be satisfied by the arguments for such a thing (including myself) but to take physical possession of a needed element for society to continue could have very positive reverberations against the terrorists and tyrants of the world.

Everything runs on energy. Food produced at one part of the world has to be transported to wherever it's processed and packaged for transportation to the local market. That's why vegetarian cruelty-free non-genetically modified etc. stuff is so expensive, even for wealth liberals. Just think how much worse it will get if gas prices go up ten bucks a gallon. Unless you've got cows, cropland and orchards in your backyard, starvation will be about a week away. That won't be changed by all the windmill, solar power and ethanol subsidies in the world.

The nuclear power advocates (of I am sorta a member) have been rightfully shaken by the catastrophe in Japan. But the nation was shattered by unprecedented earthquakes and tsunamis, [kamikaze = divine storm] and the reactors have continued to hold. Moreover, the Japanese people are calmly and rationally picking up the pieces. If there's any validity to a 'master race' argument, Japan (and Asia in general) is scoring pretty high at this point. That said, if the same crisis had struck a Chinese nuclear plant, preventing a meltdown would have been the least of the worries as chaos ripped through society. Ditto in Iran or North Korea, and their nuke-building capabilities probably aren't as secure.

The reactors have held and (inshallah) will continue to hold. One would assume the improvements in engineering since they were built decades ago can improve on this tremendous achievement. There is room for cautious optimism if you think Albert Einstein's theories can provide energy more cheaply and efficiently than coal, oil, gas, etc. However - Germany seems to have taken the lead on this - existing plants are being shut down, as literal a John Galt "turn off the motors of the world" moment as we've seen yet.

Solar power seems like it would be the greatest idea in the world, but so far it doesn't produce enough energy to power anything we actually use. I'm sure if it were possible, they'd make small things like iPods or cell phones with solar cells, and the energy savings would be noticeable because you no longer have to charge the damn things up. Wind power likewise doesn't produce enough energy.

You don't think about things like that when you're a week away from starvation. Civilization is much more tenuous than most people think. Qaddaffi could be an insane murderer slaughtering people no matter what time or place he was born and ruled. But only because wealthy western nations pay for oil does he have advanced technology to kill his people with.

What if someone came to a prominent politician or leader with a plan to create large numbers of jobs at a local, state and federal level. Many different types of jobs would be created with this offer; manual labor, production and use of everything from electronics to t-shirts, food and beverage to large-scale transportation and logistics to media attention. Sounds like a great deal.

Now what if the person who came with this offer is a known heroin addict, or at least speaking professionaly for one? It sounds kind of iffy, but it didn't stop the Rolling Stones, Led Zeppelin, the Who, Guns'n'Roses, Aerosmith, Red Hot Chili Peppers, anybody working with Eric Clapton in the 70's, etc, other drug users in rock.

The same system that makes the consumer culture possible is the one that's given us the time, leisure and wealth created by energy use.

Not really related, but I've noticed a sudden resurgence of the singer/guitarist dichotomy present in most hit rock bands. Mick and Keith haven't produced much in decades. Slash is winning against Axl, already planning his next solo album. Jimmy Page would love to fly Led Zeppelin again, but Robert Plant's not remotely interested. Brian May has produced a Britpop chick and seems to be having issues with the only other member of Queen left. I don't know what Townshend and Daltrey's relationships are like, but the Who seem to keep up a semblance of functioning [again, the only two original members left]. Eddie Van Halen may (possibly) be putting together an album with David Lee Roth, but it's been so long since he's been a functioning anything, no one cares. Joe Satriani has found a reliable team playing frontman with Sammy Hagar in Chickenfoot. A band like Rush doesn't fit into this category, so we can ignore them. Ditto Metallica, the Eagles, Beatles, solo artists, etc. Nyeah.

I wonder, in the popular entertainment/consumer side of culture, how much of what we've seen in the last half-century has been largely inspired by having to make deals with crazed twenty-somethings who have found success beyond all measure, and still maintain the same capitalist structure that lets completely normal people manage their business as well. Mick Jagger didn't waste himself with drugs (much), but he had to put up with people who did, and realized quickly that the London School of Economics teachings and a future knighthood was better than the alternative.

Here's an MTV clip from the mid-80s, the first Farm Aid (I think) and the first time Eddie Van Halen played with Sammy Hagar. The singer does an awesome job of putting on a show and they rock and roll a Led Zep tune.



And here's the "bomb bomb bomb Iran" joke. Having never seen it before, it's exactly what I thought it would be. A joke, humor that becomes more cynical by the day.

Mission: "Send the Marines back to Tripoli to put a bullet in Qaddaffi's head, then come home"

So we're invading Libya now. Or something. The UN and the French have given their instructions, and at some point Obama may follow up with Congressional authorization or something. Obama says there won't be ground troops, but if any pilot gets shot down, it's going to suck to be them if there's no boots on the ground. Wait, are we providing the pilots? What are we doing? What's the mission?

I really wish I could shake the feeling that he's been sitting idly for two weeks ("Qaddaffi must go", 3 March) hoping things would work out in his favor, and when it was clear they weren't going to unless he took action, asked himself what the guy before him would have done. The guy who had the most experience what what Obama himself is undergoing. He started a war in the region and got away with it. And this has France and the UN's approval (minus a few abstentions on the Security Council), so he can feel smug about getting permission first.

As I say, I'd like to shake that feeling. Maybe this is right on schedule with the overall war. Maybe this is thrown-together slop that will never come to anything because the C-in-C is over his head and has never lead anything like this. People around him will make a show of carrying out his orders and he'll give interviews (or not) and nothing will ever get done. The queen is surrounded by too many other pieces, and is effectively removed from the gameplay for the moment.

I have no idea if contributing anything to the removal of Qaddaffi and "owning" any part of Libya is a good idea or not (although France doesn't seem to mind; perhaps they're the ones feeling the "Bush envy" now). The abject failure to close Gitmo has demonstrated Obama is fully (if unwillingly) on board with the War on Terror as his predecessor set it up. As long as it supports that mission better than any of the alternatives, fine.

More hell is breaking loose. Saudi Arabia has ignored its relationship with the United States to send its forces into Bahrain, whose government had already fired upon protestors. Saudi Arabia is currently being targeted by Iran, which I didn't see coming. Is this just an attempt to bring chaos to the region, to stir up Shi'ite vs. Sunni, revolution and religion vs. monarchy, Persian versus Arab? Or is it about who controls Mecca?

Domestically, the Democrats are leaderless right now. Republicans are still trying to figure out what to do or how to do it, and they'll be blamed for the result. There was a story recently that Hillary was fed up with Obama's dithering. I can believe it. That's why I'm dubious about Obama's decision to go to war as part of a master plan, much as I'd like to believe it is.

Not sure what else to say. Haven't been doing much other than my job. The third draft crawls along, maybe a quarter of the way finished. I surprised myself and drew a couple of quick comics in a notebook. Nothing brilliant, but it's always a pleasure to have a comic finshed. In comics, I seem to be incapable of doing anything other than superheroes. Which is strange, because most of the basic elements of the genre are uninteresting to me as a writer, and to various extents as a reader.

I don't care about flashy costumes or fight scenes, and although I enjoy reading a good secret identity/love triangle gimmick, I only write one when I have a good idea for it. I do love the continuity aspect, but that's not really exceptional considering my similar fascination with history, rock stars, politics, etc. So although I certainly do non-superhero comic stories and strips, they're mostly one-offs and are mentally thrown on the pile with the rest - as large a pile as I can make it - and I go back to the superhero stories I enjoy doing. My art and lettering will never be professional and it's unlikely I'll ever rise to the level of competent amateur.

In (hopefully) the best sense of comic book continuity, I'm not even referencing the old stuff, so only what I can remember gets reused. Two 4-pagers in a notebook aren't much, but it's two more than I had when I joined years ago. Last deployment, I drew an 8-pager and a sorta-sequel 24-page story (22 pages?) Those were fun to do. I also did two non-superhero 60 (72?) panel strips in Microsoft Paint.

I really have no idea what else to say at the moment. Qaddaffi is making his bid for caliph. It's utterly insane, but so is he, and after four decades of power, he might be right that the alternative to him is chaos. Public unions are getting desperate in the mid-North.

Here's some outtakes from MASH.

I like stamp collecting, but there's a seductive lure... Is a rare 1916 Monaco Windsor worth one's immortal soul?

Yes! Yes! A thousand times yes!!!

Besides, everyone knows stamp-collector groupies are major babes.

I will admit, not bitching about politics and other current events has taken away a large incentive to post regularly. It wasn't exactly a conscious decision, more like 'jeez, give it a rest'. There's no real incentive to start ranting about the outrage of the day. With this administration, there's another one coming along and it's more tiresome than anything else.

Remember when Obama was supposed to be this great agent of hope and change? A lot of people saw that he had no actual experience taking difficult leadership positions, and usually voted "present" in his career. But those people didn't vote for him. Over halfway through his Presidency, his style of leadership is quite clear. Serious question for those who voted for him, two years later, what other explanation could there before why he gets pushed around by Reverend Wright, Bill Ayers, Rahm, the Republicans, Iran, Qaddaffi? Obama's not going to stand up for what's true and right and decent, why else would he wait two more years to fight for repealing Bush tax cuts? Why else did he campaign against the individual mandate and then sign Obamacare as written?

Now, does anybody remember anything concrete about him? His leadership position on Middle East turmoil? A brilliant forward-looking plan anywhere? The State of the Union was barely a month ago, did anything come out of that? [I recall something about Sputnik and choo-choo trains...]

Will he win re-election? Well, unless some serious sea change has happened in America's black communities that nobody has noticed, blacks are going to vote for him as unanimously in '12 as in '08. I think racial solidarity is a bad decision to base one's vote on, but it is a democratic right. That's the only thing giving him a fighting chance. The leftists know they're being taken for granted - who else are they going to vote for? - and every other Democratic constituency is fed up with defending their guy. The economy is worse under Obama, and he's not leading on any front. Any other President, he'd be unquestionably toast. As it is, he has virtually no chance, unless everything magically falls his way. Such things are not unprecedented.

Very little is happening as proscribed. The Muslim world is trying to unite, and the required step is a federalist sort of Islam that can credibly support a Caliphate. It could be housed in Cairo, Baghdad, Tehran, Beirut, Istanbul, Jerusalem, Mecca, I'm sure Kabul would work in a pinch, or Khartoum.

A united Islam would be a formidable enemy, but long before achieving major victory, their own internal dissension would tear them apart. Arab versus African, Shi'ite versus Sunni, tribalist versus globalist. The question - from our side - is how much damage they could inflict before this pan-Islamic civil war began. A true Caliphate accepted from Indonesia to Venezuela (ahem) would have to be a peacable one, with Caliphs replaced by means closer to the Pope in Rome than has traditionally been the case.

We'll know Islam is ready for such a state when the individual Muslim communities are able to police themselves in civilized manners. There are hopeful signs, the Egyptian protestors are making a point of cleaning up after themselves. Even the Muslim Brotherhood would have to know that actual governing on existing Middle Eastern models isn't possible without the horrible results demonstrated so far. [Except in Iraq and, to a lesser extent, Afghanistan] Anybody looking to be the next Qaddaffi? The next Saddam? The next Arafat?

The book continues, depressingly slowly. I'm about an eighth of the way through the third draft, and well over 40 corrections per page on average. I was hoping to have it at the printer's by mid-March, and that's been thrown out the window. What if I have to do a 4th draft? I'd be lucky to have the book printed by this year's NANOWRIMO.

I am pleased with the way it's turning out. Very few of the corrections are for anything other than grammar or polish. When I wrote the first draft, I had no idea what would actually happen by the end, and by the time I reached the end, I barely remembered anything from the beginning. That obviously carried over to the second draft, but now that I'm reading the book for the second time, everything fit together very well. The second draft was going through structural deficiencies and finding very few. Now I'm tracking the consistency of the characters and what's going on chapter by chapter. As long as the continuity is maintained, I'll be happy. The whole story needs to fit into a timeline, so that's the other priority of the third draft.

I'm also going back and forth on what else to include in the printed book. As a tribute to NANOWRIMO, my intention has always been to include blog posts and other stuff I wrote during the period of the first draft. I also just like the idea of making the book a complete package, more like an album. The question here is how much extra stuff do I want to include? And how much extra work is that worth?

I like the idea of including "extras". If nothing else, I'd like to have a polished readable version of the material. ["we decided that one big book was better'n two little books and rather than bring one up we decided to throw ours down..."] However, the "pure" notion of nothing between the covers except the story itself is a tempting one. The "vanity" part of "vanity press" would still be satisfied. And it would cut out much time and effort and still give me a book I'd want to read.

Ah well. I've got weeks left before I'll come close to needing to make that decision. The last half-dozen pages I've done of the third draft each have at least 55 corrections per page. There's no incentive to keep going beyond 'if I don't do it, it won't get done.' Depressing.

Speaking of depressing, one assumes the Baby Boomers must be in full *give me grandkids* mode by now, because I'm guessing there's a huge segregation in that population these days. The ones who are retiring have to fill up the hours with something. This will be particularly hard for those whose jobs really were everything in their lives, and the ones who have a crop of grandkids to play with will be noteworthy for that reason.

Anecdotal evidence suggests a resurgence of girly-girl-ism in the female of the species. That's where the Boomers who really didn't think about things like 'family values' before start seeing what really lasts. Read a story a while back about Madonna being horrified at some of the clothes her teenage daughter wanted to wear. I'm guessing that being an Italian Catholic school girl is a little harder to shake off than she thought it was. And if there's anyone who deserves to be shocked by her daughter's rebelliousness...

I've been listening to a bit of different music lately, now that I've overloaded on Steinman for the time being. I've burned a lot of CDs and listened to stuff on the car's stereo. Some stuff is surprisingly good. I still haven't gotten tired of such standards as Michael Jackson's "Man in the Mirror", Jim Croce's "I Got a Name", a Trans-Siberian Orchestra song or two. I've included some early-pop punk stuff, early albums by the Go-Go's ("We Got the Beat") and Big Star (albums didn't sell, but they were influential). Both bands are tolerable, but will probably be removed from the next batch of CDs. Joe Satriani's debut album, Surfing With The Alien was the biggest hit instrumental rock album in ages, and it wasn't just the rip-off of John Byrne's Silver Surfer on the cover that sold it. An outstanding guitarist. He's also joined with Sammy Hagar to lead Chickenfoot, whose debut album is excellent hard rock.

I'm actually becoming quite interested in Sammy Hagar. Best known as the guy who replaced David Lee Roth in Van Halen and he did that 'I Can't Drive 55' song, he's actually had a long and impressive career. Keep in mind, I haven't actually listened to most of his music, but I'm becoming more and more impressed with what I'm finding.

His first released album was as a member of Montrose in 1973, and up through his second release with Van Halen in 1986, he almost kept up an album a year release schedule. Since then, he's averaged an album every two years. Not noteable for much in the way of hits other than his VH-era releases, he always showed a relentless work ethic to tour and release material, and get to know the record company and radio guys. His collaborations with others became more and more high-profile until he stepped in to give Van Halen its biggest commercial standing.

This would be transitory, as the David Lee Roth releases continued to outsell Van Hagar in the long run. Indeed, modern Van Halen seems intent on erasing Hagar's time in the band at every opportunity. But Sammy continued releasing albums, working with other people, running a liquor empire.

I've only got most of his VH albums, the one he did after leaving/getting kicked out, the three songs he did for their reunion greatest hits tour/album, Chickenfoot, and his cover of Patti Smith's "Free Money" from one of his first solo albums.

The Smith song has always been a favorite of mine, from her excellent debut album in 1976-7. Smith and her band were basically rock critics who knew how to play instruments. She played up the poetess dancing up front while they were a tight rock band who knew all the facets of their craft. The debut album, Horses, has deservedly lived up to the hype, and "Free Money" has always been the song I think sounded most 'pop'. There's psychelic stuff and jams and heavy guitar stuff, none of the lyrics make any sense, and "Free Money" did a really good job of compacting all that in an appealing way.

So, if you only know Sammy Hagar as the generic hard-rock shouter who gets to work and party with A-list rockers, a great guy but not especially deep or outstanding in any field, you might not expect much from his cover of Patti Smith's New York punk poem. I sure didn't.

But I spent a buck on amazon's mp3 section and what I heard was an amazing cover that builds on the original in so many ways, I honestly have no idea which I prefer more. I want to like the original, but...

Here's a cover of some song I've never heard from his first solo album, the one before including "Free Money". This does a lot of the same thing, and I'm sorely tempted to do with Sammy what I did with Rush and Billy Joel, say 'screw it, I'm downloading everything'.


But yeah, Hagar's "Free Money" is perpetually listenable. I'd always wanted to hear "Sixteen Tons", and now I love it. A few standout tracks come from Dennis Wilson's debut album which sound nothing like the surfing Beach Boy burnout he actually was. Very deep and evocative mood music with a raspy voice he never had on Brian Wilson's tunes. Roxette did some great songs in the late 80's, and then redid the vocals in Spanish, so I've been enjoying those. Jim Morrison and Blondie mashed up for "Rapture Riders".

I don't know if Phil Spector needs the money or what, but a three disc set of most of his biggest records has become available, and it's very much worth it. The Ronettes, the Crystals, Darlene Love. It's not complete, no Righteous Brothers or Tina Turner, but most of his pre-Beatles output is represented. "Da Doo Ron Ron" and "He's A Rebel" are excellent productions, and if you can put aside the issue of giving money to a psychotic gun-toting lunatic like Spector, and you like his work, it's well worth the money.

If you can't put that issue aside, it's perfectly understandable. Exceptions will be made for people who create worthwhile commercial work that an audience will continue to desire. If anybody's interested in Chinatown and Rosemary's Baby as classic movies, the pedophile rapist who made them will benefit, that's just the way history works. Personally I didn't follow the Spector trial much. His out-of-control behavior was well documented over the decades - just the details given in Albert Goldman's book on John Lennon are enough - that it's less a case of him being a murderer as it is that someone finally died as a result. The amazing thing is that it hadn't happened earlier, and in that level of success, those around you will let you get away with quite a lot. "Nothing bad has happened yet" will excuse an awful lot of partying.

There's other stuff, Brian May's female pop singer who gave May songwriting credit on songs she did before him, as well as remaking old/new May/Queen songs. The best songs on Slash's album are still among my faves. He played "Sweet Child Of Mine" with Fergie at the Super Bowl show. Didn't watch it, but like Hagar, he's worked himself up to a high-profile superstar. He just took a lot more drugs than he should have to get there. G'n'R could have stayed at that level, but Axl couldn't hack it. [Slash, by the way, played guitar on the opening track of Sammy's first album post-VH, the one that came out seemingly only a few months after he was kicked out.]

The best songs on Chinese Democracy are still on my playlist too. I'm hearing new virtues in "Street of Dreams", and I thought it was a pleasant song back when bootlegs called it "The Blues". [The words 'street of dreams' appears once in the whole song, the words 'the blues' appears once in the whole song. Axl got the music right, but doesn't seem to grasp how to do the words.] But no, Slash got to the top of the rock'n'roll world twice, once with Axl and once on his own. He's even releasing limited edition live albums from his shows. I haven't found one to pay for yet, but the guy singing G'n'R songs does a good job on Youtube. Axl, meanwhile, reached his peak and decided to wear a Charles Manson t-shirt and record a Manson song, then busted up the old G'n'R with a cover of "Sympathy for the Devil," a song with its own bad history.

So, in addition to drugging and raping a 13-year old girl, Roman Polanski is also known for having his wife murdered by Charles Manson. Manson was influenced by John Lennon's lyrics. In the years before being murdered, Lennon lived at the Dakota, which is where Polanski shot parts of Rosemary's Baby. You know, the one about giving birth to Satan.

John Lennon, who had previously encountered gunplay while recording his last album of several with Spector, spent the last years of his life strung out on drugs while his wife bought important household goods like Egyptian mummies, and crucial services like a curse to keep Paul and Linda McCartney from stealing. Seriously. Yoko put a curse on Paul and he gets busted in Japan. John was shot a few months later. The McCartneys remained happily married for decades until one of them died in the other's arms. The other then mourned and moved on.

This all seems like the most convincing irrefutable evidence ever presented for mysticism and the occult (or at least "Instant Karma"). Yes, if you want proof that the universe operates on laws other than measurable science, there you go. More people sing "Give Peace A Chance" than "Please Please Me" (Lennon's first nationwide impact). All of the people involved in paens to Satan (thinly-veiled or otherwise) came to unhappy ends. Paul was too sensible to get so involved, and his record for winning the lottery of life is noticeably higher.

Notice how they clearly ran out of ideas for the last minute.


At least John had the sense to change his song title to "Yer Blues", because "I'm Lonely, Wanna Die" would be creepy. As it is, didn't any of the other Beatles or the producer ask if everything was all right at home? But Phil Spector went out and did "He Hit Me (And It Felt Like A Kiss)", a record which has nothing to recommend it beyond the shock value of the title.

The Adventures of Busty Steele: Mercenary In Leather will be back after these messages...

It looks like this weekend decided to be lazy on my behalf. Yesterday, all I did was go to Kinkos and print out the second draft. I've been admiring it since, but haven't made the slightest effort to begin the third draft. Of course yesterday I also slept for twelve hours, so I think I made the decision to be lazy last week sometime.

In the middle of those twelve hours I was woken up for work-related reasons, so life's an ever-unfolding challenge blah blah blah.

Speaking of which, Qaddaffi isn't going to get out of this one. Like every other dictator, he'd staved off the Islamists and the Americans for decades. His country is just an arbitrary conglomeration of tribes and oil fields, the alternative to him is chaos. We knew it, that's why we didn't bump him off earlier. But he's one of the people that got a message when we took out Saddam, about how easy it was, how Iraq did not unite for their dictator, and how he'd better play nice with WMD inspectors.

In Egypt, the alternative is not chaos (yet) so Mubarek left much more peacefully. Now the Muslim Brotherhood, the democrats and the military power have to figure out what to do next. Qaddaffi's accrued a lot of hardcore killers over the years, and they didn't restrain.

[When he finally addressed the protests and massacres, Obama stressed "the whole world is watching". They already know that and it already doesn't bother them. Would it be better if the world wasn't watching?]

Qadaffi says he'll die as a martyr, because like every other Middle Eastern leader, he aspires to the gold ring of Caliph-in-the-making. This is a civil war within Islam as the leaders play king of the hill. There is no time left, but Qadaffi's decided to go down fighting, rather than escape with his life like Mubarek did (unless Mubarek's dead, rumors have been sketchy, and like everyone else in the despot club, he's quite old.)

The House of Saud just increased the oil money bribes to every citizen. They have Mecca and Medina, as long as they can fend off betrayal on their home turf, they're good. But they're also in a bind, since not a bit of that wealth comes from Saudi Arabia itself, but rather from the money capitalist nations give them. The same nations who pointed to Saddam, told him he was gone, and made it happen.

Of course the west doesn't have any idea what to do or say about it. Although I am no fan of the administration, everything they do will be wrong for reasons far beyond their control. The best they can do is cover their own asses, not the most flattering leadership position to take, but one they're good at. It's not like they can bribe their citizens to stay loyal.

Wheels are spinning off of things that some people didn't even know had wheels. What beliefs, what practices, what cultures have the most staying power, those will be the winners of whatever comes next. Somali pirates have so far gotten away with killing four Americans. And there must be a lot of Muslims who wonder why they can't have nice easy worldwide spiritual leadership that changes peacefully the way Catholics have.

If that isn't depressing enough, while writing this I did the third draft of Page 1. Fifty-five corrections need to be made. Oh my...

Some times you can really identify with Daffy Duck. Just when you think you've got everything under control...

Now that's just an indignity, I'm not able to embed "Pronoun Trouble" or "Wabbit Season, Duck Season" or any other cool Looney Toons.

So here's something I just discovered, a blog that reprints and extensively comments on early Peanuts strips.
http://peanutsroasted.blogspot.com/search?updated-min=2011-01-01T00%3A00%3A00-05%3A00&updated-max=2012-01-01T00%3A00%3A00-05%3A00&max-results=50

Harry the Hat and Gary have a meeting up at Melville's...

Four months to the day after I started writing the first chapter, I've finished the second draft of the book. That was a gruelling experience, going through every single word to make sure it fit. That said, there were some bits I'd forgotten that I really liked, and I was quite impressed with how the whole 'make it up as you go along' thing worked. I've still got to do at least a third draft, making sure the characters, plot and themes are actually consistent. Everything *feels* right, but there are a few places where I'm not sure it *is* right.

It's actually somewhat educational. I tend to polish quite a bit even while writing the first draft (believe it or not), but very few pieces I've written were scrutinized this much. I must have made 60 changes per page at least, basically one edit every fifteen words. I'm a damned good writer, and it's humbling to see so much that needs to be fixed. In the last few weeks, even the prospect of getting closer to done wasn't an incentive to keep slogging through pages.

Work is going reasonably well. I'm running an arms room and putting up with some long hours and odd problems that arise. Challenging to get used to, but sort of fun that way as well.

Currently a number of Middle Eastern countries are in flames. Bahrain, Jordan, Libya, Iran, not to mention Egypt and probably others I've forgotten. There's not a lot of news. A blonde infidel woman who dressed as a whore was sexually assaulted in Egypt by a group of Muslim men who shouted "Jew". Fortunately she was saved by Egyptian women and soldiers, but it's not likely other Western newscasters will journey out too far. It's almost as horrible as covering the Tea Party.

By the way, where are the men of the Muslim world on the assault of Lara Logan? That is a total breaking point between civilization and barbarism. The demonstrators in Egypt seem to be a mixture - that varies for every individual - of desire for freedom and liberty, desire for order and stability even to the point of despotism, desire to be good Muslims and desire to be Egyptians. No nation is civilized where a woman can not walk by herself with a reasonable expectation of safety, even an infidel dressed like a whore. Non-negotiable.

Or, as a British imperialist is once reported to have said, we'll respect their customs as long as they respect our custom of shooting anybody who treats a woman that way.

I'm sure anybody in Egypt who has the slightest inclination towards American interests would jump at the chance to find this mob and serve them up on a platter. It would make a nice test of a civilized legal system, conclusively proving their guilt before execution. But what about those Egyptians who don't have an inclination towards American interests? Where do they stand on this animal behavior?

The leftist internet sites I peruse all work to avoid the elephant in the room that it might have been an expected response of violent Muslim men to sexually assault an infidel woman. Those that don't digress into hair-splitting definitions of rape and privacy in general - with regular references to the awful Republican patriarchy - assume that the assault was committed by thugs of Mubarek's regime with no evidence whatsoever. Then there's the sickos (the kind who defend Roman Polanski, Julian Assange, John Edwards, Al Gore, Bill Clinton, Ted Kennedy, shariat law even when it contradicts their supposed feminism) who think Logan had it coming for being a "warmonger".

But hey, the left is suddenly all about freedom in the Muslim world. Showing no trace of irony, the current demonstrators in Wisconsin are claiming solidarity with Egyptian demonstrators, against governor Hitler Mubarek. Showing his usual good sense, even the President has already opined, first stipulating that he knows nothing about it, but then saying it's clearly an assault on unions and therefore bad. Way to be President of the entire nation there, champ.

Despite every bit of evidence that entitlement spending is creating a crisis in every state and nation, public teachers in Wisconsin are calling in sick to go demonstrate - some of them bringing their students - rather than even consider any changes to their contract that would bring them down to the taxpayer's level. This just four months after said taxpayers voted Republicans for governor and both houses of the legislature. Somebody's cranky.

What do they think they're doing by claiming solidarity with the Egyptian demonstrators? The Muslim Brotherhood is probably the largest and most influential organization in the world still in existence that openly sided with the Nazis during the war, and played a large role in the on-going popularity of "Mein Kampf" (which FYI translates to "Jihad") Are they so blind as to not see who is waiting to profit from their lunacy?

I guess not, they don't have a chance, but they're out there anyway. There's no money. An engine won't move if there's no gas.

It sounds like there's a Tea Party planned this weekend, now that everybody else who had to work for a living has some time off. They already voted for people who promised to cut spending, public employees have no real basis for this strike. They think they're oppressed now, wait until they see their fellow Wisconsans coming out after morning prayers tomorrow.

Here's the montage of "Cheers" clips set to the full-length theme song on its 200th episode spectacular. I'm not sure why I've been thinking of the series lately, but for whatever reason I've been suddenly recalling some line or scene, whether or not I cared for them at the time.



It's still an interesting show. I think, this clip is the first video I've seen of the show in quite some time, but I found myself laughing anyway at how many forgotten moments there were. I barely recall what episode half of them were from, and almost none of them came to mind when thinking about the show before this.

This montage was biased towards physical comedy, but as I remember there was a surprising amount of it in the show. Surprising, but you don't think of "Cheers" as a show about physical comedy. Somewhere between "Night Court" and "Family Ties" on the sitcom scale [courtesy of the Nick-At-Nite "Better Living Through Television" scale of measurement], there was actually physical humor. Sam and Diane's slap-fest, or almost any time Kirstie Alley was genuinely funny. Think about that, yeah the writers gave her some good lines, but the places Rebecca works the best are when she's doing something physical, jumping over the bar or something. Without that, she collapsed into whining and the last seasons really look like the writers had a memo 'don't forget to give Kirstie something to do this week' when putting together every new episode.

The show also worked as an ensemble, where any of the characters were capable of holding a main plot or a sub-plot. I understand it was something of a pioneer in season-long story arcs for the characters, which I assume grew out of the Sam-Diane-Rebecca relationship. It did bring the domestic/romantic comedy into the workplace - unlike "Taxi" or "Mary Tyler Moore", two workplace sitcoms preceeding "Cheers" from the same creators. [Random example: David Lloyd, who wrote MTMs "Chuckles Bites The Dust" wrote the very physically-active "Woody's Wedding" late in "Cheers" run.]

The ensemble cast really helped bring the show to the gold standard of television as episodic entertainment, that of characters we want to see again and keep current on their latest adventures. The kind of show comics used to be good at. I would like to think that it was the last great show, but I stopped watching TV ages ago. After "Cheers", there was "Seinfeld" and then "Friends". Ray Romano had a show, and "Two and a Half Men" has been on for many years before it became "Will Charlie Sheen Live To The Next Episode?" To me the sitcom is dead, but there are many viewers who disagree with me.

On an NBC Anniversary special several years after the show ended, most of the cast reunited, in character, to be there. It was nice to see them all again, as was the reunion for a mid-late episode of "Frasier", a show that had nearly as much objective success as its parent, but never came close to being the same cultural touchstone. As a then-current NBC star, Kelsey Grammar had his own segment of the same anniversary show.

Amusingly, it was interrupted by Bob Newhart, complaining about all these people from NBC being at a CBS function. "Bob, this is NBC." Bob says that's not what he heard, pointing to Bill Dailey sitting in front of him, next to Barbara Eden. "Um, Bob, I was on CBS too." Later Bob showed up and mentioned his first show did run briefly on NBC, and introduced some other guest. It was a fun show, as many various casts as possible were brought out, and in character.

It was followed a few months later by a similar show on CBS which did the same thing. Highlights of that show include John Schneider and Tom Wopat doing a gawdawful country-music medley of CBS theme songs and a clip of Bob Newhart and Suzanne Pleshette waking up in bed, again. "Oh Bob, not that dream about the three woodsmen again."

"Cheers" has been released in full on DVD, I even have one season (somewhere). As has "Frasier", and even "The Bob Newhart Show." Unfortunately, "Newhart" has not been released beyond its first season, which is a shame. It's a show that really stands up, especially because it was so untopical. Except for the outfits and a very few pop culture references, there's nothing whatosever to place what time it was made.

And it was hilarious. "Newhart" was Bob's attempt to follow up his earlier show, with Mary Frann and Tom Poston backing him up. Mary Frann did an excellent job in the extremely unenviable position of following Suzanne Pleshette's footsteps, but watching the first season, nothing prepared me for how awesome Tom Poston was. If the adjectives "understated" and "zany" can be combined, and then given steroids, that's his version of George Utley, banal handyman extraordinaire.

Steve Kampmann was very good as Kirk, the compulsive liar and slimeball who operated the cafe next door. The character was just too limited to be useful, too little Ted Baxter, too much Frank Burns. In the second season, he was given a girlfriend (Cindy the clown) and then written out. Also in the first season was Jennifer Holmes as Leslie Vanderkellen. They gave her lots of interesting things to do, but it just wasn't working. Like Markie Post's early appearances on "Night Court" (or possibly Harry Morgan's appearance in MASH soon before COL Potter showed up), when Julia Duffy makes an appearance having a fling with Kirk, it's clear what direction the show will need to go.

The first season includes most of the characters who would be around for the entire series, mostly as quirky townsfolk. The Mayor and his crony, the sheriff who spoke in monotone, Larry, Darryl and Darryl. These characters and more would go on to dominate the show, but they're all in the first season. Really, Peter Scolari as Michael Harris, producer of Bob's tv show, would be the only change in the cast for the rest of the show. And Michael and Stephanie's baby, if you want to count her.

Dammit, Youtube also doesn't have Bob Newhart's appearance on the Murphy Brown show, come to retrieve his secretary Carol, the one competent assistant Murphy found during her entire show.

Speaking of that show, funny how that one doesn't seem to be remembered anymore. It was topical, no doubt about that. I remember it as being funny too, but it's been a while. That show ran into problems, some of which affect most sitcoms (changing cast members), too much topic-of-the-week, and some of which it brought on itself. In the long run, who was supported by that big deal about Murphy having her baby? Candice Bergen herself said (years later) Dan Quayle was right about a father's importance.

It wasn't the first show to jump the shark after having a baby. But all the extra attention given to the issue because of Murphy's baby - no thanks to Mr. Quayle; I know the Vice-President doesn't have anything better to do, but geez, doesn't the Vice-President have anything better to do? - went away, and then the kid just interferred with their storylines. So they ditched the kid, freely admitting it in E! TV retrospectives and the historical record. Towards the end, when ratings were dropping, they did an oh-so-touching arc about Murphy and breast cancer, and brought the kid back magically aged enough to feel sorry for her. Way to help prove the Muslims wrong, guys.

Atlas Shrugged, Part 1: The Wrath of Khan

This is going to be a disaster. Much like the Watchmen movie, this seems to have been made by people obsessively-nerdy enough about the source material to get every little detail right, right down to large chunks of dialogue. And, much like the Watchmen movie, it's just not possible to get it right.

As I was waiting for the video to load, I asked myself what the best way to approach an Atlas Shrugged movie would be. This was before I made the Watchmen connection, but I thought the best way would be to keep the plot. Don't explain the thinking behind the story, just take them and as much of the plot as you can dramatize, change everything else.

Other than the twist ending - which I'll admit was a clever change - Watchmen was a lurid pulp-inspired degradation of the graphic novel's brilliance. It was now possible to recreate the comic shot for shot, but as Mark Twain would say, you have the notes but not the music. I don't think the movie bombed (certainly not as badly as Frank Miller's The Spirit, which I've never seen), but that is how it's seen in hindsight.



Atlas Shrugged is in a similar category, with even more connections to pulp fiction and lurid materials. The dialogue alone would make it almost entirely unfilmable, and with so much of the story happening in narration, the whole idea looks pointless.

That's what I mean about taking the plot and doing something else with it. It still builds up to Galt's speech and all the reasons he has for making it, but most of his words would have to be scrapped. Hell, in the original book, he made the speech on RADIO.

With the digital revolution in filmmaking, it's much easier to make a personal vision in movies, although it comes at the expense of real styles. There's a mind-numbing similarity to digital effects - the slo-mo shot is the one that annoys me the most - and the coloring and special effects that can be made by having actors standing in front of green screens. It's why Hollywood has finally been able to film things that for so long were impossible. The Star Wars prequels, Watchmen, the Frank Miller oeuvre, Lord of the Rings and Harry Potter: The Franchise, and now Atlas. It takes far fewer people and smaller operations to file actors into a room with a green screen, film them doing their stuff and making the rest on a computer.

Visually, it looks like it could be interesting, although I admit I've never given much thought to what the characters would look like. Rand's writing style was sufficiently intrusive to ward off those thoughts, for me anyway. It's not that English was a second language to her, Tolstoy wrote in Russian and the translations of his writing are majestic and eloquent. Nah, it's just Rand.

I tend to prefer her two earlier books, The Fountainhead and We, The Living, which are each more readable and less overbearing with the philosophy. People talk much more like actual people, and have more complicated personalities - bad people doing good things, good people doing bad things - and they're shorter, which makes the plots work even better. And she did nail the plots, which in all three books are tightly-wound interweaving threads that dramatize whatever ideas she's conveying and build naturally to strong endings.

I don't know if this movie will be a bomb. Someone's obviously invested in a trilogy. If the box office take isn't there to release the sequel, my guess is the three parts (most if not all of which are probably filmed by now) will be put together on the DVD, just to hit those who did like it, or are at least willing to give the whole thing a shot.

As far as I know the other adaptations of her books remain mostly of interest to die-hard fans other than myself. She wrote the screenplay herself - awww, all by her lonesome - for The Fountainhead, which starred Gary Cooper at was a decent hit of the day. It's not a bad movie, but I tend to doubt it would appeal to anybody except Rand fans, Cooper fans or general fans of 1940's office dramas, which probably doesn't include too many people who weren't around for the 1940's. We, The Living, The Movie was, amusingly enough, produced by Fascist Italy because they thought it was a movie about how awful communism was. The Nazis, being more careful about copyright theft and understanding the book a little better, told them to suppress it. I have no idea if Rand knew about the movie at the time, but years after the war someone gave her the film itself, and reportedly liked it.

The Incredibles has often been called a movie about Objectivism/libertarianism, and I might agree with that, kind of. I'm a huge fan of the movie, but I think many of these criticisms miss the point that unlike every other movie I've referred to in this post (except Star Wars) The Incredibles were created to be a film first and foremost. The characters were meant to move and do things for a constantly-moving camera, and the story was what got them to do it.

The plot was certainly of a high quality. With the exception of the Mirage subplot, everything was flawlessly incorporated from beginning to end. Yes, the characters are incredibly (!) similar to the Fantastic Four, but every scene shows extensive work to make them original characters. It's not that easy to just come up with a whole new archtype.

[Literally. I once did a comic serial starring a quartet of superheroes, and spent many hours designing each character and the group as a whole so they would not be FF rip-offs. None of that work shows up on the page. Zero, zip, zilch, nada. Anybody would read the story and assume I ripped off the FF. A lot of that time was spent trying to add or drop a member, and three or five characters just weren't workable. Four worked.]

The FF were never intended to work as a family sitcom the way the Parrs do. Their superpowers aren't such blatant extensions of their personalities and roles in the family. The Incredibles had to be able to function in all of those areas and make it work.

Which they did. One thing that's amazing is how much story there really is. There's only the one scene at dinner that really sets up the family dynamic until the second act is almost done, and then it's an awesome ride through the climax. Frozone only makes a few brief appearances in the beginning and then is off-screen until the big fight at the end, but he's one of the main characters. There's just brief character bits or interludes in a montage that sum up the Parrs' home life, but it's a rich and varied tapestry amidst everything else that's going on.

As an example, look at Dash's interest in sports, which gets mentioned in virtually every one of those character bits. He's gotten in trouble at school for putting a tack on the teacher's chair in class, but even the videotape doesn't show him. Bob is thrilled, "they got you on tape and you still got away with it? Wow, how fast do you think you were going?" Dash can barely be seen in this shot, but just look at him start bouncing with glee when he finds out Dad's impressed. Bob and Helen argue about it that night. Later on, in the montage, father and son go out to throw and catch the football, over several miles. This is a skill that comes in handy in the big fight when they've got the Omnidroid's control mechanism. "Dash, go long!" And of course the final scene is Dash at the track meet. That's a sit-com plot, but fits in seamlessly with the superheroics, and the social commentary.

Let's play "Sid and Nancy." I'll be Sid.

I was idly thinking, as opposed to busily thinking. Most of America's political disagreements about what the government should do about our problems could be worded as simply as "cut spending first" or "raise taxes first". Different people have different levels of veneration for these ideas, but in the short term, as far as what government actually can do. So why don't the two parties put their views thusly on the ballot in 2012?

You go into the booth, you check your choice for President and Veep, Congress and maybe Senate. You vote for Proposition 23 and get your "I Voted Today" sticker. And you decide if you agree with (or against) 'cut spending first' or 'raise taxes first'. So whoever wins the election, that's their mandate. No earmarks, no fact-finding tours. These hearings will be on f*cking C-Span, unlike Obama's campaign promise.

If they don't design and implement procedures to tax or cut, everybody resigns. Their successors take over within the guidelines of the Constitution. They are then charged with completing the task within a year (in time for the '14 elections), and drafting a Constitutional amendment to make whatever they have done legal.

I don't think it should then come to a nationwide vote in 2014 though. The populist in me says 'of course it should', but the kid in me loves the frosted side, I mean says 'populism isn't everything.' [I bet nobody out there got that pop culture reference]

One of the great things about our system is the specific duration of tenures and the way they vary between the branches. The House is up for election every two years no matter what. But it's only one-sixth of the federal governent. [Perhaps coincidentally, they also have repealed Obamacare, which nationalized one-sixth of the economy. More on this later. Maybe.]

The Senate has three times as long to deliberate, and the chief executive has the average, plus a completely different set of duties and skills. Supreme Court Justices are in office until they retire or die. I don't have any strong opinions for or against these term limits (except for the President, two terms tops). I like the irony of a lifetime tenure in a republic like ours, and think the judicial side is improved by it. If people want to keep voting for the same bozos in Congress for a half-century, they should have the right to do so.

This idea should be a populist vote that up to a point, and I think it would go a long way towards working the poisons out of the body politic. After that point however, the Republic part should take over. The '14 midterms should be treated as normally as possible. With the way much of the world order is eroding before our eyes, American citizens show up like they always do, fewer in the midterms.

The 'spend less first' and 'cut taxes first' ballot will spell this out as simply as possible - well, minus my own musing on terms in office anyway - that no similar vote will be on the ballot for '14. This will not be an opportunity for populism that will damage.

If the elected Congress fails to meet the one-year deadline and their successors fail to carry out the 'spend or cut' mission AND fail to draft an amendment, then I don't know what the repercussions would be.

It's been a while since I've read how amendments are made ("when a mommy and a daddy constitution love each other very much...") so I'm not sure where the movement would go from there.

Speaking of Obamacare, the administration has been issuing more waivers to the law for its buddies in the unions and other corporate buddies - even ones that pressed the administration to enact this health care law, strange - and just today they singled out GE to get out of some EPA regulations. As the President would say, "Winning The Future???" I prefer "Whiskey Tango Foxtrot", but that's just me.

It's not the hypocrisy that's annoying so much as how blatantly they know they'll get away with it. Their own supporters won't withold votes, and they're the ones crying about money being spent on political ads.

Also, over half the states are suing to repeal it, and a judge just threw it out as completely unconstitutional. Last November was a popular mandate, and I think more could be done along those lines. It should definitely have a specified mission and a limited period of time. When Obama mentioned Sputnik recently, someone point out that the mission to the government wasn't to get man into space, it was to do it in a short period of time. The only way to get it done in time was to bring in outside interests, private by definition. [This is also where Ike saw the military-industrial complex come into effect, but that's another train of thought.] It's government contracts for the companies, and can get better results for the space program.

[Many have noted the irony of the guy who finally cut funding for America's space program should refer to Sputnik when trying to inspire a nation. Give him a break. The man has spent his whole life rarely voting anything other than 'present' and he's not going to change now. Look at his reaction to North Korean missles and riots in Iran and Egypt.]

Speaking of Egypt, it's looking like the pro-democracy faction has spoken and is ready to finish speaking now. The Muslim Brotherhood, with roots back to the 1920's and were big fans of Hitler, is probably the most prepared organization in the country, except possibly the army.

Nothing's going to happen without the Brotherhood taking a role, or else outright fighting everybody else. I would like to believe that these protests in Tunisia, Egypt, Jordan and possibly elsewhere are inspired by western ideals of democratic freedom. And I think a lot of that is present.

But the Brotherhood, big fans of Hitler remember, have a large amount of support as well. I guess topical 90 year old German political theory is just what today's young Muslim male is into. Or maybe it's the jihad [or "struggle", as in "Mein Kampf"] and hatred of Jews.

I would like to think that the outbreaks of violence have been limited to individual thugs on either/any side singling out a specific opponent for short-range or long-range goals. Islam is experiencing a civil war which goes unnoticed because the right is called racist and Fox News-loving and the usual, and the left isn't interested in what *those* people do. Gulags and slaughterhouses in southeast Asia after the US departed Vietnam didn't bother them, and if we lose this war, dead Muslims won't either.

Now the people who want democracy are retreating. Hopefully the Brotherhood and the government thugs will shoot each other and destroy the worst of both sides. Reportedly, and I am not an expert on the Muslim Brotherhood, they actually practice more intellectual diversity in their various cells through the Middle East. If they can be infected with an anti-Shariat Stuxnet virus, we've got 'em. The Egyptian military is strong and effective - it rules the country of course - and reportedly respected by the people as well. They want change. One might even say they hope for it.

The danger is that the Brotherhood has too much popular support and get full license towards their judenhass. Egypt and Jordan are the two countries most immediately troubled by riots, and they're the only ones who've ever been able to make a peace with Israel. It could get real bad real quick.

A few plus sides. After initially supporting the demonstrators, Iran made calls for restraint from violence. Even China is now banning "Egypt" from search terms on China's internet. We may not be looking at an outbreak of Jefferson-style democracy any time soon, but there are encouraging signs. When al-Sadr returned to Iraq after several years in Iran, some of his supporters were noisy. He told them (in English) to shut up. He was only a simple cleric and was ashamed by their behavior. Today Iraqi citizens attacked an Iranian embassy. Most of the Middle East is ruled by despots who might be very willing to leave with their lives and a sizeable amount of loot.

A few down sides. They want shariat law and they hate Jews. In time, the distinctions will return between Arab, Kurd, Persian, black African, Sunni, Shi'ite and more. For the moment, they are as united as the Middle East has ever been since the time of the Prophet. If they do not choose freedom, or fail to choose it strongly enough, or fail to keep it, they will be united in open war.

Iraq and Afghanistan are notable successes we have to argue. Other states in the region which are out of oil also feel similar pressures to liberalize if the rulers want to keep their perks. A dozen years ago, when my parents married in the UAE they had to get government permission to serve wine at the wedding. Now Dubai is a hotspot for Americans in the Middle East to go party when on leave. Things do change.

For a decade now, what do you think Muslims from all over the world have been talking about when they meet on the hajj? Malcom X described meeting blue-eyed blondes and whites in plural when he made the pilgrimage 40 years ago, one doubts that the racial composition has become significantly less white since then.

It's not looking good for that optimistic scenario though. Still, when Obama was melting down and caving in on the tax cuts, he promised that he'd be eager to refight the battle in two years. [A temporary truce, what a... Muslim concept.] Like Nancy Pelosi comfortably expecting to be majority leader again in two years, I think they're using their access to highly classified information to bet on their political futures. They don't know or care how they'll look for doing so as long as it works. And we might be nearing a breakthrough in the war effort.

We're near some flashpoint on the home front as well. Let's hope we can win the future.

To be a Steve Ditko character or not to be a Steve Ditko character. That is the Question.

Global warming gave us a snow day, so I appreciate that. Weirdest thing, I've turned into a baby about the cold. At first I thought it was because my body was acclimated to where I spent the summer, but over Christmas I spent hours working outside in Nebraska, with only a t-shirt and jacket. No hesitation, no problem. But now that things are back to normal, I might add a hat and sweatshirt when going outside, if I don't already have them on. [not the hat]

Over half of the first draft has been edited. It's time-consuming, but going through line-by-line is working as a slow, steady process. It also takes more mental effort, I think, than most of the original writing. Except on the worst days, it was a lot less depressing to think about adding another three paragraphs than I currently feel when I look at how many remain unedited just on the page I'm looking at now. But most of the expected roadbumps weren't there. I haven't found any places where major surgery was required, and I've almost reached the only real problem, a chapter I had mentally sketched out but wasn't able to complete.

I'm tinkering with the cover design and the overall package, thinking about the technical expertise I'll require to get them precise. I don't know if I'm going to hit my target date for having a finished product.

It's kind of enjoyable not going on endlessly about politics. One of my favorite scenes in Peter Bagge's Hate is when Buddy meets Valerie's parents. Sounds like a sitcom description, and Hate is about the closest thing comics has ever had to an original sitcom. Basically think of The Simpsons when it was at its best, and remove everything that a child could understand other than the cartoony drawing. Anyway, Valerie's father brings Buddy out to have a beer, and saying he likes Buddy more than other guys Val's brought home because one wrong word would set them off and they'd start ranting about politics and he couldn't stand people like that.

As you might guess, it's only a few panels later before he's screaming 'talk about human rights violations, do you know what the interest rates were when Carter left office?' and it's very funny. Bagge, a noted libertarian, is currently doing strips for Reason magazine online [ http://reason.com/people/peter-bagge/articles ] and the collection "Everybody Is Stupid Except For Me" is quite good.

Anyway, I check the news and see if anything's blown up, but don't quite have the urge to bitch about politics for the time being. I've been compulsively re-reading Garth Ennis' The Boys, the superhero series that out-Preacher's Preacher for extreme sex, violence and swearing.

The series is about two-thirds of the way done, and I'm amazed at how much of the background information is still unknown. After The Seven [analogues of the JLA] failed on 9/11 - because having immense superpower doesn't make you automatically better at complicated tasks like terrorists, hostage negotiation or understanding atmospheric pressure and how a plane flies through the air - they encountered The Boys, goverment operatives meant to keep the supes in line. There was a fight at the still-smoldering Brooklyn Bridge - they didn't know how to land either - and current issues are describing what happened.

In his spin-off miniseries also coming out now, it's clear the old guy Wee Hughie is talking to is none other than Colonel Mallory, the mysterious founder of The Boys, who will reveal secrets about Butcher, The Boys' current leader. Hughie is the likeable doofus/reader stand-in and Butcher is, well, a butcher. Ennis' usual themes of violence and male cameraderie show up. I think the secret is that Hughie and Butcher are related. Hughie's an orphan, and I suspect Butcher's problem with the Homelander ["Superman"] a lot further than he was letting on.

It's established that his hatred for the Homelander is personal. He tells a convincing story, but I think it's a cover. I think his origin goes back to infancy, probably as part of the same brainwashing program the government gave the Homelander when they're trying to convince a walking atom bomb to be a likeable pro-American superhero. This will no doubt tie back into the Vought-American superhero-industrial complex that wants superheroes used for national defense so they can clean up.

Issue 50 should be out any time, and we've never gotten a hint of anything about the Man from Vought, even his name. He's just a guy in a business suit who represents the company to The Seven and tells them what to do. They play along because it's easier to live decadent superlives than to run the world, but the Homelander is slowly breaking free of his programming. He has a Pavolovian reflex towards obedience to the Man from Vought, seen at Herogasm, but he's managed to kill more people and get away with it since, and he's had a secret meeting with other superheroes where he presumably said what he'd been unable to before, again at Herogasm.

The Man from Vought has hired Plucky Girl for an assistant, and she's already influencing him, pointing out that some things can't work no matter how much money is thrown at them. Black Noir ["Batman"] has had a subplot all along about learning to fly his Noirplane - he was supposed to fly the plane to safety on 9/11, but whoever was carrying him through the air dropped him early on - and the problems they're currently having are building to a storyline in the near future. Ennis said that one of The Seven would have a major problem, and I think that's what it is.

We also don't know what Noir's problem is in the first place. He violated Hughie in one of the earlier storylines. Queen Maeve ["Wonder Woman"] was the one to bug their own headquarters, which is a surprise. She spends every waking moment drinking and staring out the window to where the Bridge used to be, and it doesn't seem to have stemmed from 9/11 as I'd assumed, because she planted the bugs before then.

A-Train, Jack From Jupiter and The Deep ["Flash", "Martian Manhunter" and "Aquaman"] don't seem to have changed at all or be in the middle of on-going plotlines. A-Train is the major character in these three, and his relationship with Starlight will probably be a part. I swear, this series is chock full of Watchmen-level attention to detail. Ennis must have had it all planned well in advance, and with a much larger canvas to boot.

Except for Starlight. According to a recent interview, Ennis said she'd surprised him. She's the point-of-identification for the reader in the superhero aspect, and gets her goody two-shoes principles hopelessly ravaged right from the start. He'd intended her to be an eventual joke until he found himself writing her second meeting with Hughie and realizing that they were such sweethearts that they could have fun for a while. I mean, leaving aside the romance hook itself, how could such a master of using cliches correctly ignore the whole secret identity part of it?

Hughie knows what she did to join The Seven - exactly what you think - but she still doesn't know anything about what he does. She thinks he's an insurance investigator. But that argument is waiting to happen, because she still wants to know how he saw her "audition". It might even be Maeve who reveals it. In an Ennis book, I'd suspect Annie will lose it and hit Hughie. She's a superhero, but hasn't shown any signs of superstrength. Unbeknownst to her, Hughie was dosed with Compound V, the source of all superpowers designed by Vought-American, when he joined The Boys. Whether or not he hits her back, that will probably propel their relationship arc towards the conclusion.

Of course they're both extremely likeable, and naturally we want them to have a happy ending, with or without each other. Or at least a satisfying conclusion. I'd hate for them to turn out like Featherstone and Hoover - one of the few 'mehs' in the conclusion to "Preacher".

The other members of The Boys haven't gotten much screen time. I think Mother's Milk keeps his mother's decaying corpse locked up, and gets a little more each time he fills up his flask. Butcher's the obvious suspect to have taken the flask - hoping to uncork MM's non-commissioned officer rage - but we don't know that for sure. Frenchie remains the funny foreigner, and looks out for The Female, who fills the psychotic killer role in this team of psychotic killers, (but they're protecting us from the superheroes). These three have their story arcs, but don't receive anywhere near the attention Butcher and Hughie get.

Their government connections are changing, as Monkey is replacing whatsername. I haven't been that interested in those characters, but Monkey's sexual obsession with women in wheelchairs appears to be gaining prominence with advance art showing such a woman who just won a javelin championship (?) and will meet the President of the United States soon.

That's the other major plotline building. Vought-American played all their influence and bought the Vice-Presidency for Vic the Veep (they would have gotten one of the Bush family, but their fortunate son took his head off with a chainsaw). Every other defense contractor who would go out of business if superheroes start being used for national defense managed to get their boy in as President. The President ordered the planes shot down on 9/11, but something happened before the last plane could be destroyed.

It's not clear if Vic the Veep is still the GWB cliche, but either way he's not to be underestimated. When he was told that Dakota Bob would die soon and he would fill out the term before running for election, he responded way too quickly. It's also not clear if he actually did knock the President out and stand down the order to fire on that last plane so that the superheroes could strut their stuff the way they do in the comic books. The Man from Vought stresses that Vic the Veep is not as stupid as he appears. I think we're going to find out what happens when an actual supervillain shows up, who makes no pretenses about heroism or brotherhood, who will reveal himself as Doctor Doom the instant he gets the chance.

All these storylines naturally flow into each other, for the most part. The Boys have worked their way through various analogues of other superteams. Payback [the Avengers], the G-Men [X-titles], Malchemical and Super Duper [Legion of Superheroes, sort of, they're not from the 30th century or anything]. There's been riffs on standard cliches for short interludes. Tek-Knight [the ordinary man who wears an electronic suit], his sidekick ["Batman and Robin"] and the murder of a gay kid by a gay superhero.

There are references to "Red River", which sounds like a rival corporation infiltrating the Secret Service, but we have no details. Intimations of SHIELD vs. HYDRA no doubt. We also don't have any clue why the Russia storyline existed, other than to introduce the comedy relief. He's Russian, 300 lbs and his supername translates to "Love Sausage". No information about the war in Pakistan either. All these characters and all these on-going plotlines, and there's a whole big bad world outside.

This is one of the things that has made comics such a wonderful medium, and a shining example of what they can do in longform. It takes dedication and professionalism in addition to creativity to make this happen, but a reliable series that comes out over many years and utterly rewards the attention. Trying to read the series in order when I got back last fall kinda bored me, but I've been obsessively going through the books at random, and even have most of the issues out that haven't yet been collected. God willing, Ennis, Darrick Robertson and the other artists will have us a work which will be known as 'the longer version of Watchmen'. There are fewer meditations on quantum physics, but more people getting their face ripped off and amazingly the effect is the same. It just takes more pages to explain why the face ripping-off was important.

The Boys is the best-selling regular independent that doesn't star zombies, and even there we have the three superheroes who have been resurrected so far. Nubia ["Storm"] whom we saw in the G-Men storyline. The Lamplighter ["Green Lantern"] who died in the fight with The Boys after 9/11, the one being detailed in current issues, remember? And Blarney Cock, the one Hughie killed on his first case, from the Teen Titans analogue. The corpse gets another shot of Compound V, which can reanimate muscle but not dead brain, the "resurrected" hero does a few press conferences and is never seen again. The Seven didn't bother to do this with Mister Marathon ["Flash", died on 9/11], they just brought in A-Train. They realized that the Lamplighter wouldn't be back, so they brought in Starlight. But there's going to be a lot of people dead before this series is over, and Compound V is expensive. Wheels within narrative wheels.

Ennis says the series will go to roughly issue 72, plus a Butcher miniseries coming up shortly. I don't know if it's a monthly, but that would mean only a few years left to go.

When it's over, The Boys will surely stand among the greatest comic book stories ever told, and it'll almost be a shame to never again be able to read it without knowing how it ends.

Also credit to Darrick Robertson, John McCrea and the rest is due. I don't know or particularly care about the missing deadlines behind the scenes problems there have been. Everyone involved says the timely release of the book is the priority, so they'll all be big boys about how that gets accomplished.

Robinson's art varies in quality - I'm assuming most of it is his but I haven't looked closely. Sometimes it's incredibly gorgeous and sometimes it just looks wrong. The other artists are good, but not all that great. But with very few exceptions, they are doing the most important part of their job well, they are maintaining the consistency of the characters, which is sorely neglected.

There are quite a few Spider-books where I can't tell which one is Peter Parker just by glimpsing at it. If Mary Jane didn't have distinctive hair, she'd be out of luck. Grant Morrison's Batman had a whole subplot with Dick Grayson and Tim Drake, and I couldn't tell them apart. [Or what they were doing in the first place.] There's a reason Archie is such a staple of kid's comics, because you can tell who the characters are. Or you could, now that they're moving away from a Dan DeCarlo style art, which makes no sense. The point is, whoever's drawing a given page of The Boys, there's no mistaking who's who. The art is the most time-consuming part of the job, and that has to be taken into account on a long-term project like this.

This has implications for creator's rights as well. Ennis can write every page of the series more easily than Robertson can draw them. As co-creators, I don't think anything except a 50-50 split is fair. And if other artists are brought in and get a share, that should come out of Robertson's side.

There are alternatives, but as the baseline division, an equal split between the creators of the property is the only fair way to go. Ennis and Robertson could decide that however much a share McCrea or the others get of the complete property, the rest is 50-50 between them. McCrea could get a large percentage of a book he's drawn, or a percentage based on how many pages he's drawn in the overall story.

Now if I think the writer should get half of the property and the artist loses what comes out of his share, I think the artist deserves virtually every penny that comes in immediately. If the writer is paid at all up-front, it's a fraction of what the artist gets. You wrote a comic book page, it's not like you had to stare at it for a day or two. The artist should get the lion's share of the money of the collected edition. Not all of it though. Not that I don't think the artist doesn't deserve it, considering how little money most collections will bring in, but that it wouldn't be fair to the writer. If it's successful enough to warrant a second printing of any kind, it's disrespectful to the writer to not let him get something. If the initial page ratio was 1/100 writer/artist, the first reprinting of the work in any format should be at least 1/10. After that, I think the writer's share should be bumped in future printings until the dollar value each side has received has been equalized, at which point it's a straight 50-50 split, minus the shares that go to contributing artists.

If the writing and the art aren't separate jobs, then it's going to have to be a case-by-case basis, until policies emerge through precedent. If the writer draws out the page and the artist copies the layout, if the artist contributes dialogue and scenes, if the artist has an inker/finisher and is considered an equal partner, if someone else contributes to the writing or it's a collective work from a group, then it becomes an exponentially-increasing problem. In Hollywood, the writer and director guilds have specific percentages for how their jobs are apportioned. The writer on a given movie or tv show may only have contributed 80% of what's shows up on the screen for their job. I don't know the actual percentage, I just made the figure up, but this sort of division could be applied to the writer/artist dichotomy.

The problem is there aren't many precedents, and even fewer successful ones. The majority of collaborations took place in work-for-hire mainstream comics, so these things never came up. Ennis and Robertson took their property away from DC after it had published the first six issues, didn't have to give up anything, and it's been published by Dynamite ever since. Free movement of a property is not unprecedented, but given the blatant rip-offs of DC property, they didn't even say "boo".

Reliable workhorses are where the comics field has made its greatest impact, whether or not there was creative freedom. The Will Eisner sweatshop, EC, the Marvel Bullpen, newspaper strips. The longer-running and more productive writers and artists past and present had more of an impact than those who took years to produce what others could do in months.

The daunting task of trying to fill several years of one's creative abilities is enough to keep anyone from starting, but the few who can make it will be the trailblazers everybody's waiting for. It's not something to give up your day job for.

Well, that was fun. I've also had similar thoughts regarding rock stars. With my ongoing fascination with Guns'n'Roses, I've realized that Axl has lost the game. 13 million dollars, 14 years and only one album to really show for it. There may be two or three more albums worth of material recorded, but if it had any commercial value the record company would have released it by now. Axl must be so far in breach of contract that very few people will talk to him. He refused to promote the album, and a couple of months later, said in an internet chat that there would be a video along "soon", as soon as the drummer from Metallica [?] signed off on a clip because it's going to be in the video.

It's been a couple years now, since he said that. Meanwhile, Slash has recorded an album with a dozen or more high-profile people, and toured it, and gotten them to make a couple videos. [I'm having problems loading "Beautiful Dangerous" with Fergie or I'd link to it, but I like the opening] More touring, and he's getting ready to start the next Velvet Revolver album, probably with a new lead singer. And he's released extra tracks from the solo album (which I, for one, would like to find on amazon or someplace).

Whatever else Axl (or anyone else) might say about Slash, the guy works. Sure, Axl is touring, with a setlist still weighed towards Appetite For Destruction. Half of it is played at every show, with only one from CD with that representation. 4 songs from Use Your Illusions are also played every time. Another three each from Appetite, CD, plus "Patience" are played the majority of the time. Nothing else from the Illusions is played except "Dont Cry" which has made rare appearances recently, especially if Axl can coax Izzy to show up. A couple of songs from Lies are played rarely. One more from Appetite a quarter of the time, one from CD played half, another a third. Filling out the setlists are covers and the remaining CD songs, which are probably few and far between to the Guns fan in the audience.

If there was any more money to be made from Chinese Democracy - like an immediate follow-up such as Axl said he was planning for all these years - it would have come out by now. No record company executive is going to stake their career on the guy who's wasted 13 million dollars and 14 years. And no one's going to let Axl into a recording studio again unless it's coming out of his pocket.

Axl's probably touring because royalties alone won't keep him the lifestyle to which he's accustomed. But unless he can do something - hey, how about recording demos on the road with the band you play with every week - that's just a treadmill towards his eventual burn-out. There's no sign of him being a functioning adult, much less capable of performing like that the rest of his life.

But anyway, I was pondering other rock stars of his ilk and wondering how they rate on the productivity scale, roughly since the 80's, give or take. Let's see if we can do this without Wikipedia.

Paul McCartney, about a half dozen albums of original material since 1990, some of them self-performed, plus a few albums worth of classical, avant-garde or rockabilly covers. Tours for most of these too.

U2, album every few years for as long as I can remember.

Aerosmith, dysfunctional and possibly terminal. They've toured, but no album in years and no album of original material in even longer. Steven Tyler's in his 60s, WTF is he trying to go solo for now??? Joe Perry's released a few solo albums to cover the gap, so he's reasonably productive.

Pete Townshend, kept up a pace of albums every couple of years through the 80s, then only one Who album since around 1993.

Elton John, he keeps announcing he's done his last album and then a couple years later brings out another one. Tours occassionally with Billy Joel, who retired from making pop music in 1993, and only has one album of classical music since.

Sting, I think he regularly releases albums. Nobody cares, but he's still there.

Robert Plant, took a long break but released new work regularly both before and since. Won't go back to Led Zeppelin and (shades of Aerosmith's problem) they can't work without the lead singer.

Van Halen, nothing in over a decade. Sammy Hagar is the workhorse he's always been, pretty much doubling his recorded output since VH got rid of him, while they only have a few new songs with him and Roth, plus the album sung by Gary Cherone to show for it. Eddie Van Halen claims to have dozens of albums worth of material, but we've heard that before. Supposedly the reunion album with Roth will be out this year. Wouldn't surprise me if it happens. With Michael Jackson dead, there are so few entertaining train wrecks left in the rock pantheon.

Paul Simon, releases something once in a while. I think Bruce Springsteen has regular releases. The Red Hot Chili Peppers are prolific. Metallica's albums are about four or five years apart (remember, I'm not checking for sure, just an estimate) which isn't bad compared to the competition.

Pink Floyd, despite an almost-complete absence from the music world, seem to only have increased in public estimation. Songs they did with Syd Barret are popular among teenage kids, not to mention Dark Side of the Moon and The Wall. Roger Waters is now flogging the latter on a worldwide tour, having spent years flogging the former. He's even begged David Gilmour to show up at a special performance at some future point. Waters has a few solo albums, Gilmour has one, the band has three albums and a two-disc Best Of to show for everything since 1980.

Anything else? Just one last note about G'n'R. A random check of Amazon's rankings revealed that Chinese Democracy is second to lowest when compared to the rest of the catalogue, Slash's album and Velvet Revolver's two. Even The Spaghetti Incident ranks higher than CD, only Contraband was lower.

Axl's fanboys complain that there was no promotion of the album, but notice they're not saying Axl should have, I dunno, gone on tv or something, even once. 14 years and 13 million dollars. Unbelievable.

I was going to look for a Youtube clip, but never mind. Don't stay up too late now.

An optimist would say I'm half-sober (and half-dressed)

For most people, the proper response to mass murder is not to hurl false accusations against someone they don't like. Clinging to and redoubling one's false accusations day after day is also not considered remotely-sane behavior by most.

It's been a week since Representative Gabrielle Giffords (D-AZ) was nearly killed by a pychopath who murdered and wounded several other people. Fortunately for the left, he didn't shout "Allahu Ackbar" before opening fire, so they could finally start jumping to conclusions and making false accusations against large numbers of people. Finally, a criminal who looked like one of *THEM*.

We saw this when the Times Square bomber failed and the Mayor of New York City (among others) raced to be first to blame people who opposed health care reform and/or supported the tea party. We saw this when whatsisname flew his plane into an IRS building. We saw this when a census worker was found hanging from a tree. False accusations of right-wing "hate" and no sense of self-awareness at all when they're proven wrong. Contrast that with their reaction to Faisal Shazad, Abdulmutallab and Major Hassan. When those criminals attempted mass murder, all we heard was that everybody should be wary of jumping to conclusions, it was wrong to condemn large groups of people without the facts.

Sarah Palin used register marks - it's a printing term; comic book fans should know it from original artwork - to designate Democratic seats up for grabs in last fall's election. Somehow, without any evidence whatsoever that the psychopath even knew Sarah Palin existed, this map became the major piece of evidence that she was responsible for the murders.

That's what surprised me, that the attacks have so directly aimed at Palin and specifically because of the electoral map. Yeah, the usual suspects - Rush, Beck, GWB, Fox News - are blamed, but only as an afterthought. That's really the only thing that's caught me off-guard about the media reaction. Browsing a leftist website this afternoon, I read a discussion of "stochastic terrorism", by which Palin et al don't even need to know who the "terrorists" are or who their target will be to have full responsibility for the crimes. They have programmed the mass media to set these lone wolves in action, even from across the globe. (cf Laden, Osama bin)

I can't blame them. Look at how much effort the Beatles had to put into getting Charles Manson to start killing people. JD Salinger had to wait decades before someone was so inspired by "Catcher in the Rye" that he'd shoot somebody over it. If Jodie Foster hadn't been cast in Taxi Driver, John Hinkley Jr. wouldn't have had any direction. Tupac, Biggie and the other gangstas had to write songs about each other to get any gunplay going. But Sarah Palin's managed to get somebody to commit murder on her behalf without any evidence that he even knew she existed.

To put it another way, I bet there's more evidence on his iPod of heavy metal music warping his mind than anything Palin has ever said or done. Besides existing, I mean, because that along is enough for some people to falsely accuse her of murder. From the "Washington Wives" holding congressional hearings about explicit music lyrics to Dr. Frederic "there are pictures within pictures for those who know how to look" Wertham, the rhetoric of 'This is responsible for That' is interchangeable. Even the Wikipedia page on the PRMC has quotes from psychiatrists that heavy metal is mean-spirited and contains the central element of hatred, fitting in exactly with what the left is saying today.

[This also applies to images of the prophet Muhammed, but the left is completely willing to respect religious beliefs at the expense of free speech when it comes to Islam. You'd have to ask them why, but so far they haven't given a reason and I doubt they'll change any time soon.]

Again, they are displaying no self-awareness as they hurl false accusations. No hesitation that they might be wrong, or might be behaving inappropriately, that they may be making themselves look insane. Or that they might be enacting The Boy Who Cried Wolf, and when Sarah Palin actually does come for the sheep, no one will believe them.

For now, everybody not genetically-predisposed to hurl false accusations against someone they don't like at the first opportunity has gotten the latest good look in a long line of good looks at the people are so predisposed. The mask is gone and everybody sees them for what they are: hysterical Nazis.

Hyperbole? I think not. There was a desperate rear-guard attempt at defense when she used the term "blood libel", which is literally accurate and is not exclusively a Jewish term. It has been most often used when Jews were accused of murdering children or poisoning the water and environment - you've seen it in Israel for the last 60 years; hell, you've seen it in previous accusations against Palin - but false accusations are indeed libel, and considering how many people died or came close to it because of the murderer's act, the blood is already there.

First they falsely accused Sarah Palin of murder, and I did not speak up...

"You've done enough. Have you no sense of decency, sir, at long last? Have you left no sense of decency?" -- Joseph N. Welch

And the sad thing is, no, they really don't. If they did, they would have stopped a long time ago. Sooner or later, entropy will set in as it does with every other form of energy. God only knows when that will happen, or what form the results will take.

I signed back in from leave today. This leave was well-timed, as there's a federal holiday on Monday.

Grabbing the first Youtube clip that comes to mind, here's something purporting to be a history of product placement in movies. Other than a few clips from Fatty Arbuckle and the Marx Brothers, it's mostly modern movies and not really historical at all. They include ET and a great scene from Wayne's World.


And here's one of the hilarious cartoons released by a South Korean studio. I'm really not clear who makes these or why - read: too lazy to check - but this one explains feminism.

Would you say I have a plethora of pinatas?

I'm still vegetating, although my leave is nearly over. I might try to get a picture of myself before I get a shave and a haircut.

Among other things, I've spent this time off driving back and forth between Fort Campbell and Nebraska and edited a third of the book. Clearly posting on the blog hasn't been a high priority.

There was some hubbub recently as Republicans opened the new Congress by reading the Constitution. I genuinely can't see why any Democrat in their right mind would have said anything bad about this. It sounds like a good way to start every Congress, and it would probably be a good idea if the President does it as well after he's sworn in. One of the Democratic complaints - again, where's the sense in this? There's no way to object without looking like a vampire taking a mid-day outdoor shower of holy water where, um, the faucet is shaped like a crucifix - mentioned the 14th amendment, so I read that.

It was quite interesting, as the amendment covers citizenship, apportioning representatives to Congress among the states after disenfranchisement of rebels or felons, and an insistence that the debt of the US government "shall not be questioned." That's a lot to set into a few short paragraphs, but it was done.

Section 1. All persons born or naturalized in the United States, and subject to the jurisdiction thereof, are citizens of the United States and of the State wherein they reside. No State shall make or enforce any law which shall abridge the privileges or immunities of citizens of the United States; nor shall any State deprive any person of life, liberty, or property, without due process of law; nor deny to any person within its jurisdiction the equal protection of the laws.
Section 2. Representatives shall be apportioned among the several States according to their respective numbers, counting the whole number of persons in each State, excluding Indians not taxed. But when the right to vote at any election for the choice of electors for President and Vice President of the United States, Representatives in Congress, the Executive and Judicial officers of a State, or the members of the Legislature thereof, is denied to any of the male inhabitants of such State, being twenty-one years of age, and citizens of the United States, or in any way abridged, except for participation in rebellion, or other crime, the basis of representation therein shall be reduced in the proportion which the number of such male citizens shall bear to the whole number of male citizens twenty-one years of age in such State.
Section 3. No person shall be a Senator or Representative in Congress, or elector of President and Vice President, or hold any office, civil or military, under the United States, or under any State, who, having previously taken an oath, as a member of Congress, or as an officer of the United States, or as a member of any State legislature, or as an executive or judicial officer of any State, to support the Constitution of the United States, shall have engaged in insurrection or rebellion against the same, or given aid or comfort to the enemies thereof. But Congress may, by a vote of two-thirds of each House, remove such disability.
Section 4. The validity of the public debt of the United States, authorized by law, including debts incurred for payment of pensions and bounties for services in suppressing insurrection or rebellion, shall not be questioned. But neither the United States nor any State shall assume or pay any debt or obligation incurred in aid of insurrection or rebellion against the United States, or any claim for the loss or emancipation of any slave; but all such debts, obligations and claims shall be held illegal and void.
Section 5. The Congress shall have power to enforce, by appropriate legislation, the provisions of this article.

Much of this was clearly a reaction to the Civil War, as this amendment was one of the several passed during Reconstruction, and quite a bit of the wording is clearly intended to set down some ground rules. The first section, about citizenship, was clearly directed at giving blacks equal treatment under the law, but given the boom in immigration after the war, I'd suspect the writers wanted to set a few more guidelines down while they had the chance. It must have worked, because seven years after the amendment was passed (in 1868) the Supreme Court ruled that immigration was a federal responsibility. Section 1 also makes that clear, that no state can pass a law abridging federal preeminence in all matters of citizenship. It's a clear show of strength after the Civil War, that the states can't go their own ways, although specifically directed at the treatment of former slaves.

Section 2 covers the number of Representatives per state, discounting males over 21 who have lost the right to vote through "participation in rebellion, or other crime." One assumes the 19th and 26th amendments modified the part about men over 21, but it's interesting that the 14th amendment still reads as written.

Section 3 was definitely aimed at people who fought on the losing side of the war. Especially the last line, about Congress being able to vote to remove the listed restrictions as it sees fit. According to Wikipedia, that source of all truth, Congress restored Robert E. Lee's citizenship in 1975, and Jefferson Davis' three years later.

I can see giving Lee's citizenship back (although the point of any gesture like this is wasted after a hundred years; don't get me started on retroactively promoting George Washington so that he would still outrank General Pershing). Lee was a soldier, arguably just doing his job and happened to be more loyal to his home state than the overall nation. But Jefferson Davis, I don't see any reason why he wasn't executed immediately. Just because he led the attempt to separate from the US, on general principles if nothing else. He was imprisoned and indicted for treason, but bail was posted and he led a quiet life for twenty years before dying. That's civilized, and to America's credit, but you can't tell me the same thing would have happened to any one else at any other point in history.

Section 4 was another one with roots clearly in the war, in refuting claims made by both people in the south whose lives and lands had been ruined, and foreigners that had given financial assistance to them. The south failed to get other nations to join the war on their side, but they tried, and individuals and companies did give aid. And again, the United States government made it clear in no uncertain terms that it decided the terms, including how much money it owed, and no one was going to say otherwise.

Yeah, let's just have a bitter chuckle about that nowadays, shall we?

The first section has also been the source of further problems regarding the issue of citizenship. The list of Wikipedia Supreme Court cases developing the question is interesting. In 1884, they ruled that an Indian who voluntarily quit his tribe did not automatically gain US citizenship. Which makes sense, since as section 2 demonstrates, the Indians were very much on the mind of those who wrote the 14th amendment. Further Supreme Court cases on the matter related to people who were born in the US to foreign nationals of varying types (including Chinese) and how one could go about losing US citizenship.

Exercising citizenship of another country was traditionally considered to be a sign one had voluntarily relinquished US citizenship, and that's a fair way to go. I have no intrinsic problem with American citizens voting and whatnot in foreign nations, but I don't think foreign citizens should vote and whatnot in America. That's a double-standard, yes, so the fair way to decide matters is that you can't be a citizen of any country other than the one you vote and whatnot in. ["voting and whatnot" returns 92,100 results on a Google search. It's probably from one of the Federalist Papers or something.] Being typically contrary, it occurred to me that every Jew on Earth is a citizen of Israel.

So of course the next Supreme Court decision listed in the article on the 14th amendment was Afroyim vs. Rusk, 1967. I didn't even need to f*cking click the link to know what the issue was there. I mean, 1967!!! The year Israel's opponents are always trying to turn things back to? On the off-chance I was slightly wrong, I clicked the link, and sure enough, a naturalized US citizen had moved to Israel after it was established, voted there, and by all the standards of the time, in so doing had given up his US citizenship when he decided later in life to move back to the States. The Court ruled (5-4) that Congress did not have the authority to remove citizenship, no doubt proving that the Zionists rule for all inclined Judenhass paranoiacs.

Gotta admit, I doubt they'd have ruled the same way for, say, a naturalized citizen from East Germany who exercised any rights in West Germany (where, so I understand, they considered East Germans citizens in a similar sense that Israel considered Jews). And I can't see that they'd have been wrong in this case. I like to give Israel as much leeway as possible, but there's still the valid point that one can't be a citizen of multiple countries at the same time. Even if that is the point about serving two masters that Jews have been confronted with for thousands of years.

There's also a built-in way to increase complexities to a mind-boggling degree in section 1, where it says the state shall not deprive any person in its jurisdiction of life, liberty, property or equal protection. I hear you ask "How so?" You shouldn't talk to your computer screen like that. It's creepy.

When two or more persons incorporate as a "corpus", a "body of people", the corporation is legally recognized as a person, with its own rights/duties separate from the individuals who make it up. That's why when you spill scalding hot coffee in your lap, you sue McDonalds and not the kid behind the counter who actually gave you the coffee. That's why when you give British Petroleum an award for safety and the rig you praise blows up a week later, you go on tv and demand they set aside twenty billion dollars to use on whatever you decide, and there's nothing they can do about because... Wait, that wouldn't be constitutional, would it? Never mind.

Anyway, between the amendment's insistence on due process and the sheer volume of legal processes multiplying like agents of HYDRA ("cut off one limb, and two more shall take its place!"), the stage is set for a huge explosion of people on all sides of the legal profession. Couple that with the government's insistance that if they say they don't owe something, there's not much that can change their mind, and we see one of the more hidden results of the Civil War.

Of course an agrarian slave-based society could never conceive of such complicated ideas, much less practice them to great effect over the next hundred and fifty years, so it's not all bad.

This has been a productive leave. As mentioned, I'm a third of the way through the second draft of the book. It took me ten days to get the first 50 pages written, but 27 days to get them edited. This is not encouraging. Yesterday I did chapters 9 and 10 (of 30), but combined they were shorter than any average chapter, so that's not as great an achievement as it sounds. Haven't done anything except finish cleaning my room today - the one I'm not staying in because I'm on leave and not sleeping in the barracks.

I have finally found some copies of Rolling Stones outtakes I've wanted to hear for a long time. They've only made four albums in the last 21 years - but they've done six tours, each of which made hundreds of millions of dollars and was the biggest money-making tour ever up to that point - and I went to see them back in 1994/5, on the Voodoo Lounge tour.

I don't think the Rolling Stones are like the Simpsons or Mad Magazine, that their best era is subjective and based on whenever you first encountered them. Rock music doesn't work that way, because the stuff that lasts is fresher to most people than whatever's contemporary. I've spent my time in Army schools singing classic rock, and songs a lot older than I am are known to people a lot younger. Unless you're a Stones fan, you probably can't name more than a handful of their albums at all, and those will be the expected ones, their early 70's run and their biggest commercial hit in the late 70's. Notice I'm not naming the records. Even if you're a Stones fan, you'd have a hard time naming more than a few songs from any of these albums.

The Stones just don't make good albums. They never have. Their earliest albums were covers of blues songs and Jagger/Richards forcing themselves to be pop tunesmiths. Then the fame and drugs took over, band members came and went, and their career can largely be charted by music trends without much difference in the songs. Glam rock, disco, punk, 80's synthesizers, they did it all and it all had basically the same rock beat, guitar crunch and shouted vocals.

In-between reworking the same old riffs, they put together albums that were a few hit singles - or attempts at same - and filler that they could tour behind. The recording sessions had always been based on whoever showed up, as the liner notes to every album demonstrate. If they need a piano or a bass and the regular player isn't there, someone else fills in. The song-writing has always been prolific, as near as I can tell. I have no real evidence for this, but it seems that they go through dozens of riffs and jams (with lyrics) before they find the ones to keep for the record. And they do have a genius for the catchy riff. They can record a dozen songs, barely distinguishable from each other, and one of them will become a classic. Have you ever noticed how similar the riffs to "Honky Tonk Woman", "Brown Sugar", Tumbling Dice" and "Start Me Up" are?

So Voodoo Lounge was the first Stones album I ever bought, about the time I decided I wanted to go see them perform. I'd been listening to their greatest hits albums (no songs from later than 1969) so there'd be plenty of stuff I'd recognize. In fact, as I remember, they played all but two songs from the album they were nominally promoting, even though they knew damned well we'd be happy with "Paint It Black", a song I know they did not play, but has been my ringtone for the last couple of years. Just throwing that out there. I have no idea if they played "Sympathy for the Devil" or anything, I wouldn't have recognized it if they did.

Anyway, Voodoo Lounge must have been a challenge for the band. In the 70's, Jagger had become a jet-setter and Richards had become an addict. Once they were rich enough and lived far apart enough that it took a lot of effort to get everybody in a room together, the Rolling Stones as an organization became much bigger than anything else. By the 80's, a cleaned-up Richards was re-asserting control, and Jagger was looking to get out.

As the guy who held the show together up front and ran it behind-the-scenes all these years, Mick Jagger saw no reason to be chained to these crusty fogies. The mid-80's had an impressive array of singers from enormous British rock bands who went solo, and usually to great success. [Phil Collins, Sting, George Michael, Robert Plant, Freddie Mercury; the Americans only had Michael Jackson, Don Henley and David Lee Roth] Ever the trend-follower, Mick made his first solo album, full of flash, and went on a solo tour. He even sang at Live Aid, when the Stones didn't even answer the invitation. Stupidly enough, Keith Richards and Ronnie Wood then pulled together to back Bob Dylan for the show, and reportedly were drunk and embarassed everybody with their performance. Point to Mick.

However, although some of his albums have been hits, some haven't, and they've all fallen into the mists of time. Jagger wanted to be an actor and has had about as much luck in that arena, he's been unable to sustain any presence whatsoever outside of the Stones. Lord knows he's tried. Even on his solo tours, he's still singing "Satisfaction" as a pensioner, when he used to say he didn't want to sing it at 30. Still can't get none, can you?

Frankly, I doubt he's suffered much anxiety about saying things like he hoped he wouldn't keep singing the old songs and wiggling his bum. It's what he does for a living, and - again, ever the trend-follower - he was probably just getting mileage out of the 'hope I die before I get old' sentiment we all probably share. It's changed how he has to market his work, and to whom, but Mick Jagger's probably had to survive at least as much soul-sucking oppression with his lifestyle as Richards.

For his part, Keef' is every bit the power-hungry thug (I understand he still threatens people with knives), but much more of a team-player. The guitarist, the bandleader, and probably humbled by his drug experiences, it made a nice contrast to Mick. Keith only went solo to goad his partner. Jagger hadn't had to share power in years, and both partners were sick of each other.

It got to the point where - according to the book I choose to believe - they were ready to announce the Stones' break-up at their induction into the Rock'n'Roll Hall of Fame. It was the second year the Hall was open (probably deliberately, so they could be one year after the Beatles). 25 years was a long time. But then, rock'n'roll was never about aging gracefully.

So the various fourth or fifth-hand anecdotes go, Jagger and Richards set up a meeting in Barbados to make a final decision on the matter. They went into a room together and started screaming at each other. Within an hour they were splitting a joint and laughing about everything. Simply administering the enormous Rolling Stones empire meant that they would have to associate with each other for the rest of their lives whether or not the band broke up, so they could either do it through layers of expensive lawyers and intermediaries, or keep up the partnership as they'd already done for three decades.

So they called the rest of the Stones to come on down, scheduled a tour, threw together an album and called it a comeback. This album was the last one that had a major hit single in the US, "Mixed Emotions". Then they took a break for three or four years, the longest the band had ever been dormant.

Rock changed in those years. Guns'n'Roses had been the hot new act in '89, opening for the Stones when they played LA. If G'n'R didn't outplay the Stones, they got the publicity when Axl stopped singing at the first of three shows and threatened to quit the band if they didn't stop using heroin. So this was back when rock was in its final phase of coolness (also known as "when I started listening to it", heh). By the time the Stones released the follow up, Voodoo Lounge, G'n'R were bloated by Axl's ego, and the airwaves were ruled by Nirvana, Pearljam and the Chili Peppers. Hip-hop was building up a storm that would shortly break into gangsta rap.

Like most bands of their era, the Stones never expected to have a history. Although hyper-aware of their musical predecessors and their pedigree, they had to be savvy enough to present themselves in that context to a mass audience that has no idea of that history. They had just lost founding member Bill Wyman and replaced him with a hired bass player. This time, they spent a lot of time rehearsing and working on songs before they actually recorded the album, so they knew what effects they wanted.

It's a boring cliche that every new album they release is "the best Stones album since Exile on Main Street". [The first album other than Voodoo Lounge that I've named, but can you name any songs that are on it?] But therein lies the problem, Exile isn't any good either. The songs are riffs and jams, unintellible lyrics performed by whoever showed up that day and produced in a muddy, jarring mix. They recently rereleased the album with seven or eight unreleased songs which are the same bloody thing. If you like that sort of thing, fine.

Really, the Rolling Stones were the first band that had being famous as a legitimate part of their reason for existing. At every point in their history, they've been the sort of people that you'd pay just to see them be, you know, the Rolling Stones, even if they're just getting drunk and watching television [perhaps especially if they're...] The Beatles had quirky characteristics you could identify with, the Stones were more glamorous and decadent, "the beautiful people". You could tell because they were singing blues songs. This is what young Londoners did the generation after the war.

This image carries over into the music. They aren't original by any stretch of the imagination - Keith has said the way he writes a song is to play twenty songs by Buddy Holly and then one of his own will fall out afterward - and they haven't been since their days of pop tunesmiths competing against Lennon/McCartney. As a rock band, they have a distinctive sound, and are very good at what they do, but it's never been very flexible. They know the recording studio inside and out and are by this point as consummately professional as they'll ever get.

They approached Voodoo Lounge as professionals. This time they had lots of practice, so there were plenty of off-the-wall jams and improvisations which were caught on tape. Producer Don Was was trying to urge them in a more basic sound, like Exile, and won a Grammy for another project during the recording so he was much harder to argue against. Mick has always been more concerned with giving the work a modern sound, and the result was nice, muted collection of rocking tunes and ballads. There's a few up-tempo rocking songs, a few nice-if-simple melodic tunes ("New Faces"), a few with lavish radio-friendly production ("Out of Tears", "Love Is Strong"), a few diversions into country jangle ("Sweethearts Together") or island rythms ("Moon Is Up"), and a few songs with naughty words. No dance music, thankfully. No hit single, although they released four of them and they all got radio airplay. Even the ones with naughty words, which surprised the hell out of me. [Unlike G'n'R's "Ain't It Fun" which was released at the same time, the 't' was not muted when I heard "I Go Wild" on the radio.]

There were also hours upon hours of outtakes, and these lacked the (then) modern production values. This is just the Stones playing, early versions of songs that ended up on the album, or songs that never came close. These found their way into the bootleg market a year or so after Voodoo Lounge was over, in the form of multiple boxed sets. This is what I've been downloading tonight and writing my way towards for the last hour.

As near as I can tell, there's the four-disc "Voodoo Stew" - which is what I'm listening to now - and a four-disc "Voodoo Brew", which I have not found a copy of yet. There's also two discs of "Voodoo Residue" I listened to this morning, and there's another disc that's the best of stuff from these other complilations along with a few other unreleased numbers. There's early takes or mixes of the songs that wound up on the album, some of them with Keith singing and others with Mick laying down a barely-audible guide vocal in the background so it's effectively the instrumental track. There's quite a few songs that extend into jams which never made the cut, and quite a few more that are brand new to me. But they're great amounts of fun (mostly), as well as some interesting experiments one wouldn't expect from the Stones.

After Voodoo Lounge, the band didn't take a long hiatus. According to Jagger, his intentions were to start another solo album (why???) but somehow the Stones started work again. The result led to some tense moments between the Glimmer Twins. Mick took control of the songs he had written and Keith took control of his. The tour was the usual extravagent affair, but nothing about it even sounded like they were trying for anything different this time. Jagger finally got around to releasing his solo album - his last to date, except for a "best of" compilation - and it disappeared without a trace. Unless you count Jann Wenner's review in Rolling Stone Magazine how it was the very best thing Mick Jagger has ever done in every single way imaginable.

They added a few unremarkable songs to their 40th anniversary greatest hits compilation, and there was another tour. It wasn't until 2005 that they recorded their next album, and last to date. That one was a major change for the band, in that they dropped most of the extraneous personnel. Most of the songs were the same Stones stuff you either like or don't, but except for the lavish radio-friendly "Streets of Love", virtually all of them were performed with the core Stones members and nobody else. Mick, Keith and Charlie, the remaining founding members and Ronnie, the guitarist who spent twenty years on salary before he became an equal partner in the band are virtually the only players on the album. The hired bassist is on a few, as is the long-time keyboard player and a few of the other familiar names, on a few songs. Most songs are the main four, and a few are the founding three, which is kind of awesome when you think about it.

This tour was filmed by Martin Scorcese for his documentary Shine a Light (named for one of the songs on Exile, but you already knew that, right?). Since then, there's been hints that they're getting ready to go back to work, but it's been five years - I bought the album on the first day we were released towards the end of Basic Training - so you'd expect there to be hints and rumors. They could do more tours, I guess, but it would be harder and harder to find an insurance company, and it's not like they need the money.

If that's the case, I suppose there won't be any more albums of new material since they wouldn't have hit singles anyway. Sure, they've got tons of outtakes that could be used. "Start Me Up" came from just such an album of outtakes, when they were going on tour and needed an album but didn't have time to record one. The fans will be happy, even if they haven't been born yet, but there are probably not any forgotten masterpieces left in the tape vaults.

What is there are hours of "the greatest fucking rock band in the world" (to quote one of the guys in the seats behind us, who showed up drunk and stoned and yelling that for hours) playing. I'm almost done with disc 3 of "Voodoo Stew", listening to the second take of a song called "Honest Man", which is almost as good as the first take. Not a song that appeared on the album, it's hard to see why not, since it's easily as good as some that did. Mick does a vocal needs very little polish, the lyrics are as good as any others he's sang - not that that's any great compliment - the guitars are tight and edgy, and it could easily have replaced "Baby Break It Down" or "Suck on the Jugular" on the album.

[I would also replace "You Got Me Rocking", but the Stones seem to like that one. I don't know why, but it was a single and they've consistently played it live ever since, which is bizarre. Do you think Paul McCartney still fits "The World Tonight" into his setlist? That song was actually a hit, but he's not going to use it to replace a Beatles or Wings number. Ok, that's unfair, Paul has actually released four or five albums since Voodoo Lounge came out, compared to the Stones' two. Paul has also released a few albums of "classical" music and "avant-garde" music in his spare time. And he has more money than Mick and Keith put together.]

There's been other songs that were also enjoyable, and I haven't even tracked down the other 4-disc set of outtakes yet. In some ways, this is a fascinating look at the album as a work-in-progress, a glimpse behind the curtain of creativity that has rarely been equalled in rock history. It's never been confirmed who provided these takes, but given the quantity and quality it must have been someone close to the band. Or someone inside. But thanks to that anonymous leaker.

For the Voodoo Lounge tour, they publicized the live album with an interesting cover song. Glad they finally got to it.