Month: December 2002

…or in other words, Happy New Year.

I’ll resume regular posts shortly, and yes, first things will be addressing the reply from Steven Den Beste. Hey, if he can take two months to reply to me, I can take two weeks to reply to him…

Until then, we’ll have to muddle through somehow.

So have yourself a merry little Christmas now.

Philip Kennicott of the Washington Post gives a list of the top ten most abused forms of cultural criticism here.

Even your humble correspondent has fallen prey to some of these traps, but I won’t refresh your memories as to which.

So Trent Lott has gone bye-bye. I kinda suspected as much when Oliver Willis posted this:
\\SATAN: Lott Should Step Down
Deepest Darkest Bowels of the Soul, FL – Citing the increasingly harsh
legislative atmosphere, as well as a “public relations nightmare”,
Satan announced today that he believed that beleagured Senator Trent
Lott should step down from his position as Senate Majority Leader for
the Republican Party. “Look, I had an entire legislative agenda on a
pro-evil platform prepared for 2003. It’s not every day I get a
Republican congress and White House. I’m talking earth-pillaging,
suppression of the poor, and other nefarious deeds that you associate
with the Hell/Republican party coalition. Lott’s verbal gaffes are
endangering all that”.\\

It seems that I have been taken to task for something I’ve written over
at Peter David’s website,
specifically, for daring to suggest that the Comics Journal piece on
Carol Kalish was somehow less than worthy of being in first place at Google, in an introduction to the reprinting of Peter’s eulogy of the woman he just named his daughter after.

Dirk Deppey gives an understandable defense of his employer, Gary Groth, at the Comics Journal’s iJournalista! weblog. I have no idea if Deppey ever met Carol.

Groth’s essay– which I’m intentionally not
linking to here, as per my earlier comments; if you want to get there
you can do so by cutting and pasting
http://www.tcj.com/2_archives/e_groth1191.html– is a true charmer, and
shows why Gary is so loved the world over. While rereading it, I get
the same feeling I got when right wing commentators who disliked Paul
Wellstone made disparaging remarks about his funeral, coldly calculated
to bestow some political advantage and personal glory to their own
positions. It is mean spirited, it mocks other people’s grief and
shock, and it belittles her memory and achievements.
I could spend hours going over Groth’s column to rebut his points
(“Like JFK, the adoration heaped upon her has proved far more voluble
after her death than during her life…” no kidding, dope, who expects
to be giving praise for a lifetime of work at the age of 36, when it’s
reasonable to expect that she has decades more to go?) but I recall
that many letter writers to TCJ and the Comic Buyers’ Guide did so at the time– letters which, alas, don’t show up on either website. You can find references to them here.
Instead, I’ll just address the first error I come across in his– why,
that didn’t take long at all. Eight words in. “Carol Kalish died on
September 5 from heart failure at the tragically young age of 36.”
Carol Kalish didn’t die from heart failure. She died from a sudden
brain aneurysm.
Really, how seriously can you take an essay entitled “Lies We Cherish”
that commits factual errors in the very first sentence? It makes one
wonder exactly whose lies are being cherished.
If Mr. Deppey believes that it’s inappropriate to hope that an article
like Gary’s is not the first thing people find when looking for
information on a person, then I can only hope it doesn’t happen to him.

My friend Ed makes a suggestion. Fleshed out with my own take on it, it
runs like so:
Why not avoid all the insanity of a strike and strike preparations,
which are pricey in their own right, by making a modification to the Taylor Law
that prohibits public employees from striking? Instead, change it so
that all contracts for public employees must be settled by one full
year prior to expiration. If no agreement is reached, they will be sent
to binding arbitration to be ruled on not less than 6 months before
expiration; such arbitration is binding for no more than one fiscal
year, to give time to rehash out the issues again.
This little addition to the law could have save New York City $10
million dollars in implementing contingency plans yesterday. Wouldn’t
that have been nice to have back in these cash strapped times?

Well, the NYC transit system had avoided a strike, for at least a
while.
I’m of mixed minds of the issue– I’d really like to think that New
Yorkers could be pulling together in these trying times, instead of
going through the bull that’s been going on.
But all things considered, the unions, according to math based on items
in this article, we’re only talking about a difference of 70 million dollars a year above inflation for 34 thousand workers.

Meanwhile, we have people like Bear Stearns
who are trying to hold up New York City for $40 million– this after
having received $102 million dollars in the last ten years.
Y’know, even if we don’t have a federal program for prohibiting
businesses to get federal contracts if they avoid federal taxes by
incorporating outside the US, there’s a HELL of an argument to be made
for doing something similar in New York. Michael Thomas makes just such
a case here (by way of John Ellis).

At the very least, it’ll give the impression that we’re all in it together.

UPDATE: I forgot to include this take on the reaction to the NYC transit strike here. Continue reading Sick Transit’s Glorious Monday

…where the highlight was finding myself instead of moderating a pun
battle, replacing Spider Robinson– and proceeding to hold my own
against Esther Friesner and David Gerrold, while raising money for the
SFWA Emergency Medical Fund.
More on this after I take care of some news.

This poll by the Pew Research Center has gotten amazingly little play, both in the news and the blogosphere.

Pew asked 38,000 people in
44 countries (speaking 63 languages and dialects) what they think of
America. And the numbers aren’t encouraging, or all that surprising:

Nineteen countries with data available for comparison
showed antipathy to the US on the rise, and goodwill draining away.
Favourable ratings in western Europe, pretty consistently, were down
five or six percentage points over the last three years. That turned to
22 points in Turkey and 13 points in Pakistan. Just 6% of the Egyptian
public has a favourable view of the United States.
Is the spread of American ideas good or bad? Here in Britain, 50% say
bad. But this soars to 67% in Germany, 68% in Russia, 71% in France –
and rampant hostility the moment you get near the Middle East. Try
Turkey at 78%, Pakistan at 81% and Egypt at 84%.
Does the US “consider others: not much/not at all?” Fifty-two per cent
in Britain sign up on this line. But that’s 73% in Canada, 73% in South
Korea, 74% in Japan, 76% in France.
Do you reckon American policy towards Saddam is driven by getting its
hands on Baghdad’s oil? Forty-four per cent of Brits agree; 54% of
Germans; 75% of French. Would you let the US use your bases to attack
Iraq? Eighty-three per cent of Turks say no.
But maybe the most chilling question of the lot was reserved for Muslim
respondents only. Did they approve of suicide bombing in defence of
Islam? Seventy-three per cent in Lebanon said yes. Well, they would,
wouldn’t they? But what about the 43% in Jordan, the 44% in Bangladesh,
the 47% in Nigeria, the 33% in Pakistan? And in Indonesia (including
Bali)? Twenty-seven per cent said yes. Those are hundreds upon hundreds
of millions of people with a totally different take on what constitutes
terror. This is alienation on the grandest scale.

Well, it’s a little obvious we’re expereincing technical difficulties.
And we have a deep abiding sense of self. But if everybody’s telling us
we’re drunk with power, maybe it’s time to lie down.

Everybody has their moment that tells them that the holiday season has
truly arrived. For some, it’s Santa going down Broadway on
Thanksgiving. For me, it’s the arrival of the David Mattingly
card.
David is one of the leading cover artists in the science fiction field,
and I used to live down the street from him and his lovely wife,
Cathleen Cogswell. He puts the same amount of work into his cards as he
does into his work… although he does put more or his cats into his
cards…
Anyway, go look at his web site. Tell him I sent you.