As the "Google problem" Turns

Despite what are presumably his best efforts, Presidential candidate Rick Santorum continues to make more news in relation to his "Google problem" than anything related to his presidential bid or even substantive policy matters (those two things seem rather disconnected these days). The latest outburst is the former Pennsylvania senator's assertion that not only could Google alter the search results that put the scatological use of his name at the top of the results but also that their choice not to do so is politically motivated. I'm not sure whether Santorum appreciates the irony that his comments to Politico were made against the backdrop of a congressional hearing about whether Google is manipulating results to favor their own products.

Admittedly, it's a bit unfair to paint all of any party's politicians with the same brush based on any one person, but Santorum makes the GOP seem like a pretty thin-skinned bunch. President Obama has been likened to Hitler and had his name used to link him to terrorists and tyrants, and that's not even getting into the "birther" nonsense. In contrast, Santorum made offensive comments about an entire group of people and continues to play the victim because one of the objects of his scorn, columnist Dan Savage, found a clever way to respond in kind. Savage's method may have been distasteful, but then so were Santorum's initial comments to the Associated Press.

"In every society, the definition of marriage has not ever to my knowledge included homosexuality. That's not to pick on homosexuality. It's not, you know, man on child, man on dog, or whatever the case may be. It is one thing. And when you destroy that you have a dramatic impact on the quality [of marriage]."

In closing, here's another thought that's probably escaped the man-who-would-be-POTUS. The reason his "Google problem" persists, aside from the fact he keeps talking about it, is that he hasn't done anything worthwhile to displace it. To any Republicans reading this, it seems to me that surely your party and our country deserve better than Santorum.

The Geek Files, Volume X: Kurt Busiek

It shouldn't surprise anyone who's read more than a few postings here that I'm a fairly major enthusiast of superhero comics. With that preamble, it shouldn't surprise anyone when I relate my pleasure at having met one of (if not the best) writer currently working in that field, Kurt Busiek at a signing today at my local comic shop, Beyond Comics.

Busiek is probably best known for the miniseries Marvels and the his popular runs on The Avengers and Superman. He's probably most acclaimed for what is arguably the best superhero comic of the past 20 years, Astro City, which he created and continues to revisit on an irregular basis. Each of those series is characterized by a keen sense of the characters' history and what makes them tick. This is especially impressive in Astro City where the history has been invented from the ground up and mostly conveyed just through small hints and brief snippets of dialogue.

Despite all that, Busiek is far less acclaimed than other writers who entered comics around the same time such as Neil Gaiman and Grant Morrison. I suspect a lot of this is because Busiek is very much a classicist in his approach to more or less iconic characters like the Justice League and the Avengers. Where Moore and Morrison (not to mention Frank Miller) tend to be a bit more focused on breaking the molds, Busiek wants to see how the mold can be given additional dimension.

That last trait was especially obvious on his 1998-2002 run on The Avengers.  A friend of mine once observed that Busiek wrote The Avengers as if nothing had happened since the mid-80s. While this was true, it was no means a bad thing because despite the efforts of good writers like Roger Stern the team and its history had become something of a mess when Busiek took over, particularly after the Heroes Reborn debacle. Busiek set about making things right, writing some great stories in the process. Sadly, with the exception of Geoff Johns, the writers that came after him set about undoing all of his work and making the team a mess again, especially the overrated Brian Michael Bendis whose Avengers Disassembled may be the most mean-spirited story in the history of mainstream superhero comics.


Thankfully, for people who love these characters and the values they embody, Busiek is still working. Though he doesn't have a book in DC's "new 52" he mentioned that he's working on a new project for DC as well as more Astro City. That combined with getting one of my favorite comics that he wrote (really, one of my favorite comics in general) is enough to make this comic fan happy.

Blink of An Eye

I knew I had one more post about Borders in me, but I hadn’t expected that R.E.M. would be the thing to bring it to the surface. If you’d asked me about 15 years ago that the demise of R.E.M. would be announced within days of the final closing of Borders, I would have been sure that both events were a lot more than 15 years away. I'm not implying any particular connection here, but what links the two things in my mind is that, when I went to my local Borders during the closing sale, I noticed that they seemed to have about 100 copies of the most recent R.E.M. album on the racks. That combined with a seemingly similar number of the Irish group Anuna's Christmas album and a collection of posthumous recordings by Michael Jackson suggests that a lack of buying acumen in recent years was at least one key driver of the company's demise. Having learned recently that many of their longest tenured buyers, many of them my one-time colleagues, were either pushed out and/or forced to jump by upper management (doubtless with the shameful complicity of a worthless HR department) only adds to this feeling.

Of course, it goes beyond that change, however much it reflected a sea change in a corporate culture that once valued individual effort even if it didn’t always recognize it as much as it shold have been. Listening to a friend who worked for Borders during the last several years, it’s clear that the problems go beyond any one individual’s decisions. Whereas the company once customized inventories to reflect the interests of their market, by most indications this philosophy had gone out the window in recent years dovetailing with an equally dubious approach to merchandising. A case in point my friend observed was the Borders in Madison, Wisconsin – one of Borders’ oldest stores in one of the most liberal-leaning markets in the country. So, of course, they’re merchandising right-wing oriented best-sellers almost certainly guaranteed to alienate the customer base they’d built up over many years of hard work.

My friend also pointed to some less-discussed elements of the collapse such as the bad real-estate decisions that ultimately dictated closing stores with strong sales and the increased focus on discounts via the Borders Rewards program. As someone who used those coupons, it would be hypocritical for me to say too much about that, but the overall focus on discounted merchandise was clearly another example of the rot that took hold.  

After leaving Borders, I eventually went to work for a video company that sold to Borders. This meant that in addition to now being on the other side of the table from my former co-workers, I remained an interested observer. The last time I went to Borders HQ in Ann Arbor was February 2007, which seemed to be before the rot took hold in earnest (i.e. there were still some knowledgeable buyers there. Not too long after that, I noticed something at my local store that epitomized their problem. There was a display table full of deeply discounted movies near the registers. Doing the math about likely wholesale costs and studio marketing support for those titles compared to the boxed sets we sold of things like BBC mini-series (i.e. things that clearly fit the "Borders customer" we used to hear about so much when I worked there), I realized they needed to sell something like 6-8 copies of any of those $7.99 movies to have the same profit margin as one copy of a boxed set. In short, it was clear that they were working from the discount store playbook, trading the depth of selection that had distinguished Borders for futile attempts at driving sales volume. In a way, though, it was worse than becoming a discount store, because Borders could never fully commit to the approach. By attempting to straddle the line between high-end and discount store, Borders (or at least its management) not only divested the company of what had made it special they also made it irrelevant. And that, as much as the rise of e-books and digital downloads or the ongoing economic downturn, is what made Borders a prime candidate for the fate that just unfolded for it. Needless to say, there should have been a different ending but there was no one left with both the power and the vision to write it.

52 Pickup

I've had mixed feelings at best about every continuity-wide crossover event DC and Marvel have done for the past 25 years, which is to say pretty much all of them since the original Crisis on Infinite Earths. DC's parallel earths approach, with older and wiser versions for their World War Two heroes living on a separate Earth from their modern-day counterparts, never struck me as confusing so the need to streamline the continuity was lost on me. Still, the original Crisis was genuinely epic and often moving, especially the death of the Barry Allen version of the Flash, and unlike most of its successors stood up as a story in its own right. Since then, both DC and Marvel have done over a dozen large-scale crossovers with mostly diminishing returns.

In DC's case, the biggest of them have involved resetting their continuity to some degree and vary widely in both quality and impact. 1994's Zero Hour, which was sufficiently terrible to turn me off on Dan Jurgens as a comics writer for good, had a much bigger impact than 2006's Infinite Crisis which was fairly good, just a bit pointless. The latest "event" Flashpoint seems to have had the biggest impact on DC's characters and continuity since Crisis on Infinite Earths, maybe even bigger because the implication is that the whole history of the DC universe has been condensed into about five years of events.

It certainly had a big impact on DC's publishing which involved relaunching their entire line with 52 new #1 issues. Even so, not all issue 1s are created equal among "the new 52", as it's clear that some titles have been much less impacted by the reboot. As the first #1 issue of Action Comics is recounting the earliest days of Superman as if it's 1938 again, over in Green Lantern all indications are that things haven't changed much since the final issue of the previous volume.

I hadn't read Green Lantern for a while, having decided to take a pass on the latest multi-title storyline, but I always enjoy Geoff Johns' writing on DC's flagship characters so giving in to their #1 ploy didn't require any particular leaps of faith. Still, my faith was well rewarded as this issue really was a perfect point to get back on board. While there's a slight sense of having walked into a play at the start of the second act, it doesn't matter because Johns sets the scene quickly then makes it clear that whatever happened before this issue is just the springboard for new story-lines to come.

It's equally clear that Johns is using the relaunch as a chance to explore some different aspects of Hal Jordan's personality now that he's (at least temporarily) no longer part of the Green Lantern Corps. One of the underpinnings of Hal Jordan's character is that it's not the power ring that makes him a hero but rather the power ring chose him because he had the makings of a hero already. Johns hits that note nicely but also convincingly shows us how the same man whose will power can literally save the universe has trouble keeping a job and paying his bills. In the process, Johns manages the same trick he worked on last year's re-launch of The Flash, adding some dimension to a character who's often viewed as a bit bland without compromising their heroic core or more importantly their status as icons.

All of that would be beside the point, though, if it wasn't a good engaging story. Thankfully, that's rarely a problem with Geoff Johns, who introduces at least four key questions before the end of the issue, guaranteeing that I'll be picking up next month's issue to see what happens next. I don't know if DC's latest reboot is worth all the trouble, let alone whether any of the other comics among the "new 52" are up to the same level as Green Lantern, but it seems like it's bringing a lot of readers back to comics and getting existing readers to try new titles. Maybe I'll even give Dan Jurgens another chance and read his take on Justice League International.

In Praise of Misfits - Across Time and Space

I don't generally go in for these would-be memes that people ask me to re-post in my Facebook status. Where the Doctor is concerned, though, I'm willing to make an exception, especially for something that reflects the values I've always loved in the show the way this does.

The weeping angel you called ugly? She can't even look at herself in the mirror. See that unemotional Cyberman? He used to be one of us. The Oods that you make fun of? They get treated as slaves everyday. The lady that you called crazy? She knows all of time and space. See the weird man with the bowtie and the fez? He's the loneliest man in the universe. Repost this if you're against bullying in the Time-Space Continuum.

By the Redskin of His Teeth

Anyone who was puzzled why Washington Redskins owner Daniel Snyder just dropped his libel lawsuit against the Washington City Paper received a potential answer in the form of an article in today's Washington Post. Detailing how the initial stages of Snyder's pursuit of current head coach Mike Shanahan began nearly a year before then-current coach Jim Zorn was fired, long-time Post writer Mike Wise's piece not only reflects worse on Snyder's handling of the team than anything the City Paper had to say. It also points to possible violations of NFL rules on his part, especially the "Rooney rule" that requires teams with openings for high-level coaching vacancies to interview minority candidates.

Many people thought that Snyder was only paying lip-service to the rule when he interviewed Jerry Gray, one of the team's lower level assistant coaches in the 2009 season, before hiring Shanahan. The Post article appears to confirm that Gray was never a serious contender for head-coach or any other high-level position within the Redskins organization. As it happens, within a few weeks of interviewing for the job, Gray went to work for Jim Zorn's former team, the Seattle Seahawks (there's the circle of life for you).

Whether or not Snyder mounts another ill-advised lawsuit against a DC publication, the new article is yet more bad publicity for the team and its owner at a time when they appear to be getting back on track to resemble a professional football team (i.e. one that comports themselves in a professional manner rather than simply one that receives monetary compensation). It's not hard to imagine that the owner determined that the David-and-Goliath situation with the City Paper was at least one distraction too many, not to mention a fight where even if he won he'd still look like the loser. Then again, the past decade or so has shown that Daniel Snyder the seemingly astute billionaire businessman's sense of logic often collapses when faced with the Redskins and the emotional attachment he feels for the team.

3 Airports and a Wedding

Where I was on "9/11" isn't especially interesting. I was at work trying to go about my day. As buildings collapsed on TV and another plane hit a little closer to home down at the Pentagon, it became apparent that work really wasn't in the cards for the day so Acorn's management very thoughtfully decided to close our office early in the afternoon. I went home but, despite the endless coverage (Tom Brokaw was my guy), my gut-level sense of the day's impact didn't come until a few weeks later.

In early October, my wife and I drove up to a wedding in Tarrytown, not far outside of Manhattan. The combination of that skyline in person, now defined by the absence of the Twin Towers, and the local TV stations broadcasting live coverage of recovery efforts from the site made it all feel more real than watching Tom Brokaw cover it. The wedding itself was something of a return to normalcy, which ended up being short-lived, because the day after the wedding the invasion of Afghanistan began and we were back to thinking in terms of retaliatory attacks.

Later that week, my boss Glenn and I were due to attend the now-defunct East Coast Video Show in Atlantic City. My wife wasn't crazy about me having to travel but was at least grateful I was taking Amtrak instead of flying. Glenn was flying up from Atlanta and picking me up at 30th Street Station in Philadelphia so we could drive to Atlantic City together. In retrospect, the time spent with Glenn was the best thing about the show, which was kind of a dud (admittedly, that may reflect more about my feelings on Atlantic City than the quality of the meetings themselves).

On the way back, we drove directly to the airport, so Glenn could catch his plane while I took the airport line back to 30th Street and my train home. Walking through the Philadelphia airport for the first time since Bill Clinton was President was an unexpected step into a different world. Walking through the terminal on my way to the train, there were soldiers everywhere. More to the point, there were guns everywhere - big ones in the hands of people I'm not sure were old enough to order an over-priced beer at one of the airport bars.

It would be the better part of two months before getting on a plane would be unavoidable. When that trip came, I was happy to see fewer guns on display at the airports, BWI and Detroit Metro this time around, but that was of limited comfort with more recent worries like anthrax attacks in play. And there’s the lasting impact of "9/11" for me. Whatever today's anxieties might be, there's bound to be something at least superficially worse to take their place, but one fundamental thing will remain. You just have to keep going, because the alternatives are far worse.

Stay Classy, Governor Perry

As a character once said in a very bad movie, "Anyone who could swallow two Snowballs and a Ding Dong shouldn't have any trouble with pride." I'm sure they weren't talking about politics, but as we reflect on this picture of Texas Governor Rick Perry enjoying a corn-dog it certainly seems more than a little applicable.

Musical Kryptonite

It's no secret that the surge in American spirit that united America in the wake of the terrorist attacks of a decade ago proved to be as fleeting as a sandcastle in a hurricane. Any sensible person would tell you that there are a variety of factors that caused this. In contrast, I attribute this post-post-9/11 decline of American spirit to one thing alone, the ill-considered decision to embrace Five for Fighting's "Superman (It's Not Easy)" as an anthem.

It's not hard to see why this crybaby slice of manipulative tripe became a big hit, but what's truly amazing is the way in which the song demonstrates that people really don't bother listening to lyrics. Sometimes, this is a good thing, as shown by the way David Bowie's "Heroes" could be embraced for everything from Live Aid to "9/11" despite lyrics that are quite specific to the Berlin Wall. In the case of "Superman", though, we are worse for it because anyone who actually listens to the words would understand that the lyrics bear no relation to any concept of truth, justice and/or the American way anyone who doesn't support Al Qaeda would ever want Superman (or America) to embody.

At the risk of going all comic-geek on you, despite what this piece of musical Kryptonite would have you believe, nearly 75 years of stories demonstrate that Superman doesn't whine about his life and responsibilities. Superman does the right thing (admittedly with a tinge of fascism, you know, like Obama) because those are the values instilled in him by his parents and doesn't piss and moan about it like certain GOP politicians I could name (OK, I'm talking about John Boehner). The fact that Superman is conceptually the ultimate immigrant as well as an orphan who's adopted only add to the character's potential for resonance, a potential squandered by this godawful song. There are many things needed to spark a proper rebirth of American spirit, but a ban on this crime against popular music might be a good place to start.

Special Delivery

The recent news that the US Postal Service is on the verge of collapse seems to be another good-news/bad-news situation for President Obama. Getting the bad news out of the way, clearly the financial problems of the postal service are the President's fault. I don't have any evidence to support this assertion, but then neither does the GOP and they blame him too. The good news, though, is the impending disaster for the Postal Service serves to prove that Barack Obama is a natural born US citizen. After all, if he had been born in Kenya, surely the amount of mail he'd be exchanging with family, friends and other people there who clearly hate America would be keeping the USPS solvent. Doesn't that make sense? No? I guess I'll go back to drinking my tea.

Politically Labored

Here's a Labor Day trivia question. Guess which political icon said the following.


"Labor is prior to and independent of capital. Capital is only the fruit of labor, and could never have existed if labor had not first existed. Labor is the superior of capital, and deserves much the higher recognition."

Too hard? OK, let's just go with guessing the political leaning of the speaker. Surely it's a Marxist or at least a liberal democrat, right? No, as it happens, the speaker is none other than that leading light of "the party of Lincoln" - Abraham Lincoln himself. Ronald Reagan once said of his switch from the Democratic party to the GOP, "I didn't leave the Democratic party, the party left me." If Lincoln were available for comment, perhaps he'd be voicing similar feelings about today's Republican party.

Who Done It (But Not All That Well)

As with the first half of this season of Doctor Who, I wanted to withhold judgment on the second half until a couple episodes into things. Unfortunately, neither story so far has shaken my feeling that this is the hardest season to watch since Sylvester McCoy's first as the Doctor in 1987. In some ways, it may even be harder. As dicey as that stretch of episodes was, you could at least see signs that the production team was in the process of finding their way forward, and it paid off in 1988 and 1989 with stories like Remembrance of the Daleks and Ghost Light. Watching the current season, there's no sense that the current team, especially head-writer Steven Moffat, thinks that what they're doing is anything less than great. They should be right about that, but they're not.

They have great raw materials in the form of a wonderfully alien Doctor, a good supporting cast and a head-writer with an understanding of the show's conventions and a gift for plotting that enables him to turn those elements skillfully on their head. Unlike the late 1980s, the show also has the full support of the BBC, which means it has a decent budget. Expectations are justifiably high for the current season to be as good if not better than any of those with David Tennant or Christopher Eccleston. The difference seems to be that that, however much then head-writer Russell T. Davies went off-track at the end of Tennant's run, you could sense his desire at least in the early seasons to push the show forward in content and quality. In contrast, the current regime seems to be driven mainly by a sense that good enough is good enough. The manifestations of this attitude vary, but they seem to follow the theme that if you throw in enough appearances by established characters and monsters (however ill-conceived they were in the first place) it will seem like there's a coherent plan at work rather than a grab-bag of intermittently clever ideas, snappy dialogue and some suitably creepy imagery.

 

To some extent, both episodes that have been shown so far exemplify that trait, though, one was far more frustrating than the other. Let's Kill Hitler was a mess, but it least it was an entertaining one that made me wonder if the script had started life as an episode of Coupling. Moffat answered at least some of the questions raised by previous episodes while advancing others that will hopefully lead to a satisfying pay-off. It also featured an intriguing concept in the form of the time-traveling war-crimes avengers that made the episode's use of Hitler somewhat less bogus.

Night Terrors on the other hand is all the proof I need that Mark Gatiss should not be allowed to write for Doctor Who anymore. Even the relatively good moments felt pointless and uninvolving. While there were some superficially creepy moments with the dolls, they felt grafted on to the plot rather than being anything truly relevant to the story. As for the plot itself, which was more than a little reminiscent of the 2006 story Fear Her, it managed to be 100% less clever than the earlier episode while cramming in 100% more superfluous references to Doctor Who continuity.

I'd been trying to keep an open mind about Gatiss' writing after last year's Dalek story, because there were some really good character moments, especially involving Bill Patterson as Professor Bracewell, that helped offset idiotic things like "Danny Boy" and the Spitfires in space. Night Terrors didn't even have that much to recommend it. In short, it committed the cardinal sin of any drama, more so even than being bad, it was boring.

So, all in all, the second half of the season isn't off to an auspicious start, but I'll keep watching. Wading through some crap on the way to something stellar is part of being a fan of virtually anything and, unique though it may be, Doctor Who is no exception. Beside, next week's episode looks interesting. Fingers crossed.

Package Service

The picture to the right was from the set of the upcoming Superman movie. While I can't necessarily tell if Henry Cavill is super here, the costume leaves little doubt that he's a man - perhaps even a man of steel. Hey now.

The Messenger or the Message

You can say a lot about the influence of religion in politics, especially presidential politics, but it's certainly never boring. In the 1960 election, John F. Kennedy felt compelled to address his religious views in order to defuse concern that his being a catholic would somehow mean that he would effectively be taking orders from the Pope. As with many things, it's been a long road since then and distance is seldom synonymous with progress.

JFK put his political future on the line to vindicate the right of politician's to freely partake of the Constitution's first amendment in their public life. 51 years later, we've moved from questions of whether a candidate would take orders from an earthly manifestation of the almighty to having a candidate explicitly talk in terms of what god is telling them to do. It should surprise no one that the candidate in question is Michele Bachmann.

Putting aside her supposed joke about the recent earthquake and hurricane on the East coast of the United States being a message from god to get the attention of politicians, Bachmann has said on a number of occasions that god directed her to take specific actions, ranging from introducing legislation against same-sex marriage in the Minnesota state legislature to the decision to run for President.

In some ways, it sickens me to think that JFK's stand back in 1960 may be one of the things that makes it possible that people are treating Bachmann as if she's a credible candidate for any elected office. Then again, that's how it often works. A courageous (albeit flawed) individual takes a principled stand to fight for the rights of far less principled people. Rather than dwell on that, I'll think about that masterful JFK speech for a bit.

I believe in an America where the separation of church and state is absolute, where no Catholic prelate would tell the president (should he be Catholic) how to act, and no Protestant minister would tell his parishioners for whom to vote; where no church or church school is granted any public funds or political preference; and where no man is denied public office merely because his religion differs from the president who might appoint him or the people who might elect him.

I believe in an America that is officially neither Catholic, Protestant nor Jewish; where no public official either requests or accepts instructions on public policy from the Pope, the National Council of Churches or any other ecclesiastical source; where no religious body seeks to impose its will directly or indirectly upon the general populace or the public acts of its officials; and where religious liberty is so indivisible that an act against one church is treated as an act against all.

For while this year it may be a Catholic against whom the finger of suspicion is pointed, in other years it has been, and may someday be again, a Jew— or a Quaker or a Unitarian or a Baptist. It was Virginia's harassment of Baptist preachers, for example, that helped lead to Jefferson's statute of religious freedom. Today I may be the victim, but tomorrow it may be you — until the whole fabric of our harmonious society is ripped at a time of great national peril.

Kennedy obviously had his faults, but he knew the score.