Metablogging - Around and about:

From your lips to God's ears. Gary Farber wants to make me rich. I appreciate the thought nearly as much as I would appreciate the fame and fortune. Gary's item prompts a something I should mention - I would not argue that Captain America should be depicted, in comic or film, as a libertarian. Indeed, I'd like to see Steve Rogers more clearly written as a New Deal liberal, with those instincts and biases. Steve Rogers would by nature be an uber-interventionist abroad and at home, and it would be fun to write him that way.

Now, give me a crack at the Question and I'll give you the libertarian comic book of my dreams - like Ditko, only fun. None other than Franklin Harris approved my Question pitch when I shared it with him.

Cheeky, cheeky - Over at MatthewBarganier.com they're trolling for links. They're hinting broadly at some kind of quid pro quo where you link to them and at some point they favor you with an addition to their so-far non-existent blogroll. Fellas: this is what we call a faux pas.

Oh the sad state of libertarian institutional blogs. How come TAPped can run a blog with all kinds of links to liberal bloggers, and Town Hall can run a blog with all kinds of links to conservative bloggers, but Reason doesn't bother putting up a libertarian blogroll on Hit & Run and Antiwar.com, late as it is to the blogging party, wants antiwar bloggers to ask it to dance first? Has this got something to do with that Ayn Rand book on the virtue of selfishness that I never bothered to read?

Back from the big Hostmatters outage yesterday. Normal blogging resumes now.

Last Word (?) on Scalping goes to Chris Puzak. Don't miss his . . . appreciation of the sexploitation movie Ilse, She-Wolf of the SS either:

Gory scenes of torture are interspersed with gratuitous nudity and campy acting. In other words, it’s like Hogan's Heroes combined with Bob Crane’s home movies.

A Little Off the Top - All Scalping, All the Time! Kurt Hemr writes

FYI: Massachusetts law provides, "No person shall engage in the business of
reselling any ticket or tickets." Mass. Gen. Laws c. 140, sec. 185A. For a long time, the Boston police arrested anyone who tried to resell a ticket at Fenway and charged them with violating this statute, even though a 1924 court decision had held that selling a ticket for face value or less cannot be a "business of reselling." In 1999, a fan who had been arrested when he tried to sell a spare ticket at cost outside Fenway obtained an injunction from the federal court in Boston barring the police from arresting people who sell at cost or less. The upshot is that in Massachusetts, scalping -- selling at a premium over face value -- is illegal, but resale for face value is not.

Anyone want to hazard a guess where a lot of those Red Sox tickets used to end up?

Dooley writes

One more wrinkle to consider in your thoughts on ticket scalping, generally, it’s only illegal near the site of the event. Ticket brokers are quite happily marking up face value and are free and clear. The ‘loveable, loser cubs’ decided to cut out the middle man this year and open their own ticket scalping service a block from the park (see the Chicago Sun-Times).

Interestingly enough, this seems to be a fraud not on the customers (who after all are only paying what they are willing), but on the other 29 MLB clubs who get a piece of ticket sales.

I can not consider myself for or against scalping laws. I have used ticket brokers several times to attend Giant’s games, and quite willingly paid over face value for a ticket in the sun (SF in the summer don’tcha know). I would urge you to think just a bit more about the counterfeit ticket angle. You seem to assume that a policeman can tell the difference between a counterfeiter and a legitimate ticket scalper. I don’t think that’s necessarily true. The ticket brokers here just use specialized printers to print the ducats on card stock. This is easy enough to duplicate. A ticket broker moving counterfeits has an address to track back to and seek redress. A scalper is effectively anonymous leaving situations (e.g. multiple ticket holders for a single seat) that the event organizer has to make good to continue in business. I don’t know that this justifies scalping laws, but seems a lot closer to the truth than mere resentment. To paraphrase Heinlein “Never attribute to malice what mere stupidity can explain”.

It's an interesting point about ticket brokers (which are legal in Massachusetts - here's a list of them) and the problem of counterfeiting. I grant that it would be harder to catch a counterfeiter selling off the street rather than out of an office. But it's not Mission Impossible:

1. Caveat emptor certainly applies. When you decide to buy from a scalper, you are accepting a certain risk.

2. That risk can be reduced. Counterfeiters don't make money producing a couple of tickets for one event. They need to produce lots of tickets for lots of events. Unloading those tickets means being on the street, in the flow of traffic to a venue, on multiple occasions for sustained periods. Let people who buy tickets on the street trouble to remember what the person who sells them their tickets looks and sounds like. Let the police redirect the a fraction of the manpower currently going to hassling honest resellers toward investigating, arresting and prosecuting dishonest ones. You can't eliminate counterfeiting, but you can adjust the marginal risk so that selling fake tickets approaches reselling real ones in profitability terms.

What prodigies of domestic tranquility we could accomplish if our laws and enforcement of laws concentrated on the dishonest rather than the honest generally.

Fitfully Amusing but Cheap - the Wiggum or Bush Quiz from EjectBush.com. First off, I got 94% right, and I'm not a regular Simpsons watcher, so I'm not down with the Wigs. Second off, I'm not exactly easy on the President, but collections of malapropisms don't impress me. I've always suspected you could put such a list together for almost anyone who does a lot of public speaking, including extemporaneous speaking. Stick to the somewhat larger matters of fiscal incontinence, military vainglory and the metastasizing domestic "security" regime.

(Link via Using Bees to Effect Vengeance.)

People Unclear on the Concept - Today's e-mail brings the following:

I just searched in Google for pennsylvania auto insurance coverage and found www.highclearing.com ranked 32. I have a related website about Insurance - Auto that's purely informational (so I'm NOT a competitor of yours) and I'd like to link to your site.

I consider my site to be one of the best resources for this type of information. I get a decent amount of visitors to it so if I link to you, your site should get some decent traffic from it.

I only link to good quality sites... I think you'll find my site to be high quality as well. In exchange, I would ask that you also link to my site. I've already linked to you and will keep it there for a few days until I hear from you. Please let me know asap if you're interested and i'll send you my information.

Thanks!

And thanks to you, Angela Palmer! I hope your informational website is at least as useful to auto insurance purchasers as mine is. And I hope that, as you continue to develop and improve your site, you start reading the material that comes up in those Google searches you do. It provides that extra level of quality that can make your page stand out.

Of Imagination All Compact - Recently hawks and Bush Administration supporters have been playing up this Washington Post story:

'A Gift From God' Renews a Village
Iraqi Engineers Revitalize Marshes That Hussein Had Drained

While doves and administration critics have highlighted one from the Independent:

US soldiers bulldoze farmers' crops
Americans accused of brutal 'punishment' tactics against villagers, while British are condemned as too soft

In one case, we ameliorate someone else's war crime, in the other we commit our own.

Well, the Lord giveth and the Lord taketh away. And that's the problem: we've gone into the God business. And we expect to be loved for the giving and - not even given a pass on the taking away - no, we want the Iraqis to love us for destroying their orchards too. Nor are they supposed to remember the actual sequence of events in 1991 that culminated in Saddam's ecological pogrom - the Shi'ite revolt the US encouraged and then allowed Saddam to put down. If they note that, according to the Post article, Iraqi irrigation officials and the occupation authority have only managed to restore about 10% of the original extent of the wetlands so far, they must not connect the 90% that is still parched with US decisions a dozen years ago. They are certainly not to draw parallels between Saddam draining marshes to deprive rebels of cover and punish the locals for rebellion and the US destroying orchards to deprive rebels of cover and punish the locals for rebellion. (The orchard is a lot smaller than the marshes. We're either much nicer or just getting started.) That would be anti-American. And that's what we can't have - Iraqis looking at things like Iraqis, rather than like us.

If they can only start looking at things from our perspective, perhaps they will be gods too.

It is an unalloyed good thing that we have enabled partial restoration of the marshes. That good is embedded in many unalloyed bad things. The real problem is that we have arrogated to ourselves more power than we can possibly use wisely. It's a problem for the rest of the world, but it's a bigger one for us.

(See Electrolite too.)

Happy Birthdays are in order for the Illuminated Donkey, who turned two in blog years last week, and Journalista, a year old as of a few days ago. The Donk and I commenced blogging at almost the same time (the UO anniversary is the 21st of this month, so mark your calendars!) and he'll always have an honored spot on the O.G. list to the left. Dirk Deppey's Journalista is simply the indispensible comics blog.

A note to this site's political readers: you should make Journalista a regular stop - Dirk regularly covers newspaper cartoonists here and abroad who have exceeded local freedom of expression limits.

Don't You Know There's a War On? - Hot Liberty joins the Draft Boy Columnist Ben Shapiro movement.

All Governments Are Gangs. PATRONIZING Gangs. - From YourDictionary.com, Presidential Debates Rank at Grade School Level:

"The results of our analysis indicate that the grade level of the language of political debates, from the famous Lincoln-Douglas debates of 1858 to current series of presidential debates, has declined from a 12th grade level to a high 7th-grade reading level," said Paul JJ Payack, President and CEO of the Danville, California-based language portal.

Amiable Dunce Watch:

In the Reagan-Mondale debates of 1984, Reagan's arguments averaged a grade level of 9.75, down a grade from his debate with Carter. Mondale's sunk even farther to 8.7.

You have to wonder what the score was on that closing speech about driving along the California coast thinking about the time capsule though. We never will find out where Reagan was going with that one.

The article, alas, has not been updated for the most recent Democratic Presidential debates, nor the ones from the California recall. Enterprising readers are invited to import transcripts into word, clean them up, run the Flesch-Kincaid scores and e-mail me the results, earning fame as a UO e-mailer.

Well, not fame.

Link via Using Bees to Effect Vengeance.

A Brief Reminder That You're Reading This Blog - War is bad.

Weekly Fitness Blog Item - Yeah, a day late. Sorry. (To the people who avoid the blog on Sundays, I mean.) 164 pounds, one pound up from last week's new low. I forgot to take a waist measurement.

MSN has an amusing article comparing good weight loss compliments with bad weight loss compliments. Yeah, let's cut straight to examples of the latter:

"Once I reached goal, my grandmother said several things that were supposedly compliments: She pointed to her back end and said 'You used to be out to here...' Another: 'You have such a better personality now.'"

Bruce Baugh has some excellent diet news. He's down 11 pounds in his first two weeks, which is a solid start. On a related note, Diana e-mails me a link to an AP report of a study that seems to indicate that you really can take in more calories on a low-carbohydrate diet than on a high-carbohydrate diet and still lose as much or more weight.

Critics will note that the Atkins Foundation funded the study. The article asserts that "it had no input into the study's design, conduct or analysis."

The usual caveats apply: newspaper accounts of scientific studies are often simplistic; I haven't seen the study itself; and what matters is neither the funding source or this particular report, but whether the results can be replicated. On that score I make no predictions, but a couple of things jumped out at me:

Two groups were randomly assigned to either lowfat or low-carb diets with 1,500 calories for women and 1,800 for men; a third group was also low-carb but got an extra 300 calories a day. [ . . . ]

Everyone's food looked similar but was cooked to different recipes. The low-carb meals were 5 percent carbohydrate, 15 percent protein and 65 percent fat. The rest got 55 percent carbohydrate, 15 percent protein and 30 percent fat.

Let's crunch some numbers here. 1800 calories, 15% "protien." The article is maddeningly unclear if that's 15% of the mass of the food or 15% of the caloric intake. If the latter, that's about 67 grams of protien a day. Good thing there was no weight training component to this protocol!

The Maybe You're Missing the Whole Point Award goes to Dr. Samuel Klein of Washington University, who "said perhaps the people eating more calories also got more exercise or they were less apt to cheat because they were less hungry."

If it's the latter, Dr. Klein, this is what Atkins and his advocates always advanced as a virtue of the diet - superior satiety. Since other Atkins critics like Fumento dispute that high-fat diets provide superior satiety, Klein's take is itself surprising. As for the possibility that the low-carb proponents got more exercise, it's worth investigating - maybe secret Atkins operatives got their people on the treadmills every day. But let's look at what would have to be true for Klein to be right about that.

Over the twelve-week span of the study, the high-cal, low-carb group lost an average of three pounds more than the low-cal, high-carb group. A pound of fat is about 3500 calories, so that's 10,500 calories over 12 weeks, which is 875 more calories lost per week. In the meantime, the high-cal, low-carb group ate an extra 300 calories per day, which is an extra 2100 per week. (Ignoring Klein's flier about cheating for a moment.) Add the extra intake and the extra outflow together, and the high-cal, low-carb group processed 3,000 more calories per week than the low-cal, low-carb group.

Longtime fitness blog readers know that if you run or walk one mile you burn off - ding! that's right, Mary LaCroix! 100 calories. So for Doctor Klein to be right, the average hi-cal, low-carb participant would have to be doing 30 miles per week more than the low-cal, low-carb dieter.

For twelve weeks.

I'll just bet.

Now, all that said, what do I think this study is really telling us? Here are the key facts: there were 21 participants. It lasted twelve weeks. Everyone picked up their meals at "an upscale Italian restaurant," which cooked them to the specifications of the experimenters. All groups not only lost weight, but lost impressive amounts - even the low-cal, low-carb laggards dropped 17 pounds.

Conclusion: you can lose weight by submitting to small-scale intensive intervention. A diet that skimps on simple starches and processed sugards and is high in fats and oils may be marginally more effective in these short term conditions. But as we've seen in longer and looser studies, the real problem is that people go off the wagon and gain their weight back in the long term. (Needless to say, it's too soon to say I'm not one of those people.) We don't have any studies yet that suggest that low-carb diets solve this larger problem.

Now the pointless personal details: still working my way back into the exercise swing: last week I had one weight session, one intense cardio session, 10 miles of lunchtime walking and two hours splitting wood on Saturday. Sunday, officially the next week, I did a double-length Heavyhands session, toward the end of which I got a bad twinge in my ankle.

Captain America versus the Scalpers of Doom - Columbus Day or no, it was a big day for mail. Philip J. Birmingham writes

Long time listener, first time caller, Jim!

which has to be the coolest possible way to begin a blog e-mail. He continues

You make some good points, but I think you've missed a huge source of resentment concerning scalpers -- they are seen by most people as exacerbating ticket scarcity, and benefitting from it.

I don't know if it's a valid perception, but it's behind a lot of the grumbling about scalpers and ticket brokers.

Matt H. writes

One time John Stossel did a segment or part of it on scalpers, and when he argued with the crowd about how both sides were happy, one participant piped up, to broad assent that "I just dont want him making all that money".

So it is resentment as you are saying.

And Matthew Crane writes

These laws really do screw the average fan.

I do have to make note of the types of people that pursue scalping for a living here in Boston, though. The scalping that occurs around Fenway Park has evolved into a monopolistic syndicate of scalpers who will not allow a ticket to be bought or sold between Kenmore Station and Fenway Park unless THEY are the middleman. It's truly fascinating to see how the system has evolved around Fenway. They are ruthless scumbags whose only "virtue" is that they are willing to risk the occasional arrest and subsequent misdemeanor fine. It's a small price to pay in exchange for the outsized returns they get from rigging a market distorted by a dearth of information created by the anti-scalping laws.

The Fenway situation is a textbook case of how organized-crime syndicates arise when legislators try to repeal supply and demand. Any average fan that tries to sell a ticket in Kenmore Square will be forced to sell to a scalper at the lowball price the professional scalping syndicate sets. Anyone outside the syndicate caught trying to sell to the public will be told in no uncertain terms that this is the scalper's territory and that he'll be pummelled by the scalper and his buddies if he remains. Therefore, Joe Yuppie from Suburb, Massachusetts has one of two choices: try and sell his extra tickets closer to the park where the syndicate doesn't control the turf but where the cops are more vigilant to arrest scalpers, or accept the syndicate's lowball offer.
I wouldn't be surprised if the scalpers and the cops have basically come to an arrangement where there won't be arrests for anyone scalping tickets from Kenmore Square up Brookline Avenue to the Mass Pike bridge.

Repeal the scalping laws, allow fans to sell their tickets in an open, information-rich market, and watch the low-grade organized-crime element to scalping whither away. It will most certainly be a better situation for the fans.

As an aside, I think the day is fast approaching where non-season, individual-game tickets will be sold by ballclubs with dynamic pricing based upon the demand for the game. While that may lock the "average" fan out of a game when the Yankees come to Fenway Park, it probably means that a ticket will be very reasonable when the D-Rays are in town. In any other setup, scalpers WILL get money that could just as easily be in the ballclub's pocket.

This last seems likely. I think I saw something on the net just within the month about various venues moving to a bid system. Ticket pricing will probably evolve in the direction of airline pricing - a welter of different price points etc. People complain about airline pricing but two things are worth remembering:

o Air travel is much cheaper than when I was a callow youth. There really was a time in living memory when only rich people flew.

o Like air travel, live entertainment is a futures market. In the futures markets we're used to thinking about, like agriculture, there is a long lead time to a certain event (a harvest) with an uncertain supply. In the live entertainment business (sports, concerts, theater etc.), you have a long lead time to a certain event with an uncertain demand. In each case, dynamic pricing can cushion the shocks of swings in the uncertain factor. In each case, the supplier - of pork bellies, passage or pastimes - faces substantial fixed costs.

Captain Amerimail came from a number of people. Jesse Walker writes:

What you're really saying, I gather, is that Marvel should catch you now -- you're falling.

Exactly. Did I not bail them out when they were down on their knees? Or am I confusing myself with Ike Perlmutter?

RGB Bill Dowling suggests ending the first Cap movie with the version of Cap's revival seen in the Ultimates series. Everything prior takes place during WWII:

So you can still get the Man Out of Time aspect going at the very end without actually devoting much movie time to it (and you know how those hollywood types love to set up a sequel at the end).

I think the problem here is this: If the first movie is good, if viewers enjoy it, it gets good reviews and it makes money, it's a good movie about a superhero in World War II - a patriotic icon in his element. The ending then commits the second movie to being Something Else Entirely. So even if the second movie is good on some Parnassian scale unrelated to Hollywood's twin gods of popularity and profit, it is good in a different way than the first movie. The studio sets itself up for a serious problem - it can't be sure the audience for the first movie will enjoy the second, because the second won't be providing the same kind of pleasures the first movie did. And it can't be sure the audience that spurned the first movie will give the second one a fair shake - to them it's another damned Captain America film.

Bill makes me think, though, that my prescription was sort of backwards. So let's toss out an alternative:

Start with some variant of the WWII teaser scene I sketched out - Cap helping actual GIs in the field - then cut to the discovery of Cap's frozen body in 2003. Do all necessary WWII stuff as flashbacks. Some temporal jumps, with a lot of looks backward, in the storytelling could actually contribute to the theme. Worst case scenario - the only thing people like about the movie is the WWII scenes. All the reviews say the character only works "in that more innocent time."

So you set the sequel entirely during WWII.

Still to come: Can This Comic Be Saved, thoughts on Captain America as a comics character and solo title.

Yet More Comics Blogging - Dirk Deppey had some fascinating stuff to say about superhero comics and continuity on Friday. I'm just going to pick out one small part to agree with, and leave the rest as an exercise for the reader:

In this regard, working in a shared universe with a long history can only further hobble the aims of the artist. Going back to Morrison's New X-Men, it's interesting that in the current Magneto storyline, no reference is made to the other superheroes based in Manhattan when Magneto tears the city apart. This isn't coincidental; if the rest of the Marvel Universe were allowed into the story, it wouldn't work. For Morrison's purposes, it's far more effective to pretend that the rest of the company's continuity simply doesn't exist. Under the circumstances, it's probably the smartest thing he could have done.

Yes, absolutely! Heck, from what I can tell, Morrison is even ignoring all of the X-Men who don't regularly appear in the book he writes. I've written about continuity and its discontents before (skip down to item six). Suffice it to say that after a company has been producing superhero comics for a couple or few decades, they just have too darn many heroes crowded into their world. And some characters just fit poorly in the "heavy-continuity" approach. I consider it a truth thoroughly demonstrated that all the best Superman stories, for instance, are the ones that take place outside regular continuity.

Captain America Calling - So where were we? Sean Collins was overpraising the current Captain America storyline. Dirk Deppey and Johnny Bacardi were doubting that Cap was good movie material because "Captain America has the single goddamn silliest costume in all of comicdom," as Dirk Deppey puts it.

The American flag is fine as a banner on a pole, but paint it on a suit of chainmail, give it wide, swashbuckler booties and throw in a mask with itty-bitty wingtips and the sans-serif letter "A", and you've got the most garish set of clothes anyone could possibly be asked to wear. What works in a World War II-era comic book is going to look unbelievably ridiculous when wrapping a live human being on the big screen.

Hey, he may be right! This might be why the makers of the appalling straight-to-video Cap movie of 1991 inexplicably had Steve Rogers make (what passed for) the climactic final assault on the Red Skull's . . . balcony actually, where he was playing piano, and not wearing his skull mask either, and did I mention that in the movie he was Italian?

But I'm losing the thread here. My point is Steve Rogers spends the entire end of the movie in mufti. In fact. after the early WWII scenes, you hardly ever see the Captain America costume.

One interpretation of this seemingly bizarre choice is that Johnny and Dirk are right and the moviemakers (we cannot call them "creators") knew it - the movie becomes the proof of their thesis. Another interpretation is that this movie sucked so bad that anything the makers did is presumptively wrong.

I'm plumping for the latter view.

Do not get me wrong - I see the difficulty. But there have been some real advances in fabric and materials in the last decade, and Hollywood has an extra decade's wisdom on successfully solving costume design problems. The Batman latex suits worked until Joel Schumacher started adding nipples; a purist Spiderman outfit came off well, which is surely the last thing anyone expected; even the Daredevil costume, while changed from the comic, was recognizably descended from it. There's a Batman short film (link is to a massive video file) around the internet now. As a story, it's crap. As acting, it's a joke. But the costume, which is much more like the comics costume than the old rubber suit, looks pretty damn good. There are lighting tricks and camera angles.

And in the end, it's an uphill battle. I think you win it by incorporating the battle into the story itself - not by surrendering to kitsch, but by fighting through it.

Open on a foxhole near Tripoli. Daytime, but with the sandstorm it's not doing the GIs much good. There's an upturned jeep beside the depression, and three black GIs from the motor pool taking fire. They're lightly armed because this is the segregated army, though we don't stress that. A tank shell blasts the jeep to smithereens. The camera angles are all low, right down in the hole with the troops, and when the glare from the blast subsides, a Wehrmacht rifleman almost trips in with us. He tries to fire, but one of the troops, a sergeant, gets him first.

Another shell hits near the hole, showering the soldiers with sand. What are we gonna do? a private demands. Take a bunch of them with us, says the sergeant. He rolls to a vantage point and fires.

Smoke, sand, voices, guns, confusion. More jerries appear out of the sand, and one of them gets the drop on the Sarge.

Then the shield creams him. And the sergeant and the camera track the spangled disc as it bounces back, and when it gets picked up we get our first, momentary full-figure shot of Captain America.

Then, because he's a soldier and not an idot, he hops down into the foxhole with them.

"You ain't one of them," the sergeant says, "but who are you? And what kind of uniform is that??"

"The one they gave me, Sergeant. Are you ready to get out of here?"

"Yes, sir!" he says, that being the most politic way to address a white man, no matter how oddly-clothed. "I don't know if that tank's ready to let us out of here, though."

"Sergeant," the costumed white guy says, "give me a grenade and some covering fire, and he won't have a choice."

Roll titles.

And now you start the flashbacks and explain the backstory. But as I learned from a Rita Mae Brown book on writing, job one is to establish your leading man with a memorable first shot. The initial impression you make on the viewers is "ridiculously-garbed savior." You invest the credit immediately and make sure the returns pay off.

So where do we go from there. We establish a slightly variant origin. Steve Rogers was 4F, sure, but not just because he was scrawny - he's got something else wrong, a heart murmer or something. There's a super-soldier program, but it's not "Drink this potion and become the clean-cut version of Mr. Hyde." It's work. At the end of it, Steve Rogers is a fine physical specimen, but they don't want him so much for combat.

No, they want him to sell war bonds. And generally be a morale booster. And entertain the troops. So they put together a patriotic circus outfit and he does USO. And when he expresses his frustrations to the immigrant scientist who runs the "US Army Performance Enhancement Program" the scientist allows that, confidentially, he has some notions of how human performance enhancement could be taken to an even higher level.

Why are you telling me, and not the army? Steve asks him.

The immigrant scientist, who must be a good actor, gets that when you've seen the kinds of things I've seen you are none too quick to trust nations even good ones look - it's a look, haven't you seen it? - and says . . .

Something more profound than I can come up with extemporizing like this. But you get the idea. And one night the USO troupe gets too close to the action and Steve, in costume, saves the day. And that gives the boys in charge an idea. (Recall how the excellent Enemy at the Gates is, in one sense, about creating a superhero through propaganda.) And that gives the Nazis an idea of their own . . .

Now this is an awful lot of World War II, and you might start to wonder if there's any time left for the "Cap gets revived in the 21st century" section. And I'm not sure there is. Maybe you keep the entire movie in WWII. (This fan thinks that's the way to go.) In one sense that would be a shame, because the contemporary revival is the triple-axel of this whole routine - the longstanding "man out of time" trope dovetails right into the costume too garish for words problem. Pull it off, and you've got the best superhero movie yet. Blow it, and it's 1991 all over again, with a lot more red ink.

What about Marvel, though? What kind of tie-in do they get with the comic if the movie is set entirely in the Second World War? Marvel has all kinds of options here - not least, they can reset the monthly title as a World War II book. They did it before. During the Tales of Suspense days in the 1960s, Marvel for a time set all the Cap stories during the War. Cap's present-day exploits could be confined to the Avengers. Or Marvel could drop acid and start a second Cap title. I mean, if one book doesn't sell, maybe a two will not sell even better.

That's the other end of it, though, right? Cap has had a problematic commercial and artistic history since Prince Namor played discus with his time capsule. In addition to the question of what the hell do you do with a Captain America movie, we have to ask what the hell you do with the Captain America comic. Because we can't say the last forty years have given us very many good answers. But this item is already too long, so we'll have to return to the subject another day.

UPDATE: Sean Collins points out that I confused his views Cap's costume with Johnny Bacardi's opinion. I've corrected the item. I take full responsibility for blaming the problem on my Oxycontin habit. Sean's official view is that Cap's costume can work fine in live action. I think he's probably right.

A Fanboy's Impulse Buy - I paused by Big Planet's counter display of mini-comics this week and picked up CELLS, by Scott Mills. I assume I'm the last comics reader to discover this title, but let me enthuse a bit anyway.

CELLS is a saddle-stapled 21-page black & white book, size about 5" x 8". It came out in 1998 and costs $2, which is money well spent. It's the story of two prison inmates, one black, one white, over a twelve-year span. The figure rendering resembles what you'd find in a newspaper humor strip, but it's enough. Everything you need to know about what these guys are doing and thinking comes across clearly. Mills is also great at page layout and storytelling - page 3, which ends a conversation by transitioning from a small strip of narrowly-focused panels along the top to a surveyor's view of the prison yard in the bottom two-thirds of the page, sold me on the book. Now and then you see something in this medium that convinces you the creator really knows what he or she is doing.

The base page is a three x three panel grid that Mills rings variations on the way Shakespeare modulated the pentameter - now a double-wide panel to start the top row, now two entire rows given over to a top-down view of the cell, now a dislocated, unmoored panel gets a row to itself. There's the occasional 6-panel page (three rows of two panels), but the three-row schema, allowing for double-height interpolations, breaks only once toward the end (ironically, on a page with three rows).

So what's it about? Friendship. Loss. Maleness. Male bonding if you want to be glib about it, but I don't. Mills writes well too. Browsing around the web, it appears there's a lot more of his work for me to catch up on. I'm there.

Good Seats Still Available? - From yesterday's Washington Post:

Homeless for nearly three years, George Crouse was handed the equivalent of two weeks' worth of hot meals, a wardrobe of new clothes, or a night at the Ritz-Carlton recently when someone stuffed a ticket to a Red Sox game into his coffee can instead of spare change.

He could have walked to Fenway Park and scalped the grandstand seat for $250 or more. But Crouse went to the game. "Sell it? No way," he said from his perch atop a milk crate on a subway platform outside Massachusetts General Hospital.

Of course, he could also have gotten busted, as noted in this AP story by Tom Kirchofer:

Scalpers in Massachusetts face a $500 fine for their first offense. A second offense carries a fine and a possible one-year jail term.

For scalpers who choose to ply their trade the old-fashioned way, Boston police spokesman Kevin Jones said officers will be patrolling near the ballpark.

"We'll have special scalping details," he said. "Plainclothes officers will be out in the Fenway Park area."

So my question is, why?

I don't think there's an answer beyond sheer resentment. On this side, I have somebody with a ticket. On that side, I have somebody willing to pay $250 for that ticket. On whose behalf is the state intervening here? The only possible answer is, on behalf of people who would also like that ticket, but are willing to pay much less.

Well that's nice.

One argument would be that some people just can't afford to pay $250 for a ticket to a ballgame. Me, for instance. Of course, tens of thousands of tickets were sold at the official prices of $35 to $65 dollars, so tens of thousands of buyers payed much less than $250. But that brings up something else: plenty of people just can't afford to pay $35-65 for a ticket either. But nobody's passing laws to get them into games at their preferred price. Nor should they be.

There's a bigger problem when it comes to ticket availability. There are only so many tickets to go around anyway. Stadium seating is finite. In many cities in many sports, all tickets go to season ticket holders, and the waiting list for season tickets is measured in decades. If you're part of the out-group and you want to see a game, you have to get in on someone else's billet. That means you either have to have a connection with the in-group - and there's an egalitarian arrangement for you, succeeding on the basis of who you know - or you have to buy someone else's seat.

You might suppose that scalping laws help you do this - someone who has to sell his tickets one week - can't make the game - has to let them go for a "fair price" (whatever that is). But aside from the issue of justice to the seller (preventing him from getting the best price on his goods), scalping laws may discourage him from unloading his tickets at all. Limited to recouping only, say, face value, he may not bother to drive in to the stadium and park, or place an ad in the classifieds. He may also simply be scared of the complexity of many anti-scalping regimes. So his ticket simply vanishes from the market and his seat goes empty. Now the out-group member has less chance to get into the game than he otherwise would.

The other argumentum ad resentment is aimed at the seller - the scalper (particularly the professional) doesn't deserve the extra money. And besides, a lot of them are skeevy-looking.

Once again, some people are setting themselves up in judgment of the kind and amount of labor other people perform. If scalping is so easy, why doesn't everyone do it? The scalper works to acquire the tickets (standing in line, etc.). The scalper works to sell the tickets (traveling to the venue, finding buyers, negotiating). The scalper takes a financial risk to do these things (as anyone who sees the forelorn fellow brandishing a handful of unwanted passes five minutes before the concert will realize). The scalper provides a genuine service. Some people can't afford season tickets, but like to get to one game a year, or hear about the concert late, or can't get off work to stand in line, or can't get through to the 800-number, or decide they want to go at the last minute, or want to upgrade to really, really good seats for once in their lives. For these people, scalpers are a boon.

A few years ago, a friend and I heard about an anti-land mines benefit concert at DAR Constitution Hall the day of the show. We decided to take our chances with the scalpers and got in for not too much over list price. That evening we enjoyed great performances by Steve Earle, Emmylou Harris, Buddy Miller and Sheryl Crow, all thanks to the inexplicably underground economy.

There is a separate issue of those who sell counterfeit tickets. That's simple fraud, and not only is but should be against the law. But laws against "scalping" legitimate tickets probably make it harder to separate sellers of legitimate tickets from sellers of fakes. Imagine how different the atmosphere outside a venue where the seller of the real thing has no reason to shy from the cops but the seller of the fake does.

In the case of team sports, many teams make a prohibition on reselling tickets for more than face value part of the season ticket purchase agreement.

"We view it as unethical and in some cases against the law," [NFL spokesmen Greg] Aiello said. "It suggests a desire to profit personally and perhaps illegally on the coattails of either the NFL or the team."

And hey, says the NFL - that's our job!

Such a policy may or may not be wise, and teams can and do take season tickets away from flagrant violators. But there doesn't seem to be any reason for local and state governments to turn a contractual arrangement between team and fan into a criminal matter.