Let Me Rephrase That - Adventures in unfortunate syntactical construction, by renewed Redskins coach Joe Gibbs:

"And my experience is right now, if somebody is under contract and is a good coach, you're going to have a tough time getting him out of there. It's going to take a stick of dynamite, particularly some place where the coach is very solid."

That sounds painful.

Alternate Histories and Alternative Geographies - In general, I don't bother Victor Davis Hansen and he doesn't bother me. It's a live-and-let-live arrangement made all the simpler by his almost certain, utter lack of knowledge of my existence. But I see he currently has a much-linked column in which he writes

Thirty years ago, during the Yom Kippur War of October 1973, most of the Europeans of the NATO alliance refused over-flight rights to the United States. We had only hours in which to aid Israel from a multifaceted surprise attack and were desperately ferrying tons of supplies to save it from literal extinction. In contrast, many of these same allies allowed the Soviet Union - the supposed common enemy from which thousands of Americans were based in Europe to protect Europeans - to fly over NATO airspace to ensure the Syrians sufficient material to launch and sustain their surprise attack on the Golan.

Does this make any sense on its face? I'm not talking about the refusal of overflight rights to the US effort to resupply Israel. That's well established. It's the other part: "many of these same allies" allowing the Soviet Union "to fly over NATO airspace to ensure the Syrians sufficient material to launch and sustain their surprise attack on the Golan."

I see two little problems here. Look at a map of Europe. Recall that the only NATO allies between the Soviet Union and Syria were Turkey and Greece. It's hard to envision how the Soviets would have needed to fly supplies to Syria over Norway, or Belgium, or West Germany or even Italy. Assuming that both Greece and Turkey allowed Soviet overflights in 1973, that's two NATO allies out of, what, fifteen back then? That hardly strikes me as "many."

And there's another thing. The Soviets were doing this to "to fly over NATO airspace to ensure the Syrians sufficient material to launch and sustain their surprise attack on the Golan." And it was a surprise attack. That's a big reason why the early stages of the Yom Kippur War went so well for the Arabs is that they maintained unusually effective operational security. But by Hansen's own account, the claimed overflights had to happen in advance of the surprise attack. That's the only way you can "ensure . . . sufficient" - ahem - materiel to "launch" same. So the attribution of guilty foreknowledge - the "many . . . allies . . . allowed the Soviet Union . . . to ensure the Syrians . . . [could] launch and sustain their surprise attack on the Golan."

It sure looks like a ridiculous claim: a surprise attack so closely held that only Syria, Egypt, the Soviet Union and many NATO allies knew about it in advance. Be clear: Hanson is not just claiming that "many" allies allowed the Soviet Union to fly arms to Syria, but that they did so knowing that Syria was about to invade Israel. It would be interesting to see any historical evidence that actually backs up Hanson's implausible outburst.

Lacking Polish - From Unmistakable Marks:

I've never edited a movie in my life, never mastered a video DVD, and never even considered making a multi-track music recording. Neither have you, if I might be permitted to play the odds here. By aiming its media tools at creators instead of consumers, Apple is either confusing Jobs' Pixar coworkers and celebrity friends for normal people, or deciding that its long-time 5% market-share is too big.

and more on what he takes to be Apple's wrong turn on digital media.

Deadpan Adventures - Who could resist an item that begins

Two books made their first English appearance in 1973: Dungeons and Dragons, by Gary Gygax and Dave Arneson, and Speech and Phenomenology, by Jacques Derrida. Let's put these a little closer together...

as Bruce Baugh's does. Not me. See if you can spot the corner of his mouth twitching. It's hard!

Question of the Day comes from Rosemary at Dean's World:

Dean says that there was no "real" middle class tax cut. The reason, as Dean sees it, is because of increases in local property taxes, state university tuition, etc. His solution is to get rid of the Bush tax cuts. I'm not seeing the logic.

Does anyone think that getting rid of the tax cut will result in states lowering property taxes and universities lowering tuition?

I Cannot Teach Him. The Boy Has No Patience. - Will some liberal bloggers please try to get through to Hesiod about why his race-baiting attack on Colin Powell - calling him Stepin' Fetchit, among other things - is so wrong? I failed to get through. I've always liked Hesiod, but this is appalling. Maybe he'll take the objections of a true ideological confrere more seriously.

Zilch. Nada. Nothing. The Sequel. - Kenneth Pollack's article, "Spies, Lies, and Weapons: What Went Wrong," in the current Atlantic is a postmortem on Iraqi WMD intel and its uses by a decidedly interested party. More later on the article itself, but the most striking take on the article that I've seen came from Hit and Run commenter Andrew, a hawk:

The assessment given in the Pollack article appears to be so reasonable that I believe it will probably serve as a platform for any further discussion of the issue. I find that I come away from the article only MORE persuaded of conclusions I had already reached-- and I am sure that others, with different conclusions, will have exactly the same response...AND THEY WILL BE RIGHT.

We will all be right for sticking to conclusions we otherwise find reasonable, because what the article really demonstrates is that intellegence doesn't SETTLE any outstanding policy debate...in fact is scarcely even relevant.

If an issue of importance is out there, and a consequential choice needs to be made, a citizen can come to a sensible conclusion based on the sort of information available to any interested newspaper reader, and he will be as likely to choose correctly as any member of the National Security Council (or the equivalent policy-shaping body in another democratic society).

What Pollack's article demonstrates, is that a modern intellegence apparatus (and no one more than the US) can pile up mounds of data...which don't incontestably support any conclusion. You would be nearly as well off without any of it.

There is lots of data about the stock market. But nobody can call the market short-term, and nobody needs to, long-term (it will go up).

In a way this is reassuring. Debate over foreign policy choices (or any other policy choices) in a modern democracy can proceed among citizens, based mostly on information citizens can reasonably be expected to have.

This strikes me as brilliant and absolutely correct. More than once, among workaday acquaintances, I heard people say, "They must really know something important that they're not telling us about Iraq's arsenal to be so insistent about it." The kindest thing one can say is that that turns out not to have been the case. So even if you're not inclined to say "Never again!" to "preemptive" war, say "Never again" to the notion that mere citizens are less qualified than high officials to decide matters of war and peace. Andrew and I would have made different decisions, but the range of our decisions were no wider than the "expert range," and our basis for our decisions no less sound.

A Fanboy's Ditto - I'd been meaning to offer hesitant demurrals to the apparently universal condemnation of the new Marvel Age manga-sized trade line. For my readers who follow the comics posts here, but don't follow the comics field obsessively, the controversy is this: Marvel is starting a new line of all-ages books, and one of the things they're doing is taking early Silver Age stories and reusing the plots with new dialog and art. e.g. take Stan Lee and Steve Ditko's early Spider-man plots, write new scripts based on them, and illustrate said scripts with contemporary art Marvel believes, rightly or wrongly, to be more likely to appeal to the tastes of contemporary kids than Ditko and Kirby, while acknowledging the original creators in the credits of the new books.

This has been widely considered both idiocy and sacrilege, but didn't strike me as obviously either of those things. Sean Collins is either more industrious or braver than I, and puts together what I consider a very effective case in favor.

UPDATE: Put in an actual link to Sean's essay. I had linked the wrong thing before.

Your Latest Gift Culture Opportunity - Diana Moon writes, somewhat bemusedly, that "I have always thought that asking for money for blogging was like asking for money for knitting yourself a sweater." Of course, when you think about it, if someone knits themselves a really nice sweater, and then wears it, you get to look at the thing. You might enjoy that enough to consider it worth paying something toward it.

That makes the parallel with blogging oddly exact. In the case of Diana's blog, I look at the thing several times a day. And - here's the pitch - she's suddenly less employed than she was earlier this week. So if you admire her sweaters, now is a good time to contribute to the knitting.

A Fanboy's Tristesse - It's something close to official now. Comic fandom's "message board culture" resents comic fandom's blog culture. Someone quotes a UO item on trade paperbacks on Comicon, and someone else doesn't just take issue with my argument - why shouldn't they? - but refers disdainfully to "Hanley and the blogosphere" [sic]. I'm not sure what the source of the general objection is - some combination of Who do they think they are? and Why don't they mix it up with the rest of us? maybe. But it might help to think of us in terms of Michael Croft's suggestion that blogging is "the safe-sex equivalent of Usenet." Good fences make good neighbors, most of the time anyway. We don't get into nearly as many vicious squabbles as message board posters do. At the same time, the comics blogosphere clearly depends on the message board sites, to a considerable extent, for material, and sometimes in, well, a less than generous way (yanking stuff off of message boards for its amusement value).

I guess the point is, we're all assholes, but we're assholes in different ways. Or some of us (the bloggers) are assholes at one remove. Or something. If I had a point in the first place.

Temper Temper - Len Pasquarelli is a good reporter. But his crabby column about Joe Gibbs' return to the Redskins is lazy. He hasn't really got an argument, just a sequence of increasingly strained witticisms. (One of the downsides of the Gibbs return has been football writers trying to sound like they know something about NASCAR. I mean, I don't know anything about NASCAR either, but I can tell when someone's bullshitting their way through the subject, and that's what Pasquarelli is doing.)

In an online chat, the Post's Mark Maske theorizes that " It sounds to me like someone who's mad he didn't know the Redskins were going to hire Joe Gibbs."

Hey, Gibbs could fail! But the man has been in continuous competition, at a championship level, in two different sports over a 25-year period. Betting against him strikes me as risky.

One Step Up, Two Steps Back - Atrios has a message one of his readers got that is attributed to David Brooks, sort of apologizing for his neo-PC column the other day. I am not overly impressed. Brooks writes ""So I was careful not to say that Bush or neocon critics are anti-Semitic. I was careful not to say that all conspiracy theorists are anti-Semitic."

This is true as far as it goes. I would simply add "and careful to imply it."

Peeve: Brooks writes "First, I wasn't saying anything about people who criticize neocons' ideas. The column wasn't about that at all. It was about people who imagine there is a shadowy conspiracy behind Bush policy."

I read a lot of criticisms of neoconservative foreign policy. Been reading them for years, actually, long before the Bush Administration existed. Hey, I've written them! While I occasionally see people who use the word "conspiracy" with regard to the neocon influence on Bush Administration policy, I don't recall actual critics referring to said conspiracy, or Tendency or what-have-you as "shadowy." There is clearly nothing shadowy about prominent national security intellectuals, prominently published in many cases, holding down high-level government jobs and not infrequently making statements to the media. "Shadowy" itself is a word generally inserted into the discussion by those who smear neocon critics, the better to stigmatize them. I googled "neocon shadoy conspiracy" this evening, and a scan of relevant hits on the first two pages shows that the word "shadowy" is almost always used by smearer of neocon critics rather than a neocon critic. Then I googled Antiwar.com specifically. Of the four hits, not one used the word "shadowy" in relation to "neocon conspiracy." Then it was off to The American Conservative. No hits at all.

Googling the same site for simply "neocon conspiracy", the only hit is actually a quote by neoconservative columnist Robert Kagan. Searching the same parameters on Antiwar.com produces 10 pages of hits (imagine!), but none of the ones on the first two pages turn out to be about, well, neocon conspiracies. The word conspiracy is never used to characterize the actions of the neoconservatives in or out of government.

This makes sense. Conspiracies are secret things, and if there's one thing the PNAC, the Weekly Standard and AEI are not, it's secret. Even Richard Perle can't shut his mouth for more than five minutes.

All of which is to say, Brooks is still full of shit. And he hasn't, apparently, apologized for trying to claim that the fact that the PNAC "has a staff of five" means it is somehow without influence. (It's actually seven, plus the Project Directors, plus all the people who signed its Statement of Principles, plus all the people who signed its Second Statement on Postwar Iraq, plus all the other prominent Republican activists, wonks and politicians whose names turn up on PNAC documents.

Brooks' apology has all the sincerity and completeness of Pete Rose's, and deserves the same respect.

It's an Honor Just to be Nominated but it would, I confess, please me no end if Loyal Readers voted for this site in the Best Non-Liberal Blog category in the annual Koufax awards. You just click the link and put in the comments that "Henley's my man!" or something like that. My competitors are all whores and grifters who despise all that is good and decent in the world. It's vital that they be stopped.

Poetry Corner - It's only 2004, but Brooke Oberwetter has already produced a candidate for greatest poem of the century, "Ode to Britney." I laughed, I cried, I was moved.

Patience, My Little Ones - I apologize to people I owe e-mail from this week. It was gaming night. We'll have some good reader mail items in the next day or two.

Nothing. Nada. Zip. - "Iraq's Arsenal Was Only on Paper" writes the Post's Barton Gellman in an authoritative report. On the WMD front, the hawks seem now reduced to two claims:

1) Saddam was eeeeeeeeeeviiiillllllll! Stop asking about this stuff!

2) Saddam tried to bluff the world into thinking he had WMD. He succeeded and got wiped out for his troubles. Where's the problem?

The first is actually the stronger argument., but it simply returns us to familiar should the United States expend blood and treasure toppling foreign tyrants? ground. Had the Administration thought that argument a winner they'd never have bothered pushing the WMD line in the first place.

That leaves us with the second. We are faced with an immediate problem. Saddam's "bluff" consisted, in the main, of insisting his country had no WMDs. He furthered this bluff by having his government spokesmen say the same thing. To this, the hawks reply that these denials were pro forma, and the bluff was proven by his pattern of obstruction of the inspectors. Sticking purely to the post-resolution period, from October 2002 to March 2003, our main evidence for Iraq's non-cooperation with the inspection regime is continual, categorical statements by the Bush Administration, and weaker ones from Hans Blix.

The irony of the hawks choosing Hans Blix for an argument from authority is palpable. As for the Administration's statements, I noticed at the time how reflexive they were - no matter what Iraq did or didn't do, what papers it released or sites it opened up, someone in DC instantly declared that "Iraq is still not cooperating enough." We are faced with this problem: the same administration said, out of various mouths that it believed Iraq had "reconstituted nuclear weapons" (just add water!), that it knew of specific sites full of chemical and biological weapons, that Iraq was hording 20,000 liters of this and 30,000 liters of that, that its human sources had confirmed these facilities manufactured such and such.

We know now that none of those statements about WMD were an accurate reflection of reality. We know in retrospect, and this pisses me off no end, that the statements of one of the worst dictatorships in the world on this issue were more nearly the truth than the statements of our own government officials. So those same officials automatic and largely unspecified statements about "obstruction" are suspect.

And what about those dire warnings of Hans Blix about Iraqi non-cooperation? It makes sense to see these as part of Blix's double game - trying the best he could to keep the Americans sweet on one hand ("Look, I am tough!") and to get the most possible out of the Iraqis ("Hey, you don't deal with me, you deal with them.") It is manifestly the case that Blix's team felt the inspections were worth continuing, and clear that the hawks' derision of Blix for "failing to find any WMD" was unjust. There weren't any to find.

The inspections were, from the Administration's perspective, a charade. Blix said "Nice Doggie" while we gathered rocks. That Blix largely meant "Nice Doggie" made the charade that much better.

Which brings us back to argument 1. Saddam really was evil. And we really did get him. The costs of that deed include not just the dead and the maimed on our side, and the dead and the maimed on theirs, and the couple hundred billions of dollars from buildup through reconstruction. The costs include the Administration's decision to motivate the American people by fear, to perpetrate an official farce (inspections) and to be less truthful about factual matters than one of the most tyrannical governments on earth.

Yes, it was too much to pay, and to continue to pay.

News from Gun-Free Britain - Avedon Carol had a laptop stolen from her house, while she was in it. (The house, not the laptop.) What's worse, it wasn't even her laptop. Help a sister out by donating toward its replacement. The story is told here, here and here. The middle item is especially galling, as it has the most detail on what it takes to bother the police aboutreport a crime these days in Britain.

That's also a cost-cutting measure - instead of sending someone out to the scene of the crime, the way they used to do, they make people come to the station.

That's pretty much the end of even the fiction that police have any particular interest in solving crimes, when they can't even be bothered to come to the crime scene. Here all the police are either writing speeding tickets or buying drugs undercover. Not sure what they do in London.

Trade Me - Glen Engel-Cox takes up the baton in the "(some) comics creators versus trade paperback buyers" dispute. In addition to the personal perspective of someone who would be spending no dollars on comics if it weren't for paperbacks, Glen also has a useful consideration of the business perspective:

However, having made a small study of the business, I know the true reason why Byrne and David are concerned about the loss of the monthlies, because it is in the monthlies that so many creators make their actual money (creators of monthlies are paid by the page, while an original trade would likely be paid for the entire book - at a rate much less of the per page rate of the monthly), and they're afraid of that market disappearing. That is a real concern, but it's their concern, not mine or any other consumer. If the monthly market dies, creators will have to fight for additional payment for those original trades - if they decide to create those, and not, instead, do something else.

There does appear to be a page full of unsquarable circles composing the current economic picture. The readership is mostly interested in familiar characters in stories with a certain level of sophistication and craft. The kinds of stories that the adult superhero fan who constitutes what's left of the market enjoys can't be cranked out Bullpen-style by people writing six books a month and drawing three. (Bryan Michael Bendis is the obvious exception.) But for creators to make a living on historically low workloads means historically high piecework rates, particularly in the absence of an ownership share. (By "historically high," I exclude the late-century bubble. I mean compared to the Golden-thru-Bronze Ages.) Then there's the corporate infrastructure the big companies "have to" support. Then there's the decision of those companies to produce for a developing market (returnable books), while still depending on a declining one. Glen is certainly right that

A market is a market. Even if there's no monthlies, if there's a market for trades, someone is going to produce trades (with or without producing monthlies).

But it may be relatively few peopl who produce them, when it comes to licensed, corporate-owned superhero properties. Many artcomics creators are used to the "advance against royalties and keep your day job" model that is the standard for the vast majority of prose authors. But it will be a rude change for people making page rates. And a lot of very talented people may decide there's a better living in television, animation, design, advertising or, god forbid, telecom.

The hell of it is, I don't begrudge today's creators their living. I just don't owe it to them.

Department of Equal Time, Comicsblogging Division - Bill Sherman praises Craig Thompson's Blankets. Mike Kozlowski buries it.

A Fanboy's Mail - Kevin Maroney reminds me that it was he, not Avram Grumer, who predicted last July that Michael Chabon Presents: The Amazing Adventures of the Escapist would face significant delays. Kevin's actual predicted release date, July 23, 2004. If my source's informant was correct, he'll have nailed it almost exactly. However, Newsarama says it just ain't so.

Due to production delays, Dark Horse has confirmed for Newsarama that Michael Chabon Presents...The Amazing Adventures of The Escapist #1, originally due to be in stores on December 17th is now looking at a release date of February 11th.

Newsarama writer Matthew Brady specifically pooh-poohs the story I heard. I hope he's right and my source is wrong! We won't have long to find out, really. This is a book that was originally announced for October, then solicited for December, then delayed until January. Now the publisher says early February. We shall see.

(Newsarama link via Franklin's Findings.)

Meanwhile, Mary Kay Kare quibbles with my meager regard for Viggo Mortensen's portrayal of Aragorn:

I agree with you about Elijah Wood, but not about Mortenson. He looked very much like my idea of Aragorn and his physicality amazed me. He moved and looked like a vigorous warrior, futhermore one who is both intelligent and thoughtful.

Mary Kay has more of the Rings in blog items titled "The Return of the King" and "Yet More ROTK." Plainly Mary Kay has no truck with some bloggers' need to come up with clever titles for posts! (Or "clever" titles, either.)

Department of Ne'er So Well Express'd

TV phony John Edward's syndicated series, Crossing Over with John Edward, has been canceled after three seasons, proving even Americans can take only so much bullshit.

Franklin Harris.

Annals of Neo-PC - This year, my only interest in people who try to claim that critics of neoconservatism are using anti-Jewish code words is to ridicule them. Our first two objects of derision will be David Brooks and Joel Mowbray. What lying weasels! That is all. (But see Calpundit and Ysglesias for more on Brooks, if you're into that sort of thing.)

Pick on Calpundit Night Continues as we turn to an item on political donations from the education industry:

political donations from the education industry in the current election cycle have favored the Democrats by a margin of 65% to 34%. Since this segment doesn't include teachers' unions and is "dominated by contributions from college and university professors," it's probably a fairly decent proxy for the political leanings of university professors and administrators.

This suggests that about one-third of university academics lean Republican, which hardly gibes with the conservative notion that universities are hotbeds of lefty radicalism, a conclusion they usually come to by examining the affiliations of women's studies and social ecology departments at a few selected universities and mysteriously igoring the law schools and engineering departments.

So, yes, universities lean liberal, and some of them lean very liberal. But many of them don't, and overall they are far from monolithic.

Well this won't do at all.

First, 65-34 is much more "aligned" than the country as a whole. Second, there's nothing "mysterious" about ignoring the engineering departments, science departments and even, to a lesser extent, the business schools. It does not matter what the political leanings are of professors in departments where politics doesn't come up in class, and isn't reflected in the syllabus. The entire engineering department may have its monthly meetings at the Objectivist Center, but that will have small effect on the content of engineering courses. IF liberals are concentrated in departments where politics impinges more directly on the curriculum - history, poli sci, literature - then higher education will indeed take on a "liberal" cast. (Note: a high concentration of conservatives in the law schools would matter for just this reason, though nothing in Kevin's item establishes this as the case.)

Beyond course content is the question of the tenor of campus life. That's set by Administrators. Do most administrations tend to draw from, say, the generally-conservative business department, or the solidly-liberal Ed School? To the extent that liberal-to-radical departments provide the cadres of university administrations, universities will indeed tend toward hotbeds of radicalism. There's a tie-in to the item below this one too: those 34% of faculty who lean Republican are not necessarily as energetic in their focus on campus politics as the 65% that lean Democratic.

All of which is to say, maybe universities aren't hotbeds of lefty radicalism, but the single study of donors cited by Kevin (and Pandagon) demontstrates nothing of the kind.

Well, That Would Suck - Least Dispensible Weblog proprietor Kevin Drum is talking crazy talk, in an item about the limits of "original intent" in constitutional interpretation:

Each generation is responsible for governing itself. I suspect that this was the real original intent of the framers.

Um, then they made the Constitution so hard to amend why?

The bigger problem is that Kevin's formulation exemplifies the deep problem with American liberalism. It sounds noble enough, but falls apart on inspection, and the way it falls apart is the point. First the obvious: no "generation" governs itself. At any time, about five generations are alive. One of them is too young to have any say whatsoever. Each of the others has almost certainly been formed in ways distinctly different from the others - Boomers, their parents, Gen Xers, Millenials, we cuspers who fit between the boomers and Generation X proper - none of these generations will "govern itself." Just imagine what would happen if one tried. Some members of one will be governing some members of the others. The older generations will have a distinct power advantage. To the extent that Kevin means for the Republic to be made anew with each "generation," the several generations, each with distinct ideas of the good life and potentially vast disagreements about the nature of the good society, turn life into continual ferment and strife. No generation or even country "governs itself." Some people govern other people. Democracy is a way in which some groups impose their will on other groups. It is in theory more fluid than other ways of arranging power. In theory, all of us are on the winning team for some issues some of the time. And in theory and, frequently, practice, it is less violent and paradoxically more stable than more rigid allocations of actual rulership.

But without limits on the society's ability to re-form itself, democracy, representative or otherwise, would be quite intolerable for most people. That's because, in untrammelled democracy, nobody ever shuts up. Victory goes, not to the big battalions, but to the big mouths. A system in which "everybody has a voice" in practice favors the people with the most energy for debate and organization, and the people with the greatest interest in running other people's lives. (You can see the purest example of this in the typical Homeowners' Association.)

This is what liberals seem to love most of all - life as continual campaign, the elevation of Voice over Exit. In fact, Exit is right out. Ginger Stampley speaks approvingly of "the talking stick" and how everybody gets their turn with it. I've always thought this was a perfect metaphor for the liberal valorization of Voice. (Note: the only examples of the phrase in Ginger's archive apply specifically to gaming. While I believe she has used it in reference to politics also, I'll take responsibility for the political application of the metaphor.) It's an appealing image, of fairness, orderly discussion, consensus.

But it is, unmodified, dire. Because not everyone is equally good with the stick. And not everyone wants to talk all the time, and not everyone wants to have to, in principle, defend every aspect of their lives from social sanction. Some people have way less interest in politics than others. The problem with politics is that, because it is the arena of force, the people who do have a huge interest in it can make you care. I have a buddy who feels that the Cold War was largely a jobs program for engineers. That's as may be, but it's at least as true that the managerial state is a jobs program for the high school Poli Sci Club.

The only way to make political life tolerable, then, is to severely limit the scope of politics. This doesn't necessarily mean reducing government to libertarian proportions, but it does mean limiting the fluidity of a country's political arrangements over time. This is what Constitutionalism tries to do, and pace Kevin, is clearly what it was intended to do.

That Constitutionalism has failed to achieve its goals is a matter for another time.

A Fanboy's Strange Bedfellows - Arch-foes Peter David and John Byrne separately decry the "wait for the trade mentality" which leads many of us to pass on buying monthly comics in anticipation of getting the storyline in paperback form when it's collected. The argument is that the waiters depress sales of midlist-and-lower series, leading to a) the series' cancellation, and b) a decision by the publisher to forego trade paperback publication for those titles anyway. Byrne actually suggests that

Next time you run into someone who says he is "waiting for the trade" be sure to bombard him with as many SPOILERS as you can think of, from having read the books as they come out. Maybe that will help banish yet another thing driving nails into the coffin of this industry.

The idea is to shame the waiter into buying his damned monthly comics, apparently, rather than to convince him that this hobby just has too many assholes in it and he should leave it entirely. That John Byrne, he thinks outside the box.

In the Comicon thread, Johanna Draper Carlson stands up, as politely as possible, for the common sense idea that the consumer's only obligation is to spend her money on what pleases her.

This turns out to be a surprisingly hard sell.

I've seen this before - it comes with spending a lifetime in fringe pursuits. For instance, in the early 1990s, I used OS/2. I loved OS/2 in many ways, and I actually needed it - it was the only PC operating system that supported long filenames back then. I was a poet, and the last thing I wanted was to manage a hard drive of hundreds of poems, each in several versions, every one of those hundreds of files limited to 8-character names. As a bonus, OS/2 pushed object-orientation in directions Windows still hasn't managed. Just today at work, I was in Explorer looking at a text file and the Access database file in which it belonged. So I tried dragging the text file icon onto the database icon to see if it would start Access and kick off the text file import routine. Nothing doing!

Well, why the hell not, huh? But I can tell I'm drifting a bit. The point is, I spent a fair amount of time in Compuserve's OS/2 fora, aka World OS/2 Headquarters. And at some point, a booster made the argument that yes, all good "supporters" of the operating system would buy promising software packages even if they didn't really need them - OS/2 boosters had a duty to show developers that there was a "market" for OS/2 apps.

Of course we were demonstrating nothing of the kind, quite the opposite. The argument itself proved that OS/2 was an operating system for hobbyists and nothing more. I said to myself, "OS/2 boosterism has reached its decadent phase." (Okay, I didn't just say it to myself.) It was clear what was happening. The biggest "supporters" were IT guys who had bet big opportunity costs on OS/2 and bet wrong. All those certification programs, the hours with the API and the config files, all going to waste before their eyes. They had taken a wrong career turn and it wasn't just going to cost them money - they were going to take a "face hit" among their fellow geeks who had bet Windows and won. In such circumstances it became very difficult for them to separate other people's duty from their own self-interest.

The standout posts of the Comicon thread are by Nat Gertler. (There are no standout posts in the Newsarama thread.) Gertler, an actual publisher, doesn't just own up to his own responsibility to run his business, he refutes the argument that "if the monthly isn't selling, the publisher has no way of knowing that a trade would do better." Highlight:

I will bet far more on to-the-point anecdotal evidence than on less relevant hard numbers, and for hard numbers I would look at a wider array of things than the sales for a single book. The numbers that a monthly has been selling is not a direct dictation of how many copies the TPB will sell. In fact, the information that I get back from asking retailers actually is harder numbers for the eventual sales. When I survey retailers, asking "if I were to issue book X, how many would you order?" that gives me far better information to work with. I also look at how similar books are selling. When I consider publishing a work like Alice (reprinting an adaptation of Alice's Adventures In Wonderland that was serialized in The Dreamery years ago), the sales figures for The Dreamery are of little use to me. The news that the all-ages female-friendly Electric Girl TPBs have sold 10,000 copies each is far more useful (and that's a sales volume one could not have predicted that number from the pamphlet sales), as is news from retailers that librarians are looking specifically for comic adaptations of well-known literature.

It's certainly a tricky time for the market. The major publishers are having their books written so that they are most enjoyable reading several issues worth of story in a single sitting (when they are enjoyable at all). To the extent that they still expect readers to buy the stories in sub-optimal form they are naive. To the extent that publishers or creators feel it is the readers' duty to buy the stories in sub-optimal form the industry is, as I say, decadent.

And maybe not so bright, either. Marvel creates an entire new line, Tsunami, to appeal to the manga audience of teenagers, including girls. They don't do any significant branding with the imprint - the logo looks so much like the regular Marvel logo that it was only this last weekend I really noticed that, yeah, there's a sort of wave behind the stylized "M." Aside from occasionally cartoonier covers, the Tsunami book on the shelf looks like any other Marvel comic. (Compare the differentiation between DC's Vertigo covers, Cartoon Network books and DC's mainline imprint.) They put these titles, intended to reach new audiences, in front of the old one - the direct-market retail shops. They fill the titles with the same five-part decompressed storylines that comprise the core Marvel line. When the books do poorly in the direct-market, they cancel the monthlies and the trade paperbacks too, even though the trade paperbacks were supposed to be the point of the line, and success in the direct market was supposed to be beside the point.

In other words, they did everything they could possibly do wrong, wrong.

All the "support" in the world can't compensate for business decisions like that, which amounts to a failure to ask the "Gertler questions." So here's some "support" for you. Gertler's company, About Comics, has its website here. Check them out.

UPDATE: See also Franklin Harris, Grotesque Anatomy.

Call That Good News? - Comics bloggery is all happy to read that Daniel Clowes has announced he'll produce an expanded version of Ice Haven, the story that comprises the entirety of Eightball #22.

Well I am not so sanguine. You don't fuck with perfection. Would you consider it good news to learn that Ernest Hemingway intended to flesh out "A Clean, Well-Lighted Place"? That Jane Austen was adding material to Pride and Prejudice? That Chuck Austen was going to have Havok pee up two bodies for Iceman?

Look, I think Daniel Clowes is a genius. But Eightball #22, "Ice Haven", is perfect. There's only one direction to go from perfect, and it ain't up.

Weekly Fitness Blog Item - 161 pounds. That's five fewer than last week's figure, but that's not necessarily so great. Last week's weight was inflated by illness in ways that don't bear dwelling on, and to the extent this week's figure represents any genuine loss of body weight, I fear it came out of muscle mass rather than fat. The good news is that I got in my first real weight workout of the year tonight, so we should have things well in hand soon.

Current weight regimen: For each muscle group, 3 sets of 12 reps, as follows:

1. Exercise A, with about half maximum weight.
2. Exercise A, with the max I can lift 12 times.
3. Exercise B, with some doable load between the loads in 1 and 2.

So for example, tonight's chest routine was

1. Dumbbell bench press, 12 reps at 15 pounds.
2. Dumbbell bench press, 12 reps at 30 pounds.
3. Dumbbell flyes, 12 reps at 20 pounds.

Rep length about 3-5 seconds positive, same negative.

I got sick of Body-for-Life's six-set routines last summer. They just took too darn long to do. But I liked the idea of a warmup set, and I liked the idea of hitting each muscle group with two exercises. So I made up the current "system." I have the option of trading weight for reps later, but this is very doable.

Strange Blogiversary. This site's prototype fitness blog item appeared one year ago tomorrow. Weight that day, 216 pounds.

Goals for 2004. Repeating some New Year's Resolution material here: run a marathon, if medically cleared. Stay in size 30 slacks all year. Keep resting pulse below 50. Get cholesterol in healthy range by any means necessary, including drugs. (I haven't had a test since the summer, but I have one scheduled next month.)

Why a marathon? Because it's hard, and there's relatively few people who can/will do it, but it's within my plausible competence. I have had to accept over the past year that, while I am fitter than ever, I am still a klutz. I can get stronger, I can get faster, but what I haven't gotten is a whit more graceful. This pains me no end, but it's life.

You don't have to be graceful to run a marathon.

Steps taken so far? I have exchanged several e-mails with the Talking Dog. Hey, he is a marathoner! And his first idea - that he and I file a joint entry in the Marine Corps Marathon here this fall, is to my liking. All that's left is the, you know, training.

I see a couple of ways to attack the problem, basically from either end.

1. Walk 26.2 miles. Should take about 9 hours. Next week, intersperse some running intervals over the same course. Total time to complete should drop slightly. Keep increasing the proportion of running each week until you complete the course in the time desired, say 4.5 hours.

2. Walk X hours, where X is the amount of time in which you want to complete the marathon course. Next week, intersperse some running intervals into your X hours. Distance covered should increase slightly. Keep increasing the proportion of runnning each week until you cover 26.2 miles.

In either case, add shorter aerobic sessions and weight training between the big weekly training bouts.

2 seems marginally more practical, since 9 hours is an awful lot of time to budget if you have a family, and frankly, I think it would take me weeks of training until I could even walk 9 hours, let alone run some of that time. Maybe start at 2 and shift to 1 at some later time (like when you can complete the course in 6 hours).

Why will I continue to lift weights and do high-intensity aerobics instead of focusing on pure marathon prep? 1. Because I think of a marathon as an indicator of one aspect of fitness, not fitness entire. 2. I have a notion that good general fitness levels, including upper-body fitness, may be useful, even though distance runners at least traditionally scanted upper body exercise ("runner's physique"). For all I know the pendulum long since swung away from leg-only training among people who actually pay attention to this sort of thing.

What could blow the whole deal? My knees and back. A very early step is a planned visit to my orthopedist.

Project for this week: actually start to learn something about the subject. Your TD recommends Marathoning for Mortals, which I hope to pick up this week.

In other fitness blogs. Bruce Baugh recalls past experiences with hitting the weight loss wall and plans ways to bust through this time.

The Revolution of Frowns - Juan Cole has a useful recap of progress toward the Islamic Republic of Iraq in the Basra area. Historian John Keegan alerted us to the Brits' enthusiasm for letting local "Big Men" get on with the business of ordering things to their liking a few months ago. Cole's article can be seen as an illustration of what that entails: Christian liquor merchants bombed out of business or killed; musicians and sellers of music beaten and otherwise intimidated; jobs handed out on the basis of ethnicity and proximity to someone with juice.

The other day I wrote of the likelihood that Iraq ends up as "Egypt II," but there's another model on offer also: Kosovo II. In Kosovo, NATO brayed about fighting for pluralism, tolerance and coexistence before, during and even after the war. But what they actually did was put themselves at the disposal of the most extreme and violent elements among the Kosovars. Under NATO's nose, the KLA and its allies spent the postwar period driving off ethnic Serbs, Roma and other non-Albanian residents. This is the real reason why the occupation of Kosovo was so much "quieter" than the Iraqi occupation has been - NATO gave the most dangerous faction pretty much everything it wanted.

That hasn't been an option with the Ba'athists who have, apparently, predominated in the resistance to date. But it could easily "work" with the Shi'ites. Let them have their way, let them have their payback, let them dominate the other factions as they like behind the merest scrim of due process. Call it "democracy" because the word covers a multitude of sins. This appears to be what the British are already doing and it's very possibly what the US will settle on soon, or has already settled. The Tribunes have already begun preparing the domestic ground for this politically. Tom Friedman assured us a few weeks ago that the Islamic Republic of Iraq was coming, and that was not such a bad thing, no not really. (Via Letter from Gotham, who found another source for the plan too.) Jim Hoagland has worked the same angle from the other direction - Friedman's task has been to burnish the Shi'ites. Hoagland has taken it upon himself to demonize the Sunnis. Hoagland has been arguing lately that "the" problem in Iraq is not just ex-Ba'athists but the Sunni Arabs as a whole. "They" have constituted a favored class and "they" want to hang on to their privileges and until "they" accept that a newer more equitable era is upon us, "they" will continue to be the enemies of progress. Hoagland's argument has been taken up here and there by others. That it comes from the mouths of American white men is simply bravura.

The arguments will make a nice metric, though (as it were), for just how much a lie we are giving to the rhetoric that justified the war. This too will be like Kosovo, where the answer became: an utter lie, thank you. Keep an eye on how widely the administration and its epigones draw the "circle of shame." As it progresses from Saddam to his government to "Ba'athists" and beyond to "Sunni Arabs," it crosses from realms of genuine responsibility into realms of convenience and, at some point, libel. The purpose will be, as always, to justify the unjustifiable, and to obscure the knowledge that we were "fighting fascism" on behalf of - another fascism. That's what we did in Kosovo. If the regime of the British Zone spreads to the rest of Iraq, it will mean that that's what we did there too.

Your Liberty and Power News for the Week - Franklin Harris is the new guest blogger at L and P. Gene Healy is still crossposting there too, apparently. Maybe Franklin has to toss him out bodily or something. Anyway, a lively place is Liberty and Power, is the theme of this item.

A Fanboy's Second-Hand News - Someone I was talking to today who had lunch with Someone at Dark Horse Comics this week tells me that the Dark Horse person conveyed the news that "they will be lucky" if MICHAEL CHABON PRESENTS: THE AMAZING ADVENTURES OF THE ESCAPIST #1 ships "six months from now." The book was scheduled for last month. Apparently lawyers are involved, though the details on that aspect of things were hazy.

Drat. But Avram Grumer predicted this months ago.