Fun game of the day. [via kottke, of course]
Detective Comics #27 Sets Record
A copy of Detective Comics #27, the first appearance of a character called “The Batman,” sold yesterday for $1,075,500, a comic book record. This breaks the record set just a few days ago by Action Comics #1, the first appearance of Superman, which sold for $1 million. These are the two Holy Grails of comic books.
This is apparently one of the best-preserved copies of Detective Comics #27 ever seen. If you go to the link above, you can see an extensive description of the comic book’s condition, watch a short video, and see close-ups of the front and back covers as well as the transparent case in which CGC put the comic book. I’d never seen one of the cases before.
As for me, if I had my choice of a rare comic book, it would be The Flash #123, which introduced the multiverse to DC Comics.
Archer
Has anyone seen the TV show Archer? It’s an animated half-hour series on FX, and it’s hilarious and occasionally filthy. The best way to describe it would be James Bond meets The Office, with a gay sensibility sometimes thrown in. A recent scene involving Archer trying to defuse a bomb was one of the funniest things I’ve seen on TV in months.
The lead character is voiced by Jon Benjamin, who’s done a bunch of different cartoon characters before (such as Coach McGuirk and Jason on Home Movies). I love his weary, cynical delivery. There’s also Jessica Walter of Arrested Development, who voices his mother; Chris Parnell of Saturday Night Live; Judy Greer; and a couple of others.
There are only six episodes, and there’s actually a four-episode marathon tonight if you want to catch up.
Early TV Manual
Lately I’ve been re-exploring one of my interests: the history of broadcasting and telecommunications. Since I was a kid I’ve loved the early history of radio and TV broadcasting, the rise of the broadcast networks, the transition from radio to TV, and so forth.
I was tooling around online last night and found an RCA television manual from 1946.
1946 was the year that mass-market TV took off. Television experiments were underway in the late 1920s and throughout the 1930s, and by 1939, mass-market television was ready to go, but World War II got in the way. It wasn’t until after the war, when the economy returned to a peacetime footing and consumers were eager to spend again, that TV really took off on a mass scale. In 1946, a year after the end of the war, RCA introduced its first mass-market TV sets.
It’s funny to scroll through the pages of this manual and see how new and mysterious this all was. I love this from page 4:
Reception of a picture with the accompanying sound from a Television Transmitting Station which is broadcasting in your area is a simple tuning process. The Model 621TS gives station coverage as given on page 12.
Check to see that the Television Station is on the air at the time you wish to tune in, and note the channel number of the station. This information is usually published in newspapers. Program schedules may also be obtained from the station on request.
Ah, yes — “Check to see that the Television Station is on the air at the time you wish to tune in,” because the stations are broadcasting for just a few hours each day. Page 7 has a picture of a test pattern and says, “A test pattern of this type is usually broadcast for about fifteen minutes before the program commences.” Today, that would be a waste of valuable advertising time.
Page 12: “This Television Receiver is designed for operation on all thirteen Television Channels as allocated by the Federal Communications Commission in November, 1945. However, in no area are there stations operating on all channels.”
Page 13 explains that the TV tube and receiver will come in separate cartons:
Do not attempt to unpack the Kinescope or the receiver. Leave the equipment complete with all labels and tags in the two cartons for the technician who will install the receiver and explain its operation.
Great fun. I wonder if someday people will laugh at the instructions for setting up a home wireless network with a router.
The Hurt Locker
About The Hurt Locker: am I missing something? The film has garnered awards and acclaim, but when I rented it a few weeks ago, I had to stop watching halfway through, due to a combination of boredom and discomfort. It seems paradoxical that I could have felt both these things at the same time, and I don’t know which of them finally made me stop watching. The movie is basically a series of tension-filled set pieces in which an American soldier slowly defuses bombs in Iraq; there’s not much plot. If I’d been more interested, I guess I might have endured the tension.
Instead I stopped watching and then went to Wikipedia to read the summary.
I wish I had liked it more, since everyone seems to be calling it the best movie of 2009.
To Houston
I’m going to Houston tomorrow for a work-related conference. Houston, Texas.
I’ve never been to Texas, so I’ll be glad to knock another state off my list.
And I’ll be flying into… George Bush Intercontinental Airport.
Fortunately it’s named after the elder, not the younger.
And the temperature’s going to be in the 60s. Woo-hoo!
Houston is the fourth-largest city in the United States. I’m going to be staying in the Galleria area, or Uptown. I won’t have a car with me, so I won’t really be able to go to other neighborhoods. But the Houston Galleria is apparently the fourth-largest shopping mall in the U.S., so there’s that. And there are apparently numerous dining options around.
Should be thrilling!
Too Much to Read
A friend of mine once said that The New Yorker is a weekly magazine that contains a week and a half’s worth of reading. I’ve always remembered this because it’s true. We get The New Yorker every week, and they wind up piling up in the bathroom, along with New York magazine and Time Out New York. (Sensing a trend? We never actually subscribed to Time Out New York; it just started showing up one day, and it has followed us from apartment to apartment even though we’ve never officially given the magazine our new address.)
There’s too much to read. I don’t really read Time Out, but I do like New York. I read most of it on Monday nights while Matt watches Chuck or Castle. As for The New Yorker — although Matt reads most of it, I find that I don’t read very much of it anymore. I like the political articles and the arts criticism at the back of the magazine, but I’m kind of over Malcolm Gladwell’s too-clever-by-half overturnings of conventional wisdom, and I don’t need to read a long article about pear farmers in East Fredonia. And as for the articles I’m interested in, I could read them in the bathroom, but… those articles are long, and it’s kind of a longer commitment than I’m willing to make in, uh, those circumstances. I usually find some time to read the one or two articles I definitely want to read, but the rest of the magazine sits there, unread by my eyes. The unread magazines haunt me, because I know they’re filled with information that could make me a more informed person, and I’m an information junkie.
We also get the New York Times on the weekend, and I feel compelled to read most of that, too.
Now all my weekly reading would be manageable, except I’m usually reading a book as well. And the book is usually my top reading priority. If I’m really into a book, I don’t have time for lengthy New Yorker articles.
What’s even worse is that now we have the internet, where there’s tons of stuff to read.
Our society puts great value on the act of reading. It really is a great thing — it’s more active than watching TV. But I think I remember reading somewhere (haha) that Ralph Waldo Emerson was critical of some types of reading, because it took people away from the real world. (Maybe I’m making that up.)
Every so often you just need to declare reader’s bankruptcy and throw out the magazines you’re never going to get to. And really, none of it is crucial stuff. We went overseas a couple of years ago for a week, and I avoided all American news during that time, and I wound up not missing anything.
There’s a surfeit of information out there, and we can avoid most of it without detriment.
Paramount Closet Killer
This is my favorite find of the day. You know those production company logos that appear at the end of most TV shows? It seems that some people find them scary, because they consist of short bursts of attention-grabbing music and some sort of logo flying at you.
Well, one of them, from Paramount in 1969, has a nickname: the Closet Killer. Because it sounds like what you hear when a serial killer is waiting in your closet.
I associate this with the first season of The Brady Bunch.
(More Paramount logos here.)
Even better than that, a short film premiered at the Sundance Film Festival last month called The S From Hell, which spoofily explores children’s fears of the 1960s Screen Gems logo. The entire nine-minute film is currently online, and after watching it, I’m a little unnerved by the S From Hell, too.
Finally, here’s a good explanation of why these things can be frightening to a kid.
These Are Models
These are models. Unbelievable and amazing. [via]
Driving the TV Bus
Here’s a good rule to follow when you don’t like what’s happening on your beloved TV show:
When you like a show, you’re effectively on a bus with everyone else who likes it, and you’ve got to let the driver do the driving. You can comment on the view, you can point out the pothole he’s about to hit, you can ask him to turn up the air conditioning, and if you want, you can always get off at the next stop and hope you can get a better ride. But if you get up there with everybody else on the bus and start trying to grab the wheel, you will find yourself tumbling down the side of a ravine, and at the bottom of that ravine, there will be nothing to watch except Deal Or No Deal.
Google Super Bowl Ad
If you saw the Super Bowl yesterday, you probably saw this Google commercial. I can’t seem to get through it without my eyes welling up. Then again, I’m a total sap.
R.I.P. Alice Horton
Sigh. The matriarch of Salem has passed away.
Frances Reid, who played Alice Horton on Days of our Lives ever since the show’s premiere in 1965, died on Wednesday at the age of 95. She hadn’t appeared on the show in more than two years, but she was still officially a cast member until her dying day. (I believe she had a lifetime contract.)
I’ve mentioned several times on this blog that I grew up on Days of our Lives. My mom has watched it on and off from the beginning; I used to look at it occasionally while she watched, and then when I was 12 years old I got more interested and decided to tape it every day and watch it after school. I became obsessed: I’d draw a family tree of the show, memorize the order of the cast list in the closing credits, and for a while I wrote down each episode’s developments on a separate index card. When I was 14, I even got to visit the set and watch a rehearsal. A few weeks later we got a script of that episode in the mail, signed by much of the cast. I still have it.
I’ve watched the show on and off over the years. A few weeks ago I tuned in for a few days, because I’d heard that they were killing off Mickey Horton, one of Tom and Alice Horton’s five children. (John Clarke, who played Mickey for most of the show’s run, retired a few years ago.) I’m sure there will be a tribute episode for Alice soon, so I’ll have to watch that, too.
All of the original cast members are now gone. Macdonald Carey (Tom Horton, Alice’s husband) died in 1994, and now Frances Reid is gone, too, and Mickey Horton is also gone.
It’s a sad day in Salem.
A Failed Entertainment
Note to self: must visit.
NYT Math Blog
The New York times has a new blog about math.
A further subtlety is that numbers (and all mathematical ideas, for that matter) have lives of their own. We can’t control them. Even though they exist in our minds, once we decide what we mean by them we have no say in how they behave. They obey certain laws and have certain properties, personalities, and ways of combining with one another, and there’s nothing we can do about it except watch and try to understand. In that sense they are eerily reminiscent of atoms and stars, the things of this world, which are likewise subject to laws beyond our control … except that those things exist outside our heads.
This seems very cool and I’m looking forward to future installments.
The Sixties at 50
Today is the 50th anniversary of the Woolworth’s sit-ins in Greensboro, North Carolina. On February 1, 1960, four black students sat down at a Woolworth’s lunch counter and refused to leave without being served. While these were not the first sit-ins, they were the most famous, and they quickly spread across the South, and inspired a young generation of civil rights activists. Today, February 1, 2010, the International Civil Rights Center and Museum is opening in Greensboro.
This reminds me of something I was going to write about a month ago but forgot: for the next ten years we will be observing the 50th anniversary of the 1960s. The sit-ins (2010); the building of the Berlin Wall (2011); the Cuban Missile Crisis (2012); the JFK assassination (2013); the Beatles in America (2014); the sending of American ground forces to Vietnam (2015); the premieres of Batman and Star Trek on TV (2016); the Summer of Love (2017); the assassinations of Martin Luther King and Robert Kennedy (2018); the moon landing (2019). For the next decade it will be one 50th anniversary after another, as the Baby Boomers relive everything that was important to their youth and the rest of us commemorate a pivotal decade.
It’s fun to relive history at the same speed as it happened. For some reason I remember the 50th anniversary of the 1937 opening of the Lincoln Tunnel, commemorated in 1987, when I was 13. At that age I was an avid comic book reader, and I associated the late 1930s with the golden age of comic books (Superman and Batman first appeared in 1938 and 1939, respectively). I remember waiting to drive into the Lincoln Tunnel with my parents, its massive, vaguely Art-Deco edifice looming before us, and imagining that it was the late 1930s and we were driving into crime-ridden Gotham City, just as Bruce Wayne and his parents drove into the city on that fateful night. It seemed like a dark, depressing time and place.
But 23 years have passed since 1987, just as 23 years passed between 1937 and 1960. If I had been born in 1923 instead of 1973, I would be reading about the sit-ins happening right now, and I would be thinking back to when I grew up during the Great Depression. Since the time I was 14, we’ve observed the 50th anniversaries of The Wizard of Oz and Gone With the Wind, Pearl Harbor, D-Day, Hiroshima and Nagasaki, the creation of the UN, the birth of TV Guide, the Army-McCarthy hearings, Sputnik. Had I been born 50 years ago, I would remember those actual events, not just the 50th anniversaries of those events.
And this year you can follow a Twitter feed re-enacting JFK’s 1960 presidential campaign in honor of its 50th anniversary. Which makes me think: something like Twitter would have been incomprehensible 50 years ago. What kind of technology will we use to commemorate the 50th anniversaries of the big events of our time, like 9/11 or Obama’s election? Will we have holodecks or brain implants that will let us stand in Grant Park and watch Obama speak on Election Night, or experience Hurricane Katrina or the Beijing Olympics?
Our history was someone else’s current events, just as our current events are someone else’s history.
On Master of the Senate and Health Care
A couple of days ago I finished reading Robert Caro’s phenomenal Master of the Senate (which I earlier wrote about here). The last third of the book is about how Lyndon Johnson, the Senate majority leader for much of the 1950s, helped pass the Civil Rights Act of 1957.
As I was reading, I kept shaking my head at the parallels to the recent health care reform efforts in the Senate.
We tend to associate the legislative successes of the civil rights movement with the 1960s: The Civil Rights Act of 1964, which outlawed discrimination in public accommodations (hotels, restaurants, place of recreation, etc.), and the Voting Rights Act of 1965, which outlawed discrimination against voters on the basis of race. But there was a Civil Rights Act of 1957 as well. The bill was intended as a sweeping measure against racial discrimination in everything from public accommodations to voting. But there was a big roadblock: the southern senators were dead set against it. No civil rights bill had passed the Senate since 1875, and the southerners meant to keep it that way.
But Senator Richard Russell of Georgia, the de facto leader of the southern senators and an ardent enemy of civil rights, desperately wanted a southerner in the White House. No true southerner had been elected president since before the Civil War, and Russell considered this a great embarrassment. Russell himself had run in 1952 and had failed to win the Democratic nomination; he was too southern, too much an enemy of civil rights, had too much of the “scent of magnolias” on him, to win the support of northern Democrats. But he came to realize that Lyndon Johnson was a southerner who could win. And LBJ himself desperately wanted the presidency; he had half-heartedly run for the nomination in 1956 and had lost, and he vowed not to make the same mistake in 1960.
Both men knew that the only way for Johnson to win the 1960 Democratic nomination was for the Senate to pass a civil rights bill; Johnson, as the Senate majority leader, could reap much of the credit and win accolades from northern liberals. But the southern Democratic senators would filibuster any bill they didn’t like, and the northern liberals of both parties would stand for nothing less than a sweeping civil rights act.
Johnson needed to water the bill down enough so that southerners would at least agree not to filibuster it, but not weaken it so much that liberals would abandon it.
First he managed to throw out the sweeping “public accommodations” portion of the bill, so that the law would cover only voting rights. This angered the liberals, but he convinced them that voting rights were what was really important; if blacks could vote, they would have the political power to get the more sweeping antidiscrimination provisions passed eventually.
But he weakened the voting rights provision as well. As things stood, there was no federal law under which southern officials could be sued for prohibiting blacks from registering to vote. The 1957 bill meant to change that by allowing such lawsuits. But Johnson managed to get the bill amended so that these lawsuits would have to be conducted as jury trials. Of course, no southern all-white jury would ever convict a southern registrar. So this would render the bill completely toothless. Northern liberals were even more outraged.
What did Johnson give to the northerners? He managed to add an amendment that banned racial discrimination in any federal jury nationwide: not just in southern voting cases, but in all federal trials everywhere in the country. But while this seemed like a good thing, in the South it would have no effect on voting rights cases, because any conviction of a voting rights official would have to be unanimous, and no white on a southern jury would ever vote to convict.
This was enough to convince the southerners not to filibuster the bill. But northerners were dejected. The bill was practically worthless; why not let it die? Why vote for it?
Because it would be a psychological victory, and it could lead to more substantial victories later. As Caro writes:
[Johnson] knew… that the most important thing wasn’t what was in the bill. The most important thing was that there be a bill.
One of the reasons for this was psychological. The South had won in the Senate so many times that there existed in the Senate a conviction that the South could not be beaten, particularly on the cause that meant the most to it. … A victory over the South would begin destroying this mystique. Demonstrate that the South could be beaten and more attempts would be made to beat it.
Johnson saw this. … He used a typically earthy phrase to explain it. “Once you break the virginity,” he said, “it’ll be easier next time.” Pass one civil rights bill, no matter how weak, and others would follow.”
And there was a further reason, Lyndon Johnson saw, why the passage of any civil rights bill, no matter how weak, would be a crucial gain for civil rights. Once a bill was passed, it could later be amended; altering something was a lot easier than creating it.
The liberals came around, and the bill passed, and Eisenhower signed it into law.
And a few years later, Congress passed sweeping civil rights and voting rights measures. And the president who signed those bills into law was Lyndon Johnson.
(Look at Robert Kennedy in the front row of this photo — enlarge it, look at his face: what is he thinking, seven months after his brother’s assassination, as he watches his adversary Lyndon Johnson sign the Civil Rights Act that his brother fought so hard to get passed? He looks haunted.)
The Democrats can’t give up on health care reform. Ironically, now it’s the House that needs to take action, not the Senate. The House needs to pass the Senate bill. It’s not a perfect bill, but once health care reform is signed into law, it will be easier to fix it later. The “virginity” of health care reform will be broken. They could do this in a day and then move on to other things. And it would be a huge psychological victory as well.
Pass. The. Damn. Bill.
Greenwald on Alito
Glenn Greenwald criticizes Alito’s conduct:
The Justices are seated at the very front of the chamber, and it was predictable in the extreme that the cameras would focus on them as Obama condemned their ruling. Seriously: what kind of an adult is incapable of restraining himself from visible gestures and verbal outbursts in the middle of someone’s speech, no matter how strongly one disagrees — let alone a robe-wearing Supreme Court Justice sitting in the U.S. Congress in the middle of a President’s State of the Union address? Recall all of the lip-pursed worrying from The New Republic‘s Jeffrey Rosen and his secret, nameless friends over the so-called “judicial temperament” of Sonia Sotomayor. Alito’s conduct is the precise antithesis of what “judicial temperament” is supposed to produce.
Obama and Alito
I’m glad Obama criticized the Supreme Court’s campaign finance decision in his State of the Union address last night. It was great political theater — Roberts, Kennedy and Alito sitting there stonefaced as everyone around them stood up and applauded the criticism. Um, awkward.
In response to one of Obama’s criticisms, Alito mouthed, “No way. Not true.” He probably didn’t realize the camera was on him — I doubt he would have muttered openly to himself otherwise.
(Oh, and Ruth Bader Ginsburg looked like she was asleep during half the speech.)
Now, I’ve read a couple of random blog comments from people who say it was “classless” for Obama to criticize the Supreme Court to their faces, or something like that. But that’s nonsense. It was perfectly appropriate for Obama to criticize a judgment of the Court. Despite the robes, Supreme Court justices are not gods; they’re a branch of the federal government, like Congress. If the President can criticize Congress, he can criticize a Supreme Court decision.
I really like this take on the matter and wish I had written it:
The Supremes are used to wafting into the House in their black robes, sitting dispassionately through the speech and wafting ethereally out again on a cloud of apolitical rectitude. It’s like they forget they’re there because they’re one of the three branches. And I truly don’t think it ever occured to them that crassly injecting themselves into the sordid partisan fray of what they like to call “the political branches” with that catastrophic decision would cause the President to treat them like people who’d injected themselves into the sordid partisan fray. (And why should they? After all, they got away with Bush v. Gore with barely a dent in their credibility). I even thought I detected a bit of “told you” coming from the four in the minority.
Prop 8 and the iPad
Wow, it’s a busy day in San Francisco, with the last day of testimony in Perry v. Schwarzenegger and the release of the iPad. And they’re only about a mile away from each other.
History of the State of the Union
Here’s a nice, short history of the State of the Union address. My favorite part is about Clinton’s addresses:
[B]y his second term, his State of the Union appearances seemed to turn increasingly surreal with each passing year.
In 1997, he appeared in the House chamber at the same moment a California jury was handing down its verdict in the much-watched civil trial of O.J. Simpson, leading television networks to show the two events in riveting split-screen fashion. …
That little drama, of course, would prove minor compared to the psychodrama that awaited. In 1998, Mr. Clinton arrived on Capitol Hill for the speech just days after his affair with Monica Lewinsky was exposed, yet he went through his oratory with nary a mention of the scandal rapidly consuming his presidency. Then in 1999, he unveiled his policy agenda to the same House members who had just impeached him for covering up the affair in legal proceedings and the same senators who by day were conducting a trial to determine whether he should be evicted from office.
I totally remember these. That 1998 address was particularly gutsy. He was surrounded by all the Lewinsky drama, but he strode out confidently and he completely ignored it. The centerpiece of his address was his call to use the budget surplus (surplus!) to “save Social Security first.”
That man knew how to deliver a big speech in a moment of high drama.