Reading Materials

I composed this as e-mail to my friend Jerry, with the warning that he should expect it to show up here at some point.

He replied, "Blog, hell, you should submit the piece to the National Review."

Nevertheless, here it is. If you're with the National Review, we can discuss reprint rights.

---

Now, this is interesting: "O'Reilly, Savage, Hannity on accused church shooter's reading list" (see below), the gist of which is that the guy who shot up a UUC children's program in Tennessee had in his personal library such classics as "Liberalism is a Mental Health Disorder by radio talk show host Michael Savage, Let Freedom Ring by talk show host Sean Hannity, and The O'Reilly Factor, by television talk show host Bill O'Reilly."

Adkisson targeted the church, Still [Bad editing on the part of TRS: "Still" is a Knoxville cop who is never ID'd in the story] wrote in the document obtained by WBIR-TV, Channel 10, "because of its liberal teachings and his belief that all liberals should be killed because they were ruining the country, and that he felt that the Democrats had tied his country's hands in the war on terror and they had ruined every institution in America with the aid of media outlets."

[The complete article is here]

Now, I put it to you this way: From time to time, you may have noticed, our right-wingnut friends will get all frothy on the subject of pornography (which they know when they see it). Despite any number of studies which might cause thinking people to question the existence of any causal link between the consumption of pornography and the commission of crimes, sexual or otherwise (and indeed I've read of studies that seem to indicate such misdeeds occur in greater frequency at times and in places where pornography has been tightly censored), our right-wingnut chums know--with that deep and unshakable and frighteningly single-mindedness which only they can master--that pornography will compel its consumer to act out that which he sees on the page or the screen.

After all, they will and have argued, there is agreement that people are positively influenced by "good" material like the Bible and other inspirational or motivational works. It is, then, only logical that they would be negatively influenced by "bad" material.

(I know plenty of people who have vast libraries of "Christian" books, CDs, DVDs, and bumper-stickers and who are, in practice, shits, which tends to belie the idea that reading/viewing/listening = behavior, but let's leave that for another time.)

So if we accept the "logic" expressed by the right-wingnuts who are on the prowl for every opportunity to scuttle the First Amendment, then we have to conclude that the works of Savage, Hannity, O'Reilly, et al., must be suppressed!

They are, after all, slanderous hatemongering tracts, which have, demonstrably, incited violence.

This sort of mentality--"they" are all bad; "they" are responsible for everything that has gone wrong; "they" are ruining "our" country; it's "us" against "them"--sounds dangerously familiar, does it not? Just replace the word liberals with the word Jews.

We would not, as a society, tolerate the mass production of books, television programs, radio broadcasts, and websites that suggest that Jews are responsible for everything bad in the world, Judaism is a mental disorder, Jews are godless sub-humans who need to be wiped out by any means. (Such things exist in the shadows, of course, but not on the bestseller lists.) Why would we not so tolerate? Because of the fear that such incendiary hatemongering might lead the mentally imbalanced to conclude that they must "do something"--burn something, blow something up, kill someone--in order to "solve" the "problem."

Well, golly...look what's happened in Tennessee.

The phrase "accessories before the fact" keeps percolating to mind...

Look for this to show up on the blog sooner or later...

Man Bites Dog!

I'm as keen as anybody to see an end to excessive early-termination fees on cellphone contracts, but let's not get ahead of ourselves!

This is the headline on G4's The Feed ("The Only News You Need to Know") in re the preliminary ruling by an Alameda County, California, Superior Court Judge that orders Sprint Nextel to pay California customers $18.2 million as part of a class-action suit over early-termination fees:

Sprint Nextel Paying Back Termination Fees

Which sort of implies that Sprint Nextel has started writing out all those checks. Which it isn't. In fact, yours truly can hardly make himself believe that Sprint Nextel won't appeal the decision. Which, by the way, is a preliminary decision. In one state.

The Feed's article's opening paragraph is more measured, and more accurate:

Sprint Nextel just got ordered to refund $18.25 million to California customers who paid early termination fees to get out of their mobile contracts. A judge is also requiring the company to relinquish $54.75 million in early termination fees it charged that went unpaid by Cali consumers.

Read the whole thing here.

This is hardly the first time I've wondered whether the writers of headline even read the item in question.

Alternative Energy Sources

Ben Sargent, 7/11/08

Okay, but What About Helping Teen Girls Avoid Drugs, Alcohol?

Not Just Me

Others were as underwhelmed as I by yesterday's debut of Cuil. This from Time:

Monday, Jul. 28, 2008


Why Cuil Is No Threat to Google




By Anita Hamilton



Rest easy, Google ... The much-hyped new search engine Cuil (pronounced "cool"), purports to index more Web pages than any of its rivals. But based on its Monday debut, the new site poses little immediate threat to industry leader Google, or even its nearest competitors, Yahoo and Microsoft, in either relevance or breadth of results it delivers.


"Anybody who thought [Cuil] was this Google killer can really see now that no, that's not going to happen today — and the likelihood is that's not going to happen a year from now," says Danny Sullivan, internet search guru and editor-in-chief of SearchEngineLand.


Despite its lackluster performance, Cuil (which means wisdom or knowledge in Gaelic) got so many visitors on Monday, that its servers crashed around 3 p.m. E.T. "Due to excessive load, our servers didn't return results. Please try your search again," the site read intermittently throughout the afternoon. But even when it was working, the results were fair, at best. Enter a keyword such as "mint" and the first result that comes up isn't the herb or flavor but the U.S. Mint. ...

Read the whole article here.

No Surprise

Even as I was posting the previous entry in re the new search engine, Cuil, this appeared:

So I think my original conclusion was valid: Give them some time.

Searching Every Which A-way

However many years ago it was, I recall hearing about a new search engine called Google, which threatened to be way better than Yahoo! and Netscape combined, hard to imagine though that was. (Actually, the context in which I first heard about Google was how great it was for finding song lyrics...which it was and is.) But I tested it out, one Saturday morning ten or so years ago, by of course typing in my name. Pretty common, I'm afraid, so not terribly illuminating. So I tried my grandfather's name (my father and I shared a name, so there wouldn't have been much point searching for him), which again was a little too commonplace to be of use. So I tried his grandfather, on the theory that there can't be too many Phineas Bates Reynoldses running around. And to my amazement, up came a number of decent hits. Which is more than I could say for Yahoo! and Netscape.

Those hits led to some good internet contacts that helped me immeasurably when it came to filling in some gaps in the family tree. And Google became my search engine of choice, a tool so helpful that it remains today the home page on my browser of choice, Firefox.

So it was with interest this morning that I heard on NPR's Morning Edition about Cuil, the new search site founded by former Google employees, which went live this morning. Cuil supposedly indexes more of the web than other search engines ("Search 121,617,892,992 web pages"), which may very well be so...but when I had a chance to check it out, repeating the searches indicated above, I came away pretty underwhelmed. If nothing else, I was surprised that the family history pages that I have online--which include, of course, me, my grandfather, and his grandfather--didn't appear among the hits. Indeed, I and my grandfather seem barely to exist in Cuil, and old Phinny shows up in a couple of old genealogical pages that were among those that Google took me to almost a decade ago.

Is that a fair test? Well, you tell me. For my dime, I like a search engine that will help me find the obscure, and in that regard Google has always been the go-to guy.

Here's another couple of oddities:

First, if I put "Phineas Bates Reynolds" in quotation marks--the standard, I think, for searching for an exact term--Cuil shows me one hit but tells me there are 1,066 results for "phineas bates reynolds". I wouldn't mind knowing how to access those results. If Cuil provides a way, I have yet to find it. (The line that tells me 1,066 results for "phineas bates reynolds" is not clickable, though it feels like it should be.)

If I search Phineas Bates Reynolds without the punctuation marks, I of course get more results displayed...but most of them are wrong. And I can't seem to access the 17,056 results its says it found.

Second--and this is inexplicable--if I turn off Cuil's "safe search mode," the single result it previously displayed disappears, as do the alleged 1,066 results it claims to have found but isn't showing...and now it tells me that it's finding nothing! Very strange, no? I assure you, there is nothing pornographic or objectionable in "Whiteside Co IL Township Histories," so I'm at a loss to explain Cuil's apparent issues with it...and the thousand other results it claimed to have once had.

It is also disconcerting to click on "About Cuil" at the bottom of the page and be rewarded with this:

Well, it's all very new and all. I suppose, in fairness, I should pop back in after Cuil has been up and running a week or so and see if these apparent oddities have been addressed. For now, however, I think I'll stick with Google...even though it must be said that Cuil is much prettier.

So True, So True...

Ben Sargent 7/25/08

How Many Superheroes Does It Take to Tire a Genre?

“The Dark Knight,” “Iron Man” and “Hancock” test the limits of the superhero film. (In times of economic distress, people long for saviors, and fictional superheroes will do in a pinch.)

read more | digg story

One of the Things I Love About the Interweb!

I love when little ironies--perhaps intentional, perhaps not--pop out on the internet. For instance, here's a screen shot of a page I was looking at earlier on the New York Times website. You'll see that it's an Op-Ed piece referencing T. Boone Pickens's branding as "totally misleading" the GOP's cherished notion that the answer to today's high gas prices is "more drilling." It's fun that Pickens is one of the driving forces behind George W. Bush's ascendence to the White House, but that's not the ironic part. The irony lies in the placement of the ad directly to the right of the column, i.e.:

Yes, right next to the line that says "we can’t drill our way to lower gas prices" is an ad from "the people of America's Oil and Natural Gas Industry."

I didn't click the ad, but my guess is that "the people of," etc., aren't saying we can't drill our way out of the current state of affairs.

Gotta love it.

Promises, Promises

Some little while back I wrote about e-mail sent to me by Sprint upon my completing a customer satisfaction survey for them. In the survey I reported, truthfully, that I was dissatisfied with the results of an e-mail inquiry I had made of them previously (indeed, the survey was a "how are we doing?" follow-up to my e-mail query). (I wrote about that experience, too.) Anyhow, what they had to say at the time was this:

Thank you for responding to our survey. We are sorry to learn that you have an unresolved issue as your satisfaction is very important to us.

A Sprint representative will contact you via your PCS phone at no charge, within 3 business days to assist you.

Please do not respond to this email. If you have any questions please contact Customer Service or visit one of our websites:

http://www.sprint.com or http://www.sprintpcs.com

As previously reported, that e-mail came to me on May 15. Today is July 23. No message from Sprint, via PCS phone, e-mail, snail mail, or homing pigeon, these past two months.

File that under Don't Make Promises...

Anyhow, last night I happened to be in the Verizon store as my daughter had her phone attended to. She's already made the switch, obviously, and seems to be happy as all get-out with their service. (I should have pulled out my phone to see what sort of coverage I had in the Verizon store.) Anyhow, I've already packed our bags mentally as far as abandoning Sprint...after something like ten years. It's not as amusing as you might think to be in a public place passing the time watching other folks chat away on their cell phones while mine is doggedly Looking for Service. And since both my son and I do a fair amount of texting--often with one another--it's also a treat to see what the next phone bill has in store overage-charges-wise. (That issue, you may recall, was the genesis of my original e-mail to Sprint, the one that got responded to but not answered, which triggered the customer-satisfaction survey, which generated the above-mentioned e-mail, which did not produce the promised phone call, which lived in the house that Jack built.

But I digress.

It turns out that two of our three Sprint contracts expire in February, with the third ending the following October. That's a bit longer than I'd like to dally, but I'm unenthusiastic about spending money to get out of this indentured servitude. So it occurs to my to try a radical approach:

Ask them.

No kidding. I'm mentally drafting a nice, polite, even friendly letter to, say, the CEO of Sprint/Nextel. Something along this line:

Look, I've been a customer of Sprint for something on the order of ten years. If you haven't made a profit on me by now, you never will. On the whole I haven't been hugely dissatisfied with Sprint--it clearly was the best game in town when I first signed up--but lately it's been losing ground, at least in my area. Coverage isn't good. Calls are frequently dropped. Indeed, I was sitting at my desk on the second-floor of my centrally located home, chatting with my aunt, when suddenly I was talking to myself when the phone lost its signal. And then I had to wait for it to regain its senses, go into Analog Roam, and then finally find a digital signal again. Not good. Anyhow, with this and that my family and I are, as the song has it, already gone. We're not renewing the contracts as they expire. Given that--and given that two of our lines runs out in February--how about we agree to an amicable split? Let us out of our contract and we'll go try somebody else. No hard feelings. There ain't no good guy, there ain't no bad guy; there's only you and me and we just disagree.

Yeah, I know: I might as well go talk to the side of the Sprint/Nextel headquarters building. But you never know. Might be worth a stamp. Stay tuned for further developments.

Who Pays? Who Doesn't?

As Bob is my witless, I will never know why people say things like this (from yesterday's edition of the local rag):

In her letter in the July 9 Argus Leader, Lorri May praised Sen. Tim Johnson for voting to tax the windfall profits of the U.S. oil companies. Hello! Corporations do not pay taxes. They just pass the tax increase on to you and me with higher prices.

And so on. This is not the first person I've encountered who seems to have studied economics on the Bizarro World. Nor, I suppose with a sigh, will he be the last. Nevertheless, I posted the following pithy rejoinder to the rag's website:

So if we rely on this kind of muddled "logic," we would conclude that corporations also "don't pay" electric bills, water bills, phone bills, insurance, etc., etc....they just "pass it on to you and me with higher prices." Hello! Corporations most certainly DO pay taxes, and all of the above. (Except when they dodge their tax responsibilities by moving off-shore.) Does some of it get "passed along"? Of course! That's how the economy works.

I might have added that it's simple-minded to imply, as do the letter-writer and his ilk do, that the entire tax burden automatically is passed along to the consumer. That's ludicrous. If any corporation raised the price of its goods or services that much in one fell swoop, it would soon find itself bleeding customers. And it needn't be taxes, although that's the favorite bete noire of the right-wingnut crowd: The same is true if, say, the price for hand soap in the bathrooms: Someone gets the fun task of deciding whether and how much of the expense can/should be absorbed in the form of higher prices, and how much can/should be absorbed from profits. The idea that if Conglomeroid Company has to pay a dollar in taxes it will raise its rates to get back that dollar is addled.

I am similarly amused/amazed/annoyed by the various business types who warn against any proposed increase in minimum wages because it will "force" them to increase their prices or lay off workers or sacrifice a virgin over an active volcano or whatever the issue is supposed to be. Again, it's only their having to pay workers that will cause their business to teeter on the brink of bankruptcy...it's never the price of the goods and services they must buy in order to do business. (Damn that Abraham Lincoln for ending slavery! Just another example of the government butting in and crippling the small-business owner! They should let The Market decide what wages should be paid. If any.)

But now that the minimum wage has gone up, well, it develops that it wasn't such a big deal after all. This too from the daily rag:

Minimum wage hike won't have big effect
Many Sioux Falls jobs already pay more

South Dakota's minimum wage Thursday will rise 70 cents to $6.55 an hour, but it appears the increase will have little effect on most Sioux Falls businesses.

The South Dakota Department of Labor estimates that of Sioux Falls' 132,000 workers, only about 3,900 or 3 percent will be affected by the latest increase in the minimum wage.

Um...what?

No pandemonium? No rampage in the streets? Not even a little one?

Well, I could hardly let that pass unnoticed (obviously), so I posted this to Hearing Voices or In Your Voice or The Voice in My Head or whatever they call the comments section:

Golly...when the new minimum was being discussed awhile back, we were assured by several local businesspeople that it would be the end of civilization as we know if it they were "forced" to pay a semi-decent wage. Now we're told that it "won't have big effect" because "many Sioux Falls jobs already pay more." It's almost as if the sky wasn't really in danger of falling after all!

Personally, I'm of the opinion that a business, large or small, that "can't afford" to adequately pay its workers doesn't deserve to stay in business. Isn't that the way of The Market that we're all supposed to bow down and worship?

Cities, Customers Launch "Save Our Starbucks" Effort

From WSJ.com:

Starbucks' disclosure of the 600 locations it wants to shutter has given rise to a phenomenon: the Save Our Starbucks campaign. Across the nation, customers and city officials are pleading with the coffee giant to change its mind.

read more

As I said when I posted this on Digg:

Since none of my local Starbucks is on the endangered list, I know this is easy for me to say, but still: It's just a coffee shop!!

Irony

Tobacco 'could help treat cancer'

The tobacco plant may provide a cheap vaccine factory

The tobacco plant - responsible for millions of cancer cases - may actually offer the means to treat one form of the disease, a study suggests.

Read the article at http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/health/7517799.stm

Trust Issues

At this moment, AccuWeather.com tells me that the current temperature in my locale is 84°F with a RealFeel® of 87°F. But Weather.com says it's 85°F and "feels like" 85°F. Whom to believe?

30 Most Incredible Abstract Satellite Images of Earth

The images were taken at the turn of the Millennium, when NASA’s scientists had a brilliant idea: to scan through 400,000 images taken by the Landsat 7 satellite and display only the most the most beautiful. A handful of the best were painstakingly chosen and then displayed at the Library of Congress in 2000.

read more | digg story

Aw, Shucks

So I took this Personal DNA test ("Your True Self Revealed!"), and it turns out I'm a Generous Idealist. So my "swatch" looks like this:




For what that may be worth. It says I'm supposed to be able to mouse over the various colored patches to reveal what they mean, but it doesn't seem to work for me. That's probably not a good thing. On the other hand, I should imagine there are worse things to be than a Generous Idealist.

Here's what they have to say about me. Trust me, I'm blushing.

You are an Idealist

As an IDEALIST, you are distinctive for your integration of confidence, imagination, willingness to explore, and desire for competence over style.

You have a strong capacity to comprehend the inner workings of things, finding new ideas and innovative insights to feed your curious nature.

You are quite comfortable in the realm of abstract thought. You don't need a practical solution to every one of life's questions.

You are comfortable with the decisions you make in life. You don't need to second-guess yourself, or seek a lot of opinions before you make up your mind.

You enjoy the routines that you have created in your life, and don't feel the need to shake things up just for the sake of change.

You generally succeed at what you do, and others would describe you as successful.

It is important to you that products be efficient – looking good has to come second to working well.

You aren't the kind of person who needs to collect stylish items in an attempt to create an attractive environment – you know that what matters most is function, not style.

You're not afraid to let your emotions guide you, and you're generally considerate of others' feelings as well.

You prefer to have time to plan for things, feeling better with a schedule than with keeping plans up in the air until the last minute.

You do your own thing when it comes to clothing, guided more by practical concerns than by other people's notions of style.


You are Generous

Your awareness of those around you, along with your nuanced perceptions of the world at large, makes you the GENEROUS person that you are.

You value time to yourself and understand how rich your private world can be—you know that you don't have to go wild to have a good time.

You are excited and energized by ideas and often enjoy things more through observation than through experience.

This tendency gives you an appreciation for different perspectives and opinions about the world.

Being as aware of others as you are doesn't mean you find it easy to trust them immediately—this is something that happens more slowly for you.

Despite this, you are aware of the complexities of many situations and are reluctant to pass judgments on others.

Although you have fewer friendships than some people, those that you have are meaningful and are important to you.

You value spending time alone—it is while reflecting on the world around you that you often learn something new about yourself or begin to understand something that's been bothering you.

Shucks. Of course, it does occur to me that a lot of the above is simply parroting back to me what I told them in the course of their quiz, but at least I can place a high premium on its accuracy.

And Said As Much

It has always seemed absurd to suppose that a god would choose for his companions, during all eternity, the dear souls whose highest and only ambition is to obey. -Robert Green Ingersoll, lawyer and orator (1833-1899)

Regular readers of this chronicle know that I am inordinately fond of collecting quotations, from many sources but most frequently these days from the excellent newsletter A Word A Day. I allow them to pile up on the hard drive, then occasionally assemble them here for your amusement, and mine.

In crafting this batch, however, I came to reflect on why I enjoy collecting quotations and aphorism. I had never thought on that before. I suppose it has to do with something that someone said which somehow resonates...the above quotation from Ingersoll, for instance. Even as a lad, I thought that the idea of God creating creatures whose function was to obey him seemed--to use a phrase that I find myself employing quite often anymore--insulting to God. I recall from childhood catechism lessons the old Q and A:

"Why was I created?"


"I was created to love God with my whole heart, my whole mind, and my whole soul."

Indeed, it's one of the few things I do remember from those days, perhaps because even as I occupied a desk at good old St. Joan of Arc School, I thought that seemed a little odd. Could it really be that God is so small that he brought the whole of creation into existence solely so that it can tell him how great he is? That seems more a human attribute than a godly one, no?

As I ponder my attraction to quotations, and the sort of quotations to which I am attracted, I find that they seem to fall into three broad categories:

1. Religion and Morality
2. Hypocrisy and Morality
3. Humor, often involving Religion, Hypocrisy, and Morality


How can one better magnify the Almighty than by sniggering with him at his little jokes, particularly the poorer ones. -Samuel Beckett, author (1906-1989)

Just so. As often as not, "Humor" really should be rendered "Irony" or "Cynicism":

Be not too hasty to trust or admire the teachers of morality; they discourse like angels but they live like men. -Samuel Johnson, lexicographer (1709-1784)

In the main, I guess, the quotations have to do with The Human Condition, whatever exactly that is.

It is better to have loafed and lost than never to have loafed at all. -James Thurber, writer and cartoonist (1894-1961)

I think too that there is some solace, some feeling that one is less alone, upon discovering that someone else--even 100 or 1,000 years ago--looked at things and saw them differently than those around him. And said as much.

---

There is wisdom in turning as often as possible from the familiar to the unfamiliar: it keeps the mind nimble, it kills prejudice, and it fosters humor. -George Santayana, philosopher (1863-1952)


Nothing, to my way of thinking, is a better proof of a well-ordered mind than a man's ability to stop just where he is and pass some time in his own company. -Lucius Annaeus Seneca, philosopher (BCE 3-65 CE)


The louder he talks of honour, the faster we count our spoons. -Ralph Waldo Emerson, writer and philosopher (1803-1882)


Who knows what Columbus would have discovered if America hadn't got in the way. -Stanislaw J. Lec, poet and aphorist (1909-1966)


The world is a story we tell ourselves about the world. -Vikram Chandra,novelist (b. 1961)
Many are concerned about the monuments of the West and the East- to know who built them. For my part, I should like to know who in those days did not build them- who were above such trifling. -Henry David Thoreau, naturalist and author (1817-1862)


Right now I'm having amnesia and deja vu at the same time. I think I've forgotten this before. -Steven Wright, comedian (b. 1955)


There is a wonderful mythical law of nature that the three things we crave most in life -- happiness, freedom, and peace of mind -- are always attained by giving them to someone else. -General Peyton C. March (1864-1955)


The truth is that our finest moments are most likely to occur when we are feeling deeply uncomfortable, unhappy, or unfulfilled. For it is only in such moments, propelled by our discomfort, that we are likely to step out of our ruts and start searching for different ways or truer answers. -M. Scott Peck, psychiatrist and author (1936-2005)


Some people walk in the rain, others just get wet. -Roger Miller, musician (1936-1992)


This is my living faith, an active faith, a faith of verbs: to question, explore, experiment, experience, walk, run, dance, play, eat, love, learn, dare, taste, touch, smell, listen, argue, speak, write, read, draw, provoke, emote, scream, sin, repent, cry, kneel, pray, bow, rise, stand, look, laugh, cajole, create, confront, confound, walk back, walk forward, circle, hide, and seek. To seek: to embrace the questions, be wary of answers. -Terry Tempest Williams, naturalist and author (b. 1955)


Imagine a world in which generations of human beings come to believe that certain films were made by God or that specific software was coded by him. Imagine a future in which millions of our descendants murder each other over rival interpretations of Star Wars or Windows 98. Could anything -- anything -- be more ridiculous? And yet, this would be no more ridiculous than the world we are living in. -Sam Harris, author (1967- )

---

If You Can't Trust 'em on the Small Things...

So I end up at CBSNews.com, by way of clicking a link on Google News. The subject in question is "Filming the Dark Knight," which is all well and good. But then I click on the "Related" link, The Dark Knight, and thence to the timeline, "Caped Crusader Chronology."

And the first thing I note is that the timeline, when I get there, is in fact titled "Cape Crusader Chronology." Not "caped." This on both the page itself and in the title bar. It bodes not well. But I plunge on.

I'm basically okay for the first couple of decades. Not bothering to go and check dates and so on; things seem as right as they need to be. Of course, the timeline perpetuates the old fiction that young Bob Kane one day sat down and created Batman all by his lonesome, but of course that canard is so well integrated into the mythos that it's nearly impossible to give poor old Bill Finger his due as virtual co-creator of the character.

But when I get to May 1964, I about lose it:

Batman turns 25 and Kane considers killing off the character due to a drop in sales. Instead, the Dark Knight gets a "New Look" in Detective Comics # 327. The makeover by editor Julius Schwartz includes an updated Batmobile and the addition of the yellow ellipse behind the costume's Bat-insignia.

Kane considers killing him off? I think it's been pretty well documented that certainly by 1964 Kane's involvement with the character consisted primarily of cashing his royalty checks. Somewhere--I think in the excellent book Men of Tomorrow by Gerard Jones--there's an anecdote of a kid showing Kane the comic book that introduced the "new look" Batman (and also the first Batman book that did not include the "Bob Kane" signature) and noting Kane's surprise at both the new design and his missing byline. So I hardly think Kane considered pulling the plug on the character--or ever would consider killing the golden goose--or had any legal standing to do so if it did enter his head.

Skeptism sensors activated!

Next, it's a little odd that the "chronology" goes from May 1964 to May 1966 to January 12, 1966, and then to 1966. Ordinarily I expect a "chronology" to be you know, chronological, and the last time I looked May 1966 should come after January 12 1966. And why is 1966 hanging there all alone? The reference is to the movie Batman, with Adam West and Burt Ward, and you'd think that an organization with the resources of CBS News might have been able to dig up the release date. (October 5, if you're interested.)

Forging ahead, I come to Feb. - June 1986, and read:

Frank Miller's "Batman: The Dark Knight Returns" hits shelves, featuring an aged Batman of the future. It is considered a pioneer of the comic book industry and reinforces the darker, modern Batman.

No objection...except one wonders how The Dark Knight Returns can be a "pioneer" of a 50-year-old industry...

And so on. A few more minor quibbles--why not give the release dates, or at least the months, for Batman Returns, Batman: Gotham Knight, and The Dark Knight? But by then I've largely lost interest in the "chonology," having determined that CBS News decided it wasn't worth taking much pains with, which causes me to wonder why I should care either.

But one always does wonder: If a news organization is sloppy with small, unimportant details, what makes me think they're any more conscientious or accurate with the big, important stories?

Irony

This via MadConomist.com:

Man Wants To Change His Name To 'Fuck Censorship'. Judge Says 'No'.


Submitted by Dmitri Davydov on Mon, 2008-06-30 10:43.
Posted in: Statistics And Other Lies
Link of the day - Free $50 Kmart card.

SANTA FE, N.M. - A New Mexico appeals court on Friday ruled against a Los Alamos man who wanted to change his name to a phrase containing a popular four-letter obscenity.

The man appealed after a state district judge in Bernalillo County refused his request to change his name to "F--- Censorship!"

read more...

Irony. Gotta love it.