Hallowe’en, 2004

Pumped a lot of pain down in New Orleans

No trick or treaters. That’s okay. I’ve got a big bowl full of Reese’s Peanut Butter Cups and Kit Kat bars that are all for me, then.

My jack o’lantern survived well, but it seems to be because there is a lack of any sort of kids in this immediate area. I guess that’s better than otherwise, but I would have liked some trick or treaters. Oh, well. The jack o’lantern is going out in the trash can tonight. I usually leave the Christmas tree up until New Year’s Day, but Hallowe’en is not a holiday with hang time. Once it’s over, it’s toast.

I’ve been in an email drought for a while… I have a couple of semi-regular correspondents, and one person who generally writes me at least once a day, but I guess they all got busy on me. I did get some new postings on the Doc Nebula site bulletin board from a guy named Jack Shaver, and sent him a thank you email, and he’s sent me a longish response back, and he seems to genuinely enjoy my work, so there must be something appalling wrong with him ::grin::… but other than he, it’s been awfully quiet in my In Box lately.

Stuff has happened over the past several days to a week it’s been since I last posted to this thing, but it’s all pretty boring. Still, here’s something:

Imagine you work in some kind of customer service job. Say you work behind a help counter, for some large company, and people walk up to the counter and complain about stuff, and you have to fix it for them. Whatever they are bitching about, it’s up to you to make it right.

Further, say there are, oh, 200 of these people who come up to your counter every day, and you are one of a team of, say, half a dozen people who are supposed to help them.

Add into this that your employers, as employers do, want to turn a profit, so there are certain guidelines controlling what you can do, and what you can’t do. Most of those guidelines have to do with how much money you can give back to the customer when the customer thinks he or she has been screwed, or how much you are required to charge the customer for services they may want and/or think they are entitled to.

In addition, quite often all you can do is send a message to another department detailing the complaint, then tell the customer that you’ve sent that message.

Now add in this: one of the major ways your immediate boss, and your boss’ boss, measures your capacity to do your job is based on immediate customer feedback, to wit, every customer, after they deal with you (or one of your teammates further along the counter) is handed a survey to fill out, rating the service they received on a scale from 1 to 10.

And a lot of them do it, too.

In addition to that, how many customers you help a day is also a stat that gets measured, and that’s one that your boss takes really seriously, too.

Got that? Now, any of you who have worked in customer service know, there are easy customers, and there are hard customers. Let’s say, for the sake of argument, that the easiest customer to handle on this job is somebody who comes in and says that their thingamabob isn’t working. Thingamabobs burn out all the time, it’s just part of the industry, and you and all your teammates have a big bin of replacement thingamabobs under the counter. Somebody comes in with a broke thingamabob, you take the old one, hand the customer a new one, and they go home happy. It is the easiest, fastest customer transaction you do, and out of the 200 customers or so your team is going to service every day, you get maybe 60 to 75 broken thingamabobs.

In addition to it being the fastest customer service you can provide, these broken thingamabob customers nearly invariably give you passing surveys, because, well, they came in with their broken thingamabob, you smiled and said “Sure, no problem” and gave them a new one. Customers dig that.

Obviously, you’d like to get a lot of these customers, but it’s random. You never can tell who is going to be a broken thingamabob customer. A lot of customers keep the thingamabob in their pockets until they get up to the counter. Sometimes you think someone is going to be a broken thingamabob customer, but it turns out he or she has a whole lot of other stuff they want you to do, too. And about one in twenty customers, you get someone who needs a LOT of work done, or who you just can’t help, for whatever reason, or, on occasion, you even get someone you have to do a lot of work on and you STILL can’t really give them what they want… like, for example, the guy whose thingamabob burned out, and that caused four other doohickies in his house to stop working, and he’s really P.O.ed. He doesn’t want a new thingamabob because he’s never ever going to use any of your employers’ thingamabobs again, but he wants a lot of money to pay for his hassle (which you can’t give him) and he also wants you to send someone around to fix all his other doohickies (which you can’t do) but, in this particular instance, State and Federal law do require you to take a detailed report and forward it to the appropriate management offices (which will take an hour).

Now, as I said, you can’t tell which customer is going to want what, and neither can your teammates, so life is okay. They get customers at random just like you do, and sometimes you get an easy one, and sometimes you get a sonofabitch, and hopefully, in the end, it all evens out.

Now, everybody on the team cheats a little. Everybody will, once in a while, get exasperated when they see a particular customer coming that they just know is an asshole, and they’ll slap up their ON BREAK, NEXT WINDOW PLEASE sign and go smoke a cigarette, or take a piss, and hope that while they are gone, this annoying customer will go to someone else’s window. But you don’t do it all the time, and everybody does do it once in a while, so that evens out, too.

Now… here’s the thing… suppose your boss hires someone new. And this new person happens to be a very quick learner, with no conscience whatsoever, and in addition, she happens to be the sort of deeply insecure person whose insecurities manifest themselves as deranged competitiveness. If there is a performance statistic being measured, this new person needs to have the top numbers like a junkie needs smack.

And, let’s further say that I exaggerated a little bit above about not being able to discern what a customer wants until they tell you. In this particular job, there are ways to tell what customers want before they get to the counter. You can pull up a screen on your computer, and it will tell you exactly what this customer is here for, and then you can hit a few buttons and funnel all of the broken thingamabob customers over into the line in front of your window. This pretty much guarantees that your customer feedback will be high, and your customers-per-hour score will stay high, too.

Furthermore, when, every once in a while, one of the problem customers gets into your line somehow, well, you can always see them coming and decide you’re going to go on break just as they get up to your window. If you’re careful, and your teammates aren’t paying attention (they have their own customers, of course, and because of what you are doing, they aren’t getting any of the really easy customers, they are getting all the pains in the ass, so they really don’t have a lot of attention to spare for anything else), you can probably get away with this for quite a while.

What you are doing, of course, is pissing all over everyone else who works with you, taking all the easy work for yourself and deliberately channeling the real pain in the ass stuff to your teammates. You have very high stats, in fact, in this scenario, you generally have the best stats of anyone on the team, so maybe your boss thinks you are hot shit, but still… those stats are essentially stolen. It’s like right before the track meet, you snuck out and lowered all your hurdles by an inch, and raised all your opponents’ hurdles a like amount.

And then you walk around preening and showing off your first place medal.

Oh, and by the way, this sort of pre-picking your customers, taking all the easy ones for yourself and deliberately shuffling all the bad ones off to other people – it’s definitely against the rules. Your supervisor at work has cautioned everyone, many times, not to do it, because it’s simply not fair. Beyond that, if you do it, you will eventually and inevitably get caught, and then everyone you work with is going to want you dead, or at least, fired.

Now… I have a job kind of like this. And a while ago, my boss hired a few new people onto the team I work on. One of them is a very very bright woman whom I will call Joan. Joan is kind of foolish, and extremely self centered, and very immature, and pathologically insecure to the point where she simply cannot stand not being seen as the BEST in anything remotely competitive that she is involved in… and after her first week of learning the system, Joan very quickly started to get really excellent stats. She was servicing more customers in a day, and getting better customer feedback, than people who had been on the team for three years.

Was she previewing customers and pulling the good ones out of queue, and then shuttling the occasional bad one she might somehow still get off on other people? Well…

Last Thursday night, another member of my team mentioned to me that she had seen Joan doing this. Remember, I mentioned you had to pull up a certain window on your computer to check out what the customers wanted, and then pull them out of a general holding area over into the line in front of your window. I also mentioned that we have been told not to do this. And I personally have seen Joan cautioned not to do this by several different people, and, well, I have myself asked her, reasonably ingenuously, “You did hear from Nadine [our boss] that nobody is supposed to be pulling from the queue right now, right? We're just supposed to handle whatever comes to us.”

Joan nodded and affirmed, in utmost, chin quivering earnestness, that she had indeed heard that, and she would never never do that, it wouldn’t be fair.

So on Thursday night, another member of the team, who is about as clueless in how our systems work as you can be and still manage to boot up a computer, tells me that she has seen Joan doing this, and describes the window on the computer Joan would have to be using to do this in very specific and recognizable terms.

So, yesterday, I mentioned this to a senior member of our team I am on reasonably good terms with, asking for her advice as to just how to deal with this. See, I am not the most likable of people, as many of you know, and I do not do office politics well, and to say that my boss does not love me would be an accurate assessment bordering on ironic understatement. I do my job reasonably well, and try very hard to stay off Nadine’s radar… and going to Nadine about Joan would not only be a violation of the Work Force Code (which I don’t care much about) but would also put me unpleasantly in Nadine’s crosshairs, should anything go awry. So I wasn’t sure what to do about it. So I asked this other person.

This other person said “Hmmm, let’s see.” Did something in the computer with our programs that I still do not understand, and brought up a window showing a list of about twenty customers waiting for service, all of them labeled as ‘broken thingamabob’. Where was that list from?

It was the queue list for Joan’s service window. Joan’s employee ID was on every single one of those individual customer listings, meaning that she had already pulled them out of the general holding area and queued them for her window.

This other person did a screen shot, and copied that queue list into an email which she then sent off to Nadine, our boss.

So I went back to my own window, where I discovered that my next customer had been misbilled for about 14 different services, and by company policy, he was entitled to have his entire bill recalculated. Each line item had to be recalculated to a separate rate per unit, and each individual rate would have to be looked up. The guy was a classic nightmare customer, although it wasn’t his fault. And, assuming that the game wasn’t rigged and he had just showed up at my window as random luck of the draw, well, no problem. I got to work, and 45 minutes later, I finished up with him. I don’t know if he went away happy; he was actually pretty aggravated that he had to have all that done, so I probably won’t get good feedback from him… but you get customers like this every once in a while.

I pulled up his entry in our service log, though, and guess what? He’d been in Joan’s line three times. Each time, as soon as he got up to her window, she closed for a few minutes. On one occasion, she even actually directed him back into another queue, telling him she couldn’t help him.

And all day long, she smiled and smiled, and passed out new thingamabobs to customers who had broken theirs.

So I mentioned that to the senior team member I was already talking to about Joan, and she checked the service log, and then she sent off a screen shot of that to our boss, too.

Now, whether this will accomplish anything or not, I couldn’t tell you. I suppose there is a small but discernible chance it could even backfire on me. But... I'm hoping… it will do some good. Maybe it might even end up with this particularly egregious asshole getting sent to another team, or something.

I’m trying not to get my hopes up.

Five year plans and new deals

Here’s the latest, just to add to your pre-election stress:

In Leon County, Florida, it turns out that about 4,000 students who signed petitions to legalize medical marijuana or impose stiffer penalties on child molesters, unknowingly had their party registrations switched to Republican and their addresses changed.

Switching party affiliations on someone ain’t no thing, but fucking with their address will keep them from voting, through a double Republican whammy: if they show up at their proper voting places, they won’t be registered there. If they show up wherever they were erroneously registered, Republican poll watchers can (and most likely will) demand that they be disqualified, for filing a false address .

4,000 potential non-Republican voters, baby. Disqualified through deception and treachery and general malfeasance. In Florida, the state that decided the last Presidential miscarriage by less than 600 votes. Dig on that a while.

Oh, don’t start screaming yet. You’ll be hoarse by the time we’re done here.

In equally contested Ohio, someone handed out forged fliers in a heavily Democratic Pittsburgh area. They looked official, as they seemed to be printed on county letterhead, and they told voters that “due to immense voter turnout expected on Tuesday” the election had been extended. Republicans should vote Tuesday, November 2, and Democrats should vote on Wednesday.

Meanwhile, over in Wisconsin, a flier is circulating in several of Milwaukee’s black neighborhoods that claims to be from the “Milwaukee Black Voters League”. This flier says that if you’ve already voted in any election this year, you are not allowed to vote in the Presidential election, and it threatens jail terms of up to 10 years to anyone who violates that ‘law’.

It also thoughtfully adds, “and your children will be taken away from you”.

But Republicans aren’t evil, folks. Honest to God, they aren’t. Chris Lato, a spokesman for the Wisconsin Republican party, says the fliers are “appalling” (one of my favorite words, I use it a lot), but he went on to wonder if Democratic interest groups might be to blame. Curculators falsely claiming to represent the Republican Party might be trying to crank up the black vote by acting as agents provocateur, according to the devious-minded Chris.

“First of all, the claim was false, and it seems a little obvious,” Lato related, apparently somehow managing to keep a straight face. “We have a lot of these shadowy Democratic groups here in Wisconsin, and I wouldn’t put it past them to do something like this to muck up the works.”

Shadowy Democratic groups. A LOT of them. Laws a’mussy, how will democracy survive?

Shadowy Democratic groups probably sent that one, too, just to make sure that all the registered Democrats got really, really mad… as if, you know, we don’t have enough reasons already.

In fact, local Lake County Republicans are essentially saying this. It isn’t the GOP doing this at all. Democrats are out to make Republicans look bad. By, you know, keeping Democrats from going to the polls. That’ll teach ‘em.

It goes on. In the Cleveland area, voters have gotten phone calls incorrectly informing them that their polling place has been changed. And in both Cleveland and Orlando, Florida, unknown volunteers have begun showing up at people’s doors offering to collect and deliver completed absentee ballots. ‘Unknown’ in this case means no election official knows who the hell these people are… although one might wryly note that this stuff mostly seems to happen in predominantly black, urban neighborhoods, which generally and predominantly vote Democrat.

In Charleston County, South Carolina, another fake letter went out to black voters. This one was supposedly from the NAACP, and it says that voters who have outstanding parking tickets, or who haven’t paid their child support, may be arrested at the polls.

Having steadily typed all this in from today’s Sunday paper, I now want to embellish with one final personal remark:

Yes, Democrats have been known to employ some dirty tactics, too. I lived through the 2000 election; every Republican I know has treated me to a detailed description of how Mayor Daley threw Chicago to Kennedy… back in, what, 1960?

I do want to point out, though, that most of the dirty tricks I’ve re-reported up above have one thing in common: they seem to hinge on the notion that black people are stupid, gullible… and mostly criminals who have good reason to be afraid of the law.

Now, which of the two major parties does that sound like?

Roundin’ third and headin’ for home

Given that today resolutely sucks, let’s head on back to yesterday:

Here’s some of a notice I found in a big yellow box on the letters page of Dr. Strange #1, published in 1974. (The cover date is June, but cover dates were generally four to six months off, for various apocryphal reasons hardly any comic book or magazine scholars can agree on, so let’s just say, this thing was probably written in late 1973 and published in early 1974, and leave it at that.)

The yellow boxed announcement then goes on with a lot of hype about how they know people are pissed, and probably thinking it’s just another rip off, so Stan and Roy (that’s Stan Lee, original editor in chief and co-creator, along with Jack Kirby and Steve Ditko, of pretty much the entire Marvel Age of Superhero Comics; and Roy Thomas, Stan’s heir apparent, and Marvel’s editor in chief in 1974, as well as writer of a few books himself) can vacation on the Riviera that year. They extol that this isn’t true, that rising industry costs have necessitated the price increase, and blah, and blah, and blah.

I just… honestly, I remember this price increase, and looking back on it now, I can also remember how pissed off I was. Yes, indeed, I was annoyed. When comic books were 20 cents each, I could get 5 for a dollar… and a dollar was pretty heavy tunes back then; I think I may have been getting all of $1.20 a week as an allowance, by some arcane formula calculated by my step father of the time (it may not have been that arcane, actually, it may have just been my age times ten) – when I was lucky enough to collect it, since my stepfather at that time was, at best, an erratic source of any kind of support, financial or otherwise, and you could suddenly find that your allowance was being docked that week (or month) because you’d done something, or hadn’t done something… or goblins had whispered something in his ear, for all I knew.

So suddenly seeing my comics-buying power clipped by… well… I’m lousy at math, but I can tell you, suddenly seeing a dollar only able to buy 4 comics instead of 5, and my entire allowance suddenly only able to cover, again, 4 comics, instead of SIX… it was not a joyful noise unto the Lord that I made when I found out about it.

If you think that going to my stepfather and asking him to kick up my allowance by a nickel, or, better, 30 cents, to get me back to the original buying power I’d enjoyed only a month before was a possibility… put it out of your head, True Believer. Wasn’t going to happen. My stepfather was adamantly opposed to comic books, science fiction paperbacks, the mini-series Rich Man, Poor Man on TV, me wasting time in my basement bedroom instead of playing outside like a normal kid, me running around all over the place outside instead of spending time with my family like a good son should, me taking art classes, me learning to drive, and, in general, me doing anything that might make me even remotely happy, because he wasn’t happy, and couldn’t see any reason why anyone else should be in his immediate vicinity, ever, either.

And, as I said, I could never be sure from one week to the next I was actually going to even see that $1.20. At any given time, I might just get greeted with a “money doesn’t grow on trees and when I was your age, I was out working for a living” speech. Add into that the fact that we lived in the country, and I could only buy comics on the infrequent occasions I managed to sweet talk my mom into letting me ride along into one of the nearby towns on a shopping run… which wasn’t all that often; mom liked her peace and quiet. Now, mind you, I was a pretty peaceful and rather quiet kid (read that as, shy to the point of comatose and you won’t be far wrong), but if I agitated to go along on a trip, my wretched younger brothers would start screaming to go too, and those two only knew of the words ‘peace’ and ‘quiet’ in highly hypothetical terms, and most likely thought they were a concept that only applied to starving kids in Africa, or something.

Which, as a digression, is one of the minor positive factors about losing my childhood comics collection. As I’ve been slowly replacing them, I’ve also filled in some lifelong holes that collection had, because I didn’t manage to get into town for two or three months at a time, and thus, missed a vital concluding chapter to some DEFENDERS or MAN-THING or GUARDIANS OF THE GALAXY saga. As I’ve picked up these series again, I’ve gotten ALL of them, and some of those runs have included issues I’d never managed to read before.

Having said that, now that I’ve actually read every issue of MAN-THING, MARVEL TWO IN ONE, and DAREDEVIL written by one time Silver Age fave Steve Gerber, I’ve come to the disagreeable conclusion that Steve Gerber rarely wrote as well as I remembered. And that’s sad. But at least all the Englehart stuff has held up reasonably well over time.

Coming back from the land of digression, yes, that nickel price hike annoyed me, and pissed me off, and severely damaged my ability to buy as many comics as I wanted to buy on any given trip to a drugstore with a spinner rack.

Still. I mean, I look back now, and… jesus! TWENTY FIVE CENTS for a comic book!

That issue of Dr. Strange I mentioned, #1, was part of a complete run of Englehart’s Dr. Strange issues (#1 - #18, some very sweet, very cogent, very brilliant work; if you can find a stack, you should definitely check them out, they will, as Benicio del Torres once remarked, flip you for real) that I picked up in my most recent order from my Canadian comics pusher. In addition to those, I also grabbed up all ten issues of Steve Gerber’s FOOLKILLER mini series from 1990-1991.

To put that 1974 25 cent cover price in perspective… FOOLKILLER fronted for $1.75 an issue in 1990.

BLACK PANTHER #62, which came out last year, sports a snazzy $2.99 cover price.

You can see, then, why I look back at my 12 year old angst over a 25 cent cover price on a comic book with some sad eyed bemusement, and, perhaps, a slightly ironic tilt to one corner of my mouth.

But let’s go back to Stan and Roy, who, several paragraphs of blather further down that yellow box, tell us:

How can I not look back at that and smile, at least, a little? 75 cents for a black and white comics magazine. 35 cents for a GIANT SIZE, with 52 pages of story… even if it was all reprint (which it generally was, I have a few of them still), these were GREAT reprints, from Marvel’s early Silver Age. As to the 60 cent SUPER GIANTS, Marvel never actually did those… a few months later, a Bullpen Bulletins page noted that “our 35 cent and 60 cent mags have gone the way of all flesh”, and then gone on to state that instead, Marvel would be publishing a line of 50 cent, 68 page GIANT SIZE comics “with a feature length 30 page all new spectacular in almost every one”.

For those who don’t speak Marvel style hyperbole, as pioneered by Stan and carried on most ably by Roy, let me translate some of the passages above, with a few notes as I go:

First, the page counts are padded. A normal 20 to 25 cent (very soon to be 30, then 35 cents, actually) comic at that time was 32 pages long, but it only contained 18 pages of actual story. (I just counted.) The rest was ads. That proportion was pretty consistent over all the different sizes.

Second, as I’ve noted briefly, what both Marvel and DC tried to do, with different levels of success, during this time period, when cover prices shot up from 20 cents to 30 cents over the course of two years, and then up to 35 and 40 cents over the course of the next two years, was add more pages without increasing their costs, by throwing a lot of reprints into the back of each issue. DC first did this a few years before the 25 cent price hike; when Marvel first raised prices from 12 cents to 20 cents back in the late 1960s, DC countered by raising their own prices to 25 cents… but they added about forty pages of reprints to the back of each monthly issue they were publishing. It didn’t work, and DC lapsed fairly quickly back to a normal, reprint-free 20 cent rate just like Marvel… but both companies were to continue trying to play the ‘pad the page count with reprints’ game for the rest of the 70s. DC most likely had the best success with it, and that is probably why Marvel dumped the idea of doing 60 cent, 100 page Super Giants… because DC right about then converted their best selling titles to 50 Cent 100 Page Super Spectacular Formats, with one new lead story and one new back up story in each issue, filling the rest of the pages with reprints.

DC generally did better with the reprint game than Marvel did, because DC simply had much more, and for the most part, better, reprints to draw on. National Periodicals had, over the years, bought the rights to all Fawcett and Quality stories, so they had a wealth of Golden Age material to pull out as needed. Marvel, on the other hand, was pretty much stuck with the old Timely stuff, or with reprinting their own material from barely ten years before. Marvel did do a lot of reprints from earlier in their Silver Age, and they sold adequately (I read a lot of early Silver Age stories for the first time in Marvel’s reprint mags like MARVEL’S GREATEST COMICS featuring the Fantastic Four, MARVEL TRIPLE ACTION featuring The Avengers, and MARVEL TALES featuring Spider-Man, just to name three), but DC seemed to have the most material to pad out really large sized monthly magazines with. A lot of the old Golden Age material DC pulled out was really goofy, but I remember enjoying those 100 Page Super Spectaculars a lot when I was a kid.

Of course, it’s always easy to forget just how much prices have changed across the board. To state ‘well, comics cost 25 cents back then, and they cost $3 now’ is… an overly simplified statement, to say the least. Bread was around 35 cents a loaf in 1974, as I recall. Milk was something like $1.09 a gallon. Full price movie tickets were $3.50 or thereabouts. I still have a paperback copy of Andre Norton’s Year of the Unicorn that I bought at a bus station gift shop in 1975, its cover price is 95 cents… and to add a little further perspective to that, another paperback edition of Norton’s The Crystal Gryphon, that I bought new in 1979, shows a cover price of $1.25.

Throughout the 70s, when I was an adolescent, any spending money I had in my pocket at any given time would be a couple of singles and some change. I don’t think I even carried a $5 bill until I went away to college… and when I was in college, my work study job paid me about $45 a week… which was perfectly adequate spending money. Hell, a $20 bill was big money back then. A large pepperoni pizza with extra cheese and double pepperoni in Syracuse, NY in 1980, 1981 cost around $7.75… and in 1980, a large pizza was the size of a manhole cover, not one of these dwarf “large”s you get now. When I bought a leather cowboy hat for myself in 1980, I spent around $60 on it… and people thought it was a wildly extravagant purchase. When my buddy Jeff and I bought these really cool customized latex over-the-head Halloween masks in 1982, we spent $15 each on them, and people thought that was outrageous. (Mine was a really cool werewolf mask I named Bobo; Jeff’s was a green be-fanged and snouted demonic face in a black hood he named Nous-Carnivore. I don’t know what happened to Nous, but Bobo started to rot in the early 90s and I had to throw him out.)

So the point here is (assuming there is one, I’ve never really found one necessary when I’m feeling nostalgic) that, sure, yes, comic books were cheaper back then, but, by the same token, 20 cents or a quarter was also a lot more money in 1974 than it is now. You could buy a single scoop ice cream cone for around 30 cents in 1974, as I recall. Can’t do that now.

And yet, still, in terms of buying power… a cheap loaf of bread nowadays is around $1.75, although you can pick up an unsliced loaf of French, Italian, or Cuban bread at Wal-mart for a buck. If you split the difference, bread prices have gone up by a factor of four over the last thirty years. Comic books, on the other hand, have seen their cover price inflate by a factor of 12… and even that’s deceptive; many comic books are much more expensive than the $2.99 cover price on that issue of Black Panther I mentioned.

So, as a comic geek, and also as a book geek, yeah, I do look back with some nostalgia on my childhood, when paperbacks cost around a dollar new, and comic books were one-fourth of that. To throw even more perspective out there, I bought a hardcover copy of Stephen King’s FIRESTARTER in 1980. It cost me $13.95… or at least, that’s the price on the inside dust cover flap (I just looked). I may have gotten it slightly discounted at a Walden’s… or not… I can’t remember if they were doing a lot of discounts back then. I do remember one of my college buddies gently mocking me for spending that kind of money on a book when I could have just waited a year, and picked it up for maybe $2.95 in paperback. (I often spoil myself with favorite authors that way, and King didn’t disappoint me with FIRESTARTER, which I think is one of his most enjoyable, and least pretentious, books. Now, CUJO taught me to wait for paperback… in fact, CUJO made me wait until I could read new Stephen King stuff at the library. But FIRESTARTER was, and remains, a very good read.)

$13.95 was a very sizable chunk of cash for me to lay out on a hardcover book that wasn’t required reading in any of my college courses… just as going from 20 to 25 cents for an individual comic made quite a sizable dent in my disposable income back in 1974.

Yet, still… I look back on those times now, and…

Yeah, but they didn’t have personal computers, videotape, or DVDs back then, either. Today ain’t all bad…

RULES OF THE ROAD

In one of his many invaluable essays on life in Hollywood, Mark Evanier described his first meeting with legendary TV comic and icon Milton Berle. Upon being introduced to Uncle Miltie and shaking hands with him, Mark, who is a pretty witty guy, blurted out without even thinking about it, "Wow, I didn't recognize you in men's clothing". According to Mark, this soured Uncle Miltie on him from that point forward, because Mark had broken Rule Number One When Hanging With Milton Berle, namely, Never Be Funnier Than Milton Berle.

I'm reminded of that anecdote now.

Recent experiences at Electrolite being pretty much entirely similar if not completely identical to my previous experiences at Uppity-Negro.com and TampaTantrum.com, I thought I'd take the time to extrapolate whatever wisdom there is to find in the whole mess. Here's The Deal, as far as I can see:

If you want to make friends and influence people when you head out onto the blogging trail, at least, as regards your posting comments on other people's blogs, you MUST NOT:

Rule E comes mostly out of my experiences with Aaron Hawkin's Uppity-Negro blog. He gets a lot of female posters and like any of us male geeks would be in that admirable position, he is thoroughly whipped by them. If a new reader comes along and does anything whatsoever to offend the babes on Aaron's blog, that new reader can expect a cold shoulder from Aaron roughly the size of the Greenland glacier. I don't really blame Aaron for this; for a male geek, positive female attention is a jewel beyond price, and if I ever had any women posting to my blog who weren't related to me by marriage, I'd most likely dance and sing like a puppet on a string when they cracked the lash, too.

I should add to this that I've learned, from Electrolite, that one Must Not Be Whimsical, Oblique, or Overly Geeky When Posting To A Big Important Political Marketplace of Ideas Type Blog, because those guys just have no time for Theodore Marley Brooks or Cornelus van Lunt references, regardless of how amusing or entertaining you and some others may find them.

Now, I am posting this to point out that while these may be the universal Rules of the Road on other blogs (and as far as I can see, they are, indeed, pretty much universal) you can ignore them here. I don't care if you:

Oh, and I like geeky references and would just adore whimsical, cleverly elliptical posts to my comment threads, although I suspect I'd get annoyed if someone started posting a whole lot of Harry Potter-speak here, just for one example.

If there is a universal rule on this blog, it is quite simply, Do Not Be A Bigger Asshole Than The Blogger. In fact, if you can avoid it (and most of my small number of regular posters avoid it with style and panache) Don't Be An Asshole At All. I am quite a big enough asshole myself to supply all the assholiness necessary for any blog, and I will continue to keep this blog well furnished with stupid remarks, doltish mistakes, whiney rationalizations, and defensive recriminations by the ton lot, there can be no doubt. You need bring none of your own asshole nature with you, I have plenty and am always willing to share.

THE INEVITABLE DISCLAIMER

By generally accepted social standards, I'm not a likable guy. I'm not saying that to get cheap reassurances. It's simply the truth. I regard many social conventions in radically different ways than most people do, I have many many controversial opinions, and I tend to state them pretty forthrightly. This is not a formula for popularity in any social continuum I've ever experienced.

In my prior blogs, I took the fairly standard attitude: if you don't like my opinions or my blog, don't read the fucking thing.

Having given that some more thought, though, I'm not going to say that this time around, because I've realized that what this is basically saying is, 'if you don't like what I have to say, tough, I don't want to hear it, don't even bother to tell me, just go away'.

And that's actually a pretty worthless attitude. It's basically saying, 'I don't want to hear anything except unconditional agreement and approval'. And that's nonsense. This is still a free country... for a little while longer, anyway... and if you really feel you just gotta send me a flame, or post one on my comment threads (assuming they actually work, which I cannot in any way guarantee) then by all means, knock yourself out.

Unless your flame is exceptionally cogent, witty, or stylish, though, I will most likely ignore it. You do have a right to say anything you want (although I'm not sure that's a right when you're doing it in my comment threads, but hey, you can certainly send all the emails you want). However, I have an equal right not to read anything I don't feel like reading... and I'm really quick with the delete key... as various angry folks have found in the past, when they decided they just had to do their absolute level best to make me as miserable as possible.

So, if you don't like my opinions, feel free to say so. However, if I find absolutely nothing worthwhile in your commentary, I will almost certainly not respond to it in any way.

Stupidity, ignorance, intolerance... these things are only worth my time and attention if they're entertaining. So unless you can be stupid, ignorant, and/or intolerant with enough wit, style, and/or panache to amuse me... try to be smart, informed, and broad minded when you write me.