Here is my print column from the July 2 Alliance Review:

I’m flipping through the 2009 edition of “Best Editorial Cartoons of the Year,” and I’m not enjoying myself. I’m too busy thinking how many of the cartoons would provoke criticism from some Review readers.

A drawing by Nate Beeler shows then-Gov. Eliot Spitzer as a knight, holding a shield that proclaims him a “Crusader for Ethics & Integrity.” Below his waist is nothing more than a pair of boxer shorts (with hearts!); at his feet is a sleazy call girl in fishnet stockings, smoking a cigarette and dangling a hotel key in one hand.

In another cartoon, by Mike Luckovich, one squirrel shouts to another, “Hide your nuts!!!” as Jesse Jackson approaches, a reference to the reverend’s candid and controversial response (never intended for the public) to Barack Obama last year.*

Both cartoons would have sent some Review readers into a frenzy. Both would have been doing their jobs.
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News stories about obesity (like this one) are often accompanied by film or photos of unidentified fat people walking around on city streets. They are unidentified because nobody wants to be the photographer who has to go up to a heavy person and say, “I took your picture to illustrate a story about America’s epidemic with obesity. May I have your name?”

But still, somebody is bound to know these people. In the Associated Press story linked above, the women shown walking away from the camera is wearing a distinctive outfit, so even though it doesn’t say where or when the photo was taken, she could very well see and ID herself (or be recognized by a friend or co-worker).

It’s a public street and all, and the AP and any other news agency that wants the picture can snap it, but boy, I’d hate to be one of the people selected for this dubious honor.

What better way to spend a few minutes this Independence Day weekend than by watching the classic Tom and Jerry cartoon, “Yankee Doodle Mouse”?

Released in 1943, this cartoon with a Cohen score (predominantly “Yankee Doodle Dandy,” but with snatches of “Over There”) won an Oscar. Basically, it follows the plot of almost every other T&J cartoon — Tom wants to eat Jerry, Jerry doesn’t want to be eaten. The usual over-the-top violence is present, the kind that The Simpsons parody with the “Itchy and Scratchy” shorts. Mixed in is a definite wartime patriotism, as Jerry sends communiques back to base explaining his defeat of Tom and asking the war office to send more cats.

When I was middle-school age, the local CBS affiliate, WJW-TV8 (the same station that aired Hoolihan and Big Chuck and later, Big Chuck and Little John — not to mention Ghoulardi) would show these cartoons at 7 p.m. or 7:30 p.m. on weekdays. My sister and I always watched. We loved the earlier Tom and Jerry shorts and were less enthused with later entries in the series, where the creativity and animation had gone south.

You can see the cartoon here, maybe — the link is a little temperamental.

Fame is not the ultimate arbiter of an entertainer’s talent, nor is the amount of coverage he or she receives upon death. Even so, in a fair world, Karl Mulden’s passing would receive more than just a fraction of the media attention focused on Michael Jackson.

But this isn’t a fair world.

I have a greater respect for tradespeople, not that I didn’t respect them before. I spent much of today with my hands in a backed-up drain pipe in my basement, trying to ram a plumber’s snake into it and unclog it. No luck. I ripped the hell out of my hands, mingling my blood with rancid water filled with stuff I don’t even want to think about. Two hours later, I finally gave in and called a plumbing company.

Fifteen minutes later, two plumbers were at my door, moving in their large-scale equipment. Fifteen minutes after that, bam! the drain was opened. They knew exactly what was wrong, how to tackle it, and had the right tools for the job — three things that I was missing. Both guys were so competent I didn’t even mind paying for the service. Well, almost didn’t mind.

So today I’m saluting the well-trained trades person for the work he or she performs, doing tough jobs for customers who are often irritated by the inconvenience and expense. Hooray!

The July 2009 issue of Reader’s Digest has a piece titled “The Price ($0.00) Is Right.” Chris Anderson, editor of Wired and author of Free: The Future of a Radical Price, discusses the various ways that “free” can work to the advantage of both online businesses (specifically publishers) and customers.

While some take an either/or approach, Anderson is more nuanced: It’s OK, he says, for sites to give away mountains of free content, and it’s also OK for them to phase in some system of paying for it. He believes the New York Times, for instance, had no choice but to begin giving away content online if it wanted to remain “a thought leader that maintains its leadership by dominating the conversation.” He is a believer in tiered marketing — offering a free level of service and a paid level, with enough bells and whistles at the paid end to entice non-payers to give it a try.

Even customers who are paying nothing are bringing something to the table — “time and attention,” Anderson says. He believes that advertisers will pay to have access to both, but that sounds a lot like the philosophy that’s driven Internet news for the last ten years or so, the one that many papers are abandoning because they can’t find enough paying advertisers. In some ways, I this failure is actually a failure of imagination — not thinking far enough outside the traditional advertiser base and not accepting that in 2009 it may take 140 small- to medium-sized customers to make up for one gigantic account from years gone by. It’s hard to readjust the scale of your thinking about advertiser size downward when your potential circulation has increased exponentially — from maybe a few thousand or hundred thousand in a relatively concentrated geographical area, to millions and millions around the world — but it has to be done.

Ironically (I suppose) the piece isn’t available at the Reader’s Digest site, at least not anywhere that I could find it. I paid $3.99 for my copy at the Wal-Mart checkout. I’m not a regular RD reader, but I do pick up the occasional issue and am seldom disappointed in the variety of articles and features. Maybe this is the best way to ensure paid customers: Providing enough quality content to keep them reaching for their wallets.

Back in 1987, I listened to Alice Cooper’s Raise Your Fist and Yell so much that I wore out one cassette and bought a second. After I left that one on the seat of my car one hot day, the case melted around the cassette, ruining it. So it’s been a couple decades since I’ve heard the album, until my wife gave me a CD copy for my birthday last week.

What a difference 22 years makes! Cooper creeps into the metal age with generic melodies and anti-social lyrics. Until he starts singing, it’s hard to differentiate one song from the next, and co-writer Kane Roberts’ guitar playing is uniformly fast — and bland — throughout. The only redeeming songs are ”Freedom,” a blistering anti-censorship track that opens the album, and the “Chop, Chop, Chop/Gail/Roses on White Lace” trilogy that closes it. Here, Cooper plays a ferocious serial killer, one who is truly frightening, unlike his kinder, gentler sociopath from last year’s Along Came a Spider. Other tunes are either forgettable (”Step On You,” “Not That Kind of Love”), achingly average (”Prince of Darkness”) or downright embarrassing (”Give the Radio Back” and “Lock Me Up,” the latter with a snicker-inducing voice over by Nightmare on Elm Street’s Robert Englund).

Nothing screams late ’80s like that Jim Warren cover (above). I feel self-conscious listening to this one in the car. Maybe if I leave it on the seat on a hot day … 

Below is my June 25 column from The Alliance Review:

More than 400 years after it was originally written and performed, William Shakespeare’s “Romeo and Juliet” still causes controversy. Certainly, this is the mark of a classic.

In a letter published Monday in “Dear Abby,” a parent fretted over her son’s reading the play in his freshman year of high school. Abby, bless her heart, defended the tale of star-crossed lovers who kill themselves, but perhaps unwittingly made a distinction that exposure to the work is only OK when “it’s done under the guidance of a teacher,” as if having an impressionable teen read the play on his own is similar to his self-medicating from Dad’s liquor cabinet.

I have an image of small print at the bottom of the prologue that notes, “Caution: Professional readers on a closed track; do not attempt at home,” or some other variation on car-commercial legalese.

In my teaching experience, I have never encountered a student — not one! — who found the suicides of the two main characters to be romantic. Usually, it’s just the opposite: They find the characters’ deaths — one by poison and one by dagger — to be brain-numbingly stupid. They often fault Shakespeare for this, even after learning that he borrowed the plot from an earlier story to such a degree that any writer who tried the same thing today would likely be charged with plagiarism.
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I had the chance recently to listen to the debut CD from Chickenfoot, a supergroup made up of ex-Van Halen lead singer Sammy Hagar, ex-Van Halen bassist Michael Anthony, Red Hot Chili Peppers drummer Chad Smith (don’t know if he’s an “ex” or not), and guitar god Joe Satriani.

Based on the finished product, I picture the four members — or their agents and record companies — getting together and figuring that if each member brings 50,000 or so fans to the table, the album could be a moderate hit and an excuse to tour outdoor venues and make some cash this summer. Because this thing plays like a well-calculated corporate buy-in — very slick, very commercial, very safe.
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Since the phenomenal success of Dan Brown’s Da Vinci Code, novelists have been falling all over one another to come up with the next big, Bible-based mystery thriller. It’s tempting to lump Brad Meltzer’s Book of Lies (new to paperback this month) into that category, but you have to credit him with finding a unique spin that makes this the first, and possibly only, entry in the scripturally oriented comic-book thriller subgenre.

Not for a moment will readers buy into the convoluted plot that combines Depression-era writer Jerry Siegel, the co-creator of Superman, with the story of Cain and Abel, a mysterious cabal intent on finding the first murder weapon, and an emotionally fragile protagonist who watched his father kill his mother. From such disparate materials, Meltzer weaves an intricate story, making use of the same techniques of short, short chapters, multiple points of view, and frequent cliffhangers that propelled readers through The Da Vinci Code, but  does it so charmingly that one can forget about the implausibility of it all and just go with it.
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