Nonsense! Nonsense, I say! Go HERE, for Nonsense!

What. A. Day. First of all: you asked for a donation button. Why, I’m happy to help; I’ve set it up with PayPal, and as I might expect, it doesn’t work. Yet. Some sort of verification needs to occur. When the bytes move through the digestive system and cough up useable code, I’ll slap it up.

This morning was normal enough by the new abnormal standards – a pell-mell race up Park Avenue to work, with “Turning Japanese” on the radio for the final leg. Deeply creepy song. No one knew what it meant except that Japanese stuff was cool, you know. I had a girlfriend who had a sweater with big Japanese characters, and was a bit disheartened to learn it meant something like “Fish Cowards in The Hallway” or something equally unhip. On the other hand, the sleeves had two sets of zippers, this being 1983, and multiple zippers indicated that one was fully aligned with the zeitgeist.

For all I know, the “Fish Cowards” were a good band.

This. Day. After morning TV newswork I finished a column, then shot out here:

The Bob Who is Of the Sponge! We had to cut a video to drop into the Star Wars Holiday Special. I got a look at where we’ll be shooting; it’s a five-story rotunda that has something going on every day. Today it was an anti-cigarette campaign, complete with a gigantic Claus Oldenberg-proportion cigarette stubbed in an ashtray. Enormous video screens showed depressing ads to an audience of Zero. You don’t get people to quit by scaring them; they’ve internalized that fear way down deep and spend the day moving it aside 20, 30 times a day. When you tell them that smoking will do bad things they think “it’s probably done it already, so what’s the point in quitting?”

This is where we’ll do our show next Monday. Today we shot the gift-giving sequence. I’m looking for a present for my co-anchor, and vice versa. Lest you wince at the possibilities for faux camaraderie, it began thus:

(shot of LILEKS and AIMEE laughing, as though the camera just happened to catch our Newsbreak Anchor Team having a great festive on-the-job moment)

Me: “Hey, you know how TV stations always like to make their anchors do things together so you think they’re friends?”

Aimee: “Instead of barely tolerating each other on camera?”

Me: “Heck, off camera too! Well, that’s what we’re going to do today.”

And so on. As it goes on, it’s apparent she’s shopping for an insufferable co-worker, and I’m trying to get something cheap that doesn’t require much effort or thought. I don’t know why I keep writing bits for myself that put me in the worst possible light. Perhaps the surest way to deflect minor criticism is to embody the major ones, and inflate them? Naaaaaaah. Couldn’t be that.

We were interrupted three times by Mall Cops, who wanted to see our papers. One such fellow made a call up the chain just to check us out, then came back again to see our papers, only to tell us it was okay, but he had to check. In this modern world of constant threats and tiny cameras capable of recording exploitable terror points, you can’t be too cautious, even if you see a crew with large media badges on their coats and a camera the size of a roasted pig from a royal banquet. I understand, they’re doing their job; no harm no foul. But when I asked if the media badges meant anything, he said that anyone can get them, you just have to show credentials.

This is why I throw my lot in with the Citizen Journalism types. All credentials mean, I guess, is “someone else hired me.” What I’d decided to hire myself?

That was my day; aside from work, I had a brief desperate nap before supper, a radio interview, piano instruction with the Child, a short session of reassurance that the movie version of her new favorite book may indeed be okay (“but I looked up the cast on the internet and they have a girl with brunette hair playing the girl who’s blonde.” I could either say “that’s how I felt when they said Jessica Alba would play Sue Storm instead of Charlize Theron,” or reassure her. Chose the latter) and then I wrote the text for sixteen pages of Institute of Official Cheer updates.

Why?

Because I love this site and I love the fact that people like it. So there.

Your enormous Comic Sins :: comic ads :: Muscle Ads update is here. Enjoy! See you around noon with Sears 1934, and later today with 100 Mysteries.

Can’t get enough of those stamps, can we? Go HERE.

There’s a vase with a flower in a niche on the bathroom wall. Or rather there was. Spun around this morning getting out of the shower, the robe caught the flower, the vase went down. Glass everywhere in the room of bare feet. I thought: the day’s either off to a horrible start, or this is as bad as it gets.

That all depends on one’s self, doesn’t it? As I said yesterday: adapt, adopt, improve, DESTROY. Or something like that.

Just a few notes here; exhausting day. Get this: we had the first musical concert. For the TV channel. At the newspaper. In the morning I was Ted Baxter with the news, doing a sports interview of all things, and then we hosted a remarkable group of musicians.
The guitarist was Billy McLaughlin, with his group “Simple Gifts.” Oy. Lovely beyond compare, this; go to the site and listen to the samples. Billy had a big career in the 90s with the Narada label before he came down with a rare condition that just happened to cripple his left hand. For a guitarist, that’s the end of the career. He taught himself to play with the other in a new style, and this new group is part of his renaissance. Sweet guy, kind and generous, and the band was equally talented. The violinist was playing some old tunes, and I asked her not to play “Nearer My God to Thee,” because, well, around here in the newspaper business we’re sorta gunshy about Titanic references. She laughed and played it, and it was lovely.

I have the best job I’ve ever had.

Somewhere in between the morning news and the afternoon concert I posted to the Strib blog, the Bleat, the Hughniverse, and wrote most of Friday’s column. Wasn’t home to get my daughter from the bus, which made for a double-bad day. Miss breakfast with her, even though she’s as owly in the AM as I was as a kid. She’s about four, five years away from asking if she can have coffee.

She already asked why I drink coffee, and I say “because I like it.” Which is true. Not the most ethical answer, I suppose. “Because Daddy needs a jolt, and gets pounding headaches if he doesn’t regularly dose his system with the hot, nourishing power of caffeine” would be honest, but then you’re setting the groundwork for saying that drugs are okay.

Of course, drugs are okay, depending on the drug. I know this guy who’s absolutely brilliant – one of those free-ranging intellects that can fasten on the particulars of a scientific discipline for a career and engage in wide-ranging conceptual debate for the joy of the argument. On coffee, it was like arguing with a supercomputer with buzzsaw arms and laser-beam for eyes; on the spleef, he walked into every logical trap like a sleepwalker in a rake store. And he was smart enough under the influence to know he’d been smoked on account of the smoke, too. That’s the thing with weed: you’re so boring. The ones who get out in time are the ones who get tired of boring themselves.

They’re also the one who realize, early on, that (fill in the blank with the name of an artist) was probably not high when he did that. Even though everything just FITS so AMAZINGLY and seems aimed with obvious intent at other people who were high.

Anyway. I miss my daughter in the morning. But work is good, and I still have freedom and challenges. After today I went home, fell asleep in my shirt and tie, woke, then went to dinner with Mr. and Mrs. Giant Swede at a local restaurant. There are so many. Every commercial district in the neighborhood has a new little cafe, and they’re all great, and they’re all packed. We do this every fortnight now; last time it was a Spanish joint, this time a carb-heavy wine-bar famous for homemade spicy tater tots and sandwich fare.

The bathroom:

I have to laugh, because 40 years ago I don’t think people were pulling out Instamatics to snap a shot of light fixtures in a bistro can. They could have, but when you were given an allotment of 12 or 24 shots, you took care.

It had an interesting effect, though – when you went to camp, you rationed your shots, mindful you had two dozen, no more. You ended up shooting half of them the last day just to burn off the roll. The entire concept of “burning off the roll” is probably lost, and it’s a pity; it was gone before anyone thought to devote a big expensive coffee table book to the 24th shot taken by people who were heading to the drugstore to drop off the film, and realize they had one more picture left to take.

Wonder what that book would be like. Lots of dogs? Drug store parking lots?

As for yesterday – interesting response. Heard from a few people in the same situation. People in The Business. This was something of an open secret, but apparently I’m the first to talk about it. I have to admit I worried about breaching the matter; gosh, what if they get mad and do something legal? Then I remembered: they have my money. They took my money and did not give me my money. So, there’s that. I appreciate all the well-wishing and sympathetic outrage, guys – why, it’s prompted me to set up a PayPal for donations to the Bleat, just for spit ‘n’ skittles, as they say. I’ve never charged for this or run ads, because that’s always seemed like sitting someone down, making them listen to a monologue, then asking them to pick up the check for coffee.

But, what the hell.

I will say this: it’s been a hell of a task to keep this thing Popping and Vibrant this year, because I’ve been lashed to the wheel since I was reassigned to the digital / video division. (These terms are relative, of course – it’s not real work in the sense that my father works, as in “lifting things” or “Driving all night” or “sitting in the bottom of a Navy vessel listening to the watertight doors close because there are Japanese subs about.” I’m not that deluded. Making your living with your tongue and fingertips is still cakewalk city compared to making your living with your back and your arms.)

Anyway: it’s not over. I learned a great deal today, and having shaken the tree, let’s see what drops down. If I don’t hear anything from the other parties in 48 hours, I’ll post a few links which will speak for themselves.

Later today: First Day Covers, oh boy. Gosh, can’t wait. But then it’s Sears 1934 around noon, if I remember to post it.

Thanks for your patronage & support. You’re swell. You just are.

Cars start in cold weather – in a second! Mm-hmm. Right.

A handsome ad from 1936. Name the product:

The job has become consumed by preparations for the Star Wars Holiday Special, as I’m calling it. We’re shooting a big show at the Mall of America next Monday – stop on by, say hello, throw tomatoes – and we have a pre-taped hardy-har segment on Thursday, and a music show to shoot tomorrow. The music will be excerpted for the Holiday Special, and I assume we’ll be doing non-sectarian stuff, no hark-the-heralds.

In case you’re wondering: yes, I do work for a newspaper. But as our name reflects: we’re a media company now. Adapt, adopt, improve; wasn’t that the Musketeer motto? No; picked it up from a Monty Python sketch, I believe. The one where Cleese robs a bank. Anyway, it’s a fine motto, no?

Speaking of which – brief hiatus, as I finish up the enormous and enormously likable Python documentary. Pity they didn’t get all together to do it, but I suspect the egos and aggravations have expanded to the point where they don’t fit comfortably in a room; alone, they can be more expansive about each other, and generous. You do wonder who made the most money, though. I suspect it’s Cleese. Palin seems the most normal, but somehow the most remote; Jones is the fellow with whom you get into terrible arguments; Idle the one who wants to get the band back together because life has been so much less exciting ever since they broke up.

Ah, probably not possible. I can’t imagine getting together with the guys I worked with in my youth, unless they were the fellows with whom I shot pinball and discussed life and international Communism; we still see each other. The Crazy Uke, for example. We were roommates for a while at a house his dad built; it was 1983. Three of us, the troika filled out by Victor, a younger fellow who loved the Stray Cats, later became a private detective operative, and then an Orthodox priest. (I think. More or less.) For some reason when I recall the house I remember a comrade from the Daily newspaper, an utter drunk, a fellow who looked tailor-made to play an upper-class dissolute serving time in India, self-medicating with gin and quinine, making sardonic remarks about the Hindoos or the Mooselmen until he went native and became one or the other, or died in a last gasp of heroism during the Sepoy rebellion, stirred by the smell of gunpowder to find his essential qualities as an English-speaking person and die with the Union Jack clutched to his homesick bosom. He did coke, I seem to recall. Later he started up a magazine.

Everyone started up a magazine in those days. Those who didn’t wrote for them. His version lasted one issue, which was typical. I don’t remember what I wrote for him, but I do remember the payment. I went to his apartment to get it. He apologized for not having actual money, and handed me a check he had designed on his Personal Computer and printed off on a Dot-Matrix Printer, state of the art. It would be good for one hundred dollars in the future.

Never saw him again. I was thinking about that last night after I wrote the piece about Money, and it set off a row of dominos that click-click-click until they dead-end at the Obelisk of Betrayal. Said object was erected, oh, a year and a half ago? I’ve never talked about it.

Well, as the dentist said in a Moorhead office building when he discovered my first cavity and prescribed a filling, “no time like the present.”

My last book, the sequel to Regrettable Foods, was sold by the same agent who sold my previous seven books. The difference with the eighth? He kept a large share of the royalties, which is a kind way of saying he took the money from the publishers and did not give it to me. In this business we expect 15 percent to be shaved off, but 100 percent seems a bit excessive, don’t you think?

I began to be intrigued by the slow delivery of royalties, and called the local branch of the agency. She promised to get right on it. I heard nothing. Calls to the head agent, now in New York,  went unreturned. Mind you, we’d been friends since 1985. I was happy to be with the agency. Proud! They had a great client list, New York cred, success after success. If you wrote a book in this town, he was the agent you sought. We did deal after deal, and I figured thus it would always be.

Except he wasn’t returning my phone calls.

I assumed he was busy. He used to tell a joke: a man comes home from a business trip to find his house burned down. He calls a friend, who says “your house is gone, your wife ran off with the insurance adjuster, the dog is missing, your car was stolen, and your teenaged son drained your bank account. Oh, and your agent called.” There’s a moment of stunned silence; eventually the man says “my agent called?”

Hah hah! Well, we had a laugh about that. We had many laughs. Last time I saw him we were in a Village bar with plank floors, meeting with my Random House editor about the next book. All very New York Publishing World and very cool and amusing. Top of the world, Ma.

But now he wasn’t returning my phone calls. Heck, even if I’d been a pity client from the old days whose work he couldn’t sell, I would get a mercy call now and then. Not now. And the checks were missing. I didn’t think there was any connection. But. Well.

The local branch didn’t return many calls either, but when we did talk, she promised to get on it. And call me back.

So I’m sitting in the movie theater on a summer afternoon, watching the trailers before “Batman Returns.” Phone rings. It’s my agent. I make the great fatal mistake: hey, good to talk to you, but, I’m about to see Batman; can I call you in two hours? I’ve been trying to get the check for the last book. He says absolutely.

When the movie is over, I call back. Answering machine.

He never did call back, that day, or the next.

One call to the publisher informed me that the check had been sent, and cashed, a looong time ago.

If you’re wondering why I had not made that call before, well, I’d been used to slow payouts for a long time. DIDN’T YOU THINK YOU WERE BEING ROBBED? No. By my friend? Why? He had books on the NYT list. He handled just about everybody on NPR. He was the guy.

Armed with the information about the payoff, I confronted the agent who ran the local branch. To this day I don’t know what she knew exactly, but I suspect she had her suspicions – and while she always struck me as a good person in a tough spot, I can sum up the year that followed:

Sorry; vague words about what happened; you’re not the only one; we will repay; money is coming from a settlement, be patient; I’ll sign a contract that sets up a payment schedule; sorry the payments are late, but I’ll set things right; the settlement didn’t happen.

Leading to: if you want to sue, I don’t have anything.

I think I’m as furious about this now as I was when I discovered the perfidy.

It would be difficult to press criminal charges against the local agent. Any legal judgment would probably be paid off as quickly as the money the agency owes me, which is to say: never.

I feel bad about this, for the local agent’s sake, because I believe the misappropriation was solely the lead agent’s doing, and she didn’t profit from it. Everything I’ve seen from her indicates shame and horror at finding it all blow up like this. That said, we had a contract. I would have been content to get fifty bucks a week for the rest of my life. The last series emails and phone calls have gone unreturned; radio silence since last summer.

More tomorrow.

Out of context ad challenge around 10:30 or so! See you then.

Welcome to Two-Candle Hideout. This noir seems rather familiar, but aren’t they all the same movie in the end? Go HERE.

Guardian to the rescue! Or not. Go HERE.

Allow me some parental pride:

She whipped this up after school. Drew the cat first – which she doesn’t like much, she said – then did the lyrics from some song the kids like on their Warrior Cats tribute videos. “Did I teach you how to put layers under other layers?”

She grinned. “No.” She’s proud of the general effect, which is why she gave me permission. Also came up with a nifty little piano composition tonight. Annnnnd acts like math is slightly less difficult than gargling house paint.

I hate banking; I hate almost everything about it, for one reason: I don’t believe the money’s there. If I can’t have it in front of me, Scrooge McDuck style, it just doesn’t exist. This is immature, yes, and probably speaks to deep issues about money, but I’ve been wondering why this is. Why I found it more comforting to have cash in small amounts on hand instead of in the bank, doing something. It was unlikely it would be needed for a kidnapping, after all, because they’d want more than the small amount I had on hand, and the criminals would be unlikely to be swayed by the fact that I had ironed the money to make it extra flat and therefore aesthetically satisfying. There woul be a pause on the line: you ironed the money? Confused words in the background: he did what? Why does this matter? But I enjoyed setting aside some pin money. Got over that; put it in the bank. Periodically it goes into investments, which is even more unnerving than the bank, because it all goes into vast sloshing piles, as easy to identify as am individual steerage passenger thrashing around after the Titanic went down. Less so, since I don’t imagine my money screams. Much.

With age comes wisdom, they say; if so, I’d best call UPS and initiate a package track. This might require a trouble ticket.

Whenever I used to go to the bank I would get a certain nervous feeling, expecting the teller to frown, tap some keys, and say “you said you had how much?” Now it’s all online, which is logical and secure and fool-proof, right up until you check your checking account balance and it’s about 1/10th of what you expect it should be.

This happened Sunday. I looked at the receipt, and figured: we’ve been robbed. At least they left a few dollars. Nice of them. But how? HOW? Wracked my brain; had I used my credit card online? Because as we all know, once they have your number they can drain your entire bank account the way hackers do, which is by typing furiously in a dimly-lit room until someone says “we’re in,” and then they get a completely nonstandard interface with no real-world analogue, complete with spinning graphics and keystrokes that make clicks and beeps.

Yes, I’d used my card online. It was a paypal site. Wasn’t it? Yes; I always check the URL to make sure it’s real, and the company isn’t located on 123 Fake Street. But here’s the amusing part: after I bought the software (a really nice disk utility) I’d browsed the “about us” page, and everyone on the software team was Russian. No offense, but I figured it was all a Mafia setup at that point, and the disk utility had somehow found my master list of passwords – which is A), encrypted, and B) written in a code no one else can figure out, because it’s based on a conceptual template that can be customized without me forgetting it, and has random permutations that make it extra strong – and they’d figured out how to get into my bank account.

This, I knew, was nonsense. But. Where had it gone? Where? I was out on errands, but couldn’t concentrate. Drove home. Traffic was slow. Move! It may be Sunday, and the banks are closed, but they’re probably open in Russia! Not Moscow, but one of the eastern parts from Risk! Then: ah. Realized what happened. Long boring story, but it was suddenly clear what had happened. Confirmed it online, breathed a deep sigh of relief, and continued on the Sunday errands.

Provisioning is the weekend errand, and I try to do it cheaply. Because I am, perhaps, cheap. Not wise, and not psychopathically penurious, but . . . frugal. Not one of those who comparison shops for months on end before a major purchase; no, that makes sense. I fret over small things, as if this somehow insulates me in the long run from overspending. Premium brands? No. Lots of clothes? No. Expensive wine? No. Which brings me to these people.

It’s a story about people who used their severance to continue their lifestyle just as before, and ended up broke because they ate out a lot and bought “cases of $36 a bottle wine” and lots of flowers and had manicures. This to me is madness. I probably don’t enjoy a good economic boom as much as I should, because I figure it’s going to end eventually, and you might find yourself broke, unable to sleep, mentally toting up the cost of all that Starbucks over ten years.

What I can’t bring myself to do is use coupons. If I could have them all on my iPhone, and just run barcodes over the scanner, fine, sign me up. But my objection to coupons stems solely from the person who is always behind the person with coupons. At Target the other day a fellow got out an envelope with at least 7000 coupons, and proceeded to thumb through the Clancy-thick sheaf until he found the right one.

Today: Comic Sins, and something else. It’s a week of generous updates. See you soon.