One Trick Pony

So here I’ve been for two decades in the city that thousands make a pilgrimage to each summer, and I’ve been oblivious. It’s like living in the suburbs of Mecca and never doing the haj. Today, at long last, we all went to Comic-Con and trolled through the vendor area.

And saw: stacks of comics from the 50s, miniature orcs and knights, strolling Klingons, medieval trollops… you name it. Cartoonists have groupies here, all lined up to get a signature or to watch him draw. June noticed how dark most of the present day comics are, so different from the brightly colored worlds of Archie and Superman.

I had two brushes with celebrity here. First, I followed a line of people waiting for an autograph and found a familiar face at the end of the line surrounded by security people. Immediately I recognized him as the guy who blocked the aisle and smiled apologetically as he settled into his seat in first class as I headed for steerage on the plane coming back from DC. I didn’t know who he was but he clearly had star quality. I completely forgot about him until I saw him there signing autographs and looked up at the sign: Crispin Glover. Don’t know what his connection with comics is, but there he was.

Then, sitting quietly at a table with a tip jar, with no lines of fans in sight, sat one of the heroes of my yoot: Forrest J. Ackerman. In 1958 he began to publish Famous Monsters of Filmland, a monthly magazine filled with stills from all the vampire, godzilla, werewolf and flying saucer movies that I loved as a kid. I bought every issue (long gone, unfortunately) probably well into high school. Forrie’s career went back further than that, all the way to the pulp magazine origins of sci-fi (a term he coined). What an interesting, idiosyncratic, obsessed life!

Had we planned this better, I would have gotten to see two more of my favorite bloggers and writers: Wil Wheaton and Neil Gaiman, both there today but somewhere out of view. Maybe next year.

From Findlaw…

“What I found, in critically examining Bush’s evidence, is not pretty. The African uranium matter is merely indicative of larger problems, and troubling questions of potential and widespread criminality when taking the nation to war. It appears that not only the Niger uranium hoax, but most everything else that Bush said about Saddam Hussein’s weapons was false, fabricated, exaggerated, or phony.”

Fuzzy information was taken as fact; guesses turned into certainty; qualifiers removed.

“Bush is not the first president to make false statements to Congress when taking the nation to war. President Polk lied the nation into war with Mexico so he could acquire California as part of his Manifest Destiny. It was young Illinois Congressman Abraham Lincoln who called for a Congressional investigation of Polk’s warmongering.

Lincoln accused Polk of “employing every artifice to work round, befog, and cover up” the reasons for war with Mexico. Lincoln said he was “fully convinced, of what I more than suspect already, that [Polk] is deeply conscious of being wrong.” In the end, after taking the president to task, the House of Representatives passed a resolution stating that the war with Mexico had been “unnecessary and unconstitutionally commenced by the President.”

Isn’t this more impeachable than lying about a squalid dalliance with an intern? How many soldiers died for Monica Lewinsky?