They say that the first step is admitting that you have a problem.

Hi. My name's Mike, and I'm a YABS addict.

See, I started reading this forum, You'll All Be Sorry on ComicBookResources.com because the moderator is one of my favorite current writers, Gail Simone (Birds of Prey, The New Atom, and others), and lots of other interesting people stop in and post.

Then she started a thread here
http://forums.comicbookresources.com/showthread.php?t=156451
regarding her dealings with a convention promoter who invited her as a guest at his convention and resisted reimbursing her out-of-pocket expenses (She fronted her own money to attend, which most convention planners would not THINK of asking of a prospective guest - thy're invited, after all, to ATTRACT the paying customers, not to BE one!), all the while, apparently, alternately swearing that the check was, indeed, in the mail, or that his his entire team of accountants had sloped off to Brazil with his bank books and his dog (Okay - I'm making up that last part... But after reading the thread for a while, one begins to feel that I'm not exaggerating by much!). This brought more people out of the mist who had done work in just about all jobs imaginable for the guy's would-be publishing company and, similarly, not been paid.

The whole thing snowballed from there, with the (alleged) deadbeat in question entering the fray, throwing racial, sexual, and every other readily-available type of insult around at the posters, as well as veiled (and not so veiled) threats - legal and otherwise.

This started on Dec. 15 of last year, and has now well-passed 1,000 pages of... I'm not sure, exacty, *WHAT* to call it...

...Did/do either of my readers ever have that friend who couldn't miss "her shows"? I knew people in college who scheduled their classes so that they could be back in the TV lounge at the dorm to catch their afternoon soaps.

That's what this is - it's *MY* soaps, and I'm absolutely addicted. Watchig what I see as the self-destructive behavior of the individual in question is fascinating - in a clinical (and, yes, slightly morbid), watching-a-cancer-choke-off-its-own-blood-supply, sort of way. Sometimes its like watching slow-motion footage of a train wreck, with that inevitability about it.

I sat up until about 3:00 AM last night/this morning trying to get caught up, and fell further behind as I did! It's insidious and addictive!

My name's Mike, and I'm a YABS addict.

An Open (and short) letter...

Senator Carl Kruger
The State House
Albany, NY

Dear Senator Kruger:

I read with interest you proposal to lay a $100 fine on persons tuning out the world with loud music when entering crosswalks, and I have to say, I agree with you wholeheartedly! While I don't live in New York, I visit New York City on occasion and it's blatantly obvious that people are tuning out the world around them by playing music loud enough to drown out all outside sounds, and it needs to be stopped - particularly with those loud subwoofers booming out and the windows closed! I mean, how can they possibly be aware of any...

...I'm sorry...?

What...?

Your bill is intended to fine pedestrians wearing headphones in crosswalks...?

...Because they're dangerous to themselves by crossing the streets without being aware of vehicles, and so on...

Hunh...

Well, it's an interesting approach, I suppose - although proving that the pedestrian in question HADN'T hit the "Pause" button as s/he stepped off of the curb and restarted the music upon reaching the other side could be difficult...

Wouldn't it just be easier to - oh, I'm just sort of tossing out a wacky idea, here - but wouldn't it be easier to simply fine people who cross against the lights or don't even use the crosswalk - we could call it something catchy like "Jaywalking"! Ohh...! Or maybe we could have the Police issue citations and fines to drivers who fail to yield the right of way to a pedestrian who is legally in a crosswalk.

Do you think that maybe actually enforcing either or both of those might do the job without adding any new laws onto the books?

Hmmm...?

Yours, EVER so sincerely

Mike Moyle

So, I'm walking to work this morning...

...freezing various body parts off...

...and I am handed a valuable lesson:

Politeness + Paranoia = The Force (tm)

After my (more-or-less) daily mile walk, I was almost to the office - I just had one small street and an open plaza to cross to get into the building and I was, frankly, not wasting time - it was bloody COLD out!.

Now, the street that I had to cross, was one half of a fork - traffic comes in from about 2 o'clock and splits so that two lanes of traffic swing to my right and behind me, and two lanes cross straight in front of me (I'm actually at one corner of a large, triangular island and the other two corners, towards which the oncoming traffic is heading, BOTH have stop lights. Occasionally (*a-HENH* Ah say - OCCASIONALLY!) drivers will see that they have a green light ahead of them and will gun it from further back than is reasonable, in order to make the light while it's not TOO red, if y'know what I mean.

(Of course, from MY point of view, it's like I'm playing a neverending game of "chicken" with a succession of cars, all of whom are pointing straight at me until they swing left or right...)

So, I'm at the corner, and bearing down on me is a BIG commercial delivery truck - like, the last step before a semi- big - what's that... a 24-foot box...? Anyway, he's coming down and I'm not sure which way he's going, so I'm standing and waiting and freezing in place. It turns out that he's going to cross in front of me, but he comes up to the crosswalk and he stops (Thanks, W.B. Mason - you have nice drivers!)

Now, both of my readers know that I'm compulsive about cosswalks - my daughter calls me a Crosswalk Nazi.

Nolo Contendere.

BUT... while I will get cranky and bounce pennies and such off of cars that ignore crosswalks, if someone is courteous and stops I will, as often as not, tip my hat and wave them through - Hey... you be polite and I'll be polite. (Let's hear a rousing chorus of "After you, my dear Gaston!")

So, this big-ass truck has stopped in the lane right in front of me at the crosswalk and, while I *AM* bloody cold, I flip my mental coin and the good face comes up, and I decide to wave him through. (There's the politeness part of the equation.) Along with that: we *ARE* both stopped, and - you know how, sometimes when BOTH of you are waiting for the other guy to do something, then BOTH of you decide that the other guy ISN'T going to do anything so you BOTH start to do that thing that you were going to do at the same time and either bump into each other or do the start-and-stop thing a couple of times before you figure it out? (Good heavens! I think I'm channelling Roseanne Rosannadanna!)

Anyway - I decide that this guy is just WAY too big to play that sort of game with, so I decide to play it safe and (again) wave him to go ahead. (...and there's the paranoia...!)

He nods and waves back, and he's just BARELY started moving into the crosswalk...

When the FRICKIN JACKASS who never so much a slowed down goes whizzing past him in the right lane, straight throught the crosswalk and, coincidentally, through where I would have been if I hadn't waved the other guy to go first!!!!

(Cue Sir Alec Guinness: "Trust your FEELINGS, Luke...!")

Frickin' moron...

(The driver, not Sir Alec...!)

So that pretty much made my day - there's something about being two steps away and hearing that metaphorical bullet go ka-PWEEENGing past really clarifies the mind tremendously.

Of course, eventually I get into the office and, about an hour or so later - when the adrenalin rush has worn off - a project that hasn't been taken care of, because it requires input from about twenty-seven people, and which no one can figure out how to do, and which is now OFFICIALLY about fifteen seconds into the last minute - gets dropped on my desk...

(Bill Cosby - as Noah, talking to God - ..."You let me bring in a PREGNANT ELEPHANT... Did you TELL ME that the elephant was pregnant...? No! You gave me NO manual for delivery; you DIDN'T tell me that the elephant was pregnant; no NOTHIN'! Here's good ol' Noah standing UNDERNEATH the elaphant...*BWOOOAAAARRRPP*!!!")

And as everyone flusters out of my office... I look at this pregnant elephant... and I say to myself: "Man... I could have been laying around a nice warm emergency room with nurses and all sorts of good drugs... But, NO-O-O-O-O...! I had to use the Ffrickin' FORCE!!"

So how was YOUR day...?
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Almost Closing Thought for Today:

"Liberty means responsibility. That is why most men dread it." -- George Bernard Shaw
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Actual Closing Thought for Today:

"Ya HEAR that, you DIPSTICK?!!?" -- Me

Two Bombs for the Price of None

Further proof, if any were needed, that the Mooninites really *ARE* smarter than the rest of us - or at least smarter than Bostonians...

*sigh*

Now, besides feeling compelled to apologize for unleashing Mitt Romney on the rest of the world, I feel like I have to try to convince everyone else that we're not *ALL* completely clueless bozos on this bus.

...again... *sigh*

Yes, I'm going to weigh in on the "Aqua Teen Hunger Force" promo stunt that went awry.

For anyone who has been living in a cave on Mars for the last few days, Turner Broadcasting's Cartoon Network hired a guerilla marketing company (whose name I'm currently too lazy to Google-ize) to promote their ATHF (see above; I'm also too lazy to keep retyping the name of the series everytime I mention it!) series and the apparently soon-forthcoming feature film which probably NEEDED the publicity, since this is the first that I've heard of it and I watch CN fairly regularly... but I digress...

The promotion consisted of hiring locals in a numbeer of cities to place magnet-backed blinking signs featuring one of the afore-mentioned Mooninites giving passers-by the finger. It's pretty much a naked circuit board, a couple-dozen lights, and a battery pack. A number of these displays were planted in Boston, New York, Los Angeles and other cities and have, apparently, been up for two to three weeks.

The first one found was, apparently, spotted around 8 AM on Wednesday on I-93 in Charlestown and blown apart with a water cannon some two hours later. Other devices, now that people were lookig for them, were spotted later in the day and, eventually, according to the Boston Globe (http://www.boston.com/news/local/articles/2007/02/01/froth_fear_and_fury/), "Sometime between 2 and 3 p.m., ... a Boston police analyst..." looked at one closely enough to say, "Y'know..."

The two people hired in Boston were arrested, with much fanfare and hoopla, by local poloce and charged with "placing a hoax device in a way that causes panic and disorderly conduct", or something similar. Note that they are *NOT* charged with actually planting bombs, but with carrying out a hoax to cause panic.

As near as I can tell from the news reports, the only ones who panicked and caused disorder were the POLICE!

Maybe I'm missing something here...

Now before anyone says anything: Yes, I possibly WOULD be one of those people lambasting the Boston Police if they HAD been bombs and had started going off around the city - because my understanding is that THEIR JOB IS TO NOTICE WHEN SOMETHING'S WRONG AND TAKE CARE OF IT BEFORE ANYTHING HAPPENS!!!

Now, these things have, supposedly, been in place for AT LEAST TWO WEEKS and, again supposedly, the local police are patrolling the SAME streets that these were intended to be visible from, and NEVER NOTICED THEM!!

THEY WERE FRICKIN' **BLINKING*** AT NIGHT, PEOPLE!!!!

Two weeks - That's 336 hours... for 196 of which these things were in darkness - flashing - and NO public safety people spotted a single one: not the Boston Police, nor the Charlestown Police, nor the MBTA Transit Police, nor the State Police...

NONE OF THEM!!

And when one is finally pointed out to them, they shoot it with a water cannon two hours later.

Now, I'm no expert, so maybe I'm missing something, here... But it seems to me that, at some point in those two hours, SOMEONE from the bomb squad HAD to have said, "Yeah, it's got wires and... that's probably a battery... but I don't see any thing that looks like an EXPLOSIVE...?" I mean, except for those lights on it, it'a all of about a sixteenth-of-an-inch thick..."

Now, I had wondered about the actual size and layout - that is: *COULD* it have been reasonably taken for a bomb - until I finally found a picture of one here:
http://www.myfoxboston.com/myfox/pages/Home/Detail?contentId=2233130&version=17&locale=EN-US&layoutCode=TSTY&pageId=1.1.1

I have to say; it doesn't look it to me, but then - as noted above - I'm no expert. Maybe to someone who KNOWS bomb technology inside and out it fairly screams "I'm a BOMB! I'm a BOMB! I'm a BOMB!" ... but I have to say that, somehow, I doubt it.

So clearly, what this REALLY is, is an embarrasment for the city and the commonwealth and their various public safety agencies... their, apparently, very EXPENSIVE public safety agencies since, according to Boston's Mayor Menino, they ran through $750,000 in the six hours that this whole fiasco took. (I'm going to be charitable here and assume that Hizzoner isn't counting the Police Department's regular daily running expenses, but ONLY the extraordinary expenses... overtime, fuel for driving out the water-cannon truck, etc. He wouldn't try to inflate the figures to make the situation look bigger than it really was, would he...? *NAH!!*)

And worst of all, he didn't even get a personal apology from Ted Turner! Again, according to the Globe article: "Menino was also upset, he said, because top executives at Turner Broadcasting did not contact him directly to discuss what happened. The mayor said he did not receive a call from the company until about 9 p.m., and it was from a low-ranking press official."

...no comment...

Compounding the problem is that Boston's Police Commissioner, Edward Davis, has only been in the position since December, and Governor Deval Patrick and Attorney General Martha Coakley started just a couple weeks ago. None of the three, even if they WANTED to, can afford to say anything that could be POSSIBLY be construed as making them look soft on crime and/or terrorism.

So two men have been arrested and charged with "placing a hoax device in a way that causes panic". Now maybe it's just me - and I'll freely admit that I am as competent a lawyer as I am a bomb-disposal specialist - but doesn't part of "placing a hoax device in a way that causes panic" sort of require INTENT - i.e., to intentionally make something that LOOKS like a bomb and then to INTEND that it cause panic? I mean, if I carry a toy gun in my pocket and rob a bank by showing the bulge to a teller -- that's armed robbery, since I THREATENED the teller and CONVINCED her/him that I was armed. If I made a "gun-shape" in my pocketr with my finger and did the same - same thing. If I stuck a digital clock, some batteries and some wire onto a five-pound block of modelling clay and left it under the seat of a subway train, THAT's "placing a hoax device in a way that causes panic" and is, as I see it, a slam-dunk.

But being hired by a major corporate entity to stick up illuminated signs that, as far as you can tell, do not resemble bombs, is NOT a slam-dunk and, as far as I can see, there was no intent involved; case dismissed. (The lack of apparent intent was a fact which the judge in the case noted to the Assistant AG prosecuting, while leaving it as an item to be taken up at a later hearing.)

And, yes; I actually DO understand that these two prosecutions are just so that the city and commonwealth can get at Turner Broadcasting's far deeper pockets, but it disgusts me that they are potentially ruining two lives by doing so.

One defendent, in particular, is in an extremely tenuous position. Peter Berdovsky, 27, is a freelance video artist who is in the U.S. with a green card and is seeking asylum in the United States. Even if he is not convicted, I could imagine that merely being charged with a felony relating to terrorist activities might not work in his favor in his asylum request and could result in his being deported back to Belarus.

...And they have the nerve to say that a little honest work never hurt anybody...

HAH!

...And SHOULD these two be convicted, it sets what I see as -potentially - an extremely dangerous precedent. From that point on, anyone who accidentally leaves a package on a bus or a train or a bench could conceiveably find him/herself in court, attempting to prove that the package NOT intentionally left so as to "...(cause) panic and disorderly conduct." Federal inspectors open your luggage at the airport and your bottle of baby powder has poofed a little bit out...? It'll be up to you to PROVE that you didn't intend people to think it was anthrax, or botulinum, or ricin...

Am I exaggerating? Am I overreacting? HOW FREAKIN' MANY bottles of her own breast milk did a nursing mother have to drink in order to convince a government-issued moron that she wasn't going to blow up an airplane with it...?!!?

...Yeah... I'M overreacting, and none of THESE nitwits are...
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Closing Thought for Today:

Actually, I'm torn - they both relate - pick one:

"In a mature society, 'civil servant' is semantically equal to master.” -- Robert A. Heinlein

"Those who would give up Essential Liberty, to purchase a little Temporary Safety, deserve neither Liberty nor Safety." -- attributed to Benjamin Franklin