For the next couple of days D.F. Rogers and I will be at the Big Apple Con in — where else? — the Big Apple. I hope to finally meet Mark Evanier in person. Dennis and I also hope to talk to comic book artist Joe Sinnott, just like we did 30 years ago! I’m traveling light, and won’t be taking a laptop computer, so unless the hotel has more than just Wi-Fi hot-spots for Net/Web access, my next post will be sometime Sunday.
Month: November 2007
HAPPY BIRTHDAY PETULA CLARK!
Today is Petula Clark’s birthday! Happy birthday! In 30 excellent minutes, the divine and sublime Pet tells her own story.
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Sofa King Crazy!
If you followed our exciting porch project, I should let you know the room is painted and ready, and we have a sectional sofa on order. We looked at a lot of sofas at a lot of furniture stores, but there’s one place we missed.
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Jo Stafford, Right Tonight For Temptation
Let’s hear some more Jo Stafford, in recognition of her 90th birthday, a couple of days ago. Here are two songs by Jo that were on the radio at the same time, in 1947, the year this picture was taken with Tommy Dorsey and somebody who I assume you recognize.
Let the first one play through, then for contrast the second song will come in to give you an idea of her versatility.
Hyannis Homeys
At the beginning of the year, the news was this:
Tax Cuts Offer Most for Very Rich, Study Says
By EDMUND L. ANDREWS
Published: January 8, 2007WASHINGTON, Jan. 7 — Families earning more than $1 million a year saw their federal tax rates drop more sharply than any group in the country as a result of President Bush’s tax cuts, according to a new Congressional study.
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Families in the middle fifth of annual earnings, who had average incomes of $56,200 in 2004, saw their average effective tax rate edge down to 2.9 percent in 2004 from 5 percent in 2000. That translated to an average tax cut of $1,180 per household, but the tax rate actually increased slightly from 2003.Tax cuts were much deeper, and affected far more money, for families in the highest income categories. Households in the top 1 percent of earnings, which had an average income of $1.25 million, saw their effective individual tax rates drop to 19.6 percent in 2004 from 24.2 percent in 2000. The rate cut was twice as deep as for middle-income families, and it translated to an average tax cut of almost $58,000.
And today the news is this:
Buffett Says Estate-Tax Repeal Would Benefit RichestBy Alison Fitzgerald and Ryan J. Donmoyer
Nov. 14 (Bloomberg) — Warren Buffett called on Congress to maintain the estate tax, saying that plans to repeal the levy would benefit a handful of the richest American families and widen U.S. income disparity.
Buffett, the billionaire chairman of Omaha, Nebraska-based Berkshire Hathaway Inc., told the Senate Finance Committee that advocates of repeal were “dead wrong” to call the levy a “death tax.”
It would be more appropriate to call it a “death present,” said Buffett, 77, who is the third-richest person in the world, according to Forbes Magazine. “A meaningful estate tax is needed to prevent our democracy from becoming a dynastic plutocracy.” Heirs to vast fortunes, he said, have already won the “ovarian lottery” and shouldn’t be further rewarded by the tax system.
But enough reading. Let’s watch a video!
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The Complete ‘Dream of the Rarebit Fiend’
Long before the cartooning innovations of Charles M. Schulz, there was Winsor McCay. Preceding his masterpiece, Little Nemo In Slumberland, McCay drew a comic strip called Dream of the Rarebit Fiend that I featured very early in this blog’s existence, here and here (sorry, the video isn’t embedded).
McCay the artist dominated the industry, but McCay the man was dominated by his wife Maude. The portrait of Maude is how she looked when she met McCay. They had a whirlwind romance and eloped in 1891. If Maude looks young, that’s because she was 13. Some accounts give her age as 14, while others say she was still briefly 12 after she ran off with McCay, who was 10-12 years her senior, depending on Maude’s true age. McCay made phenomenal amounts of money for a time as a cartoonist, animator and vaudeville performer, while Maude spent his money and allegedly took lovers. There were public difficulties, such as the account published in The New York Times on December 23, 1914 (click image to enlarge).
A new, complete collection of Dream of the Rarebit Fiend, is available for the modest sum of $133 US. The Boston Sunday Globe has a nifty slideshow about it that you can watch by clicking here. The video player has a Rarebit cartoon by McCay, called ‘Bug Vaudeville’. Be prepared, however, because it’s long, repetitive and tedious.
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