Albany Comic Con

After a harrowing drive in a freak snow storm last night, especially nerve-wracking when going through the Berkshires, Denro and I are in Albany for a comic book convention. These one-day shows are nice because they’re small and manageable. Joltin’ Joe Sinnott is here, and this is a picture of Denro with Joe.

Dennis is holding the original art to page #19 of Fantastic Four #46, the third issue of many that Joe inked over Jack Kirby’s pencil art. Technically, it’s the fourth issue of FF Joe handled because he had inked ish #5, before leaving Marvel for a while when he was under contract with Treasure Chest comics.

The power is out at my house and at Dennis’ too. I’m told there is a large tree down that’s blocking my street. It’s a dead end, so I’ll be returning to a dark, cold house in a neighborhood I can’t leave!

LIFE misses the Beat

LIFE Magazine, or what’s left of it, has an online George Harrison tribute. There’s also a print edition of the LIFE tribute to George, but it has an error that kept me from buying the issue. It’s a particularly annoying error, that was probably repeated from Bob Spitz’s useless, mistake-filled book, The Beatles: The Biography. The error is that Pattie Boyd appeared in A Hard Day’s Night with her sister Jenny. This is incorrect. Jenny “Jennifer Juniper” Boyd was not in AHDN. The girl with Pattie was, of course, my friend Prudence Bury. The paragraph below was scanned from Hunter Davies’ book The Beatles, in which Pattie mentions her two sisters (Jenny and Paula), as well as Prue.

A couple of years ago I said that Prue’s hair stylist was her friend Vidal Sassoon. Here is a picture of Prue sporting a Sassoon cut. Vidal is on the right, and the man in the middle is Alexander Plunkett-Green, husband of fashion designer Mary Quant.

Back in the former USSR

Unbelievable. The once-mighty Electronics & Musical Industries — EMI — is being bought by a rich Russian, who apparently now lives in NYC.

In other Beatle-related doings, there is still no official DVD release date for the Let It Be film, but director Michael Lindsay-Hogg says work is progressing on the project. He was interviewed on WNYC radio, and the podcast is on the audio player.

[audio:http://www.podtrac.com/pts/redirect.mp3/audio.wnyc.org/soundcheck/soundcheck101711apod.mp3|titles=WNYC: Michael Lindsay-Hogg interview]

Ideological illogic

Despite Jon Stewart’s typically excellent job of deftly standing up to inanity, I muted the TV in disgust last night and read the paper while Andrew Napolitano spouted his extreme ideological nonsense on The Daily Show. Later, I watched it online.

Napolitano repeats the Ayn Rand assertion that selfishness is a virtue. Well, that depends on the definition of selfishness. Wall Street executives and brokers were absolutely acting in their own self-interest in their quest for fat bonuses, which led to reckless and risky financial speculation. Their selfishness, often fueled by drugs, was limited solely to their individual, immediate financial gain, and look at the outcome.

Napolitano says he agrees with the Occupy Wall Street protesters that the government shouldn’t have bailed out the big banks. What he fails to acknowledge is that it was the lack of government regulation that allowed the banking crisis to happen. The successful repeal of the Glass-Steagall Act, a dream of Napolitano’s fellow libertarian Alan Greenspan, was a monumental mistake that must be undone.

Napolitano also says that public schools “stink” because they have no competition. Of course there’s competition, and I don’t mean private schools. Towns compete with one other, and some towns have better schools than others. By the very definition of competitive behavior there will always be losers, so the correct argument for a libertarian like Napolitano is that of course some of the public schools are better than others. That’s the way it is, and the losers just have to keep trying. Or maybe the students who are losers should just give up on school and turn to dealing drugs to stock brokers.