Will post-COVID New York City and San Francisco end the 21st century as ghost towns? Or will they be transformed from centers of commerce into mixed-use living space?
I chuckle when the current interest rates are called “too high.” This attitude is the result of banks and businesses being addicted to the free money that followed the Great Recession. My first mortgage, in early 1988, was for 10.125%.
In my opinion the Fed should leave everything as it is. Let the markets adjust to the long-overdue hike in rates and the end of quantitative easing. Once again I point to Frontline’s “Age of Easy Money” from a year ago. Where’s the recession that so many were predicting from the higher interest rates?
Wally Wood considered himself to be the world’s second best comic book artist, behind Jack Kirby. I would also place him as second best at inking Kirby next to Joe Sinnott, while noting that some other aficionados aren’t wrong in preferring Wally over Joe. (You know who you are!)
Mark Evanier says he has revised his own opinion of Wood inking Kirby.
As Mark says, Joe Sinnott decided he was putting too much of his own style on Kirby’s pencils. Especially the faces, as I heard Joe say more than once.
As was done at DC, Marvel would also put inkers with a lower page rate on their best-paid pencilers. Vince Colletta, who made his money on quantity more than quality, had a long run inking Jack on Thor. Stan, who proudly called The Fantastic Four “The World’s Greatest Comic Magazine,” took Vinnie off the title after his sub-par job on Annual #3, and paid Joe what he was worth to return, starting with issue #44.
Mark says, “They [DC] could have stolen Joe Sinnott away from Marvel but they didn’t want him.” By then, 1970, Joe had a contract with Marvel, and he wouldn’t have wanted to work for DC anyway. Their editors had a reputation for abusing talent, to the point of extorting kickbacks, although Carmine Infantino put an end to that practice, once he was in charge. Which brings up the story of Joe inking FF #5, only to stop working on issue #6 the same day that he began.
Joe’s working method was to ink pages from the bottom up. He’d put off inking the first page, aka the “splash,” until completing the other interior pages, saving the cover for last. Joe’s handiwork is seen only on the bottom 2/3 of page 2 in FF #6, with Dick Ayers taking over after that.
Joe had received a lucrative offer from Treasure Chest, the comic book publisher affiliated with the Catholic Church. It meant stopping his work for Stan, but with another mouth to feed in the house the offer was too good to turn down. (That “mouth” is currently recovering from a burst appendix. Get well soon!)
I can imagine how some DC editors — perhaps any of them — would have reacted to that. “You sonuffa b*tch! Who the !@#$% do you think you are, pulling a stunt like that? You’ll never work here again!” Joe had a taste of that sort of abuse when he told Colletta he could no longer be the ghost penciler for Vinnie’s Romance comics at Charlton.
So what did Stan do when Joe walked out and left him high and dry? Stan told Joe he understood and that he should do what was best for his family. Not only that, Joe was welcome to return to Marvel whenever he was ready, which of course he famously did. That was Stan “The Mensch” Lee.
Anyway, back to the actual subject of this post. A comic strip that resulted in Jack being treated very badly by DC. A few years ago, this book collected the complete run of daily comic strips for Sky Masters of the Space Force.
Distributed by a small syndicate, the feature was short-lived, and it came to a bad end, with Jack having to do the inking himself and him even being sued by DC editor Jack Schiff. But it got off to a fantastic start, with Wally inking Jack. Even if Wood was the world’s second best comic book artist, he was the acknowledged greatest of sci-fi comic book artists, making him the perfect choice to ink Sky Masters.
The Jack Kirby Museum & Research Center is launching its Kirby Museum Press with a follow-up Sky Masters volume, collecting all of the Sunday strips, in color. It’s being crowd-funded on Zoop, a sort of Kickstarter for comic books and related projects.
A withdrawal approach based solely on required minimum distributions (RMDs) not only fails to meet retirees’ annual income needs but can also leave money on the table at the end of their lives, the financial services firm found.
I’m enjoying the new Universal Monsters Channel that’s available on Roku devices and on Fire TV’s Roku Channel. I don’t know if this link will work for you, but give it a try.
My 3-year-old Google Pixel 4a phone has a headphone jack. That was one of the reasons why I bought it, so there’s no need to retire the excellent and durable Sony portable headphones that I bought at least a year before starting this blog.
Sony MDR-A35
Whenever I eventually get a new phone, it will undoubtedly not have a headphone jack. Adapters with a DAC that converts USB-C to 3.5mm analog audio can be had for $10 and less.
UGREEN USB C to 3.5mm Audio Adapter
Another option is the Linsoul 7HZ Salnotes Zero IEM with USB-C connector and built-in DAC. It costs $24 and works well, with volume and play/pause controls for mobile use.
7HZ Salnotes Zero
Used with the right ear tip (for me it’s not the one that’s pictured) the sound is excellent. For the ultra-nerdy, there’s a setting in the Wavelet app for Android that tweaks the sound closer to the Harman IEM curve.
In my more productive and lucrative past life, I worked with VMware, both the product and the company. VMware brought virtual servers into the corporate mainstream, where they became an essential tool for enterprise computing.
When I retired, VMware was mostly owned by storage system technology vendor EMC. At the time, Dell was in the process of acquiring EMC, and we were under non-disclosure regarding Michael Dell seeking financial backing from China to close the deal. I assume the loan was settled long ago. VMware is now owned by Broadcom, which is making some painful changes at its new acquisition.
For a time VMware, Cisco Systems, and EMC were in a partnership called VCE, offering pre-configured server/storage/networking packages.
These product offerings made sense at the time, given the complexity of the configurations. A typical IT department, deploying desktop PC’s, making employee badges and replacing laser printer toner cartridges, didn’t have the resources to install and configure VMware with an EMC Storage Area Network. One area I specialized in was Storage Area Networking, a technology that hyper-converged networking has effectively made obsolete. Hyper-converged networking, first used at Amazon, is the foundation of cloud computing, which runs on commodity server hardware. The worst of the complexity is remote to customers, leaving IT departments free to deploy desktop PC’s, make employee badges and replace laser printer toner cartridges.
VCE’s long-term viability quickly faded with the rise of cloud computing, and the partnership was dissolved. On-premises systems continue to be essential for many applications, and yet I have to wonder how much more relevance VMware and EMC have in the corporate IT market.
My job was often fun, and it was certainly always interesting, but I’m glad to be out of it. Life put too many personal challenges in my way to manage both it and what I used to do for work.
For a time VMware, Cisco Systems, and EMC were in a partnership called VCE, offering pre-configured server/storage/networking packages.