Hoody hoo!

At least four new episodes of The Powerpuff Girls are coming in September--one every Friday!

Also, Bravo is about to start reruns of The West Wing! Given than nellorat and I didn't start watching until the third season, there are about 40 episodes we haven't seen. Yee ha!

Where California Goes, America Follows

By profession, Mark Evanier is mostly a television comedy writer, but I first became aware of him as a comic-book writer. Then, when he started writing essays in his comics, and, later, as a weekly column for The Comic Buyer's Guide, he became one of my favorite essayists.

He knows a tremendous amount about the comic book artform and industry, has a staggering number of amusing entertainment industry observations and anecdotes, and has a light and deceptively simple style that just goes down easy.

In recent years, like everyone else in the western hemisphere, he's been maintaining a blog. Because Mark is a compulsive writer, it's a slow day in which he posts less than four items. In recent months, he's been making more political comments. I don't always agree with him--I'm more rabidly partisan than he is, or, in the words of someone on rec.arts.sf.fandom recently, "Screw it. This time, I just want to win." For the last couple of weeks, he's been doing a fair amount of good coverage of the insanity of the California gubenatorial recall election. Today, he hits the nail on the head:

And with the concept of recalling someone like Gray Davis comes an even greater means of denying it's over when it's over. Losers are emotionally vulnerable and there will be those who will seek to exploit that vulnerability. Every time someone loses an election, we'll see some opportunistic cash-raiser declaring that the so-called winner is, at best, only momentarily legitimate. They'll say this as they pass the hat to fund the recall. It could become very lucrative to treat duly-elected officials as temps.

We're already partway to this mindset. About twenty seconds after Bill Clinton first won the presidency, some of his detractors were talking of impeachment. This was long before Ms. Lewinsky assumed a kneeling position. They just assumed that if they kept at it long enough, they'd find some means of aborting a Clinton presidency.

One of the things which hasn't gotten nearly enough discussion in the press dismissal of Sid Blumenthal's The Clinton Wars is precisely the degree to which the "war on Clinton" was a Clausewitzian "continuation of politics by other means". The Republicans knew that they couldn't stop Clinton by politics in the old sense--that is, by debate and democracy. Instead, they assigned a hell hound to start digging and not stop until he found (or manufactured) a bone. Or, in the memorable words of 1940s Supreme Court Justice Robert Jackson,

Therein is the most dangerous power of the prosecutor: that he will pick people that he thinks he should get, rather than cases that need to be prosecuted. With the law books filled with a great assortment of crimes, a prosecutor stands a fair chance of finding at least a technical violation of some act on the part of almost anyone. In such a case, it is not a question of discovering the commission of a crime and then looking for the man who has committed it, it is a question of picking the man and then searching the law books, or putting investigators to work, to pin some offense on him.

Of course, Evanier follows up his insight into the new, neverending War on Incumbancy by making the mistake of equating Republican tactics with the totally virtuous and unassailable refusal to acknowledge Bush's election as in any way legitimate.

But if he were perfect, I'd have to kill him.

Subtractive color: Theory and Practice

About half of the basement of our house is a large rec room, which is in turn divided into two sections, forming a lumpy and misshapen L. The back half of the room has an overhead light in the ceiling and is otherwise quite dark, even if the lights are on in the other half of the room.

The bulb burned out in the overhead, and, since replacing the bulb requires climbing up a ladder and balancing, I was tasked to do it. (Arthur used to change all the bulbs, but a mishap atop, and then underneath, a damaged and poorly made ladder just before New Year's Eve 1999 left him with several new joints in his left arm. So now I do it. It's my turn.) So that I wouldn't have to work in near-total darkness, I turned on three decorative bulbs along a shelf--one red, one green, and one blue.

As I was atop the ladder turning the screws which hold the light fixture's faceplate in place, I noticed the shadows of the screwdriver on the ceiling. There were three shadows, one from each of the three widely separated bulbs--no surprise there. However, I would not have predicted that the shadows would not be black, but would instead be visibly colored: magenta, cyan, and yellow.

It's one thing to understand color theory in the abstract. It's another thing entirely to be looking at a bright yellow shadow in a dark room.