Monthly Archives: May 2010

Another Fred Kaplan piece. This one's about how modern technology is changing the way people kill each other.

Years ago, I did my accounting on Quicken. I wasn't wild about it, mostly because it had way too many bells 'n' whistles. I needed something that would…

1. Download my checking account data and credit card activity…
2. Allow me to easily assign categories to each item…
3. Allow me to print out annual reports of each expenditure grouped (and totalled) by each category…

…and that's all. I don't need to track investments or compute interest on a mortgage or budget how much I'll spend on tuna fish over the next fiscal year or manage a pension plan or track the exchange rate of the Norwegian Kroner or anything of the sort. All that stuff gets in the way.

The then-current Quicken (this was long ago) just did too many things for me. When I got an offer to buy Microsoft Money for a pittance, I decided to switch…and it was a little better. It still did way too much I didn't need and seemed unduly clunky for the functions I did need but I liked it more than Quicken…and they were, at the time, about the only two options.

Over the last decade or so, Microsoft Money has added features. I believe the last version can cook an omelet and backwash your Water-Pik. But it's still terribly awkward for what I need…and I'm obviously not the only person unhappy with it. Microsoft has discontinued the program.

So I'm looking around for software that can do the 1-2-3 functions above. I fear Quicken has only gotten more complicated. The other ones I've looked at sure seem to be. I found a program called AceMoney that seemed to be what I wanted but after fiddling with the trial version, I discovered it wouldn't download from some banks — mine, among them — and didn't have a format for the kind of report I wanted, nor will it let you design your own. I also tried GnuCash and Household Accounting and didn't like 'em.

Anyone out there got a suggestion?

Fred Kaplan on how some G.O.P. politicos can't quite wrap their minds around the idea that the Cold War is over. Oddly enough, it seems most often to be the ones who also want to convince everyone of the (I think) dubious premise that Ronald Reagan "won" it.

I'm having some problems with this blog's RSS and Atom feeds. This is one of those areas that's a bit outside my area of software expertise. I'll try to figure it out in the next few days but if anyone reading this knows more than I do about this and is willing to help, drop me a line. Apparently, even though I changed nothing until this morn when I started trying to fix things, it's started to truncate postings and we don't want it should do this.

I have occasionally mentioned a good buddy of mine here named Brad Ellis. Brad is a brilliant musician and we've sometimes written songs together for cartoon shows and for the cabaret acts of mutual friends. You might be interested to know what Brad has been up to lately. In fact, you might discover that you've seen him without knowing it was him. Here's a report.

Nate Silver tells us what really happened in the elections today. Bottom line: A few different Democrats and Republicans will be competing in the November elections. Ignore all that spin where either party claims they creamed the other guys tonight.

Paul Levitz reminds me there's a book coming out that I'm looking forward to reading: 75 Years of DC Comics, the Art of Mythmaking. It's a 650 page tome which they figure to weigh in at 15 pounds, meaning that you may have to be from the planet Krypton in order to lift it. It's from the Taschen publishing firm which does so many snazzy volumes and it will contain over 1,500 illustrations, many of them rare to the extreme, plus a 32,000 word text by Paul on the history of the firm he headed for so long.

I've long found the history of that company to be fascinating (ditto Marvel's), especially if you view it not as the history of a company but of various people involved in a continuity of business. The DC run by Jack Liebowitz didn't have a lot to do with the the DC run by Jenette Kahn, Paul and a few others, nor with the transitional periods before and after. It's easy to miss this as an outsider because you look at what you see of the company, which is its output, and you think, "Well, it's always been the outfit publishing Superman, Batman and Wonder Woman." It's also easy to forget that companies don't make decisions. People do…and sometimes, they're people who won't be there in six months. When Paul and Jenette were in charge, they did an awful lot of things (most of them wise, I think) that their predecessors swore the company would never do. Future managements will probably do a lot of things Paul and Jenette would never have done.

I first worked haltingly for DC in 1970, the midst of a volatile period in their office. Commencing around 1968, most of its management changed, many longtime employees and freelancers departed (many, against their wills) and those who remained nearly all wound up doing different things. Because the place seemed so tumultuous, and also because I was based in Los Angeles and the company wasn't, I never figured I had much of a future with DC…and I didn't, compared to many of my friends who began working for them around then. But somehow, without ever once really seeking work there, I've managed to turn up in their books intermittently for forty years…or about nineteen Wonder Woman makeovers.

In those forty years, I've seen 'em come and go, and seen periods when the folks in charge of the business weren't quite certain what business they were in. So I'm really eager to read this book, especially because Paul understands its history. That's why he's been there so long without repeating it.

Jeffrey Toobin compares Obama to F.D.R. and also talks about court-packing.

Ever since I first learned about the Supreme Court back in Junior High School (I think it was), I've thought that it was an oddly-devised institution in this regard. Everything it does turns on who's on the court at that particular moment and this changes almost because of chance: Who's well? Who's getting too old? One of these days, the luck o' the draw is going to allow some Chief Exec to name a huge chunk of new justices. It might swing the court wildly to the left or wildly to the right…but the losing side will then mount a campaign for term limits or some other alteration that would prevent any president from appointing more than a justice or two per term.

Up at 8, at the computer by 8:10. Had to fix one more technical glitch on the website, then on to scripts which have to be finished pretty soon. They're for a cartoon show we're recording on Monday.

Ate, showered, dressed and made it up to UCLA by 11:30. At 11:50, I phoned Sergio who (I figured out) was doing a panel with Stan Sakai at the Motor City Comic Con near Detroit. If you're near there, go by tomorrow and say howdy to the both of them. I like heckling Sergio when he's in the middle of a panel.

At Noon, I appeared on the stage of the Freud Theater with a wonderful lady named Claudette Sutherland, who was in the original Broadway production of How to Succeed in Business Without Really Trying. A superb revival, about which I still need to rave here, is being performed eight times a week on that stage. As I've mentioned here, on Saturdays, they have these free lectures or seminars or whatever you call them. The idea is to have a noted theatrical scholar lecture on the history of the show…and if they can't find one, they call me. Sometimes, there's an interview of someone who, like Claudette, was there when it started. I had a great time interviewing her and discussing folks she worked with like Frank Loesser, Robert Morse, Bob Fosse, Rudy Vallee and Charles Nelson Reilly.

I'm doing another one of these next Saturday. Not sure yet if Claudette can juggle her schedule and come back or if it'll be just me. I'll let you know when she lets me know.

When it was over, I took Sunset to the 405 North to the 101 North to Encino and only missed the first half hour or so of a wonderful memorial service for our friend Eddie Carroll. I wrote about Eddie here…a dear man who had an awful lot of friends and zero enemies. The place was packed and no one budged even though the speeches totalled about two and a half hours. Eddie knew an awful lot of funny people.

And now I'm back here, locked in until I finish scripts. So once again, I've put the soup can up…just my way of alerting friends that I'm not returning calls or e-mails as rapidly as I should. I won't be posting much here except, of course, when I do this, I always find myself having to stop work and post an obit. Let's see if I can get through this little intense work period without that happening.

This kinda ties in with the next thing I'm going to post here. Greg Grandin is a professor of history at New York University. He discusses how too many people are learning skewed versions of history from advocacy groups and partisans who are not above rewriting it to serve their purposes.

Fred Kaplan says things aren't going as well as we'd like in Afghanistan. Or at least, that's what a Department of Defense report will tell you if you, like Fred and perhaps no one else, will take the time to actually read it.