Monthly Archives: May 2021

Another rendition of the "Meet the Flintstones" theme. This one is Patrick Boyle on the guitar…

Another rendition of the "Meet the Flintstones" theme. This one is by Scotty and it may be my favorite so far…

Dog meets ferret.

There is work to be done, to be done. Not much will be posted here until a script gets finished.

Another rendition of the "Meet the Flintstones" theme. This one is from William Gamache, a man who owns at least four t-shirts and I'm not sure how many trombones…

Throughout this annoying Pandemic thing, I've been relying a lot on delivery services. For prepared meals, it's almost always GrubHub or DoorDash and with either, chow usually arrives promptly…but there are the occasional mistakes.

A lady friend is staying with me this weekend and last night, we ordered a batch of Italian food to be delivered by Grubhub. The order arrived in a timely manner but a small pizza we'd ordered was nowhere to be found. I went on the Grubhub app and clicked where you click to report a missing item and instantly, the app told me they were sorry and that the full price of the pizza — $16.00 — was being refunded to my credit card.

There was no option for "No, have someone else bring me my damned pizza" but I guess I could have just ordered it anew if it mattered that much to me. Of course, I'd probably have had to pay another delivery fee of some kind and the deliverer would have deserved a tip. But I was impressed with how immediately I got my refund.

This morning, my friend asked if we could have breakfast delivered from a favorite fast food company. Demonstrating what a wild and free spender I am, I opened the app on my phone and placed an order that came to a whopping $15.00 and, again in a timely manner, it was delivered. This time, the courier was DoorDash.

And this time, the problem was that they delivered the wrong breakfast sandwich. They gave me one that because of my food allergies, I could not eat.

So I went onto the DoorDash app, clicked where you're supposed to click for such an error and this time, the app gave me a perfunctory apology and an offer of $1.81 in credit. This is for a sandwich that cost $4.51.

There are times when you feel silly quibbling over a couple of dollars. And there are times when you feel as a matter of principle, you ought to pursue the couple of dollars. This was the latter. I told the app the offer was not satisfactory and it put me into a "chat" situation. It first asked me to describe the problem and I typed in an explanation. Then it said to wait for one of their representatives to join me in chat so they could resolve the matter to my satisfaction.

So I waited. And I waited. And I waited. Then it dumped me out of chat mode and I had to start over. I entered my explanation again and this time, it only took about two minutes before someone with a female name joined me in chat.

I guess "she" is a person but I also guess "she" is sitting there with a screenful of pre-written responses and "her" job is to just select the appropriate one and maybe fill in a blank or two. But if she does have those pre-written responses, I'm guessing they weren't written by someone for whom English is a first — or maybe even a second language. I am transcribing the following directly off my iPhone screen and not altering any of the grammar. I'm also omitting "her" name so this person does not get scolded or fired…

"SHE": Hi! My name is [REDACTED]. Give me a few seconds to pull up your account info.

"SHE": Thank you for bringing this up to our attention, rest assured that I'll be working with you on this.

"SHE": Hi Mark, thank you so much for contacting us regarding on this issue you had with your order. I understand that this is really frustrating that you have received an incorrect order, and waited and hoping that you'll received your correct order. It makes me sad to hear this happened and you have to deal with the process in extending your time to contact us. No worries I am here to help you.

"SHE": I know you've spent a lot of time and money on this already. Let me make it right.

ME: You can make it right by just refunding me the full price of the item I didn't receive.

"SHE": Yes, Mark, no worries! I am now checking your order from [NAME OF FAST FOOD RESTAURANT]. Please bear with me as I check what is the available option to resolved his issue for you.

"SHE": I'll make sure to do the best I can to straighten things out for you.

"SHE": Thank you so much for your patience.

"SHE": I can issue you $4.51 in DoorDash credits which will be available to use immediately and will automatically apply to your next order, excluding Dasher tip!

"SHE": Please let me know if you would like a refund back to your payment method or a redelivery instead.

ME: The refund will be fine. Thanks.

"SHE": Thank you so much, let me process this for you quickly Mark.

"SHE": One moment please and thank you!

"SHE": I appreciate your patience with us Mark! Just to confirm, you reported that item in your order was not correct and I was able to issue $4.51 back to your original payment method.

"SHE": The pending charge is a temporary hold that won't be processed and will be removed from your original payment method within 3 business days – this timing is set by your bank. You may track the details of your refund on your mobile phone by visiting the "Orders" tab in your app and clicking into the delivery.

"SHE:" Again I apologize for the trouble with this order but I'm glad I was able to help. Have I resolved all your concerns with this order?

ME: Yes, thank you.

"SHE": Thank you so much! We truly value you and I hope that I was able to satisfy you with the help I have provided you. Thank you if everything's all good now, I wish you would have a great day!

"SHE": Stay safe and take care and don't forget to put a smile on your face after a long day. Good bye for now, Mark!

I encounter this more and more these days and I'm betting you do too. You don't know if you're "chatting" with a person or a computer or some unholy amalgam. I'm sure no one is sitting there — wherever the hell "there" is — composing those dissertations from scratch for each customer. But I don't get why they're written so awkwardly and so expansively, like they're trying to waste a lot of my time explaining how they know how maddening it is to have this kind of thing take up my time.

I'm going to guess GrubHub's computer is set to issue an instant refund for any complaint under X dollars or maybe X% of the total order. I've probably paid upwards of a thousand bucks this past year to DoorDash and its computer wanted to haggle with me and see if I'd take $1.81 for my $4.51 undelivered item and then when I wouldn't, it ate up fifteen minutes of my life. But at least it provided me with a blog post that isn't about COVID, Donald Trump or the theme from The Flintstones. So I guess I should be grateful.

This morning, I guested on Comic Book News with Dan Shahin, a popular video podcast. I figured it would be an hour at most and we wound up chatting for close to two-and-a-half hours about Jack Kirby, the way the comic book industry used to operate, Groo the Wanderer, Garfield, some of the famous people I've been fortunate to meet…and not much else. I've promised Dan we can do another one of these soon so we can get to some other topics on his list. If you wanna watch it, here it is — but I'll warn you: It's an awful lot of me…

William Saletan (him again) discusses how the ouster of Liz Cheney from G.O.P. leadership could backfire on Republicans.

I'm seeing a lot of articles about the state of the G.O.P. and its allegiance to Trump and what that means for upcoming elections. They all seem to operate from the premise that Trump's popularity will remain stable; that he will lose no followers and gain no followers. I'm not so sure those assumptions are warranted.

Another rendition of the "Meet the Flintstones" theme. This one is a guitar lesson from Mitch Gissendaner.  Don't worry.  Sooner or later, I have to stop doing this…

• When those Cyber Ninja guys get through counting the vote in Arizona and "prove" Trump won Maricopa County, I want to hire them to "recount" the Emmy vote the year I lost "Best Writing in a Childrens Program" to Mr. Rogers. I'm so sure he cheated.

Startled/shocked to awake this morning to the news that editor-writer David Anthony Kraft had passed away. The saddest thing you may read this week are these words posted on his Facebook page by his wife, Jennifer Bush-Kraft…

For those who didn't know, David and I had been battling COVID pneumonia since April 28th. Yesterday morning, in the wee hours, he was too tired to fight anymore. He died quietly, holding my hand and looking into my eyes.

David, whose age is given as 68 or 69 by various sources, was a writer-editor-publisher-agent-critic. He came into comics in the mid-seventies with a background as a rock music journalist and worked, mainly for Marvel, on dozens of comics and special projects. The comics included The Defenders, Man-Wolf (in Creatures on the Loose), The Savage She-Hulk and Captain America among others. He tapped into his rock experience to script two acclaimed Marvel specials, one telling the life story of The Beatles; the other, an adaptation of the movie, Sgt. Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band.

He also worked for DC and Atlas, and founded Fictioneer Press, which published many acclaimed science-fiction authors and his popular magazines, David Anthony Kraft's Comics Interview and Comics Revue. A very industrious, smart guy.

Others who knew him better than I did can tell you more about him. But I would expect that everything you hear from them will be flattering to the man and express grief over his loss. And here's a reminder that while COVID-19 seems to be going away, it's still taking a lot of good people with it.

In this post, I featured a video by the C.C.H.S. Trombone Choir and I said I didn't have any idea what the "C.C." stands for. Well, I do now. Reader-of-this-site Michael Draine writes that it's the Concord-Carlisle High School in Massachusetts. He says, "That's the high school I briefly attended, and dropped out of. I haven't heard of the Trombone Choir before, though I live one town over from Concord." Boy, you people know everything.

Once again, my buddy Charlie Frye does stuff that I can't do and you can't do…

Republicans appear to be telling Democrats, "If you raise taxes on corporations and top earners, we'll just cut them back when we regain power." As Jonathan Chait notes, this is a true statement even if Democrats don't raise taxes on corporations…

Republicans are going to cut taxes for rich people the next time they hold power, regardless of what Democrats do. Over the last three decades, Republicans have made clear that they believe the perfect response to a slowing economy, a rapidly growing economy, a budget deficit, a budget surplus, war, peace, high inflation, low inflation, or deadly pandemic is to give rich people a nice big tax cut. It's their religion.

So, yes, if Democrats raise taxes on the rich, then Republicans will cut taxes for the rich next time they gain power. For any X, the statement, "If X, then Republicans will cut taxes for the rich next time they gain power" is true.

There are a number of key issues that define the difference between the two major parties. This is a big one. And I'd be very surprised if any prominent Republican would deny it. Some of them would probably be very proud of it.