« October 2005 | Main | December 2005 »

November 16, 2005

Lot Auctions server crashed due to high volume

The Lot Auctions server has crashed due to high volume. We're working on the problem and will be extending the comic book auction 24 hours from when we get the server live again.

Posted by Glenn Hauman at 03:56 PM | Comments (0) | TrackBack

November 15, 2005

I Admit It: Bush Was Right

After changing his mind a few times President Bush informed us this war thing was all about bringing democracy to a place that sorely wanted it. Sure, at first I hoped he was talking about Florida and Ohio, but as it turns out he was talking about Iraq.

Among the wondrous improvements Mr. Bush has told us he brought to Iraq was a higher degree of equality among the sexes. Again, I scoffed. I thought that taking women out of the rape rooms and replacing them with men sort of missed the point about rape. But I was premature. It turns out Mr. Bush has indeed brought a greater degree of equality among the sexes, and that’s not easy. After all, the new grand and glorious Iraqi social code guarantees a constitutional theocracy, and women usually don’t make out too well under that form of government.

But I was wrong. George W. Bush has indeed brought a greater degree of sexual equality to Iraq. Let’s face it: before our invasion, the idea of a woman strapping a belt of explosives around her waist and walking with her husband into a hotel wedding celebration and blowing everybody up to, well, some sort of kingdom come was completely unheard of in Iraq. It simply was not done.

Sure, the woman’s bomb didn’t work. But that’s not the fault of President Bush. This is a great victory for Fundamentalist Islamic Iraqi women, and some day Sajida Mubarak Atrous al-Rishawi will get her proper respect as the Susan B. Anthony of her generation. They’ll probably stamp her likeness on their dollar coins in her honor, just as we did here in the United States of America.

It’s a shame that Mr. Bush has dropped this line of reason in favor of preaching from the Ann Coulter hymnal. He should stop and savor the sweet smell of success.

Posted by Mike Gold at 06:23 PM | Comments (8) | TrackBack

A comics commercial break

Hi, I'm Glenn Hauman. As you may know, I'm the site administrator around here, and the assistant editor on Jon Sable and GrimJack. run a website called Lot Auctions, and there's an auction going on now of 30,000+ comics that a lot of you might want to bid on. Every so often, you hear about a collection like this-- now you have a chance to get in on it.

This is the personal collection of a long-time employee of the big-two comics companies (we can't tell you who because of their corporate policy) who has to pay for a college education for his kids-- so he's selling off his entire collection, from Action Comics to Zot!, including complete runs of Avengers, Justice League, Green Lantern, Iron Man, and many others. And just to keep it on topic, there are a lot of books Mike worked on from First and DC alike.

Most books prior to 1975 are VG or better, most books after 1975 are VF or better. Many are in mint condition (read once) and many rare issues are to be found, like the Elseworlds 80 Page Giant that includes Kyle Baker's "Letetia Lerner, Superman's Babysitter" and which was pulped in the United States-- less than 700 copies are suspected to exist.

Covers shown are NOT the actual covers, but used only for display purposes. The collection is available for viewing by appointment, and individual issues are also available for more precise grading information on request. Shipping costs will be paid by the buyer for any and all issues purchased.

Any questions, feel free to ask in comments here or on the Lot Auctions site. Bid heavy-- the more money this auction brings in, the less intrusive ads I have to put on the site to pay for all this bandwidth.

And bid soon-- the auction ends in just over 24 hours.

Posted by Glenn Hauman at 02:43 PM | Comments (0) | TrackBack

November 07, 2005

Damn, Go Buy A Newspaper, Sucker!

There’s a management philosophy called the megaphone effect. Briefly, it means you think you’re talking at a normal pitch but your subordinates will hear it at a louder volume, proportionate to the distance between your lofty position and their toady existence.

Giving our nation’s Dummy-In-Chief the benefit of the doubt, I think Mr. Bush needs to appreciate how the megaphone effect works. He doesn’t seem to have caught onto the fact that he’s only hearing what his subordinates think he wants to hear. That’s the only reasonable explanation of his comment made in Panama City and reported by Reuters on November 7th that, and I quote the President, “we do not torture.”

Here’s the lead paragraph of Tabassum Zakaria’s story: The U.S. government is aggressively taking action to protect Americans from terrorism but “we do not torture,” President Bush said on Monday, responding to criticism of reported secret CIA prisons and the handling of terrorism suspects.

Mr. President, dude, please go buy a newspaper. Even your banker Rupert Murdoch ran photos of the torture committed by the United States of America at Abu Ghraib in his ultra-right wing newspapers and on his überNeo Fox “news” network.

Perhaps you didn’t get tickets to the congressional screenings of the photos and home movies made at Abu Ghraib – the stuff that was so shocking and disgusting your minions had them designated “top secret.” Maybe you haven’t read the reports coming out of our concentration camp at Guantánamo. Maybe you believe we’d schlep our prisoners of non-war to remote ex-Soviet prisons in Eastern Europe and then deny the International Red Cross their right to inspect these facilities simply because we thought they’d enjoy a vacation.

If so, Mr. President, dude, if as you say we do not torture, then why is Vice President Dick Cheney spearheading an effort to have the CIA exempt from Republican Senator John McCain’s bill that would ban torture and inhumane treatment of prisoners? I mean, if we don’t actually need this bill, as you profess, then the United States of America could at least use the public relations boost from passing such a bill.

Even if your buds down the hall don’t plan on honoring it.

Posted by Mike Gold at 04:43 PM | Comments (3) | TrackBack