Thursday, February 9, 2012—News and Notes

It’s Thursday, and I’ve no idea what to write today.  So I’m gonna fall back on my favorite old standby, recounting some of the interesting things I’ve read in the news lately.

1.  Over at Slate.com, writer James Sturm recounts Jack Kirby’s struggles with Marvel/Disney over his rights as a creator working under what appears to have been an exceptionally cut-throat work-for-hire deal back during the early 60’s Marvel heyday.  Kirby was working with writer/editor Stan Lee back then, drawing comic pages on the fly based on rough outlines of plots written by Lee.  Kirby’s work using the so-called Marvel method was instrumental both to the long-term success of Marvel as a company and to the specific creative partnership he had with Stan Less.  Or, to put it another way, Kirby worked closely with Lee to create nearly all of Marvel’s now-iconic characters, but in the years since, his heirs have been shut out entirely from the company’s subsequent windfalls based on Kirby’s work.

My personal take on this is that while it’s true that Kirby probably deserves at least co-creator credit for a goodly portion of Marvel’s cash-cow characters, the reality of the situation is that he signed a contract and his heirs now have to live with it.  Like it or lump it, them’s the breaks.  Moreover, Marvel went bankrupt in the 1980s, and their characters—and the financial value that those characters represent—would have gone by the wayside long ago had Marvel as a corporation not made good corporate decisions about their core strengths as a company.  Which is to say that smart business guys—and not Stan Lee of Jack Kirby—made the decision to focus the company on branding and licensing rather than publishing, and it’s that decision that resurrected both the company’s fortunes and the value of most of its properties. 

So yeah, maybe Jack Kirby did come up with the visual designs for some of Marvel’s better characters, and maybe he did help plot some of the iconic stories.  None of that would matter at all today were it not for the success of subsequent corporate decisions made by others in the four decades since that occurred.

2.  Slate also has a pretty interesting graph about national housing inventories.  Essentially, the article’s author notes that between the slow-down of foreclosures and recent buying spurred by finally falling house prices, the country has at last begun to work through its housing backlog—at least at a national level.  The only caveat I’ll add to that is that housing is a distinctly local, non-commoditized market.  Which is to say that specific areas of the country area likely to recover a lot faster than others, and the national averages might therefore not be a good reflection of what’s actually going on in large swathes of the company.

3.  The New York Giants have won the Super Bowl, New York City has held a parade, and now Giants fans and columnists both have begun to slowly turn their attention to next season.  With that in mind, the draft is only a couple of months away, and as it happens, both of the Giants’ starting Tight Ends tore their ACLs during the Super Bowl.  So while that’s not the be-all, end-all of the Giants’ needs heading into the draft, looking for a new Tight End is certainly a good place to start thinking about them. 

Also worth considering: a way to improve the running game.

4.  Rick Santorum won two state caucuses Tuesday night, along with a non-binding primary vote in Missouri.  What’s weird about that, though, is that none of the events actually gave Santorum any delegates, and for that matter, neither did his win in Iowa.  He’s no closer to actually winning the Republican nomination now than he was back when he’d been left for dead by the media back during the summer.  These wins will probably help Santorum with fund-raising, but even that is less important than it used to be given the change in Super-PAC financing rules.

Bottom line, I don’t think anything can stop Mitt Romney from winning the Republican nomination and then getting beaten like a dog in the general.  My prediction is that ten years from now, we’ll be talking about “Obama Republicans” in the same breath as “Reagan Democrats”.  I only hope that we don’t wind up with four more years of legislative gridlock on the budget deficit.

5.  Somebody I’ve never heard of says that Adele is too fat, which is only interesting because I can’t name a single song that Adele sings and yet the news that she’s fat has been printed in nearly every newspaper on the planet.  Seriously… that’s what passes for news these days?  Judging by this picture I pulled out of the Wikipedia’s Commons file, I’d say that it’s been common knowledge since at least 2008.

Adele circa 2008, courtesy of Wikipedia Commons

Seriously, I don’t care one iota about Adele’s weight, but I will say that if it’s your business to sell yourself based on your voice and your looks, you’d do well to make both as classically attractive as possible.

6.  And finally, while the Giants and their fans are ready to move on, the angst is apparently only just beginning in Boston.  Like piranha circling around a wounded shark, Bostonians have targeted their rage on QB Tom Brady’s wife, supermodel Gisele Bundchen.  You’ll recall that Bundchen correctly but impoliticly called out Wes Welker and some of the other Patriot receivers for drops shortly after the Super Bowl, and while that was tacky, I think it was probably a forgivable sin.  She’d just watched her husband lose a second Super Bowl in four years, and if that’s an annoyance and/or a frustration for fans, it’s something else entirely for the one person who’s now got to actually live with the failed perfectionist while he processes the second mind-numbing defeat over the course of the next six months.

This may surprise you, but I feel for Bundchen.  I really do.  What she’s got to look forward to is not a happy thing.  I know that for me, when I have a bad race, I’m miserable to be around for days on end.  And I don’t even race for a living.  For me, it’s a hobby—one of many.  But back when I took it more seriously, the losses sucked even more, to the point where when the Army Swim Team lost to Navy during my plebe year, I was utterly crushed beyond what I know how to describe.  It is no exaggeration to say that I never approached swimming as a sport in the same way ever again, and that was based on a loss we took in a meet in which I won my individual event in what may well have been the best athletic performance of my entire life.  A race that my mother actually mentioned on her death bed, that was how awesome it was.  But still…  as a team we lost, and I was crushed.

For Tom Brady, football is his life.  His whole life.  It’s actually his focus, the thing he cares about most in the world.  And to fail like that twice?  Ouch.  Good God, it actually hurts me to think about what that must feel like.  And Gisele is the one who has to help him pick up the pieces now. 

It’s a tough spot to be in.  So I think we can forgive her a little pique at her husband’s fumble-fingered teammates.