Comics Publisher Has Lousy Rep with Freelancers
The small comic book publisher Bluewater Productions keeps getting an enormous amount of mainstream media attention for publishing cheezy comics about celebrities and other public figures, like its upcoming biographical book about Facebook founder Mark Zuckerburg:
Bluewater Productions Inc. is doing a "giant-sized" 48-page bio-comic that will explore the question, "Who is the real Mark Zuckerberg?"
The company said it had good success with comics like its "Female Force" series featuring women like Hillary Rodham Clinton, Sarah Palin, Michelle Obama and Oprah Winfrey. The company has done other bio-comics about soccer's David Beckham and singer Lady Gaga.
So, Bluewater believes there's an audience for a $6.99 comic book about Silicon Valley's latest young billionaire, who Forbes magazine says is now worth more than Steve Jobs.
I would pay $6.99 not to get to know the real Zuckerberg.
One thing that the press doesn't report about Bluewater is that the company offers its creators an incredibly lousy contract.
The artists and writers aren't paid any advances, collecting only a royalty if the book meets the contract's definition of a profit. The company has in its short life amassed an impressive collection of disgruntled ex-freelancers. The artist Sean Gordon Murphy, now working with DC Comics on Joe the Barbarian, did his first job for the publisher. He said in an interview, "I never got paid. From what I can tell the owner has published that stuff illegally and is continuing to burn people under a new name, Bluewater."
Chase.Com Website Down for Hours
J.P. Morgan Chase Credit Card customers have been unable to check credit card activity online or pay credit card bills for at least 12 hours Tuesday. Currently, customers trying to log into their accounts on Chase.Com get the message, "This website is temporarily unavailable. We're working quickly to restore access, and we encourage you to log on later. Thanks for your patience."
The site offers customers access to credit card information, checking and online bill paying services. The credit card provider has 16.5 million customers who use its online banking services.
Several customers exchanged information about their experiences on Yahoo Answers. "For what it's worth, I haven't been able to get on it since yesterday. Got different messages," wrote one customer. "First, one about maintenance. Next, one about upgrading their website and now, just an apology and try again soon. Kind of scary when you can't check cc activity. They obviously have a serious problem, routine maintenance does not take that long."
A spokesman for the company contacted by ABC News said that the server outage is due to an unspecified technical problem. No estimate has been provided on when the problem will be resolved and service will be restored.
Gingrich, D'Souza: Obama Has 'Kenyan' Behavior
Although I try to stay out of political discussions on Facebook to avoid harshing anyone's mellow, I couldn't help myself when it came to Newt Gingrich's recent statement that President Obama exhibits "Kenyan, anti-colonial behavior":
Citing a recent Forbes article by Dinesh D'Souza, former House speaker Newt Gingrich tells National Review Online that President Obama may follow a "Kenyan, anti-colonial" worldview.
Gingrich says that D'Souza has made a "stunning insight" into Obama's behavior -- the "most profound insight I have read in the last six years about Barack Obama."
"What if [Obama] is so outside our comprehension, that only if you understand Kenyan, anti-colonial behavior, can you begin to piece together [his actions]?" Gingrich asks. "That is the most accurate, predictive model for his behavior."
This is incredibly ugly rhetoric, given the lack of any rational reason why the president would be described as Kenyan.
Obama was born in Hawaii and lived in the U.S. through age 6. He moved to Indonesia when his stepfather's student visa was revoked by that country, returning at age 10 to Hawaii where he was raised by his maternal grandparents. He lived in the U.S. thereafter, graduating from Columbia and Harvard universities, serving as a state legislator and U.S. senator in Illinois and raising a family in Chicago.
Accusing him of "Kenyan" behavior -- when he's never lived in that African country and had zero relationship with his Kenyan father -- seems like a creative, right-wing intellectual way of calling him an un-American [slur].
The D'Souza article Gingrich likes so much is written to make Obama seem like he's not as American as the rest of us:
Here is a man who spent his formative years -- the first 17 years of his life -- off the American mainland, in Hawaii, Indonesia and Pakistan, with multiple subsequent journeys to Africa.
D'Souza groups Indonesia and Pakistan with the American state of Hawaii, suggesting that for his first 17 years Obama lived in places with exotic foreign values. Alaska isn't part of the mainland either, but I can't imagine he'd make the same insinuation about Sarah Palin. Even better, D'Souza was born in Mumbai, India, and lived there for his first 17 years until coming to the United States through an educational program.
You know this country is a melting pot when a guy who became an American citizen at age 29 can use a national magazine to question whether the president of the United States, who spent all but four years living in this country, is American enough.
Visiting 30 Mosques in 30 Days
Aman Ali and Bassam Tariq are spending Ramadan on a 12,000-mile road trip, visiting mosques across America and writing about their experiences on 30 Mosques in 30 Days. They were interviewed by NPR at the start of the trip:
... a lot of Muslims that live in small communities across the country, whether it be the Midwest, down South or even on the West Coast, they might feel, "I'm the only one going through this struggle. I'm the only kid in school that has a funny name. Or I wear a headscarf -- I'm a Muslim woman -- and I get dirty looks and, you know, people make me feel uncomfortable."
So this is a way to show that we're not the only ones going through our struggles ourselves, you know. Ramadan is a month to bring people together.
One of the first mosques they visited was the Park51 mosque two blocks from Ground Zero.
They made a stop last week here in Jacksonville at the Islamic Center of Northeast Florida on the city's southside.
As they drove to the mosque, they spotted a "hilariously racist" sign for The Sheik, a sandwich shop that describes itself as "Home of the Camel Rider." I've seen that place for years but been afraid to eat there. A CNN.Com reporter accompanying Ali and Tariq was more courageous:
Wayne [Drash] isn't fasting so he decides to go inside and order this place's infamous Camel Rider sandwich. He walks outside showing me what's the sandwich: ham, salami, and American cheese.
"I think this is probably the most American sandwich that you could possibly eat," Wayne says.
If you're as disgusted as I am by the round-the-clock media narrative that Muslims are anti-American subversives who attend "terror mosques," check out Ali and Tariq's excellent adventure.
Do We Believe in Freedom of Religion or Not?
I am one of the 52 percent of Americans who believe that Muslims should be able to build mosques wherever any other people can build houses of worship.
That number should be 100 percent.
When I first heard about the mosque two blocks away from Ground Zero, I thought it was a non-issue. Two city blocks is a long distance. It's not a "Ground Zero Mosque" -- no one called the former tenant the Ground Zero Burlington Coat Factory. The strip club around the corner is not the Ground Zero Strip Club. The community and zoning authorities in Manhattan overwhemlingly approved the project and Faisal Abdul Rauf, the imam in charge of the project, is so respected that Presidents Bush and Obama have sent him to do outreach to international Muslims.
It has been extremely disheartening to watch anti-Muslim fervor sweep the country fed by Fox News, the New York Post and other right-wing media. The people who have fueled this controversy the most, such as the blogger Pamela Geller, are motivated by a fierce hatred of Muslims. They've been telling blatant falsehoods to stir outrage about the project, such as the untrue claim that it was scheduled to open on Sept. 11, 2011. (To give you an idea of Geller's credibility, this frequent Fox News guest has used her blog to spread the claim that President Obama's father is secretly Malcolm X.)
A lot of Republican politicians have opportunistically jumped into this issue, feeding off the media-generated outrage. To my great disappointment, a few Democrats such as Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid have joined them.
There are more than 1.1 billion Muslims in the world and perhaps as many as two million living in the U.S. They're neighbors, coworkers and friends. They serve in our government and in our military. They can be found among the dead on 9/11 and in our national cemeteries. The fact they've been able to worship freely here without interference has been a testament to this country's deep respect for religious freedom.
That may be changing.
The controversy over this mosque has inspired protests against other mosques around the U.S. and legitimized the idea that the U.S. is at war with Islam. In Sheboygan, Wisc., some Muslims who fled persecution elsewhere are afraid to worship here.
If you are one of the Americans who thinks Muslims are the enemy, you're giving Osama Bin Laden the propaganda victory he hoped to achieve with the 9/11 attacks.
Photo credit: The photo of a Detroit mosque was taken by Just Us 3 and is licensed for reuse.
How to Join Kurt Vonnegut's Family
Last June, I began writing my first novel, a thriller about nuclear terrorism. I finished the first draft a month ago and sent two copies to people I know who are avid students of fiction writing. I just got back one copy covered in handwritten notes. The other is still out, Wade Duchene.
When I mailed the manuscript, these were the first two people who had seen the novel aside from my wife Mary. I encouraged the reviewers to be critical, stressing to them that I'm already a published author and understatedly handsome man. My self-esteem is not in jeopardy. They could be brutally honest about weaknesses in the novel. I wanted them to be as tough on the manuscript as the first prospective agent or publisher who pulls it off the slush pile.
This was, of course, a pack of lies.
When I encouraged tough criticism, I only did so in the belief that my novel contained no weaknesses.
Somewhere in the mail, the book acquired some significant flaws. I've been hearing about them at great length over the phone and dutifully taking notes.
Most notably, as it turns out, a man and woman in bloom of first infatuation would not stop to make out when they're minutes from nuclear catastrophe. Even if the man is a decent guy beset by incredibly hard times and she is a beautiful and ballsy college student with corrected vision -- thinly veiled author's wife alert! thinly veiled author's wife alert! -- the imminent death of thousands is a mood killer. It's hard to enjoy having your esophagus grouted by the protagonist's tongue when his skill set is perfectly suited to saving the world.
So I'm now working on the second draft.
One of the things that kept me from writing a novel was the nagging suspicion that I might prove myself a bad novelist. By spending almost 43 years successfully not writing novels, I have kept that dire possibility at bay.
In 1989, Kurt Vonnegut wrote a letter to first-time novelist Mark Lindquist, who had thanked him for being an inspiration. Although Vonnegut makes clear he did not read Lindquist's book, he offers this encouragement:
The fact that you have completed a work of fiction of which you are proud, which you made as good as you could, makes you as close a blood relative as my brother Bernard.
My new goal is to finish the book, making it as good as I could, and become Kurt Vonnegut's blood relative.
Google's bin.clearspring.com Warning Explained
Several web sites I've visited today, including Time Magazine and Planet 107.3, are triggering a malware warning in Google Chrome:
The website at www.planet93.com contains elements from the site bin.clearspring.com, which appears to host malware -- software that can hurt your computer or otherwise operate without your consent. Just visiting a site that contains malware can infect your computer. For detailed information about the problems with these elements, visit the Google Safe Browsing diagnostic page for bin.clearspring.com. Learn more about how to protect yourself from harmful software online.
Twitter users report the same problem on Fast Company and the Chicago Tribune, so it's presumably hitting a lot of media sites. I've encountered these warnings before when a third-party advertising service was hit with a malware attack. Every site using widgets or ads from the domain bin.clearspring.com is probably triggering Google's warning.
A blog post on Clearspring states that their widget delivery network was hit Saturday with a malware attack detected by Google:
We noticed early this morning via Twitter that a large number of folks using Chrome were being warned of malware when visiting sites with Clearspring Launchpad widgets. To summarize the event, our portion of the Content Delivery Network (CDN), the service we use to efficiently host all Clearspring widget internals, was compromised with files that redirected users to a certain malware domain (which we won’t link here). We quickly fixed the issue and are now back to normal operation as far as the CDN is concerned. Because of Google's aggressive malware prevention policy, users may continue to see warnings until Google completes its re-review process. ...
Note that this issue had no affect on the AddThis sharing platform, only on widgets served via the earlier-generation Clearspring Launchpad platform.
When Google thinks a web site may be serving malware, it displays a warning in place of the site. Although it's possible to ignore the warning and continue to the site anyway, that's a monumentally bad idea. Within 24-48 hours, the bin.clearspring.com warning will likely go away if Clearspring has cleared up the problem.
I've never heard of Clearspring before, but letting its servers become infected with malware files and delivering those files on third-party sites is a massive PR disaster. The company also was criticized in a Wall Street Journal piece Saturday for putting 55 different Flash-based tracking cookies on the computers of people who visited Comcast's web site:
Clearspring, based in McLean, Va., says the 55 Flash cookies were a mistake. The company says it no longer uses Flash cookies for tracking.
CEO Hooman Radfar says Clearspring provides software and services to websites at no charge. In exchange, Clearspring collects data on consumers. It plans eventually to sell the data it collects to advertisers, he says, so that site users can be shown "ads that don't suck." Comcast's data won't be used, Clearspring says.
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