Jonathan V. Last's Blog, page 53

My Little Pony

A few weeks ago I was looking around ebay FOR NO REASON WHATSOEVER and noticed that a comic which came out just a couple months ago is really hot right now. And it struck me as being a really unlikely candidate for quick price appreciation.

The book was My Little Pony: Friendship Is Magic. And by hot, I mean $130, or $225, or $300 for some of the variant covers.

Yeah.

I couldn’t figure out who was laying down that sort of scratch for My Little Pony books–even crazy parents would top out at $25 on a first-print book for their kid, right?

Then Galley Friend B.D. sent me this story. And it all made sense.

Warning: This is totally, completely, safe for work. But you’re going to need to shower afterwards anyway.

The Atlantic without Megan McArdle

This Atlantic piece on Trader Joe’s and the importance of paying high wages to retail employees isn’t the dumbest thing ever written on the subject. But it’s not the smartest, either. Sample analysis:

Keeping shelves stocked and helping customers find merchandise are key to maximizing sales, and it takes human judgment and people skills to execute those tasks effectively. To see what happens when workers are devalued, look no further than Borders or Circuit City. Both big-box retailers saw sales plummet after staff cutbacks, and both ultimately went bankrupt.

Yup, Borders and Circuit City went bankrupt because they didn’t pay Costco-level wages. There wasn’t anything else happening in their space AMAZONAMAZONAMAZON which disrupted their business models. Come to think of it, low wages are probably what killed Blockbuster, too.

You may recall that Megan McArdle wrote about employee wages and the Costco vs. Wal-Mart question last year. It’s so smart, actually, that it makes you wonder how the Atlantic could even run its piece.

“What to Expect” Update

Two very thoughtful reviews today. The first is Michael Rosen at The American, who is very, very nice to the book. (And who isn’t fooled by Chapter 9–he notices how thin my ideas on How to Fix Everything are.)

The second is Part Deux from Scott Yenor at The Blue Review, in an essay titled “What to Do When No One Is Expecting.” It’s everything you could hope for in terms of applying philosophical seriousness to the bigger questions of policy. Sample awesome:

What is it about religious practice that makes the faithful more likely to resist the modern technological thrust? At least when it comes to life and death, the faithful are more likely to appreciate the limits on human power and to appreciate the gifts that they have been given in life and to see the modern project of controlling nature as much more limited. They may delay pregnancy, but not practice “birth control.” They may plan, but also recognize the limits of their ability to plan. The intractability of children and the burdens of parenthood do not stand as a reproach to the faithful because they do not expect a burden-free life. In fact, the “burdens” of parenthood foster loving, responsible human beings. This view is much more accessible to those who believe, but it is not inaccessible to those who seriously think about the limits of human power and the nature of human life.

Studies show, as Last points out, that parents are generally less happy than non-parents and that their happiness declines with each succeeding child. “Having children,” Last writes, “makes parents less happy” (p. 160). David Hume had said that happiness relates to fecundity, while Last says that fecundity diminishes happiness. I am suggesting that we must understand the poverty of what we often mean by happiness—we seem to mean something like “doing what I want” or “being free from unchosen burdens.” Last concedes (in a footnote) that happiness is not the “virtue to be prized above all others.” Here we need more than a splash of Aristotle. Happiness is indeed the prize, but it must be happiness properly understood. Our poets, aided by our philosophers, must show the poverty of contemporary happiness and the beauty of a more virtuous, responsible, loving happiness.

Any long-term reversal of population decline or, what is more likely, a reversal of the birth dearth depends on the cultivation of such a perspective—an appreciation for the limits of human freedom to redefine our world.

Teh hotness.

Trailer City

I should probably go into lockdown on Star Trek: Into Darkness, because each this latest trailer has raised the bar to probably an unreachable height. But boy, howdy, does it look awesome.

Georgetown and Management Theory

Old Georgetown motto: Hoya Saxa!

New Georgetown motto: Bibbidy, bobbidy, boo!

Matus is in Vegas, and is in nearly Leaving Las Vegas levels of despondency over Georgetown’s latest NCAA bust. In case you missed it, this year’s Hoya squad became just the sixth #2 seed to lose in the opening round of the tournament. In case you’re keeping score at home, since John Thompson III took Georgetown to the Final Four Georgetown has:

* Lost in the second round

* Lost in the first round

* Lost in the first round

* Lost in the first round

* Lost in the second round

*Lost in the first round

Which isn’t so bad except that in each case Georgetown has drastically underperformed its seed. (Get the motto now? They make Cinderellas.)

But even that isn’t so bad. The big problem for Georgetown, as I’ve mentioned before, is that they violated the management theory version of Robert DeNiro’s Ronin rule: Never walk into a relationship you don’t know how to walk out of.

Georgetown can’t fire Thompson because his father still lives in the area and has too much influence with the school and around town. As long as Old Man Thompson is around, Georgetown is stuck in the JTIII business.

Now, if you want to really revel in the rubbernecking, I suggest this thread. (Funnily enough, it seems that explicitly calling for Thompson to be fired is grounds to banning from the Hoya Saxa forum. It’s basically this:

George F’in Will

So what my new column presupposes is, what if the Constitution was a suicide pact?

Mark Steyn on Abortion

What he said.

Gambletron 2000

So how does Vegas know?

Last night’s play-in game between North Carolina A&T and Liberty looked pretty lopsided. NCAT wasn’t very good; with just 15 wins, Liberty might be one of the three worst teams to ever get into the NCAA tournament.

Yet Vegas had the line at +2. WTF? As the Czabe put it, that line stunk.

And what happened? NCAT won. By a point.

No mas

Joel Kotkin piles on Richard Florida. Not for the faint of heart.

Hawkeye

Over the weekend Galley Friend J.T. gushed about Matt Fraction’s Hawkeye. I was pretty skeptical–Fraction has never blown my skirt up and the Fear Itself miniseries was, by the even by the standards of Marvel Event Comics, pretty lackluster.

But my goodness, Hawkeye is something else. The first trade paper just came out and you can get it from Amazon for $10. Go read it. Right now.

I don’t even quite know how to sell the series to you. Tonally, it’s like a cross between Queen & Country and Alias, two of my favorite series in recent years. Only funnier. And the layout is brilliantly inventive. (See here.) Every single page is fresh and bustling with energy. I really can’t say enough about about this book. It’s fantastic.

In trying to find something to compare Hawkeye with, I started thinking about some of the comics I’ve really loved in recent years. And it struck me that while the last 10 years haven’t been a golden age, and there’s been a lot of dreck–there have been a lot of really, really high-quality books. Books that I’ll want to revisit. Just a partial list:

Identity Crisis

Whiteout

Queen & Country

Astonishing X-Men

Runaways

Alias

Incognito

Quesada’s Daredevil “Father”

Batman Noel

This is just off the top of my head and doesn’t include stuff like The Walking Dead that other people love. You probably have your own list.

But here’s the thing: None of these books is groundbreaking in the way that Watchmen and Dark Knight Returns were. But I’d argue that this is a good thing–because it means that the medium has matured enough as a medium that books can make a mark purely in terms of storytelling without having to break molds and do double-duty as paradigm shifters.

They can just tell stories.

Now people have been doing serious story-telling in indie comics for decades. But these aren’t indie books. These are mass-market comics put out, for the most part, by the two dominant houses. That’s amazing progress.