So, uh, we've got a nice package for you, too.
Now, do you want me to play this card?
Yeah.
Okay, let's, uh, what's the significance of this now?
Uh, okay, well, this is what we...
We haven't told the horror story yet.
Yeah, this is what people, uh, play, uh, when they're promoting Nuff Said on, on this station.
And we have to listen for something at the end.
Yes, there's something at the end of it.
Okay, let's listen.
People think comic book is nothing, but comic book shoots right across young culture in
America.
It shoots right to the kids.
It hits the, it hits key kids who are decision makers in their groups.
Uh, comic books are read by people who read.
Comic books are commented on by people who think.
They're not, they're not for stupid people, and they're not for ignorant people, and they're
not for non, non-leaders.
They are for everybody, but as, from my experience, they go directly to people who have things
to say, who, who will have things to say in the future.
And the fact that they're being done the way they are, and the fact that they're being
done by people who really care about what's going on in America is, I believe, is gonna
make a difference.
And it's not a small thing that's happening there, and I'm very happy to see it happen.
That was Neil Adams speaking on an early episode of Nuff Said.
To hear a thought-provoking and entertaining discussion on the subject of comics, tune
in every Tuesday night at 10 p.m. for Nuff Said, here on WBAI New York, 99.5 FM.
And visit our website, NuffSaid.net, for our upcoming schedule of guests.
See you there.
Well, I don't know how you did it, Ken, but you're up to $29,150 in the first, uh, couple
of minutes of your show.
That's, that's phenomenal.
That's, that's unbelievable.
And maybe somebody down in the tally room is messing around with the calculator, I don't
know, but, uh...
I think they're adding up maybe the whole day, or the whole evening, or the whole something.
I don't think in 60 seconds, uh, we'll have, we have 29,000 people in what, uh...
Don't underestimate your, your listenership.
But call 212-209-2950.
If you have $29,150 to pledge, by all means, you know...
And that last part of the card you just heard about, uh, and go to our website for our schedule
of upcoming guests, uh, don't go there.
Oh, yeah, right.
Don't go there.
And, uh, there's a lot of people, I suspect people still play this card, and, uh, and
not realizing that NuffSaid.net...
Unless you've changed the sort of guests you have on your program.
No, we haven't.
We haven't.
Well, I mean, it's not that we've never had X-rated, uh, guests on, on the comics.
That's right.
I mean, I, I've written X-rated comics.
Uh, Mercy has drawn them.
There's nothing wrong with it.
I'm not against pornography per se.
It's not NuffSaid.
What I'm against is having our website hijacked and being turned into a, a, uh, site.
It sort of costs us a lot of our credibility.
Hijacked, eh?
It was hijacked, yeah.
I, I would say that's a nice way of putting it.
Um, that's, the Friends of Lulu people, uh, mentioned that, that they, they refer to it as hijacking.
I thought, oh, that's a nice way of putting it.
So I'll, uh, use that word.
It's one of the many links that we had that we have now lost because of what's happened to the website.
And I think it's...
What does NuffSaid have to do with pornography anyway?
Why would somebody take your website and turn it into a porno site called NuffSaid?
Because we got a lot of traffic, I think.
People are going to sites that have a lot of hits and they'll just, uh, say, oh, well, it, it, the thing wears off.
You know, like, you haven't renewed it because nobody was communicating.
No communication was going on.
And suddenly, it was up for sale and anyone could buy it at that point.
And so, oh, this has a lot of hits.
Let's just buy that.
And they'll slap their, their website under your name.
And they've done this to people.
It's been in the paper.
You know, talk about that.
Well, the, the irony is I saw, I saw a lot of the, uh, the, uh, email shooting back and forth that, that Ken was trying to gain, gain control because it had been registered by somebody else.
By, by Edmenji.
Yeah, and, and you were trying to renew it, but you couldn't renew it because you weren't him.
You couldn't contact him.
And they, they, they would just reply with these auto replies.
Yeah.
And you wouldn't ever get any, any satisfaction with trying to pay them.
And what, what was the company that you were trying to pay?
EasySpace.com.
EasySpace.com.
They're a company in England.
Okay.
Maybe this is indication that that's not the kind of company people should register for because if you ever have a problem, they won't respond to you.
Yeah, I, I am wondering, you know, which ones will, but, uh, uh, EasySpace certainly did not.
Mm-hmm.
I've had, you know, I know people say a lot of bad things about network solutions, but when our, our domain got hijacked a couple of years ago because somebody actually figured out a way to fool them because they have no security whatsoever.
That's another issue.
Uh, I finally did reach a person who understood what I was talking about and was able to fix everything.
And that's, there's nothing better than that.
I've also, I've complained about Amazon on the radio and I had a problem with them.
I reached somebody who understood what, you know, how their systems work.
I actually talked to a person at Amazon and they fixed everything.
So if you can actually do that and reach a human being.
Sure.
There's, there's no limit to what they can do.
It's when you, you only reach the computers and you can't get past them that, uh, you just have to suffer.
And suffer is, is, is what you did.
Because.
I am still suffering.
One day, one day it just expired and all of a sudden it belonged to somebody else.
Yeah.
I mean, it, it wouldn't have been as depressing and, uh, angry, uh, if I hadn't been trying to do it correctly.
Mm-hmm.
You know, before the date was up, I was trying to get the website, uh, put into my name instead of Ed's so that I could, you know, renew it.
So I can give them the money to register it.
And they, all they do is, was, uh, send me automated response on how to re-register it if I was the same person.
Mm-hmm.
Uh, and they, they, every, every piece of, of, uh, mail, you know, uh, your new password, they would send to Ed.
Uh, Ed is not even on a computer right now.
Uh, due to, uh, you know, other personal problems.
Mm-hmm.
The, uh, they did send a snail mail, uh, response which, uh, we, which Ed's ex-wife, ex-wife is one of the reasons he's not around.
We got that a few weeks ago, like days after the deadline, weeks after the deadline.
Yeah, I mean, this was, you know, uh.
We didn't get it until weeks, you know, after the deadline.
She received it, you know, weeks after it was supposed to have been renewed in the first place.
And, of course, she didn't know what it was and, oh, it's not important, you know.
Uh.
Uh, but, but the point is that I kept trying to communicate with the actual company who registered it.
Mm-hmm.
And they just got automated response finally, uh, almost, uh, almost 30 days after the registration should have been renewed.
I got somebody saying, well, well, tell Isaac who was the contact person, uh, uh, from them, you know, to change the name from Ed to me.
Mm-hmm.
Which, um, Isaac said he already did.
Mm-hmm.
So it should have been okay, but they didn't have it or, or said they didn't have it.
Or else Isaac did really change it.
I don't know.
I have, I have a tendency to believe Isaac over them since, um, you know, they were being so stupid, uh, and ignorant, uh, before that.
Well, if there's anyone out there, and I know there are a lot of, uh, off-the-hook listeners remaining, uh, who, um, who have expertise and connections and things like that.
If there's anyone out there who might have a solution for this or some way of fixing things or at least coming up with some better ideas to, uh, how to pursue this, uh, maybe a, a, a better site.
I don't know.
Uh, please email us at offthehookothat2600.com.
We'll forward it over to Ken and, uh, maybe we can, uh, figure out a way around this kind of thing.
But this happens all the time.
This happens to a lot of people.
Well, yeah, it's, it's fine for it to happen to a lot of people when it happens to you.
Mm-hmm.
And, and the thing is that most of the people it happens to, I understand people didn't realize about re-registering or whatever.
Um, I realized it.
And I tried to do it correctly.
Uh, when I got a new computer, uh, almost exactly a year ago and it destroyed basically my entire hard drive.
I was trying to make a backup and it overrode everything.
See, that's real pain in my eyes.
That's real.
Yeah, well, I lost, I mean, here I am a professional writer.
Mm-hmm.
And it destroyed all my writing.
There's nothing worse than that.
No worse feeling than losing things.
But I haven't emotionally or psychically recovered from that.
Mm-hmm.
And, and the thing is like, oh, you have to go on, you have to go on.
All that stuff that people always give you when, when you go through this.
Yeah.
And so my going, I said, all right, I'll, you know, do this website.
You know, I have a new computer so I can get a website going.
And I've got, I don't know how many links I've got.
I've got dozens and dozens of links because the comic book community online is, is quite, uh, extensive and quite powerful.
Uh, you know, we've done some wonderful things.
Uh, and it's a wonderful community to be in.
And a lot of people link to, uh, nuffsaid.net.
And including like, uh, the Golden Age of Radio, which is here on Sunday nights.
Yes.
I heard from Max.
You know, Max told me, uh, a, uh, woman was, had her child on her lap, or so she claims.
And, and linked to my site from Max's site.
And up pops.
And up pops a porn site.
Polly and the Porny.
Sounds like George Carlin all over again.
Minister driving with his son and hearing the seven dirty words on the radio.
Yeah.
And whether it's true or not, if, even if it didn't happen in her case, which it probably did.
Uh, it could happen and probably has many cases.
Right.
Uh, you know, the, the Friends of Lulu is an organization to promote comic books by women and for women.
And they linked to the nuffsaid site.
And, uh, got a, a, a CC from somebody who says, uh, you better break that link.
Uh, uh, take my word for it.
Don't go and check it yourself because you're not going to like what you find.
And, and I don't want to be in a position of being anti-pornography.
Mm-hmm.
I'm just anti the company that wouldn't let me re-register my site.
I am anti the company that took it over.
Uh, you know, Isaac said when I was starting to panic, you know, before the thing was up.
He said, oh, there's a grace period.
Don't worry about it.
Well, the grace period, I guess, is 30 days.
You had thought it was 90.
It, it is with Network Solutions.
It's 90 days.
Yeah.
Well, it's, it, it, it was 30 in my case.
Uh, and, and I just couldn't get it.
And I don't know how to get it back.
Uh, I have been, um, despondent for a month now because that's about how long ago this happened.
Now, I don't think, though, there was 30 days where the site didn't belong to anybody.
It seemed to me like one day it belonged to you and one day it belonged to these other people.
Yep.
They snapped it up.
That's basically it.
That's why, that's the hijack part.
Mm-hmm.
Yeah, that's the hijacking part.
Uh, it, it was that quick.
It didn't belong to them and they just took it.
And, uh, Jim Freund, uh, heard about me being despondent about it and called me up trying to help
because he knows, you know, a bit about computers, as you know, since The Hook started on his show.
Absolutely.
And, uh, he looked up who had it.
Uh, and it was a company in the same city that does all the registrations of, uh, of web, of web domains.
So, he said, I know there's a conflict of interest, but there, that conflict of interest exists, so they may have grabbed it.
Because it's a high-traffic site, uh, especially on, on Tuesday nights.
Yeah.
Since the show is at 10.
And a lot of people come in and then they, they will link to whoever I'm talking about.
And a lot of people listen to the show by coming to the Nuffsaid.net site.
We hand out, uh, hundreds of flyers at, at, uh, most conventions telling people to listen to BAI 24 hours a day.
You can go in via our website.
And, uh, I've got articles.
I've got articles on 9-11 and WTO and, and various comic book creators and, and whatever.
Uh, an incredible number of links to various writers and artists.
And that's all gone.
Well, it's not all gone.
It's just isn't reachable.
It's not reachable, yeah.
Right.
Um, and, yeah.
Until you either come up with a new site or, or you, uh, get that name back.
Yeah, and my feeling, it's like after losing my, everything off my hard drive last year and then this happened.
I was like, I don't think I even belong in this computerized future that, that we're living in right now.
And, and this is my feeling about, you know, the future in computers.
But you see, that's the thing.
I don't belong there.
Everybody belongs there.
And everybody has the right to say this is how I want my environment to be.
And, uh, they should not be intimidated by other people who may have more money or more bandwidth or, you know, more connections or anything like that.
Uh, everybody has the right to be there.
Everybody has the right to express themselves.
I can agree with you intellectually, emotionally.
I'm like, oh, that is such bleak.
Well, you know, practically I know when something like this happens.
But, um, the, the thing is to not have these things happen.
To protect ourselves against that somehow.
Yeah, I was trying.
I just have a quick, quick question.
Did you try to pay for the site under your friend's name?
Just send a money order with, with his name on it just so that you could continue to.
No, no I didn't.
I was trying to, to, you know, put the right registration and everything else.
And they weren't giving me that option.
They kept giving me these automated responses.
You know, go to our website and go to this page on the website and you can do this.
I'm like, no, Ed can do this, I can't.
This is the whole reason I am writing to you.
It used to be that you could do that.
You could, um, I know somebody renewed Hotmail a few years ago.
Because they let their, uh, their site lapse.
And somebody actually renewed the site for them.
And that prevented it from falling into someone else's hands.
I don't think you can do that anymore.
It's a, it's a, it's a good service.
No, you have to have the secret code.
And if you don't have the secret code because the person is not available, you're out.
And they'll give you a new secret code, but they send it to the person who did it.
If you're that person.
Which makes sense because then anybody can come in and say,
by the way, I'm now running, you know, IBM.com and, and, and give it to me.
But the thing is if the person who they haven't registered with, in my case Isaac, has changed the name.
But how, okay, you raise a good point.
How would you expect them to believe that you weren't up to no good?
How, how would they verify that?
There's, they have, they're, okay.
Nuffsaid.net is hosted by ctech.org.
Which is itself hosted by 2600.com.
Right?
And so they have the contact name, Ed Menge, of Nuffsaid.net.
And that's registered with Isaac at Ctech.
And so his point was to have changed it from the contact from Ed to me.
And the email address from Ed's to mine.
And, you know, I'm assuming he did that.
And they're supposed to now send everything to me and let me register the darn thing.
Let me give them money.
And they wouldn't take it because they're, they're too busy giving me automated responses.
I wish I had known about this before this happened.
Oh, well.
We'll figure something out.
Do you know how much optimism I have with that sentence?
Let's play the theme.
Yeah, let's play the theme.
Let's play the theme to Nuffsaid.
You still got the radio show.
Yeah, we're going to, you still got the radio show.
I haven't hijacked that.
Can you imagine if pornographers hijacked your radio show?
And we're coming in here every week instead of you.
And you couldn't do anything about it.
All right, we're going to, we're going to play your theme.
And while we play the theme, I'm going to get up and go over to where you are.
You're going to get up and go where I am.
Okay.
And take control of the, of the 50,000 watt radio.
50,000 watt radio station here.
And hopefully people will, you know, your pledges are still at 29,000 and change.
I don't know what's going on down there.
All right, so hopefully people will call in 212-209-2950 as Off The Hook turns into Nuffsaid.
Nuffsaid.
I want to be a comic book hero.
Comic book heroes.
Only.
X-Men, Avengers, Fantastic Four.
I want to be like them.
To save the world, who could ask for more?
I want to be like them.
I want to be a comic book hero.
Wear a fancy costume and a real cup.
I want to be a comic book hero.
Comic book heroes.
Only.
I want to be like them.
I want to be like them.
I want to be like them.
I want to be like them.
I want to be like them.
I want to be like them.
I want to be like them.
I want to be like them.
I want to be like them.
I want to be like them.
I want to be like them.
I want to be like them.
I want to be like them.
I want to be like them.
They're out of reach.
They're real neat.
They're out of reach.
I want to be like them.
I want to be like them.
They're out of reach.
They're out of touch.
They're out of reach.
And you're listening to WBAI 99.5 FM in New York City.
And this is Nuff Said combined with Off the Hook.
And I make that mistake every once in a while.
I just made it again.
Anyway, getting all stressed out just talking about this whole web stuff.
Actually, that was my mistake because I left the CD player in continuous mode instead of single track mode.
Whatever.
It's electronics.
We've had a problem with computers.
Anyway.
Your pledges have changed to zero now.
I just lost $29,000.
Start again.
212-209-2950.
Place to become a member of WBAI FM.
And for $50, you become a member of the station.
You'll be able to vote with the local advisory board
and have a large say on what goes on at this station and at the Pacifica Foundation
that runs all five stations.
So, I mean, that's a pretty powerful amount of say you've got for $50.
And $25 if you're unemployed.
That's participating in your democracy.
That's how democracy is done.
And if you put in an extra $50, you will get a copy of Ted Rawls' To Afghanistan and Back.
He was on our show a couple weeks ago.
He's the one who went to Afghanistan after the war started
and reported on it firsthand.
Talking about some of the lies that you would have heard on commercial television
and replying in great detail to what was going on.
Everybody should read this book.
It was an amazing book.
It was heart-rending.
Talking about the three journalists who he went with who never came back.
Killed by each of the different factions there.
One by the Northern Alliance, one by the Taliban, and one by the U.S. bombs.
They will bomb a journalist convoy.
And the journalists will put the fact that they're journalists on the top of their vans,
thinking that this will keep the U.S. Air Force from bombing these particular cars.
But it doesn't for some reason.
And if a journalist gets injured like the person who got injured by the Taliban bomb,
they're sending supplies from Tajikistan all the time.
And so they go back empty.
And they don't do medical evacuations for journalists.
The man died.
And whose fault is it?
Everybody's fault.
It's amazing the amount of stuff that has happened.
And he documented it both in prose and in comics.
And since he had been to that area of the country several times before,
he knew a little bit more about the customs and the prices of things than the other journalists.
So where CNN got charged $1,400 to go across the border, he got charged $40.
That's a great title for a book, prose and comics.
That is great.
You also get the latest issue of the comic book artists.
Well, not the latest issue.
The best issue.
The Sugar and Spike issue of comic book artists.
Sugar and Spike, I think, is one of the best comics ever made.
It's one of the most brilliant, most clever, and most poignant great statements on just how people are
and how they try to figure out the world.
And comic book artists did a special on Sheldon Mayer who created it.
And that is part of this package.
All of the comic books that Mercy and I published as evolution comics, you will get.
And you get the first printings.
There are second printings.
You'll be getting the firsts.
And you also get an issue of Rex Monday, hard-boiled detective stories, and the film noir.
A lot of stuff.
That's for $100.
An extra $50, $100.
$100 donation to WBAI.
If you can call 212-209-2950.
We take Visa card.
You can pay it over a period of time.
If you can't afford that much, if you just want to show your support for this show and the station, $10, $20, every little bit helps.
We have to keep the machinery going.
We have to pay rent down here on Wall Street to keep the show going so that you get shows like this.
Information.
You will get it.
That's right.
Should I do news?
212-209-2950.
Get those phones ringing.
And let's introduce ourselves.
All of us.
Okay.
I'm Ken Gale.
And I'm Mercy VanVleck.
Manuel Goldstein.
Jeff Flash.
I'm Mike.
I'm Red Bellaclava.
And Porkchop.
Indeed.
So we're combining with the off-the-hook folks and we're going until midnight.
So it would be our normal time.
Yes, it's 10 to 11.
This time we're going all the way to midnight.
And so we're trying to get your support for WBAI-FM.
And right now there are zero calls coming in.
And zero dollars on the tally.
That is completely unacceptable.
Uh-oh.
But it does line up rather nicely.
But we need to fix that.
We need to make it look all crazy.
Every phone call matters.
Every phone call counts.
212-209-2950.
Be our first phone call.
Be our second, our fourth, our tenth.
This is your chance to ruin symmetry.
Something you don't get often.
212-209-2950 in New York City.
And, anyway, why don't we go with our usual news segment that Mercy does every week.
Okay.
The enough said news for May 21st, 2002.
Folks, call in.
That's right.
Comic book artist Tom Sutton was found in his apartment by Massachusetts police on May 1st.
Dead of as yet unannounced causes, he was 65.
For the most part, he eschewed superhero work.
Though he did work on Marvel's Doctor Strange.
He drew an issue of Captain Marvel and inked Warlock.
The Marvel work this writer, Piers Askegren, via Steve Shen, sent us this.
He remembered like best.
It was a pair of stories published in the company's ARGH dark humor comic
featuring a gigantic sentient rat with the mind of a dead gangster on a rampage in New York.
Beautifully drawn.
Mostly he drew horror and science fiction stories
and he drew them in great quantity for whoever would publish them.
He also drew sex comics for fanographics under the Dementia pseudonym
and extensive commercial art for New England ad agencies.
Sutton was fantastically prolific.
Perhaps because of his speed, his work had a busy, sometimes sloppy look to it
and he relied more on expressiveness than tight draftsmanship.
His Charlton stories are especially energetic looking and feature a wide range of technique.
His influences appear to have included E.C. artists Graham Ingalls, Wally Wood, and Jack Davis.
The latter is especially evident in his humor work.
And Robert Kaniger, unfortunately, has also passed away.
He was working for D.C. Comics for years.
He had showed early promise as a writer when his short stories and poetry
began appearing in magazines including The Loyalist and The Bridge in the late 20s.
He won a New York Times Collegiate short story contest in 1932.
And he wrote for popular radio shows including House of Mystery and Cavalcade of America in the 30s.
His earliest comics work was for Fox's Blue Beetle and MLJ Archie
doing Steel, Sterling, and the Web and other titles.
Editor Sheldon Mayer gave Kaniger his first D.C. work in 1946 in Sensation Comics.
Kaniger soon found himself providing scripts for Green Lantern, The Flash, Hawkman, The Atom,
The Justice Society of America, and Wonder Woman,
whose adventures he went on to write for the next 20 years.
In 1946, also saw Kaniger hired as an editor at D.C.
He would remain on staff through 1968, then return again as editor from 72 to 74.
Joe Kubert.
I worked with Bob for about 30 years.
Our collaboration was always terrific for me, and his stories were always great to work on.
He had the ability to write in a way that painted pictures verbally, which made my job easy.
His stuff was so provocative, too.
He permitted me a lot of freedom on the stories we did.
As far as I'm concerned, he was one of a kind.
He wrote Flash comics, Sea Devils, Superman's girlfriend, Lois Lane, for years, Wonder Woman, Metal Man.
He also scripted the first appearance of Barry Allen, The Flash, in Showcase No. 4,
and did a lot of work on Wonder Woman.
Most of all, though, he was a great, great writer in the 40s,
and I thought the quality of his writing went down somewhere in the 50s,
and I always wondered what happened in his life that did that.
He also will be forever identified with war comics.
He brought us G.I. Combat, Our Army at War, Our Fighting Forces.
A lot of the war comics were written by him.
Here's a quote from Kaniger in the pages of 50 Who Made D.C. Great.
I draw from life, from emotion, from personal experience.
That's what makes my stories what they are.
The readers recognize in my books one drive, one thought, one mind.
The stories bear my stamp.
The family asks that in lieu of flowers, donations to the United Jewish Appeal be made in Kaniger's name.
If you'd like to do something in that realm.
I also have a professor who's using comics to teach physics.
This is a professor in Minnesota, at the University of Minnesota.
He's got a selective elective course for freshmen called Science in Comic Books.
Dr. Jim Kakulos says,
The fun lies in pointing out where the comic book writers got the science right
and where they got it wrong.
They've explored Spidey, the explosion of Krypton.
They concluded that Spidey's web is plenty strong enough to swing him from a building or catch a falling heroine.
The comic book says the hero's webbing has the tensile strength of steel.
From that, Kakulos calculated it would support a couple of tons.
For the final exam, history major Kristen Barberi
discussed how much caloric energy the flash would need to circle the globe in 80 seconds.
She said he could never have eaten enough to actually do that.
The Spider-Man movie made movie history with the record-shattering opening weekend for a movie, sequel in 2004.
It's funny you mention about using comics to teach physics
because another man died recently, Stephen Jay Gould.
He used comics to teach.
He did a lecture at the Museum of Natural History
and he was talking about surface area to volume ratios.
He showed slides from various sci-fi movies of the 50s.
Giant tarantulas and giant insects
and people shrinking and becoming giants
and explaining how bad the science was.
Then to show a good use of science in fiction,
he tossed slides of two different comic books on the wall.
One was a Marvel team-up with Spider-Man and Yellow Jacket
where an explosion when Yellow Jacket was very small
pushed him out of the way and he never got hurt by it
because of the force of the explosion pushed him out because he was so small.
That fit right in with his surface area volume ratio.
That was quite accurate.
He couldn't identify Yellow Jacket.
He said, that one's Spider-Man.
It's not Batman. Anybody know who it is?
I'm sitting there waiting.
Is there another comic book fan in the room?
Is there another comic book fan in the room?
I guess there wasn't because I yelled out the thing.
He said, I knew somebody would know. They always do.
The other one was Allegiant Superheroes written by Carrie Bates
where Shrinking Violet was fooled into thinking
she couldn't turn back into large size.
She fell from the table and she realized she was falling
the way she would fall if she were large
which is much more quickly than if you were small
when your surface area is much larger.
He was very impressed with the science in that one.
It turns out his students he was teaching at Harvard
would give him comic books with science in them.
It was so neat that somebody of his caliber
and one of the top scientists of the 20th century
produced using comics in a positive way.
We try to use comics in a positive way here.
Enough said.
We don't use them for evil.
Only for good.
We've got one pledge that has come in.
Thank you for that.
Last time we got an awful lot of pledges
doing our show about Tolkien.
I hope we don't need to do a Tolkien show
for every pledge drive in order to get people
to donate money.
212-209
The man we had as a guest is the person
who writes Videric's The Druid for Evolution Comics
and you will get that with a pledge of $100.
You'll get that, you'll get To Afghanistan and Back,
you'll get Comic Artists, The Shelter Mayor
and Alex Toth issue.
Please call in.
212-209-2950
Can we step in and thank some of the remaining people
from off the hook?
Absolutely.
Great.
Mike and I are going to alternate with the names here
so that we'll do this quickly.
Please give a call.
212-209-2950
We have $50 so far.
We need to expand on that quite a bit.
There's plenty of good material here.
Is your premium still available?
It's still available but we really should focus
on the Enough Said premiums right now.
If you call 212-209-2950
the pledge people will certainly work with you
to get you anything that you want.
One important thing I'd like to stress
is that you have to call for the radio station.
Even if we weren't offering any of these thank you gifts,
your support is what is needed
and that's what you should be feeling,
the need to invest in this place to keep it going
because if it wasn't here you'd be hearing
something else on this frequency instead
and you wouldn't be able to call in and be part of it.
That's very important.
You'd be hearing 5 or 6 songs all the time.
Pretty much.
Same ones over and over.
You'd have no say.
Somewhere, in some place, some office somewhere,
they decide what a hit is going to be
and you have no say in that.
They play the music that they decide you want to hear
and then you go out and you buy it
and you confirm that for them
because you have no other way of expressing yourself.
This is a way of expressing yourself.
212-209-2950
That way you can pledge your support
and keep this show, this station going.
212-209-2950
Let's thank these people.
Let's thank Bernice from Plainfield, New Jersey.
Let's thank Mortimer from Kings Park, New York.
Jeremy from Columbus, Ohio.
And Uzi from Raleigh, North Carolina.
In fact, he was our guest last couple of hours.
He's basically having the Nissan Motor Company
suing him to take his name away
even though his last name is Nissan.
Unbelievable.
He felt strongly enough to actually call back
and pledge for the show after talking to him.
That's a good deal.
But almost as good as Eugene from Montclair, New Jersey.
And Richard from Westchester, Pennsylvania.
All right.
We passed through there, I think.
We're near there.
Okay.
Rob from Jersey City.
Steven from Philadelphia.
And we have Claudia from Morristown.
Mark, again, from Center Reach, New York.
This is the second Center Reach we got in this night.
And Alicia from the city.
This person has...
It's not this person's fault.
It's whoever wrote this.
It looks like Brian, but it's spelled Brayen.
So either one of those.
I'm sorry if it's neither.
From Washington, D.C.
Thanks so much for your pledge.
We have Arthur from Port Washington.
And John from Lincoln, Nebraska.
Goodness.
And one more is Josh from San Rafael, California.
All right.
Still nobody from overseas, but...
Far-reaching.
A good range of the country there.
A thousand miles away.
Yeah.
212-209-2950.
Where are you from?
How much can you spend?
Give us a call.
Yes, we're not competing with the off-the-hook folks,
but we don't want to look this bad.
$50 in total pledges from enough said audience.
You've always done better than that.
So I'd like to see you do better than that again.
And I know there's a lot of you who were not pledging
during the coup on principle.
Well, as they say on the Morse Orthodox show,
now it's time for you to become members
on that very same principle.
So that's 212-209-2950.
So anyway, you were trying to give me some optimism
about this whole website stuff
and how I still should try to be in the online community
and computers are the future and I belong there.
Explain to me why and how I still belong there
when this kind of stuff happens.
If you don't belong there,
somebody else is just going to be there in your place.
They are.
Well, of course, as they are right now, in fact.
I mean, you have every right to be on the Internet
as anyone else does.
You should not be intimidated into not being a part
of what's possibly the greatest invention mankind has ever known
as far as communication.
You're able to reach people all around the planet
with whatever words you choose to put out there.
You're able to have people listen to your radio program
from around the planet.
That's something that is magical.
It's something that could not happen only a few years ago.
Now it is happening,
and it's something that we all must take part in.
Because if we don't take part in it,
the commercial interest will.
With their particular vision,
they'll charge us for everything.
They'll prevent certain things from happening
that need to happen, such as free exchange of information.
They'll quell that.
They'll sue people who try to get around their restrictions.
And we'll all wind up playing by their restrictive rules.
Whereas if we shape the Internet,
if we shape the whole communication devices
that are invented,
all of a sudden you'll have more open source.
You'll have more people that are interested
in the First Amendment
and in just sharing information
for the sake of freedom of speech.
I think you've seen a lot of that on the Internet so far
because the Internet was basically started
by people who believe in this kind of a thing.
If the Internet was started by the same corporations
that are trying to run it into the ground right now,
we'd be looking at a very different animal
than what currently exists.
There is hope, and it's because of institutions,
you know, that have formed from the Internet.
We need to keep that strength going, though.
And the only way to do that is to get more people
such as yourself and many, many others involved.
Don't be intimidated by what goes on in there.
You know, just make your presence known
and don't back down.
That's my advice.
Yeah, when you introduced this, Ken,
you said it was a horror story.
And the horror is not that it's gone
from a comic book site to a porn site.
That's just the underlying sub-theme.
The horror is that it's gone from a site that you had
that was generated toward disseminating your ideas
and feeling about comics to the world
to a site that is crassly commercial
as opposed to just being normally commercial.
And it's important for people to get on the Internet
to present whatever they want to present
for the sake of that.
I mean, I've had fascinating conversations with people
on the street, on the Net,
about all sorts of weird things
that I would not be interested in
if it was just presented to me as a list of topics.
But it was presented in a way that was original and different,
and that's what the Net can do.
By just people coming in and hijacking your site,
and hijacking radio stations across the country,
it takes away from that sort of thing.
It makes us homogenous, inch by inch, acre by acre,
city by city, state by state,
where the Net should allow us to be diverse.
That's right.
212-209-2950.
We had three phone calls just now,
so let's keep that momentum up.
Pledge your support to Nuff Said.
Pledge your support to WEBAI.
Pledge your support to Freedom of Speech and Expression,
and ensure that this place will be here tomorrow
and in the years to come for you to take part in.
I mean, if you've ever taken part in this radio show,
and I think a lot of you listeners have,
you've experienced it in some way,
well, this is a way of investing in that for the future
so that it will be there for you.
We've said this before where, yeah,
WEBAI asks for money several times a year.
It's because we don't ask for money every day,
and what I mean by that is other radio stations,
actually, they don't ask for money.
They just take money every single day from you
because of all the advertisements that must be paid for,
and that goes into advertising budgets
of everything that you buy, everything you buy.
And they don't ask,
would you like to pay to advertise this on Hot 97 or whatever.
No, they don't do that.
They just basically pay that money
and add it to the cost of the product,
and that is a fact of life,
and you wind up paying orders of magnitude more
throughout the course of a year
for those commercial radio stations than you do for this.
That's why it's important to realize
that when we are asking for money,
it's because that's the only source.
You're our only source of funds.
We don't get it from advertisers
because we don't have advertisers.
If we did, the topics here would be profoundly different.
You wouldn't be able to say a lot of the things that you say.
I'm sure that applies even to the world of comic books.
It absolutely does.
If this was a commercial station
and there was a comic book show on it,
the main advertisers would probably be DC and Marvel,
which means that if I were to criticize DC and Marvel,
they'd replace me with some shill who would not.
Go ahead. Criticize DC Comics.
DC and Marvel have something they need to do
to keep their sales up.
They have to give them what they expect,
which means if they push the envelope,
if they are a little bit different,
if they're a little bit more daring,
people are going to go,
well, this isn't what I'm expecting.
The formula is so many pages of characterization,
so many pages of fighting,
and maybe a little imagination if they think about it.
Independent comics don't need to do that.
They can cover any subject,
and they can cover it in any way possible.
DC and Marvel were not published to Afghanistan and back.
That was published by NBM,
which is definitely a much smaller publisher,
and they don't have to worry about the same distributor
DC and Marvel use.
They have a lot of overseas distributors.
They're in a lot of bookstores.
Afghanistan and back, in fact, is a hardback book.
It doesn't look like a comic book at all.
It looks like a hardback, and if you open it,
the first thing you'll see is several pages of prose
because when he was in Afghanistan,
besides doing his weekly column
that appears in The Village Voice and a lot of weeklies,
he was also writing for a newspaper column.
So you get those newspaper columns in this book
as well as all the strips he did while he was there.
It's amazing the parallels at that run
in all the communities that I visit,
including this community right here,
of the independent artist having to struggle
against a monolithic corporate mentality.
And I guess, you know, in the comic book world,
this happens a lot.
I mean, distribution must be a nightmare
if you don't have the backing of certain powerful forces.
Distribution, there's one distributor
that distributes comic books for every comic book shop
in the U.S., Australia, Canada, England,
and several European areas.
One distributor.
And he doesn't like independent comics,
and he won't carry a lot of them.
If he carries a few, he'll dump them
because he wants something to make so much money.
It doesn't matter how much acclaim it gets.
It doesn't matter what kind of statements it makes.
It only matters if it makes a lot of money.
Sounds a lot like commercial radio
where the only thing that matters is money.
And, you know, taking over radio stations
is the order of the day.
You know, this station could be taken over
by Clear Channel tomorrow,
and it wouldn't mean anything to them.
It would just be another acquisition.
It would be, you know, a nightmare
for so many people that we know.
It would be such a monumental event,
but to them it would be nothing.
It would just be, you know, another investment,
another, you know, another series
of financial figures to manage.
That's it. That's all there is to it.
Oh, New York doesn't have a country music station.
We'll put one on.
Oh, it didn't sell.
Okay, we'll just change it to something else tomorrow.
It doesn't matter if it had, you know,
people wanting that music, you know, that minute.
Ah, we'll change it to something else.
And it really doesn't matter.
No, and if nobody called 212-209-2950,
it would make it so much easier
for them to just get away with this kind of thing
because the support wouldn't be there.
But we know the support is there.
People come out in the streets when WBAI is in danger,
and they rally to support us.
They show up at various functions that we have,
and very importantly, they call in
when we ask for their help.
And this is one of those times we ask for their help
because, you know, we're on the air every single week,
every single day, in fact, with different programming.
And that programming exists
because the fundraising makes it possible.
That's why your call is so important now
because this is the fundraising period.
That's why there's not commercials the rest of the year.
Yeah, that's right. That's right.
It's either this or commercials,
and if it's commercials, then we can't do this.
You know, we can't...
By this, I don't mean just asking for money.
I mean talking about the things that you talk about.
212-209-2950. No calls on the line right now.
Please fill up those phone banks.
Now, we were talking about, you know,
the Internet community,
and certainly the comic book community
is very, very strong.
A lot of the slang terms on the Internet,
a lot of the little abbreviations
and the little smiley faces, whatever,
come out of science fiction fandom
and to a lesser extent comic fandom
because science fiction fans were
really involved in the Internet
at the very, very beginning.
You're saying science fiction fans
created smiley faces?
They created the way the little, you know,
the colon, dash, parenthesis.
Yeah, parenthesis.
Things like that was done in science fiction fanzines
and appas before the Internet ever existed.
Why would they do that in comic books?
No, they would do that in fanzines.
In fanzines. Okay.
A fanzine is a magazine by fans for fans.
One of the parts of our premium,
comic book artists, is a fanzine.
It's a magazine by fans.
It's for fans.
Nobody else is going to want to read about,
you know, the life of Sheldon Mayer
except for someone who's a fan of comics
to see what kind of creativity
this guy brought forth to this medium.
And people were doing fanzines for years.
The first app, Amateur Press Alliance,
began in the 1890s,
and the first science fiction app,
it was in the 1930s.
And so they had little print abbreviations
such as the colon, dash, parenthesis,
for a smile,
and then variations of that,
initials like, you know,
H-H-O-K, ha-ha, only kidding,
or some of the other really common initials.
LOL.
LOL for laughing out loud.
Yes, laughing out loud.
Yes, that was in fanzines
at least in the 50s,
probably before that.
L-M-A-O.
Well, let's not get into that so much.
But if we could maybe trace
the etymology of the smiley face,
see what the earliest sighting of it was.
My guess is that it would either be
in a science fiction app
or a science fiction fanzine.
But when? What year?
But when?
I'm not sure.
I know, you know,
I started getting involved in this in the 70s.
Typewriter pictures.
And, you know, it was there then.
Yeah, typewriter pictures.
That's a great way of putting it.
My point is,
I'm sure there's a listener out there
that has this information right now
that's bouncing up and down
saying, I know the answer to this
and wants to express it.
Now, imagine if this show didn't exist.
You couldn't express that, you know?
Well, and it's also, you know,
these initials and these little, you know,
typewriter plays,
it's part of popular culture.
And you don't really learn about popular culture
in any other station but this one.
You know, there's a little bit of it on NPR.
I remember recently hearing a great,
or I shouldn't say a great interview,
an interview with three great comic book creators.
They spent an hour justifying
why they were spending an hour.
To talk about comic books?
And it's like,
you've got some of these,
the best people in this industry right now
together to exchange ideas
and to tell stories.
And they're not.
They're not talking about the creative process.
They're not talking about how they did
some of the wonderful things they did.
And I'm sitting there going,
what are you doing?
Don't, you know.
Five minutes to justify your hour is fine.
But an hour to justify your hour?
Give me a break.
And I'm thinking, you know,
here's a show on comics
going to way more cities
than Nuff Said goes to.
And it's not saying anything.
And I was just, you know, so,
I was just crushed by it.
Because one of those creators
I've tried to get on this show
and he won't come on.
And they had him.
And he didn't say anything.
This is your chance to say something about radio.
About the kind of radio you like to hear.
Please support this show.
212-209-2950.
Give us a call.
And anything you can donate at this point would help.
I mean, if you can donate $100
and get these great premiums
and comic books that we're presenting
and comic books I've worked on,
things I've drawn,
Ken's with the editor on,
Viderig's the juror,
and Green Ghost and Lotus,
which was written by Tom and Mary Beerbohm.
We were just up in Erie visiting them recently.
And you get all that
and sample comic books
for only $100.
Tom and Mary Beerbohm wrote for DC Comics
and they had to do what they were told to do.
Speaking of corporations.
And I heard from Tom's end
some of the conversations with his,
with one of his editors
and it was not a pretty sight.
Tom is one of the most mild-mannered people
you'll ever meet
and you wouldn't know it
by his half of the conversation.
It was amazing
about what they were telling him to do
that had nothing to do with creativity.
But when he worked for Evolution Comics
he got to write what he wanted.
And all I did was,
it was, you know,
as editor,
my job was to make sure it was fun.
You know, exactly how we want it to be fun.
That was his idea.
That was his creativity.
That was his freedom.
Way more than he got from the mainstream.
Of course, I couldn't say that
if there was an advertisement from DC Comics
I simply couldn't put them down.
You know, one person who worked for Marvel
said something in an APA
which went to 50 people
praising Watchmen.
Which might be the best comic book of all time.
And all of a sudden she's censored
by the editor-in-chief of Marvel Comics.
You're not allowed to say anything good
about the competitor.
You know,
and of course what happens
if you never say anything good
about the competitor,
only your own stuff,
you have no credibility.
If she says,
this is good no matter who publishes it
and she says,
this is good
and it's by the company she works for,
you may have a bit of a tendency
to actually believe her
and not think she's being a shill.
And of course the editor-in-chief
didn't get it.
You know, he just saw it as,
wait a minute,
we're in competition with these people
you're not allowed to say nice things.
So that's the difference
between independent thought
and the same thing
with independent radio.
With independent radio
you have to support us.
This is the time we need your help.
People haven't been helping out
because of the coup.
That's over now.
It's back in the hands of the people
and you're part of that.
In order to participate,
we need you to call
212-209-2950
and donate money
if you can help out.
That's definitely what we need right now.
I ran into a lot of people
who just love the Ted Roll Show.
And so now is a chance
for you to get a copy of that book.
It's a hardback book.
It's a gorgeous book.
And you'll get a whole bunch of other things
in the package as well.
For a $100 donation.
NBM donated these copies to WBAI.
Don't insult them by not taking them.
They're going to kind of wonder
if it's worth it
being on this station
and saying anything at all.
So please call 212-209-2950.
If you already have a copy of the book,
I bet you know somebody who'd like it.
And you can buy it
and it's tax deductible.
Which is cool.
How often do you get to buy comic books
and it's tax deductible?
That's pretty cool.
I think we've gotten a bunch of pledges
that haven't been added up yet.
That number has not changed since we started.
Oh, we're getting a call now.
Thank you for that call.
Yes, thanks for the call coming in.
212-209-2950.
Please continue with your calls
and pledge as generously as possible
because every call makes a difference.
And I think that will be proven
at the end of the night
when we see how high the number can be.
212-209-2950.
Two calls on the line.
Thank you for that call.
And there's many people out there.
So please show your support.
Starting out talking about
getting the website hijacked.
I'm not feeling very optimistic about this either.
It's been real hell the last month.
Watching at first the frustration
of trying to renew the website
and not being allowed to, it seemed.
It's almost as if the company who registered
had already received money
from the people who ended up taking it over.
Or threats, I don't know.
I don't know what I can do about it now
and what I could do about it in the future
if I tried this again and it happened again.
Because my reward for doing a good website
that had a lot of traffic
and a lot of people bookmarking
and a lot of people linking to it
was for somebody to go,
ooh, I want that traffic
and just grabbing it.
Jim Freund said that there is a way
to find out every single person
who has linked to my site.
I'm seeing a nodding of the head.
Yeah, you can just go to your summary stats
and find out where they're coming from.
It depends on which program you're using.
But all that information is available.
Depends if it's a log as well.
Yeah, you have to have the site
in order to be able to do that.
Which is under somebody else's name.
Oh, God.
And the site's gone at this point.
Well, we have a question here
as to what exactly you mean
by finding out who's linking to it.
You can go to a search engine
and discover who's linking to a given site.
The code is, or the command to put in
is in the current edition of 2600,
for Google at least.
Huh?
If you go to Google and it's link colon?
I believe the syntax is link colon
and then the URL of the site.
And it will return, as it's hit,
it will return sites that link to you.
Rather than...
And you can do this for all search engines?
Or does it matter?
Google's enough.
Google's the only one.
I know you can do it for Alta Vista in the old days.
We have three calls on the line,
so people like this kind of talk.
Thank you for those calls.
One of the folks whose name I already forgot
is pointing out the page in the latest 2600,
which has a lovely picture of Ben Franklin on the cover.
It's an engraving, yeah.
I think it's been stolen.
I think it's money.
The money was stolen.
The picture was not.
I don't remember Ben Franklin crying on the money,
although he probably should be.
I was squeezing him very tight.
I would be if I were him.
Anyway, Stupid Google Trips is on page 10
and explains how to do just what you just talked about.
So at least I can go back to everybody who linked to me
and tell them what the new link is,
assuming that I bothered with it.
Well, the problem is you get current links,
so some of those people may want to link to naked women.
Well, yeah.
But no, Jim Freund said that there's some sort of a,
he called it a time machine,
where you can go to what the Internet looked like
on a given day.
So I can go to the day before this happened.
It's a little tough to deal with,
and I can't remember what the site is actually called.
Web Archive, I believe.
Yeah, that's it.
I'm not sure if it's .org, .com.
Their site is archive.org.
Not webarchive.org?
No, just archive.org.
Well, I know if you do a search for the Wayback Machine,
which is a name he mentioned.
Under Peabody?
Yes, he mentioned Wayback.
They stole the name from Sherman and Peabody,
the classic cartoon on the Rocky and Bullwinkle shows.
Yeah.
And it will list a given earl as it used to be
every time they changed it.
I know because I had a site that had difficulties
and is now a porn site as well.
And yes, we're looking at it.
It happens.
I feel left out.
None of my sites are porn sites.
Oh, we can hear that.
They will be.
You have a digital camera with you, right?
This is Robin.
Eventually, if you don't touch your site,
eventually it will turn into pornography.
That's like the rule of the Internet.
If you leave it.
If you don't keep an eye on it.
Well, what percentage of the Internet is now pornography?
Oh, what, 95, 96?
Yeah, 596%.
We get so much email that it's just so annoying.
Well, I mean, yeah, I would say most of the spam is pornography.
Russian wives.
Or mortgages.
Like I have a mortgage on my New York City apartment.
And they keep trying to get us to get insurance on our car
that we don't own.
We don't have a car.
We use subways.
You want to insure one of those?
The 6 train maybe?
The Lexington?
I don't know.
Thank you for those calls.
We've got three lines lit up.
We need to line up all the lines to keep this station going.
212-209-2950.
Please call.
Now, this is the first time that Nuff said
and Off the Hook has collaborated, right?
Other than socially.
Well, publicly, yeah.
In front of the public.
I mean, well, when the coup was first over,
I sat in on an Off the Hook show.
And that was the closest thing to a collaboration.
But this is more like, yeah,
we're talking about the internet and comics at the same time.
Well, I had an idea just a few minutes ago,
and I passed a note or two.
But Eric Emanuel, sorry,
you were talking earlier about how,
oh, I've blown something, how...
Talking about pornography?
No, no.
Blown something?
No.
On Freedom Downtime,
once you explain to people the technical aspects,
they get the underlying philosophical and political aspects.
I was thinking,
what better way than a comic book for much of this?
Hacking comics or DCSS comics.
Words and pictures.
Well, it's, you know, the possibilities are out there.
I certainly can't draw, but...
We did a story with Miranda,
where there was a computer involved.
Remember Joseph?
And he was helping her set up her computer,
and that's when she jumped all over.
It was kind of fun.
He enjoyed it.
It was much more active
than just having someone sitting there typing.
She dragged him out of the floor a little bit.
This is something, well,
Mercy and I, I mean,
I mentioned I wrote X-rated comics.
Well, this is actually the only thing
that I wrote that Mercy has drawn
was this X-rated comic book called Miranda
that appeared in Puritan magazine.
And we have this guy sort of wanting Miranda
to teach him life
because he'd spend all his time on the Internet.
And at one point, somebody destroyed a computer.
A shot missed him and shot the computer,
and he went nuts,
because how dare you treat hardware that way?
So he beat them all up.
Yeah.
You're monsters.
And he beats them all up, and she's amazed.
She's like, well, next time somebody's threatening you,
just pretend they're after your computer.
You'll be fine.
She tried to teach him karate and stuff.
It's like, oh, he took the whole place out.
So we've got quite a few donations since then.
Thank you for those calls.
Thank you for supporting WBAI and NUFSAID.
Well, we've got to almost 10% of what Off the Hook put in.
212-209-2950.
Please call and help out WBAI and NUFSAID and Off the Hook
and all these great programs.
If you like Max Schmied, he puts on the show...
Golden Age of Radio.
Golden Age of Radio, which is a lot of fun.
Yeah, things are going slow for him too, but not this slow.
Even if you listen to only one show, only this show,
you should still give money because think of all the people
that only listen to their one particular show.
If they each gave $25, $50 to that show,
it would push BAI into the next time frame.
Right now, because of what happened during that coup
and keep alluding to, this station was just about broke
and we are still not out of debt.
We can now pay for the operations of the station,
but we're still not out of debt and we need your help
in the worst way or in the best way.
A lot of people always say the worst way, right?
If you need help, it should be the best way, yeah.
The best thing you could help with.
Like I said, we were just in Erie, Pennsylvania,
and I actually found a comic book in a supermarket,
which I haven't seen in years.
They've all gone into these specialty shops.
You can't find them anymore.
I actually saw a rack of comics in a giant lion or something.
Whatever.
Giant food store.
I had to watch it when you're checking out
because the lady tried to put the orange juice
right on top of it.
I'm like, give me that.
Don't get it wet.
I have to put that in my purse.
But it was neat to be able to pick a comic book up anywhere
because they have gotten kind of hidden away.
Which used to be the case.
Yeah, I used to get them at the 7-Eleven and the pharmacy.
They don't have 7-Elevens anymore?
Occasionally.
You'll find one here and there.
They're rare.
You have to go to comic book shops.
Yeah.
Enough said.
Listeners know when they pop in
different little 7-Elevens to let us know.
Like the South Shore in Long Island
seems to be a place you can get them.
The Jersey Shore.