The Tease of Things I Don't Need

The Saturday muddle

Friday night went on until nearly dawn, though it was largely frittered away. Much has been and remains on my mind, but none of it's something I want to make into individual blog entries. I'm not even sure I want to write about most of these scattered things.

A sawed-off shotgun burst of these items ranges from the trivial to the weighty, so I'll take a quick sample of them in an ascending order.

Despite having said weeks ago that I'd cancelled my Icons order -- which I'd said because I knew I fully intended to and because I'd already picked up the phone twice to do it only to be interrupted before plugging in the full number, which also meant I'd mentally gone through the process a couple times -- I only did it in actuality Friday morning. Icon USA's business hours make it necessary for me to make these calls during breaks in my weekday workday schedule, and as surely as people will try to reach you while you're hitting the can or out to lunch, picking up the phone is a sure way to invoke the sudden appearance of someone looking for some answers.

The operator I spoke with was not onlyu pleasant, but either the timing was right in her day or we hit it off, because we ended up talking long enough that I had to be the one to back off and bring it to an end. Aside from Katrina and the economic/social waves (probably my final topic in this thread) we did talk about Wizkids, their approach to supply and set size, etc. They've already gotten word that the first wave of shipments (presumably hitting there on Tuesday, though we didn't get into that) will only be 20% of their total order. This irritates them because they know they put in a huge amount of their order nearly four months before the set hits, which really should entitle them to receiving a higher percentage of it up front than all the retailers who only order theirs within the often slightly less than two month window of retail comics shop owners.

Concerns about shipping quantities are something the comics shops themselves are having as they're looking ahead to November's Armor Wars and the Clix Brick program set up to encourage sales at the retail level. "Clix Bricks" are shrink-wrapped, quarter-case groups of 12 boosters which WK is trying to get retailers to pre-sell to customers. The hook as far as the consumer's concerned is that if one buys a brick and gets a store receipt for it along with some form in the brick itself, they can send away for a special clix that won't be available otherwise -- aside from the secondary market, or course. The shops are looking at the situation and are facing a few problems. One, most of their customers can't just throw around $100 or so on a pre-order of something that's on top of their usual comics buys. Two, if they take these pre-orders and order what seems appropriately, what happens when the release day hits and only two of their 10 cases arrives?

The business structure model WK obviously wants them to do is to break those two cases into their eight, component bricks and pass those out to the pre-sale folks and, if there were eight of those people and so the supply is momentarily gone, tell everyone else to wait a week or two for the next wave of shipments. Even if they wrap their minds around this (which, they know, will just drive most of the people who would have bought two, five or so boosters from them into the arms of other, area merchants because they (understandably) want them now, when they're new, there's another possible problem. Suppose ten people fork over cash for the pre-sale bricks and those two cases are still all that come through the first week? The potential for much disappointment and angry people requesting refunds so they can take their money over to a Game Stop or somesuch and buy them during release week is all there.

All small potatoes items, admittedly, but so much of a day's balance is made up of such things, good and ill.

I started a brief comics, sub-post here, thinking I was going to blurt out a few quick comments and then move on (I'd only just gotten the latest shipment last night), but once I was three paragraphs in and already rethinking a hasty reaction, I cut it and pasted it into a Word file for later, so that's a few pellets removed from this scattershot.

Up the scale from there is the growing awareness that I need to make a list of the components make up my monthly nut and see where cuts can be made. Reviewing the horror that our auto insurance billing became when we dropped an old, dead car from the policy and added a much newer vehicle we're paying on (along with some coverage changes my wife made) and looking for alternatives is at the top of the list. Some elements of our cable service would most likely be next, ranging from getting the second digital converter box and its remote out of here and back into their hands, and looking at buying our own cable modem rather than using the one Comcast sent us "free" at the start, which we're paying a "rental" fee for each month. The Devil's in the details, and the Devil has big, sharp, teeth and claws and an appetite that puts a teenager's to shame.

Finally, we come to the national level and the mixture of elements surrounding and being tied to Katrina.

I find I don't have the energy to get into the human tragedy of it all, other than to say that a great deal of the horrors seen this week can be laid at the feet of this administration's policies and awful priorities, and is also in part a reflection of the growing gulf between rich and poor in this country. Most of those who got out of New Orleans did so because they could, most of those who stayed did so because they didn't. They had no car to drive in, no money to spend once they hit the road even if they did have a car, and no place to go. Yes, there were the dim-wittedn folks shooting at police and miliary helicopters, trying to get their attention, and instances of crime and general predation, but that cannot be used as some excuse for what's been allowed to happen.

One peripheral element that bothers me is the way the human suffering and the storm - something we couldn't control - is being used to deflect people from the flat-out fact that oil companies are racking up another banner financial year. Yes, everything from oil platforms to refineries and pipelines have been blasted by the storm, and it's going to have an impact on prices. To use this as an excuse to hit everyon up front this past week with enormous jumps at the pump should be a criminal matter. That gasoline was from oil pumped, shipped, refined, reshipped and distributed weeks and even months earlier. Yes, I accept that the station operators aren't seeing the profits, and those who are part of national chains have no choice but to raise their prices at the demand of the system supplying them, but to characterize what we're seeing as anything but blatant profiteering is wrong. The gasoline we bought on Friday and that we bought the previous Friday was from oil that went through nearly identical price points at nearly the same time. To suddenly re-price it to reflect some loose idea of what the cost of getting gasoline to market over the next few weeks will be -- gasoline we'll also be paying similar, peak prices for -- is double or triple dipping into our wallets.

To see good people swallowing it in the spirit of looking at the wretches in New Orleans and saying they can't bring themselves to complain about an extra dollar at the pump makes me angry. Why not just get us into a default mode of negating any complaints about the lack of affordable healthcare in this country or the lives lost in the Bush administration's march towards a Holy American empire because, well, people are dying of cancer and I can't compare this misery to that?

Those who aren't trying to deny that with misdirections towards infrastructure damage and crude pricess are spouting economist's platitudes about letting the market find its own level, and treating the raised prices as something to help people economize. Bullshit. There's little difference between this and trying to hawk bottles of water to disaster survivors for $20 a pop. The wealthy will joke about the cost and still fill up their boat's engine for their Labor Day weekend lake or river outings, and those who need gasoline to get to and from their jobs will bleed at the pump to do so. Meanwhile, while some of it will be mopped up by repair costs, you can count on the oil companies posting another quarter of record profits.

Back to here and now, though, it's time for me to dig into some work around the house today. That cabinet's not rebuilding itself...