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Comics Column #6: Fourteen Capsule Reviews
I thought I'd take a minute to scoop up a big random pile of stuff here and do some old-fashioned reviewing.
Michael Peterson
Photo: Top Shelf Productions
After this columns's previous installment, I thought the format needed a break. My wife and I have a pretty wide-reaching library of comics (and comics-related works) in other media here at the house, and so I thought I'd take a minute to scoop up a big random pile of stuff here and do some old-fashioned reviewing, the way Mama used to do it. Let's see what I could find:
Kill Shakespeare #1, McCreary/Del Col/Belanger, IDW Publishing
Tom Stoppard this isn't.
Prince Hamlet of Denmark is recruited by Richard III and the three witches of Macbeth, who want him to kill an evil (?) sorceror in exchange for the resurrection of his late father. The sorceror's name is not a surprise if you have read the book's title, or indeed, any metafiction ever written.
This comic is off to a bad start just on the basis of its back cover. The high concept pitch may have gotten the book published, but putting "…a dark saga that is Fables meets League of Extraordinary Gentlemen with a dash of Northlanders" in your cover copy is both arrogant and dangerous in the expectations it sets—and in this case does not meet. The first two books in that list offer intriguing twists on the original characters in classic stories, whereas this issue does not promise new insights so much as the sliding around of puzzle pieces.
More interesting is the claim to the third title: I haven't read Brian Wood's Northlanders, but one of the viking epic's draws has been the portrayal of brutal action by a number of strong artists (though their rotation has apparently left some inconsistent story arcs). That seems to be where their claim is leading here, as the first issue is mostly set during the off-scene pirate attack in Hamlet. Unfortunately, the art is workmanlike at best, with no dynamism to the action scene and a limited range of facial expressions. Moreover, the pirate scene adds nothing to the story but "action," and reads more like the two writers had always wanted to see the moment play out.
More petty is the way Rosencrantz and Guildenstern repeat each other's names over and over during their few pages. Were they concerned we would not be able to tell them apart? Seems pointless, as they of course die before the issue is half over. A poor beginning to a series with an idea that could be used in interesting ways under a stronger hand.
Super Spy: The Lost Dossiers, Matt Kindt, Top Shelf Productions
I've previously spoken highly of Matt Kindt's Super Spy, one of that year's strongest graphic novels. This new volume isn't a sequel but a victory lap, a set of DVD bonus features, with some new short stories, sketches, reference photos, etc.
The short stories are notable here for being a bit more experimental than the material in the original—without having to fit into the original's format, Kindt has more room to play around a bit. The "blur your eyes 3D" stereoscopic gimmick falls flat, but one of the book's largest stories, in which you reassemble a set of nonlinear story beats along a map, is genuinely interesting (and fits right in with the theme of my previous article on the book). The highlight of the volume, however, is the annotations for the original text, offering commentary on process.
It's a fun and worthwhile addendum, and for fans of the original a must-purchase, but it would make a poor introduction to Kindt's real strengths, which play out over his long books like Super Spy or 3 Stories.
Justice League: Crisis on Two Earths, Starring William Baldwin, Mark Harmon, Chris Noth, Gina Torres, and James Woods, Warner Bros. Animation
If you get James Woods to play a supervillain, why the holy Hell would you ask him to play the character without emotion? The actor's strengths lie in switching between rage and smarm—even Disney knew that. It's not a question of Woods phoning it in; even in the video game series Kingdom Hearts, reprising his Disney role, he does more heavy lifting than the next six voice actors. No, it's a script decision to recast the evil alternate universe Batman as an emotionless psychopath, and it is a baffling one, not only on a story level (if he's Batman's opposite, he should be decadent, as Grant Morrison's version of this story showed), but also drains all pacing and energy out of the film's third act.
An early-in-their-career Justice League (Superman, Batman, Wonder Woman, Flash, Green Lantern, and Martian Manhunter) come into conflict with an alternate universe in which evil versions of themselves are holding the world hostage. They travel to the mirror universe and do battle. Not much else happens. Dwayne McDuffie is a strong writer, and he had a hand in many memorable episodes of the Justice League animated show, but this feature-length DVD film is spectacle from beginning to end. The Martian Manhunter is given a romantic subplot, but not until partway into the second act, and many of the characters remain as ciphers. Many of the straight-to-DVD films that DC has put out in the last few years have been lazy, but this one, based on a classic story and with the potential for an examination of moral relativism, is particularly frustrating.
There are highlight moments; Gina Torres as Superwoman, the evil Wonder Woman analogue, vamps it up and appears to be having more fun than the rest of the cast. And superhero fans get a good laugh out of which character is U.S. President in the mirror universe. But the film is largely forgettable, except perhaps for a climax which suddenly shifts in tone and has Batman straight-up commit murder against an opponent when it's arguably unnecessary, which is difficult to swallow.
Speaking of decadence, the DVD contains a featurette with DC staffers patting themselves on the back regarding a series of poor choices and embarrassing stories over the last few years. It's telling that they choose to celebrate their retrograde choices on the same disc as a film which reverts its heroes from the original, beloved animated incarnations of particular heroes (the Wally West Flash, the John Stewart Green Lantern) to the bland earlier versions that the supposed wider audience of an animated film would have no connection to.
The film also comes with a short based on The Spectre, largely a snoozer only worth mentioning because it used an iteration of the character that hasn't existed in years—the current Spectre's human host is an African-American man, and it's clear that they went with the older character to support a lazy noir pastiche, but it speaks to a larger whitewashing of DC Comics that has been under discussion lately. Draw your own conclusions.
Our Sentence is Up: Seeing Grant Morrison's "The Invisibles," Patrick Meaney, Sequart Research & Literacy Organization
I'm not entirely clear what Sequart is doing with these volumes. This is the second one they've done focusing on the work of Grant Morrison, and while this one is a stark improvement over the previous (Grant Morrison: The Early Years), it's a bit of a mess.
Sequart has a laudable goal. From their website:
"Sequart Research & Literacy Organization is a non-profit organization devoted to promoting comic books as a legitimate artform. Our mission is twofold. First, we promote research into comics-related topics, publishing books and other materials that encourage comics scholarship. Second, we promote comics literacy by promoting the medium itself and encouraging others to experience the unique artform known as comic books."
Unfortunately, this volume, like its previous on Morrison (the only ones I've read thus far), is only approaching these ideas in a roundabout fashion. "Research" implies a level of formalism, but of course there are no citations—indeed, there is very little in reference to secondary sources at all. This is commentary, by a fan (Meaney is also directing a Morrison documentary through Sequart), and reads like one.
The book is formatted one issue at a time, and consists of a great deal of plot summary, with interspersed analysis. Some of the analysis is strong, and there's an awareness of how these themes tie into Morrison's other works. That's solid. However, the extent to which the stories are summarized feels greatly like padding—this is a book analyzing a single comic series, and people who would pick up such a volume are going to have read the series in question.
The book has a great deal of merit, but needs a much stronger editorial hand. The previous book about The Invisibles, Patrick Neighly and Kereth Cowe-Spigai's Anarchy for the Masses: An Underground Guide to The Invisibles, was derided in some fan circles, and it's easy to see why, as that book featured a lot of opinion on particular stories and plot twists, opinion which doesn't really fit a guide that offers analysis and supplemental reading. Unfortunately, Meaney suffers from the same problem, and a lot of "this issue really moved me" and "this one is my favorite" slips in, as well as a lot of opinion on recent American politics, which makes the volume feel like a collected set of blog entries. The former volume's explication often went so basic as to be condescending (it explains to the audience who John Lennon is), whereas Meaney sometimes assumes you know a little too much. Both volumes offer explanations of different ideas, and each offers some theories that the other doesn't, and one can imagine that a good editor could probably merge the two books into one better one, with a bit less plot regurgitation.
The Invisibles is a complex work, and it's nice to see more books looking back on it not only as its own book, but how it fits into Morrison's oeuvre. However, the book isn't strong enough to "promote comics literacy" or serve as a text on its subject of analysis. Sequart is going to have to diversify their subjects—and their authors—if they want to serve their mission statement.
Mirror's Edge, Pratchett/Smith, DC Wildstorm
When my wife picked this book up, she was not aware that it was based on the game for the Playstation 3. The game, which I haven't played, received criticism for (among other things) poorly conveying the dystopian story that underpins the mechanics. The setting is an Orwellian nightmare city where all communication is controlled except for messengers who scale the roofs and balconies Parkour-style. The graphic novel is an attempt to clear up the game's backstory, which would be great if said backstory wasn't paper-thin and cliche.
Faith (groan) is a new "Runner" with an older mentor and parental issues, and a sister who has joined the enemy police. She learns that her absent father is still around and is a target of the enemy, and in rescuing him comes face to face with the truth about who her parents really were. A very bland set of revelations telegraphed miles in advance.
The book's art style is appropriate: when conveying Faith's acrobatics and feats of balance in the air, there is a great sense of motion and a lot of money shot poses of her "cool moves," but whenever details are to come into focus, things collapse. Most egregious may be the portrayal of a seedy strip club bar, which looks airy and spotless, even as Faith is revolted at how sadly it's fallen from its days as a charming pub hangout. It took a second time rereading the scene to even understand that it was supposed to be a strip club. The book is a style over substance exercise without half the style to support it.
Lunch Lady and the Cyborg Substitute, Jarrett J. Krosoczka, Knopf (Random House)
At C2E2, the new Chicago convention, they were handing out a pile of these little graphic novels for kids. They're cute, the quality varies of course, but this one may have been the most fun, casting school lunch ladies as super spies with an array of cafeteria-themed gadgets. They all have a monochrome-with-one-accent style, in this case yellow, and Krosoczka's cartooning is expressive and simple. It was an enjoyable enough little breeze, though I wonder if it's quite charming enough for children to re-read.
The evil plot the lunch ladies must foil involves a science teacher replacing the other teachers in school with cyborg substitutes who are no fun, so that he'll become the favorite teacher. Which is silly enough, except…I don't know, casting the fun teacher as the villain and the other teachers as possible slaves of said villain kind of gives the wrong idea, doesn't it? Probably just me.
G.I.Joe #155 1/2, Hama/Padilla, IDW Publishing
May First was this year's Free Comic Book Day, an annual event timed to coincide with a major superhero film release, in which the publishers give out free books to encourage comic shopping. Comic shop patronage goes up a little, there are sales and signings and events—it is virtually the only time that I see kids visit comic book retail stores in Chicago. This year's batch of freebies may have been one of the most cynical collections yet, overall. There were still some fun releases, but the ratio of give-aways that were not even comics, but collections of advertisements and checklists, was higher than ever.
One of the releases was this prelude to a new ongoing G.I.Joe series, reuniting Larry Hama with the property that he built single-handed at Marvel in the 1980s. Hama's actual military experience always lent the original title a surprising realism that battled tooth and claw with increasingly ridiculous characters and equipment that were dictated by Hasbro in the book's service as a toy advertisement (Hama always did a better job with his property than the Transformers writers did, sadly).
Nostalgia's newest hold on the superhero comics business has been the institution of a series of books where creators are given their own title to continue formative runs of their work from decades earlier. Chris Claremont, who is almost single-handedly responsible for the X-Men as we view them in the modern day, has come back to continue his original story in X-Men Forever, and that book has inspired a number of other Forever spin-offs with other creative teams. Hama's return to G.I.Joe is in this vein, and so it's destined to suffer a similar problem that the other books in this style already have: that is, it's been decades, the world has changed, the characters have been used since, and there's no such thing as a "perfect reset."
This prologue issue involves perpetual antagonists COBRA putting a secret government agency in their back pocket (written for maximum current political commentary) and a catch-up on the status quo vis-à-vis their perpetual infighting and frequent brainwashing of each other. It's decent enough material, but everything is off by just a degree or two, as Hama's style has changed naturally over the years. The dialogue is off just that little bit (Destro and The Baroness, two of Hama's pet characters, suffer the most here, and a confrontation between two other characters is awkward given their long history rubbing up against the aforementioned brainwashing). The art is competent but boring—the original title's run had some talented artists and some hackwork, and this falls closer to the "talented" side, with solid figurework that move naturally, but the action sequences are a little perfunctory and have little pop to them.
For a freebie leading into the story, it's fair work but doesn't fully entice. You don't get any more sense of how the series is going to work than you would have without it.
Krazy Kat (A Novel), Jay Cantor, Vintage (Random House)
Cantor's more recent novel. Great Neck, also dealt with comics; the revolutions of the 1960s and 70s were partially framed in terms of a fictitious underground comic and its characters as superheroes, with only a cursory glance at the actual comics industry of its time. The book was well-crafted but largely an exercise in miserablism. There was, however, one really brilliant comics-related moment: the suggestion that the darker and more comparatively realistic twinge to superheroism in the wake of the birth of Marvel Comics in the 60s was a way of sublimating the pre-Code subversiveness (a parallel drawn between the silver age self-loathing hero and the shift in American Judaism to self-loathing is less solidly-delivered).
This book, though, in which legendary comic strip characters Krazy and Ignatz witness the first atomic detonation (Coconino country being not all that far from Oppenheimer's test) and subsequently awaken to their status as characters, tears me in two ways. There are flourishes of genius and equal slogs of trite, but that also seems to be somewhat purposeful.
I asked Jog, sharpest man in comics, for his opinion on the book on Twitter:
"Yep—it's both kind of interesting and crashingly obvious, very much the product of some inherent whoop-de-doo whimsy, assumed from dragging cartoon characters into elaborated sexual and political personae. A little condescending. But some decent ideas…felt like a modern superhero revamp to me, a 'rethink' that's more common, reflexive now."
He's a very prideful author, to be sure. And he does seem to know the material, Tiger Tea and all. I think that, as precious as some of the individual ideas are, the satire of using critique to justify "low art" worked at large. He's playing with two conflicting ideas, that by dissecting and postmodernizing the characters, they become "rounded," versus their "less-rounded" nature being what allows criticism in the first place. But he inherently segregates into "high art" and "low art" to make his argument in the first place, which mucks it all up and raises the question: is this exercise because Krazy and Ignatz are iconic, or because as comic strip characters, they're simplistic enough to fuck with? The "love them" versus "using them" argument then overpowers a lot of what he's trying to do. It's a fascinating book, even if it's not a perfect one by any means.
Unknown Soldier Vol. 1, Haunted House, Dysart/Ponticelli, DC Vertigo
Dr. Lwanga Moses, Ugandan expatriate, returns to his homeland to provide humanitarian aid in 2002. However, the enormity of the situation there quickly tries his pacifist stance, and awakens something buried deep inside him, an unstoppable soldier bred to destroy everything in its path. Moses, at war with himself, attempts to use these sudden and surprising skills to fight a one-man war against an entire nation's suffering, even as the C.I.A. roll into Uganda to follow up on an old project.
The story is meticulously researched, well-scripted, and is unflinching in its portrayal of Uganda. The art's scratchy, dirty style is visceral and portrays the violence as ugly while still conveying the skill of "The Unknown Soldier." It's a brilliant book, except that its very premise is controversial and difficult. A drama set in war-torn Uganda is enough without the genre trappings that no doubt helped get it published (the character's name and bandaged face mark it as a new iteration of a DC-owned war character dating back to decades ago). The mystery of what has been done to Moses and why he has these skills is well-conveyed and engaging, but in the face of the rest of the book, it trips things up. The painstaking realism dry heaves whenever Moses lets his persona take over and moves about like a superman, and speaks to the Twilight Zone that is mainstream comic books.
That said, in its final pages, Dysart attempts to lay out a way of making the two books that he's writing here dovetail into one ethical examination. Moses declares his new statement of purpose, his one man war, and a supporting character states the obvious: "But that means declaring war against an army of demoralized children." Uganda has no action movie fix to its problems, and Dysart clearly wants to get at that, and in the process he may along the way offer trenchant critique on the American desire for a fictional solution to problems they don't want to pay attention to. Unfortunately, he has a long and difficult road ahead of him if he's going to get anywhere with it, and despite the story's strengths, it may in the end prove too difficult, considering the cognitive dissonance that the book has thus far provided.
Sparta USA #1, Lapham/Timmons, DC Wildstorm
This wasn't a Free Comic Book Day release, per se, but some of the local comic shops were giving away #1 issues of a number of recent titles, which tends to be far more useful for publishers than the specially-targeted crossover advertisements that they ship out for that event. Chicago Comics, I know, was handing out first issues for the Morrison/Phillips mini Joe the Barbarian, a beautifully-drawn fantasy comic that at its halfway point is only just barely now hinting at the idea of thematic layering, and for the Ba/Moon Daytripper, in which the twin brothers (new favored sons of pop mainstream comics) do a riff on the magical realist novels of their South American heritage—their gifted linework only somewhat masking the triteness of their "carpe diem" storytelling.
But this one I hadn't read, and David Lapham built up so much credit (which he is burning through rapidly) as the creator of Stray Bullets, still a landmark for crime fiction in comics, that it was worth a read… I missed Lapham's last book, Young Liars, which had a pretty even split with readers, who only apparently agreed on the word "crazy" as a descriptor. It seems equally relevant here, if not moreso.
The story is apparently about a not-so-idyllic small town under the control of a blue-skinned man named The Maestro. The residents seem under the impression that they are living the American dream, but the only resident to leave the town borders has returned (with red skin) to tell them that "America" does not exist and that he has returned to free them. The opening pages that establish the community are full of blunt-object political commentary, overly cynical about red state ideals, which makes the flipped skin color of the two opposing forces the only interesting twist. Most of the first issue is concerned with a power struggle between residents whom we've yet to actually meet—little of Lapham's economical storytelling seems in play here, and the characters are all ciphers.
But, of course, the most off-putting detail to the book is the one which has come up with every review. Photo refrencing versus tracing versus original figure drawing is an argument that could easily fill a column on its own, and anyone that does care about that argument should be reading Dave Sim's Glamourpuss for a look at how all this got started and also so confused; but all of that dialogue falters before the simple fact that the hero (?) of Sparta USA looks like Colin Farrell and it's distracting me from the story. I don't know if everyone here knows that a big part of the reason for casting Samuel L. Jackson as Nick Fury in these Marvel movies is because writer Mark (Kick-Ass) Millar deliberately based his new Nick Fury on Jackson, and that everyone viewed it as (A) distracting, (B) a shameless attempt to get him interested and subsequently cast, until it actually worked. As many comic artists become less and less concerned with hiding which actors they're referencing, we're only going to see more of these books, which are unreadable because we're all too busy trying to figure out if they're just movie pitches in comic form or comic stories with lazy artists.
With a writer like Lapham supposedly steering this project, we should be able to expect better.
Fullmetal Alchemist Vol. 20-22, Hiromu Arakawa, Viz Media
We just caught up on these here at home, after a prolonged period when we couldn't find volumes without ordering online—which I thought was strange, since this series has always been a phenomenon here in the States, and even now is enjoying a resurgence due to a brand new anime series.
That said, the extended break from this series did it no favors with me. I'd always been a bit surprised with how much I ended up enjoying this manga series, about state-controlled "alchemists" (their use of the term "alchemy" basically gives it an all new definition) at war with a group of homunculi based on the seven deadly sins. It comes, I think, from an adolescence spent soaked in console RPG video games—the title was originally published in Square Enix's manga magazine, and reads very much like a manga conceived as an RPG in print (one of many reasons that it's so baffling how bad Squeenix's game adaptations of the series have been to date). Protagonists and characters who could easily be called "NPC's" slide around the board into various configurations, engage in short skirmishes before a "boss battle" in which someone is finally killed off. The early volumes were especially notable for this, as main characters Edward and Alphonse Elric would go to a new town on the world map and get tangled up in a new conflict which fed back to the main plot—there was even Squeenix's favorite Final Fantasy staple, the battle aboard a train. Contrasted with many of the popular shonen titles, Fullmetal Alchemistwas also notable for having protagonists who were not concerned with being the best at their particular field, except insofar as an increase in their abilities might aid their quest for a more concrete and identifiable goal, the restoration of their own bodies.
As the series enters its last act, however, the building sense of menace is starting to give way. So many characters need page time, and the political maneuverings which gave the earlier arcs needed grounding have now created so many double- and triple-agents, that no time is given for any particular event to breathe, which is unusual in a genre that usually runs overlong in order to let things play out. And indeed, there's something very Western in the way Arakawa tells the story. The panel-to-panel and page-to-page pacing rarely slows for action, the way it would in traditional shonen: pages flow vertically, rather than straight-shot horizontally.
To steal a remark from Jog, talking about a different manga:
…for youth-targeted genre manga of this type, panel-to-panel flow is crucial to the expression of action. Time is dilated to a considerable extent, while place dissolves into temporary lines and partial white void, pliable in much the same way as the emotive character cartooning typical to Japanese comics. Of course, manga like this also benefits from a fairly secure industry allowing for long, steady serialization of self-contained stories (and proctoring the assistant-stocked studio setup often necessary for continuous production), which encourages the use of page space for stretched time; even at the height of the 'decompression' popular half a decade ago in Marvel comics, the effect of wide panels and bleeding pages was primarily the conveyance of enormity.
And "enormity" is the only thing Arakawa will pause for, the earth erupting due to a well-timed spell or a villain's transformation to a giant lizard creature. In earlier volumes, this technique (along with making it very approachable for Western audiences) allows Arakawa to have some grace notes with regards to character and dialogue, but in the ramp-up to the final battle, all that's left is exposition and witty rejoinders, and so Fullmetal Alchemist reads more than ever before like an American superhero comic, with all the attendant strengths and weaknesses.
Long-running series of this type usually creak at this stage, however, between the final moments of character growth and the action climax, when characters and plots get juggled around. Arakawa has plenty of time (and pages) to bring things to a conclusion worthy of the book's earlier volumes. However, there is a sense that the mangaka may have gotten tired, maybe frustrated at having the anime lap the book twice over now (Yoshiyuki Sadamoto, still working on the original Evangelion manga adaptation, could relate, I'd think), and while the series has been on the whole reliably entertaining, there may in the end be nothing to the book as clever as the original two character designs, for the two Elric brothers, still one of the smartest designs in recent shonen history.
Problem Sleuth, Volume 1: "Compensation, Adequate," Andrew Hussie, Topatoco
MSPaint Adventures may be one of the most consistently reliable, enjoyable sources of humor and entertainment on the internet; and the level of craft that Hussie now displays on an almost-daily basis (he updates more often and regularly than most any other cartoonist I can name, but he's been understandably intermittent of late due to concerns out in the "real world") belies the bad-on-purpose aesthetic that his website's title would imply, a title which was initially far more accurate, if almost never literally true. The only thing that might trip him up a little bit is the argument some quarters might forward, which would be that maybe what he's doing isn't actually "comics" at all.
This sort of defining for defining's sake always leads too far off the road for me, this "what is comics and what is not," it's just not all that useful except when you're looking to exclude things. That said, Hussie's projects on that site have consistently poked at the boundaries of the form, for the most part without much thought or recrimination. The style of MSPaint Adventures is to mimic, to some degree or another, the old-style graphic "point and click" adventure PC games of the previous generation. An individual panel represents, to some greater or lesser degree, the window that would contain the game screen, and so the majority of the time there is only one panel on screen at a given time (which an orthodox proponent of McCloud's definition of comics would immediately raise as a red flag). More interesting has been his intermittent use of multimedia.
A friend and I once went to a talk where Ivan Brunetti (a cartoonist who gets to sit at the table) scoffed at the idea that comics were flourishing on the web—this was a couple of years ago, but not that many, before some trends but well after some others—and he said a thing that we've always found funny, that he literally could not conceive of doing a comic online without adding in sound, animation, etc, that the temptation would be too great and that no cartoonist, unequivocally, would be able to resist that impulse. That Chris Onstad's Achewood has now largely been accepted into the canon means there's a readily-available single example out of the trillions to hold up (second place being, I suppose, Penny Arcade, not for the artistic merit or lack thereof but merely for the sheer size of its phenomenon) as proof that Brunetti was being a characteristic crank. But some cartoonists have been probing those regions, either as deliberate experimentation or just for the sake of their particular story. At this point, Hussie's current comic Homestuck, midway through serialization on the site, has contained not only animated gifs and embedded music, but full animated Flash sequences, interactive battle sequences, embedded minigames, and in a few instances full-fledged game sequences which can take up to an hour to explore while still representing a single "panel."
There were minor animated images in his earlier works, but the real root of this style came in Hussie's year-long epic Problem Sleuth, the (ostensible) story of a detective who has locked himself in his own office and requires the reader to assist him escape through the solving of Sierra/LucasArts-style adventure puzzles. Hussie's more deliberate experimentations have involved varying degrees of reader input, and in the case of Problem Sleuth, virtually every "game command" which would lead to a new panel was provided by the readers. It's very silly, of course, and part of the appeal is watching Hussie dance with the readers as they each try to foul the other up. Homestuck is deeper, and relies upon actual characters, and is an all-around more satisfying read, but Problem Sleuth is arguably a "purer comedy" for its devotion to the slapstick and running gags at the expense of virtually everything else.
Topatoco has released the first of a series of print volumes collecting Problem Sleuth now, and the book takes on a second dimension in that it is an interesting case of something very specifically designed for the web making the formatting jump back to print. Some things get lost—certain jokes that relied upon the animation are here watered down—but the consolidation of multiple panels to a page and the removal of the multimedia also bring it back in line with more traditional "comics," and inadvertently reinforce the narrative aspects of the project: it feels more like an actual story now, albeit one that's a goofy parody. The flip side is that the feeling of "playing" the adventure game is eliminated almost completely, which makes the format seem a little more arbitrary than in its original format. In one respect, though, this brings out a bit of humor that was a bit lost in the original, the idea of keeping track of each character's "inventory," because the smaller panels make that part of the artwork a little harder to make out in the strip's rough style—only, you lose nothing from not keeping track, as the collection of items was always played for humor and becomes more and more pointless as the story goes on.
The book thus becomes an interesting artifact as well as a funny comic; the only downside is Topatoco's poor editing job. There are a number of typos (even in the indicia) and production gaffes (a footnote repeats on two pages), which makes the whole thing look a little more unprofessional—ironic, given the aesthetic style of the comic in general.
Syncopated: An Anthology of Nonfiction Picto-Essays, Edited by Brendan Burford, Villard (Random House)
Anthologies. Sigh. Comics don't do well with anthologies, generally speaking. Other media have similar problems, but price points and varying art styles widen the gap further in comics.
The subtitle is instantly off-putting, as well, "Nonfiction Picto-Essays." It's because there isn't anywhere near enough cohesion to the pieces contained within the book, some are autobiographical, some are reportage, some are something else entirely. The book frustratingly reads throughout like an attempt to put something together solely for use in schools, "everyone pick a piece and write on it," etc. There's some solid work in here—Alex Holden's "West Side Improvements," about particular graffiti, has terrific linework and uses the comics medium particularly well to tell its story, as opposed to just fitting the story to form after the fact, as some of the pieces do (including "Boris Rose: Prisoner of Jazz," written by the editor). Victor Marchand Kerlow's portfolio-piece collection of full page sketches of subway buskers, on the other hand, is non-narrative, non-sequential, and is text-free, barely fitting into the anthology at all.
Some strong work lies within (including an appearance from Nick Bertozzi, who as the largest name involved understandably opens the book), but the book is so non-notable and directionless that there's little to recommend it overall.
E-Merl.com, Daniel Merlin Goodbrey, Online
E-Merl was, actually, one of the very first comics I ever publicly reviewed, back a couple of lifetimes ago when I was doing reviews for Cellar Door Publishing, an indy comics outlet, back when my review of Scott Pilgrim could still be counted as shedding light on an undiscovered gem. Cellar Door has just started putting out a very sharp book by a very good friend of mine, Richard Carbonneau's The Marvel: A Biography of Jack Parsons, which would be unprofessional of me to review. But reviewing E-Merl all those years ago, I enthused:
"Merlin is one of those guys who makes the miraculous look so simple that you almost want to hate him for it. Better instead to hate his sadistic avatar Mr. Nile… Merlin and Mr. Nile don't just experiment with the comic form—they are full-blown mad scientists, and their twisted creations now run rampant across the internet, changing whatever they touch. When Scott McCloud spoke of "Reinventing Comics," he was talking about Merlin…what it feels like to exist in sequential panels of movement, and how sound exists in comics. There are questions answered we didn't realize we wanted the answers to."
Which is hyperbolic, to be sure (I was young, your honor), but not entirely inaccurate. Merlin's early career was about pushing those limitations of form we were just talking about, also playing with nonlinear narratives and McCloud's idea of the "infinite canvas" potential of online comics. He was so enjoyable as a formalist, in fact, that it came as something of a disappointment when he spent the last few years focused on more traditional stories, occasional print work-for-hire, and approachable but unchallenging humor strips. They were frequently still fun, but felt like hollow works, grasps at wider audiences.
Goodbrey may have felt the same way, because upon retiring his previous humor strip All Knowledge is Strange, he revised his site and launched three strips simultaneously, two of which are the resurrections of his long-lost projects for other webcomic collectives, including the delightful The Nile Journals, a faux-journal comic for his sociopathic breakout character in an "Unfolded Earth" where the multiverse has something of the consistency of uncooked dough. The return of Mr. Nile and the way Goodbrey uses Flash to illustrate the character's higher consciousness and shifting reality is a breath of fresh air in a webcomics community which has largely (but not totally, as mentioned above) stagnated into a series of humor strips with niche audiences that frequently overlap. It was hard to realize how much Mr. Nile had been missed until he made his triumphant return. Now all Goodbrey needs to do is follow through with one of his daring formalist hypercomics, and his site will be fully unmissable again. And with Patrick "E-Sheep" Farley making a full return in June on the wave of overwhelming fan support, we may be due for a new formalist webcomic renaissance.
There is no conclusion to be drawn from this grabbag of reviews, except just maybe a reminder of the breadth of modern comics. It's just a snapshot of what I had around, what's had me thinking lately, and in a few cases what's worth seeking out. My generation of comic readers will probably be the last one to find novelty in there being so many interesting books that I'll never get to them all, something which in this still adolescent medium was not true at all not so very long ago. I can be grateful, then, that it's hard for me to take that for granted. It used to be that discoveries were made in a limited number of genres, from sifting through water-stained longboxes; now, it's just a question of taking a chance on something that might be right on the shelf at the local comic shop, or the big box bookstore, or on Amazon, or hosted online as a webcomic, or as a digital download, or, or, or. Writing a lot of these reviews, when they were negative, made me tired, but looking back at the collection in full, I'm reminded how much I love doing this.
Next Time: My comics can beat up your comics!
This article was originally published on The House Next Door.
Review: Sam Lipsyte's The Ask: A Novel and the Gen-X Badge of Honor
Review: Firefly: Still Flying, A Celebration of Joss Whedon's Acclaimed TV Series
RuPaul's Drag Race Recap: Season 10, Episode 14, "Grand Finale"
RuPaul's Drag Race Recap: Season 10, Episode 13, "ReUnited"
RuPaul's Drag Race Recap: Season 10, Episode 12, "American"


As of July 1, 2012, America's top national broadcast and cable networks are each required by law to provide at least 50 hours per calendar quarter, approximately four hours per week, of prime time or children's television programming that is described for people with vision loss. But how well are they doing to make this fun and informative means of making TV more accessible a reality?
On Wednesday Evening, July 24, at 7:00 p.m., Eastern, join in a lively discussion about the past, present and future of described television. Learn about what programs are being described and where to go to find described TV listings. Get practical tips on how to turn described TV on and who to talk to when you have trouble getting description to work. Hear results of a national survey of viewers with vision loss to find out what the most popular described programs are and which ones people with vision loss would love to see described. Weigh in with your own favorite programs and personal experiences both successfully and unsuccessfully trying to access described TV. And learn what the future holds for description and how you can help to bring it about.
who will share their expertise with you and invite you to join in an interactive conversation with them to help all of us better understand how to fully enjoy described TV , to trouble-shoot problems, and to make our voices heard.
We hope you will join us and encourage you to share this announcement far and wide!


Oral history with Henry R. Holst of La Crosse, Wisconsin, recorded on October 30, 2000. Holst discusses memories of growing up in La Crosse and talks about his family. This collection includes the cassette recording of the interview and a printed transcript.
Materials in this collection are available for patron use. Patrons may not list to original cassette recording; a use copy must be created prior to patron access.


text:
How to Make the Most From Your Funds
Investors make big mistakes with their mutual funds. Here's how to avoid them.
Dan Caplinger
(TMFGalagan)
Published: May 31, 2011 at 12:00AM
Dan Caplinger has been a contract writer for the Motley Fool since 2006. As the Fool's Director of Investment Planning, Dan oversees much of the personal-finance and investment-planning content published daily on Fool.com. With a background as an estate-planning attorney and independent financial consultant, Dan's articles are based on more than 20 years of experience from all angles of the financial world. Follow @DanCaplinger
Follow @DanCaplinger
Mutual funds have opened the door to investing for millions of people. Yet even though many mutual funds have posted attractive returns over the long run, their shareholders often don't reap all of the benefits of their success. Failing to make the most of the mutual funds you own can cost you a huge amount of money.
One of the big mistakes people make with mutual funds is chasing performance. By buying top-performing funds after they've already posted huge gains, investors hope that like a big roller at the craps table, the hot hands that produced those high returns will stay on their hot streaks. In the end, though, their impatience often causes them to miss out on big parts of the long-term returns they could earn.
What you're doing wrong
Mutual fund researcher Morningstar took a look last year at the reality of how fund investors invest compared to the funds' reported returns. Specifically, the researcher examined when investors bought and sold shares of the funds they owned and adjusted its fund return data to account for the actual amount shareholders had invested in the fund. Doing that produced a more realistic assessment of how the typical fund shareholder did, as it gave more credit to returns when many investors actually had money in the fund.
Morningstar found that in nearly every category, fund shareholders did markedly worse than the overall results of the fund would suggest. During the so-called "lost decade" from 2000 to 2009, the typical U.S. stock fund had an average annualized return of around 1.6%. But the corresponding investor return was just 0.2%. In other words, as meager as total returns have been in recent years, investors have left just about all of their return on the table because of their mistakes.
Running away from performance
Of course, over the past two years, confidence in the stock market has risen dramatically, thanks to the rebound from 2009's lows. Interestingly, though, investor return numbers suggest that after having seen a decent recovery in their portfolios, investors are getting out while the getting's good.
For instance, look at the Vanguard 500 Index Fund (VFINX), the original S&P 500 index tracking fund. During 2008 and 2009, its investor returns closely tracked the overall performance of the market. But in 2010, investor returns started falling off, and over the past 12 months, the difference has widened to more than four percentage points. That may stem from the weak performance of tech megacaps Microsoft (Nasdaq: MSFT) and Cisco (Nasdaq: CSCO), both of which have struggled from hiccups in their long records of growth. In contrast, small-cap indexes have outperformed the S&P 500, even reaching new all-time highs at the same time that the large-caps languish well below their 2007 record levels.
Fund investors do tend to be a fickle bunch. After a decade of outperformance at Bruce Berkowitz's Fairholme Fund, the fund has performed abysmally so far in 2011. Berkowitz's biggest bet, AIG (NYSE: AIG), has seen its share price cut in half after strong performance in 2010, and retailer Sears Holdings (Nasdaq: SHLD) continues to defy the manager's hopes of a turnaround.
In response, the fund is facing shareholder redemptions. As one Fairholme analyst recently commented, with nearly a quarter of its assets in cash, Fairholme is well-positioned to handle redemption requests without having to liquidate stock holdings at low prices.
Yet investor reaction to Fairholme's performance makes little sense from a longer-term perspective. Berkowitz has made no secret of his belief that financials would outperform the market going forward. Fund investors have known that big banks Citigroup (NYSE: C), Bank of America (NYSE: BAC), and Goldman Sachs (NYSE: GS) play important roles in Berkowitz's investing thesis and had ample opportunity to get out when those stocks were doing well. To leave only now that those returns have evaporated shows just how backward-looking many fund investors are -- and explains why if Fairholme returns to its former glory, many former shareholders will miss the boat.
It's hard to fight through periods of losses. But as Morningstar's research shows, investors too often fall prey to getting out of mutual funds after the worst of losses are over, only later jumping back in and in the process missing out on a good portion of their long-term returns. Unless you fundamentally disagree with a top fund's new direction, then sticking with it makes the most sense -- and if you do think a fund has lost its way, don't wait for losses to come before you make a switch.
Many mutual fund investors have made the switch to exchange-traded funds. Find out about three promising ETFs in the Motley Fool's special report on ETFs -- it's free.

redpajama_set_name: RedPajamaCommonCrawl


As always, we will have great door prizes throughout the day(don't forget your business cards), as well as food and drink.
After we are finished learning, we will head to a fun place for happy hour to celebrate being smarter! Heck, you might just feel like you can walk on water by the time we're finished!


Nestled among the exhibition reviews and auction reports in contemporary-art journalism last week were scattered items about the Roski School of Art and Design, at the University of Southern California. On Friday, the first-year students in the school's M.F.A. program announced that they were all dropping out. "All," in this case, meant seven students: a small number, but, given the difficulty of getting students or artists to do anything together, the action was a feat of organization and solidarity. It was also a brave gesture—not heroic, maybe, but one made at a personal cost and resonant with the larger situation in art right now. The M.F.A. is not only a prerequisite for teaching art but a marker of professional seriousness in the art world: if you want to get your work into the Whitney Biennial, so the conventional wisdom goes, you're going to need a degree. Abandoning one on principle is no small thing.
In their open letter, posted to an art-education Web site, the U.S.C. Seven (as they were christened on Twitter) detailed the timeline that led to their decision to withdraw from school. Last December, their program director, A. L. Steiner, stepped down, and no replacement was appointed. Frances Stark, another senior faculty member, left shortly thereafter. In January, according to the students, meetings with the school's new administration (Roski appointed a new dean, Erica Muhl, in 2013) suggested that funding promises made to them during recruitment would not be honored. They would now be competing for the second-year teaching fellowships that they had understood to be guaranteed, and faced a potential doubling of their student debt. Reports of curricular changes in the offing led the students to suspect that Roski's administration did not intend to retain, in recognizable form, the program that they had enrolled in.
The U.S.C. Seven's decision to drop out is a vote of no confidence in the administration of one particular school—which, until the recent overhauls, had been among the most well-regarded graduate art programs in the United States. But is it also a rejection of what art school has become? The M.F.A. is recognized as the terminal degree for artists wishing to teach on the college level. However, as the art historian Howard Singerman has argued, more people now go to M.F.A. programs to learn to be artists than to learn to teach: getting the degree is a way to acquire the conceptual and social skills needed to navigate the professional art world. So, as tuition costs continue to rise and M.F.A.-bearers are produced in higher numbers each year, further outstripping the capacity of either the academic job market or the art market to absorb them, many teachers and students have voiced concerns about the future of the whole arrangement. (Full disclosure: I am a critic in the M.F.A. painting program at the Rhode Island School of Design.) For the U.S.C. Seven, the loss of two revered faculty members and an alleged higher debt load led them to opt out of the system.
The situation at U.S.C. is a small scene in a much larger drama, one concerning the place of art in the new, more corporate university order. Traditionally, art education has been a little too vocational to fit in with the rest of the humanities. But lately it seems that art education isn't vocational enough. Or, at least, it's out of step with the pedagogical model to which universities are turning in an effort to make their arts offerings both more alluring and more lucrative. Last fall, the Roski School of Art and Design inaugurated the U.S.C. Jimmy Iovine and Andre Young Academy for Arts, Technology and the Business of Innovation, a four-year undergraduate program designed to "empower the next generation of disruptive inventors and professional thought leaders across a multitude of global industries." (Muhl serves as both the dean of Roski and the director of Iovine and Young.) The ultra-hip academy, where students learn about visual and audio design rather than art or music, and where coursework culminates at a mysterious experimental facility known as The Garage, was made possible by a seventy-million-dollar gift from its eponymous donors—both of whom recently sold their headphone company to Apple for $3.2 billion, and one of whom is also known as Dr. Dre.
This brings us to the value that often drops off the lists of those espoused by the new art-school programs. "The M.F.A. Program we entered in August 2014 did one great thing: it threw us all together, when we might not have crossed paths on our own," the former Roski students wrote, a reminder that, before there is creativity (or disruption, if you prefer), there is something quaintly called community—which is hard to quantify, always there if you want to find it and can lead to all sorts of developments beyond professional success. They closed their letter with a call for like-minded individuals to get in touch, particularly anyone who "dreams not of creating a 'better' institution, but devising new spaces for collective weirdness and joy." School's out, forever.


The Google Chromebook platform runs on a large number of different computers but based on a reasonably restricted number of chipsets: we have Intel-based Chromebooks and we have those that use an ARM-based processor, manufactured by Samsung or Rockchip. Arguably these companies are in the business of making low power, low heat chipsets for mobile devices but they are by no means alone in the industry: to date, we have not seen a Chromebook built around an AMD (Advanced Micro Systems) or Qualcomm chipset, for example, despite these companies designing chips that may well lend themselves well to the platform. However, in the last few months, we have seen an increasing number of references to an AMD project board spotted running both Linux and Windows. It may well be that AMD are involved in a Chrome OS computer.
Over the years, we have seen references to AMD in Chrome OS' code, but this is because Google's Chrome OS platform is based upon the open source Chromium project, and a large number of manufacturers can edit this code including of course AMD. AMD have built in support for their chips stretching back to 2011 but so far we've not seen any hardware based upon this technology. However, in late August a new board was referenced in the Chrome OS repositories with the codename of "Jadeite." Not much is known about this board other than as stated above, it has been spotted being benchmarked running both the Windows and Linux operating systems and even then, only from October 2016 onwards. This appears to be a new board design and presumably is still under development. Furthermore, changes to the Chrome OS source code reference the "AMD Platform," rather than "amd" in lower case. The changes to the code also refer to two of AMD's newest APU (Accelerated Processing Units) chips from the Excavator family, Carizzo and Stoney. These chipsets contain everything necessary to run a full operating system without needing a standalone GPU, which increases the complexity and power consumption of the computer.
The information we have points that AMD are at least experimenting with a Chrome OS machine. These new APUs could very well form the hardware platform in a new graphics-focused Chromebook or Chromebox, and having another chipset manufacturer building Chrome OS hardware should be a very good thing for the industry.


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The Hold Steady : Separation Sunday
Label: Frenchkiss
by Jeff Terich
Thanks to the success of Garden State, one of my neighbors has been inspired to blast The Shins' "New Slang" from his stereo at least once a week. It would be much worse, had I actually shared a wall with this obnoxious specimen, but hearing it from across the courtyard is no less irritating. Personally, I believe that the more people that love The Shins, the better. But does it have to be given the Dr. Dre treatment? It's not even a party song. Not even close. But still, I am forced to listen to James Mercer's falsetto at an ungodly volume, coupled with drunken reverberating chit-chat, more often than I would care to. I can put up with it when it's only three minutes a week. But should this become a daily occurrence, I'm arming myself. That motherfucker is going to have to do battle with The Hold Steady.
If you abuse a pretty ballad to show off your stereo, you're going to have to face New York's rockingest combo. And you're going to lose. You know why? Because The Hold Steady is louder. The Hold Steady has more soul. And The Hold Steady is better.
Following up last year's debut, Almost Killed Me, the NYC quintet channels the blue collar stadium rock of Bruce Springsteen and the punk-inspired chaos of The Replacements on Separation Sunday. With some beefy power chords and greasy Hammond B-3, The Hold Steady plays good old fashioned rock `n' roll without pretense, leaving only one truly awesome rock album.
On Separation Sunday, The Hold Steady makes a rowdy happy hour ruckus, but sacrifices nothing in the way of cleverness or intelligence. They're not playing an "ironic" type of barroom rock, they're doing it the way it's meant to be done, albeit with an English degree. While the rest of the band is clanging out a mighty rock thunder in "Hornets! Hornets!" and "Banging Camp," vocalist Craig Finn spits pop-culture referencing one-liners in his rangeless growl. He may not be much of a singer, but whatever he does he does it well, spouting lines like "later on we did some sexy things, took a couple photographs and carved them into wood reliefs" and "Holly wore a string around her finger/she said it helps her remember all the nights that we got over/and besides, it ties her outfit all together." If Bob Seger had a mastery of the English language like that, his Detroit pilsner rock might not be so bad.
The Hold Steady's music is a celebration. It's fiery, powerful and irresistible. And it's smarter than Kings of Leon will ever be. Tad Kubler's guitar is as loud and distortion soaked as they come, while newly tenured keyboardist Franz Nicolay pulls the band through Motown as Finn redirects his lyrics to his old hometown of Minneapolis. Finn's tales are tall, but they're backed with an equally large soundsystem behind them. As he puts it on "Chicago Seemed Tired Last Nite," "we mix our own mythologies we push out through PA systems." Amen, brother.
Don't get me wrong, The Hold Steady's rock `n' roll is as enjoyable as it comes. But it's a hell of a lot louder than "New Slang." So if my neighbor feels like playing that song just a little more often, I'll raise my glass and crank up "Charlemagne in Sweatpants." And then he'd know better than to mess with The Hold Steady.
Bruce Springsteen and the E Street Band – Greetings From Asbury Park
Replacements – Pleased to Meet Me
Rocket From the Crypt – RFTC
May 2, 2005 Jeff Terich
Home The Hold Steady : Separation Sunday
May 2, 2005	Album ReviewsThe Hold Steady


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Unrelated Business Income Taxes (UBIT) | "Trade or Business" (Silo-ing)
Submitted by Tiffany Gourley Carter on Tue, 09/04/2018 - 11:11am
On December 22, 2017, President Trump signed into law Public Law No. 115-97 that includes two new provisions regarding unrelated business income tax ("UBIT"). The first provision, Section 512(a)(6), directs nonprofits "with more than 1 unrelated trade or business" to compute their unrelated business income (and related losses) earned "separately with respect to each such trade or business," but it does not provide any definition about what constitutes a "separate" trade or business, creating uncertainty about how to document, compute, report, and pay such a tax.
Regulations based on prior law provided that, in determining unrelated business taxable income, an organization that operates multiple unrelated trades or businesses could aggregate all revenues and expenses from all such activities and compute UBIT liability on the aggregate income. This permitted an organization to use a loss from one unrelated trade or business to offset income from another, thereby reducing total unrelated business taxable income. Significantly, because income and losses were treated in the aggregate, distinctions between separate businesses were made, if at all, not for tax payment or reporting purposes, but instead largely for internal management and, perhaps, branding purposes.
The new unrelated business income taxes (UBIT) on nonprofits took effect on January 1, 2018. Nonprofits had only a few days over the holidays to learn of and try to understand these new tax liabilities, adapt their accounting systems and procedures to secure full compliance, and budget for the unanticipated costs. For many organizations, the application of the new liabilities landed in the middle of their fiscal years, thus requiring different cost allocation and tax treatment within the same accounting period, adding to the burden and costs of compliance. Many were required to make quarterly estimated payments to the IRS by mid-April 2018 based on their best guess of what their new tax liabilities might be since no guidance had been issued.
The new Section 512(a)(6) of the Internal Revenue Code changes the way nonprofits calculate UBIT; instead of aggregating all of their profits and losses from unrelated business activities, nonprofits must now "silo" their revenues and expenses for each "separate" "trade or business" and pay UBIT on each. Neither of the quoted terms is defined in the law, causing nonprofits, foundations, accountants, and tax lawyers to demand relief and clarity. The proposed rules released in August 2018 provide some clear answers and instructions on how to comply with the law immediately, but many questions remain that must be resolved during the formal rulemaking process.
"The charitable nonprofit community has very grave concerns about the implementation of new subsections 512(a)(6) and (7) of the Internal Revenue Code and believes that Treasury and the IRS have a duty to the regulated community to provide immediate relief and substantive guidance on these provisions."
Updated Comments to Secretary Mnuchin and Commissioner Kautter
The Notice provides a way for nonprofits to comply with the new law and the opportunity to recommend changes to the proposed rule that fix any shortcomings. The first step for any nonprofit potentially affected by this tax is to review the NAICS codes and compare your unrelated business revenue streams to determine which categories apply neatly, and which codes don't make sense. Then call your Representative and Senators at 202-225-3121 and tell them to repeal the siloing provision under the 2017 federal tax law at Section 512(a)(6).
On August 21, 2018, the Treasury Department and Internal Revenue Service have issued a Request for Comments on proposed interim and transition rules (Notice 2018-67) for interpreting one of the two major changes to nonprofit unrelated business income tax (UBIT) included in federal tax law.
In the Notice, Treasury and the IRS acknowledge the frustration and confusion that nonprofits are experiencing, stating: "There is no general statutory or regulatory definition defining what constitutes a 'trade or business' for purposes of the Internal Revenue Code." The Notice expressly provides that starting on January 1, 2018 (when the tax-law provision took effect) until issuance of final regulations (probably in 2019) nonprofits may rely on a reasonable, good faith interpretation of the UBIT statutes in determining whether their organizations have more than one "trade or business." Specifically, the IRS suggested using the North American Industry Classification System (NAICS) 6-digit codes as a reasonable, good faith interpretation. Practically, this means:
Nonprofits can combine the revenue and expenses from all advertising activities (e.g. online advertising and ads in a variety of print publications) into one category (NAICS code 541800), since these would all be within the same NAICS code.
But the NAICS code may not provide clarity for some or many other sources of revenue and expenses. For example, the NAICS has multiple codes relating to rentals. Consequently, rental income and expenses may need to be divided or grouped in other ways, meaning it's possible that expenses for some types of rentals may not be used to offset income from other types.
A separate question arises when a nonprofit has an ownership interest in a partnership that engages in many "trades or businesses." For now, the IRS will treat revenue from a partnership as a single "trade or business" if one of two tests is satisfied: the de minimis test (ownership interest of no more than 2%) or the control test (no more than 20% ownership interest and no control over the operations of the business). Revenue from other forms of partnership interests that fail to meet these tests can still be treated as a single "trade or business" during the one-year transition period that runs from August 21, 2018 to August 21, 2019.
Representative Conaway(R-TX) introduced the "Nonprofits Support Act" (HR 513), and Senators Cruz (R-TX) and Shaheen (D-NH) introduced the bipartisan bill "Preserve Charities and Houses of Worship Act" (S.1282) to repeal Section 512(a)(6) as well the tax on nonprofit transportation benefits under Section 512(a)(7). Read the press release.
Comments to the IRS Notice 2018-67, National Council of Nonprofits, December 3, 2018.
Unrelated Business Income Taxation, National Council of Nonprofits
Resources on How the New Federal Tax Law Impacts Charitable Nonprofits, National Council of Nonprofits
Request for Comments Regarding the Calculation of Unrelated Business Taxable Income under sec. 512(a)(6) for Exempt Organizations with More than One Unrelated Trade or Business, Internal Revenue Service, August 21, 2018.
Updated Letter to IRS/Treasury requesting delay in implementation of the new UBIT provisions in Public Law No. 115-97, National Council of Nonprofits, July 21, 2018.
Preliminary Letter to IRS/Treasury requesting delay in implementation of the new UBIT provisions in Public Law 115-97, National Council of Nonprofits, April 24, 2018.
Guidance Released for UBIT Reporting by Activity, BKD, September 6, 2018.
Unrelated Business Tax Regs May Bring Nonprofits Headaches, National Council of Nonprofits, August 22, 2018.
IRS Issues Guidance for New UBTI "Siloing" Rules under Section 512(a)(6), Quarles & Brady LLP, August 29, 2018.
Letter to the Members of Congress, Council on Foundations, July 11, 2018.
Comments on the regulatory implementation of new section 512(a)(6), American Bar Association - Section of Taxation, June 21, 2018.
Request for Immediate Guidance and Delay, National Association of Independent Schools, June 7, 2018.
Request for Delay in Effective Date of IRC Section 512(a)(6), AICPA, April 17, 2018.
Joint Explanatory Statement of the Committee of Conference, at pages 410-411, U.S. Congress
Unrelated Business Income Tax
UBIT
Trade or Business
Policy Issue Categories
State & Local Policy Issues
Johnson Amendment
Government-Nonprofit Contracting


text:
Q: Database creation script - external parameters/settings Question Summary:
Is there a better method than the one posted below to implement the database-creation stage of an automated deployment?
Background/Requirements:

*

*I am in the process of attempting to develop a coherent database version control process using an approach similar to this one.  This question is specifically about the baseline, which includes physically creating the database.

*The plan - for now - is to implement a simple command-line tool (in .NET) to apply both the baseline and change scripts.  I want the tool to be generic (we have several independent transactional databases), and therefore would like all scripts to be external, including database creation.

*The test environment(s) may not be a perfect replica of production; physical file locations and sizes may need to be quite different.
Current Idea: (What I'm looking for feedback on)
Basically a template system.  Use a simple string.Replace on a script like the following:
CREATE DATABASE [{DBNAME}] ON PRIMARY
(
    NAME = N'MyDB_Data',
    FILENAME = N'{PRIMARYFILENAME}',
    SIZE = {PRIMARYSIZE}KB,
    MAXSIZE = UNLIMITED,
    FILEGROWTH = 5%
),
FILEGROUP [FG_MyDB_Index]
(
    NAME = N'MyDB_Index',
    FILENAME = N'{INDEXFILENAME}',
    SIZE = {INDEXSIZE}KB,
    MAXSIZE = UNLIMITED,
    FILEGROWTH = 5%
),
-- more filegroups ...
LOG ON
(
    NAME = N'MyDB_Log',
    FILENAME = N'{LOGFILENAME}',
    SIZE = {LOGSIZE}KB,
    -- etc.
)
GO

ALTER DATABASE [{DBNAME}] SET COMPATIBILITY_LEVEL = 100
GO

-- more ALTER DATABASE stuff ...

Obviously, the tokens to be replaced are the ones like {DBNAME} and {LOGFILESIZE}.  The values for these would be taken from command-line parameters or perhaps from an external file.
Problems I see with this approach:

*

*The "script" bills itself as a T-SQL script but is in fact invalid T-SQL.  It forces you to either use the deployment tool or perform a tedious manual search-and-replace.

*There is no way to run it with "default" values.  Worse, it provides no indication of what a good default value would be.

*It feels flimsy.  It seems like it would be possible to alter the script in such a way that it is still valid SQL (or at least, as "valid" as it presently is) but still break the deployment tool.  The lack of any escaping, for one, is concerning.  And template parameters within literal strings make my skin crawl.
Other possibilities that I've considered:

*

*Construct a dynamic SQL script to be executed with sp_executesql.  This would provide the benefit of true parameters as opposed to a naive template, but would make the script incredibly cumbersome to write, test, and maintain, especially if we ever decide to take a new baseline (which we might - it's a big database).

*Use SSMS template parameters.  This decouples it nicely from the deployment tool but also makes it difficult to integrate with the deployment tool - kind of ties it to SSMS.

*Embed the script in the deployment tool.  That way nobody can mess around with it, and it's clear that the script is merely a template that must be processed.  Default values can be embedded somewhere "close" to the script.  The main, huge disadvantage is that the deployment tool becomes application-specific and might require code changes for something that really shouldn't require a code change.

*Generate the entire script dynamically off an external, human-readable file, like YAML.  At first this idea seemed very elegant, but eventually it started sinking in that I might be re-inventing the wheel.  Everything about the database would have to be included in the file, so does this really offer any advantage over manually modifying a plain-vanilla SQL script or even creating the database manually through SSMS?
None of these options seem quite right.  What I want is something that's independent (just as code is theoretically independent of the environment you use to build it), but also readable (no "SQL within SQL"), and self-explanatory (clearly identifies what settings are needed and what good defaults might be).
Are there any methods that will achieve everything I'm trying to achieve?  Or am I just being too picky or looking at the problem the wrong way?
(P.S. I am not presently looking for commercial, standalone, 3rd-party tools that will perform this task for me.  "Now I have two problems.")

A: I would probably either use this script as an embedded template in a command-line tool;  get the minimal information you need (to replace the placeholders - DBName and LogFileSize; the other things like filegroup names could be deduced from the DBName, e.g. FG_{DBName}_PRIMARY for the primary filegroup) from the command line parameters. Use text search/replace to fill in the blanks, and then execute this against the SQL Server you want to deploy it to.
E.g. something like:
CreateDB -server:(local) -dbname:MyTestDB -logsize:50 (as in 50 MB)

Or: use SMO (SQL Server Management Objects) to create the database. You basically need the same information (DB Name, Log File Size) and you can programmatically create a database and its layout - no T-SQL script required.
As a side note: if you're going into creating separate filegroups, I'd suggest this layout at a minimum:

*

*primary filegroup: left alone for just the system catalog views - nothing else

*DATA filegroup: mark as DEFAULT, use for tables

*INDEX filegroup: for indices

That way, you minimize the size of the primary filegroup, and thus you also minimize the risk of it running into a disk error and getting corrupted. The primary filegroup contains the system catalogs, so if that FG is ruined, your entire DB is toast.

A: Have you considered using SQLCMD scripts and the SQLCMD utility rather than writing your own command line interface, or perhaps writing your own and simply wrapping the SQLCMD functionality?  Naturally this would assume you only want to support SQL 2005 and up.  I've done this in the past a few different ways (i.e. using a simply batch file with params/options that wrap the SQLCMD, using a more extensive approach wrapped with code that happened to unfortunately be VB 6.0 at the time, etc.).
If you take the route of wrapping with your own code, may want to consider leveraging powershell as well (I'm currently thinking of this as well).  Sql Server now includes custom Powershell providers and extensions for things like SMO functionality, code execution, management, etc., which can naturally and easily be extended to wrap SQLCMD and SQL functionality.
Given what you're trying to do, the benefits with SQLCMD (and SQLCMD scripts) seem to fit nicely into things:

*

*The scripts are still valid for use/interpretation/integration with SSMS and other IDE's

*There are a few options for default values, though nothing really integrated into the scripts themselves (environment variables, command line options, etc.). Additionally, you may want to consider pulling your default values for file/group locations from a pre-defined location on the server/instance you are running on (such as the model or master or tempdb).

*Less flimsy in the sense that current IDE's that support SQLCMD would throw exceptions in SQLCMD mode for undefined variable/value combinations

If you'd like to exchange notes/thoughts on your project, I'd definitely be up for helping out with coding and/or just talking through some challenges I ran into (different editions of the engine for example and feature usage were a few things I didn't originally think of).

A: We solved a similar problem by making a script that could use sqlcmd parameters.  Something like:
:setvar filename somefile.ext
:setvar version 1
:on error exit

print 'This is version $(version) on $(filename)'
-- the rest of the actual script

This could be run via command line or in SSMS.  Eventually we made a tool that could read the file and replace variables with the same syntax.
I don't think it takes care of every concern you listed, but it should help with some.

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Home Page ‹ IRAQI DINAR: VERIFIED NEWS & ARTICLES ‹ Iraqi Politics & Economy
Iraqi National announces not to attend the national meeting which will be held this month
From Reputable News Sources
by admin » Tue Sep 10, 2013 8:33 am
Follow-up - and babysit - announced MP / coalition in Iraq / Maysoon, for national boycott of the Iraqi bloc led by Iyad Allawi to attend a national meeting to be held end of this month to sign the Convention on the National Honor because he is not the benefit of the country.
She Damluji said in a statement: that the mass of the Iraqi National decided not to attend the so-called national meeting or sign a document civil peace, noting that the rest of the menu, such as 'united' led by Najafi and 'Dialogue Front' led by Deputy Prime Minister Saleh al-Mutlaq, will participate in the meeting, which free in their positions and their decisions but we see no real benefit of this document.
She explained: mass believes that the current stage requires measures and laws in the government and parliament for more than a decade meetings and meetings that will not provide or delay in the situation because it will be the only purpose of the media is nothing but propaganda.
She added: that our demands postings and clear, namely to achieve a true partnership and the national balance in the institutions of the state and to agree on security strategy and activating the role of Parliament and abide by the constitution.
And increased: to achieve the demands of the blocks to ensure an end to the political situation in crisis.
He strongly rejected that be a reason not to attend the mass meeting, the national bid political or electoral motives, indicating that the coming days will prove that the meeting scheduled for the end of the month, like the previous meetings. O, o
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Last week I shared some thoughts regarding the unprecedented rise in auto loan delinquencies and growing risks impacting many financial organizations. We covered the weighty consequences of competing for market share coupled with less stringent underwriting standards. These factors significantly increase credit and in some cases compliance risk in auto loan portfolios.
We covered five core platform capabilities required to potentially reduce operational risk while sustaining positive consumer opportunities and incremental net revenue.
Comprehensive history of all transactions, delinquency ratings, and credit bureaus.
Real time commentary search capabilities including time/date and user stamp.
Estimated and actual loss analysis on the repossession /sale of the asset.
Automatically update delinquency information after backdated transactions are posted.
Bankruptcy sub-statuses (disposition codes) from which to track the process and build work queues.
The value of a credit reporting system supporting a lending platform depends on the comprehensive nature and freshness of the credit information collected and shared, especially the interactive structure of the reporting system itself. In other words, "garbage in….garbage out".
Effective credit data gathering and application penetrates the "lending fog of uncertainty" surrounding each new loan applicant. Additional data concerning a prospective or existing customer's credit history improves the risk assessment process. The end result is a better alignment of capacity to pay versus requested debt.
"Full-file reporting" of both negative and positive lending behavior data concerning borrower behavior improves risk based pricing capabilities and mitigates lending risks. Studies have proven that dynamic full-file reporting augments capabilities to better predict borrower risk. Full-file reporting improves the lender's ability to predict repayment probabilities. A second benefit of full-file reporting is that it increases a lender's ability to advance credit and enhances the probability of repaid loans.
Finally, Metro 2 is the credit data standard with specifications established by the Consumer Data Industry Association for credit reporting data providers. You will need to have a data furnishing service agreement with one of the major credit bureau associations and be prepared to update consumer credit history information electronically in the standardized Metro2 format.


[ TOEIC 文法演習 037 ] The economy in the region is booming thanks to the company like Morita, one of the world's ——– auto manufacturers.
[正解] The economy in the region is booming thanks to the company like Morita, one of the world's leading auto manufacturers.
the world's ——– auto manufacturers.


Johnson said, that Dr. Grainger was an agreeable man; a man who would do any good that was in his power. His translation of Tibullus, he thought, was very well done; but The Sugar-Cane, a poem , did not please him; for, he exclaimed, 'What could he make of a sugar-cane? One might as well write the "Parsley-bed, a Poem;" or "The Cabbage-garden, a Poem".' Boswell. 'You must then pickle your cabbage with the sal atticum.' Johnson. 'You know there is already The Hop-Garden, a Poem : and, I think, one could say a great deal about cabbage. The poem might begin with the advantages of civilized society over a rude state, exemplified by the Scotch, who had no cabbages till Oliver Cromwell's soldiers introduced them; and one might thus shew how arts are propagated by conquest, as they were by the Roman arms.' He seemed to be much diverted with the fertility of his own fancy.
The 19th of November 2011, a Saturday, at 8.09.
Generally: cabbages; more specifically to do with: absurdity, cabbage, humor, james boswell, poetry, samuel johnson.