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Scott Adams gives fans chance to one-up Dilbert punch lines
The Dilbert comic strip has gone interactive.
Hint: Click in map to explore connectionsStory continues below interactive map
MAP HINTS: Click expands a name. Control+Click centers map on a name. Solid lines are current relations. Dotted lines are former relations. For advanced tools choose Tools > Options from the menu at top. More help. Not seeing the maps? Please go here to check for the latest version of Java.Scott Adams, creator of the global Dilbert empire, has revamped his website, dilbert.com, to allow fans to offer their own punch lines to his comic strips about life in a corporate cubicle. Soon, viewers will be able to author text for entire strips, and Adams will engage in back and forth about the mashups.
“I’m surrendering myself to the realities of the Internet,” Adams told the New York Times. “People can already doctor strips. We’re just making it easier so people have more reason to visit the site.”
“And it’s fun,” he added. “This makes cartooning a competitive sport. It’s a game changer.”The revamped site, which debuted Friday, includes animation, colorized strips, an expanded archive, a “most popular” section, as well as the area where visitors can write their own punch lines. A software filter is supposed to prevent readers from posting offensive content by converting certain four-letter words to the “&*@!”-style cursing of comic strips.
Besides his insights into the existential dread of the modern-day office worker, Adams has shown surprising managerial acumen, building the Dilbert brand into a multimillion-dollar empire. One of the first cartoonists to post his strips to the Internet, he also syndicates them through United Media to more than 2,000 newspapers in 25 languages in 65 countries. He has written more than 10 books, authors a blog and oversees conceptualization of a small army of Dilbert-related products, from desk calendars to cards.
And his entrepeneurial spirit is evident in enterprises other than cartooning. Adams, a vegetarian, is a co-owner of Stacey’s Café, a pair of vegetarian restaurants in northern California where he lives, and was the CEO of Scott Adams Foods, a vegetarian food company in Newton, N.J. which pioneered the “dilberito,” before deciding to sell his interest in the company.
In the last five years, he has repeatedly appeared on a top 50 thinkers list, sponsored by the European Foundation for Management Development.
Born and raised in Windham, a small town in the Catskills in upstate New York, Adams likes to say he was high school valedictorian because “the other 39 people in my class couldn’t spell valedictorian.” He holds a BA in economics from Hartwick College, in Oneonta, New York, and an MBA from the University of California at Berkeley.
After getting his BA, he held what he has described as a “a variety of humiliating and low paying jobs” spending eight years at Crocker National Bank in San Francisco and eight years at Pacific Bell. He describes being a bank teller (robbed twice at gunpoint), computer programmer, financial analyst, product manager, commercial lender, budget manager, strategist, project manager and pseudo-engineer.
During this time. Adams said he entertained himself by drawing insulting cartoons of his coworkers and bosses in meetings. Eventually a bespectacled character named Dilbert emerged from the doodles. In 1988 Adams mailed some sample comic strips featuring Dilbert to the major cartoon syndicates.
United Feature Syndicate plucked Dilbert out of thousands of submissions received that year and offered Adams a contract. Dilbert launched in about 35 newspapers in 1989. Adams continued his day job at Pacific Bell until 1995, drawing Dilbert at 5 a.m. everyday before work. Today, he devotes himself full time to his cartoon creations.
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Patron of ‘vast right-wing conspiracy’ endorses Hillary Clinton
On the eve of today’s Democratic primary in Pennsylvania, conservative patron and publisher Richard Mellon Scaife did an historic turnabout on New York Sen. Hillary Rodham Clinton.
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MAP HINTS: Click expands a name. Control+Click centers map on a name. Solid lines are current relations. Dotted lines are former relations. For advanced tools choose Tools > Options from the menu at top. More help. Not seeing the maps? Please go here to check for the latest version of Java.On Sunday, Scaife’s newspaper, the Pittsburgh Tribune-Review, endorsed Clinton, saying that Clinton had demonstrated political courage, while Obama had not. If that wasn’t strange enough, Clinton’s campaign put out a release touting the endorsement.
For those who may have forgotten, this is the same Scaife who used the Tribune-Review in the 1990s to try to prove that Clinton killed White House Deputy Counsel Vincent W. Foster Jr., who committed suicide in 1993.
Scaife has repeatedly called Foster’s death “the Rosetta stone to the Clinton administration” (a reference to the stone found in Egypt that allowed scholars to decipher ancient hieroglyphics), the Washington Post wrote in 1999.
Scaife also gave $2.3 million to the American Spectator magazine to unearth dirt on former President Bill Clinton and supported other conservative groups that pilloried his administration. After hiring private investigators, the magazine reported that Clinton had asked state troopers to help procure women for him and that he had sexually harassed a state worker named Paula Jones. Jones’s legal case against Clinton helped launch an independent counsel investigation that eventually exposed his relationship with White House intern Monica Lewinsky.
At the time, First Lady Clinton railed against “a vast right-wing conspiracy that has been conspiring against my husband since the day he announced for president,” and identified Scaife as its benefactor.
Beyond that, Slate’s Tim Noah describes Scaife as “a raging misogynist. “In 1981, Noah recounts, Scaife called a reporter for the Columbia Journalism Review a “fucking Communist cunt”; more recently, he had his wife arrested and jailed for trespassing when she sought to confront him over his extramarital affair with a woman twice arrested for prostitution.
All of which is to say that the Tribune-Review’s endorsement appears a bit suspect – notwithstanding that Scaife telegraphed a change of heart last month after Clinton sat down with him and the paper’s editorial board.
Afterward, in an editorial headlined, Hillary, Reassessed, Scaife declared that her courage in attending the meeting “changed my mind about her.”
Perhaps. But perhaps the patron of conservative causes is simply pushing Clinton because he believes that she would be easier to defeat in the fall than Barack Obama.
The Tribune-Review is the largest newspaper in Pennsylvania to have endorsed Clinton. The Philadelphia Inquirer, the Philadelphia Daily News, the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette, the Scranton Times Tribune and the Morning Call of Allentown all endorsed Obama.
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Delta, Northwest hire power brokers to push merger
Delta and Northwest airlines have hired high-powered lobbyists, including two former senators, to argue their case before Congress to create the world’s biggest airline.
Hint: Click in map to explore connectionsStory continues below interactive map
MAP HINTS: Click expands a name. Control+Click centers map on a name. Solid lines are current relations. Dotted lines are former relations. For advanced tools choose Tools > Options from the menu at top. More help. Not seeing the maps? Please go here to check for the latest version of Java.The two carriers, which want to combine into a single, mega-airline called Delta to reduce costs, announced a proposed merger last week. Executives immediately went on the road to sell the idea to newspaper editorial boards and airline employees in major hubs like Atlanta, Minneapolis, Cincinnati and Salt Lake City.
This week, flanked by high-profile lobbyists, they take their case to the nation’s capitol where they are expected to face questions from competitors, consumers and union representatives.
Among those lined up on behalf of the airlines are two of the best-known former lawmakers in the lobbying world — Trent Lott of Mississippi, who until recently was the second highest-ranking Republican senator, and his new lobbying partner, former Democratic Sen. John Breaux of Louisiana.
Also signed on is Mehlman Vogel Castagnetti, which boasts numerous former Capitol Hill staffers and Bush administration officials.
Delta’s top executives told the Atlanta Journal-Constitution that they have also hired R. Hewitt Pate, who ran the anti-trust division at the U.S. Justice Department from 2003 to 2005, to deal with questions from regulators. Pate now heads the “global competition” practice for the Hunton & Williams law firm.
In addition, they have brought in leading anti-trust lawyer Donald L. Flexner of the firm Boies, Schiller & Flexner LLP. Flexner was featured as the lawyer to call “to survive life-or-death antitrust matters” in the April 2007, Inside Counsel magazine.
The mission of the expanded team, who join Delta’s veteran in-house lobbyist Donald Yohe, is to persuade the Justice Department that the merged airlines will not be a monopoly. They are expected to argue that the two companies serve different regions.
The House Judiciary Committee’s antitrust task force is slated to look at the proposed merger in a hearing at 10 a.m. Thursday. The Senate Judiciary subcommittee that deals with antitrust issues will examine the proposed combination in the afternoon.
Congress has no authority to stop the merger, but committee appearances often become public forums for lawmakers who oppose or support such plans. The biggest potential threat to the deal right now is public opposition of Rep. James Oberstar, the Minnesota Democrat who chairs the House Transportation and Infrastructure Committee.
Oberstar, who was largely responsible for grounding hundreds of planes this month by insisting on rigorous FAA inspections, has pledged to press the Justice Department for “vigorous scrutiny” of the plan.
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Children and ex-manager fight over Ray Charles estate
It’s been four years since Ray Charles died, but his name is still a money maker.
However, his will failed to designate someone to manage his name and image after death, sparking a battle between his twelve children and his longtime manager, Joe Adams, 86.
The family maintains that the singer’s trust has been mismanaged by Adams, Charles’s manager since 1961. The singer’s children, by several different women, also claim that Adams has tarnished their father’s name by releasing albums he wouldn’t have approved. They hope to gain more control over the estate, image, music and foundation of Ray Charles.
Mary Anne Den Bok, mother of Charles’s youngest child, Corey Robinson Den Bok, has filed a federal suit on behalf of several of Charles’s 12 children claiming Adams was overpaid by $1.2 million in 2005 and 2006.
The family will seek a formal investigation and audit of Charles’s estate, trusts and foundation. Although Adams has resigned as president of both Ray Charles Enterprises Inc. and the Ray Charles Robinson Foundation, the Charles family maintains that Adams still exercises control over the estate.
The Los Angeles Times reports that although Ivan Hoffman replaced Adams as president, “a receptionist at Ray Charles Enterprises said last week that Hoffman was not currently its president. Hoffman and a company spokesman declined to comment.”
After Charles’s death in 2004, Adams ran Ray Charles Enterprises Inc., as well as the Ray Charles Robinson Foundation, Charles’s charity organization. At one point, Adams held the position of president, chairman & treasurer of the foundation, which violated state law. He also had control of the trust funds for Charles’s children.
This isn’t the first time attorney Mary Anne Den Bok has intervened in affairs related to the estate.
In July 2007, Den Bok wrote a public letter on behalf of eight of Charles’s offspring, including Ray Charles Robinson Jr., David Robinson, Robert Robinson, Sheila Robinson, Raenee Robinson, Robyn Moffett, Vincent Kotchounian and Corey Robinson Den Bok.
Den Bok spoke about the supposed threats Ivan Hoffman made to rescind the donation made by Charles to Albany State University. Hoffman was head of Ray Charles Enterprises at the time, and because of the delay in building a performing arts center in the artist’s name, he and Adams reportedly considered taking legal action against the university.
In addition to disagreement over finances, Charles’s sons and daughters have taken issue with the creative direction of the posthumous career of Ray Charles.
They have voiced their disagreement on the management of their father’s recordings, believing that the last two albums produced after Charles’s death would not have been approved by the artist himself.
Even after the commercial success that followed the Oscar-winning flick Ray, posthumous releases, Genius & Friends and Ray Charles Sings, Basie Swings, sold poorly.
Genius & Friends is a duet album, made by dubbing the voices of singers on old tracks Charles had recorded. Ray Charles Sings, Basie Swings remixes Count Basie with unreleased Ray Charles material.
The albums sold 161,000 and 209,000 copies respectively, according to Neilsen. Sales showed a significant drop from the 3.2 million copies sold of Genius Loves Company, the last album recorded in his lifetime.
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Scott Adams Gives Fans Chance to One Up Dilbert Punch Lines
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Patron of Vast Right Wing Conspiracy Endorses Hillary Clinton
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Michael Moore Encourages Pennsylvanians to Vote for Barack Obama
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Delta Northwest Hire Power Brokers to Push Merger
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Murdoch Close to Buying Newsday From Tribune
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