Pete Rose steals the show
BY STEVE KETTMANN
(10/25/99)

What really struck me was Pete Rose's unrepentant demeanor in the interview. As much as Rose loves the game of baseball, he loves himself even more. He still refuses to acknowledge that he bet on the game of baseball, and, as long as he refuses to do that, he places himself above the game itself. You simply cannot have ballplayers betting on baseball games; it would completely destroy the integrity of the game. The only way they should let him into the Baseball Hall of Fame is posthumously. That way, he gets credit for what he did on the baseball field, but is not rewarded for his criminal behavior.

-- Richard Vigesaa

"From Hell"
BY CURT HOLMAN
(10/26/99)

While it's nice to see Alan Moore and Eddie Campbell get some mainstream credit for their fantastic work, I was dismayed to see a few elementary errors. Two that leap to mind are the author's assertion that the "Love and Death" issue of Swamp Thing was the first mainstream book to be published without the Comics Code Authority seal (leaving aside Dell/Gold Key publishing -- who never used the seal -- two issues of Amazing Spider Man still beat Swamp Thing out by over a decade) and that Moore left DC because "For Mature Readers" was included on "Watchmen" (the real break being caused by royalty and merchandising disagreements).

This is, in fact, Moore's best work since "V For Vendetta" (I've always found "Watchmen," though a good story, to be highly overrated) and Campbell's best work ever, which is saying a great deal.

I must say, though, that I am somewhat relieved that Moore has gone back to writing comics that are meant to be simply fun, like "Tom Strong" and "Tomorrow Stories." To a great extent, Moore's element is playing with convention, only slightly twisting it to show us a different light, as with his Superman and Swamp Thing stories. And of course, "From Hell," where he twists the basic concepts of history.

Possibly the most dismaying thing about your review, though, is the almost total lack of mention of Eddie Campbell, himself an artistic genius with a fairly broad oeuvre. I mean, he only drew the book; surely he rates more than a paragraph or two. Or is it possible that your author is not familiar enough with his work to write about it?

-- Jonathan Miller

For too long, Alan Moore's genius has been appreciated only by those lucky enough to have a well-stocked local comic book store -- and brave enough to not be self-conscious about reading books with pictures. Moore has the piercing social insight of William Burroughs combined with Scheherazade's abilty to keep the reader enthralled from one chapter to the next. His characters literally come to life, because he understands the human heart and what motivates it.

-- McCamy Taylor

Microsoft flip-flop
BY ANDREW LEONARD
(10/26/99)

Does Microsoft understand the software business? I wonder at times. Their recent abandonment of support to their financial newsgroups in favor of their buggy, slow, confusing "Web Communities" has caused at least one person (me) to go elsewhere for financial information.

-- Richard Sanchez

I did not mourn the end of the MVP program. I think it could use some thinning out, actually, because the program has become less about community support and more about a few people getting free software and a cliquish designation. The problem is, Microsoft primarily gets feedback about MVPs from MVPs.

Though I think there are excellent MVPs for Frontpage and IIS, there are some horrible, self-serving ones for HTML Help and Office. Some MVPs have developed a cult of personality. Others campaign to get the MVP designation, then you never hear from them again. I think it's high time they thinned the herd.

-- Tracey Attwood

The information laundromat
BY MARK GIMEIN
(10/26/99)

Whispernumber.com is using a straightforward application of the Delphi Method, published by the Rand Corp. in the 1960s. This is a group consensus and decision-making method using structured communication, anonymity and feedback. The method is specially useful for areas where lack of information renders traditional planning imprecise (such as predicting the future). Hence the reference to the oracle at Delphi.

If the group can keep their egos under control, anonymity is not necessary, in my experience. I've used the method for project scheduling, for a project involving new software methodology for which there was such a severe time constraint that traditional planning methods wouldn't be appropriate.

-- Conrad Clark

Eating Iberia
BY DOUGLAS CRUICKSHANK
(10/23/99)

A decade ago, while editing a glossy magazine, I took advantage of an absurd-sounding junket opportunity: free airfare from San Francisco to London, followed by a two-day excursion to Scotland and back on the refurbished Royal Scotsman railroad line. (More precisely, the line was its old furbished self, but the railcars had been spruced up a bit.) Then instantly back to San Francisco, for four days of constant motion all told. The Scotsman got stuck in the snow somewhere outside Glasgow -- note to self: Avoid junkets to Northern Europe in February -- and I got so whipsawed by jet lag in both directions that I can recall further details today only with the greatest difficulty. The food, needless to say, did not approach Cruickshank's Iberian excesses in terms of either quantity or quality. There's more than Gibraltar separating his octopus from my haddock, believe me.

-- Jonathan F. King
Senior editor, Mother Jones
San Francisco

Disease parties
BY JON BOWEN
(10/26/99)

Jon Bowen does his readers a disservice by giving equal weight to anti-vaccine advocates and medical authorities; he fails to make clear that there is literally no debate within the medical community about the desirability of vaccination. "Cost-effective, maybe, but are vaccines always safe?" he writes. I answer, as an epidemiologist who studies vaccine safety: cost-effective definitely, and yes, vaccines are always safe, since withholding them places a child at enormous risk for infection. One child in a million healthy, immunized children will develop reactions to vaccines, but no medical procedure is perfectly safe. This is the tradeoff we must make to live in a society where the majority of children make it to adulthood.

What happens when ill-informed parents focus on the possiblity of a rare reaction to rather than the giant benefits of vaccination? There is no better example of this than in Britain, where some years ago fears about the whooping cough vaccine led to a drop in vaccination rates -- followed, predictably, by a huge surge in whooping cough.

-- Logan Spector
Department of Epidemiology
Emory University

I'm a chicken pox party parent. In general, my wife and I believe American medicine is a little vaccine-crazy. Recent actions by vaccine producers to stop using Thimerisol as a vaccine preservative to prevent significant mercury exposures to infants getting the full course of shots point out the distressing lack of research and consideration given to the cumulative effect of multiple vaccinations. If the doctors have forgotten to consider something obvious, like accumulating amount of intravenous mercury, what else may they have missed regarding subtle effects of multiplied assaults to an infantile immune system?

Specific to chicken pox, we have serious doubts about a vaccine that provides temporary immunity to a disease that is relatively minor in childhood, but wears off just in time to make patients subject to life- and fertility-threatening adult infections. The main selling point of the chicken pox vaccine is the hours of parental work time saved by delaying infection. We decided to take the time necessary to give our son permanent immunity.

When the first child in our community got the pox, we brought our boy, Coyote, over for a limited time. One of the contributing factors in chicken pox is the intimacy and duration of exposure to infection, so by limiting Coyote's exposure, we reduced the severity of his illness. Now he's got permanent immunity, without a dose of mercury, and without dumping a whole host of antibody producing agents directly into his bloodstream.

-- Ken Erfourth
Mount Horeb, Wis.

Publisher halts George W. Bush bio
BY DARYL LINDSEY
(10/21/99)

As character assassins go, J.H. Hatfield is maybe an L.H. Oswald -- a guy who looks kind of like a commie, but who might be something else entirely -- like perhaps the fall guy for a right-wing operation.

It's really amazing that the mainstream press paid little attention to this "biography" of George W. Bush until the elder Bush denounced it on national TV. That saved George W. from having to do it himself, which would have only brought down an avalanche of questions from reporters about his true relationship with cocaine.

How serendipitous! A paroled felon in Arkansas writes a demonstrably false book about George W. Bush and cocaine, then dad steps forward and points out the errors in the book, and all the unanswered questions about the younger Bush and drug use suddenly evaporate! Count on newsrooms cracking down on reporters who bug George W. about drugs (or anything else) now that "publishers" are on the hot seat for checking facts.

-- Mark Kind

Gee, isn't it interesting? A book about George W. Bush has info that is or is not true; the author is smeared and the books are, quick as lightning, taken off the shelves. What happens when the books with hateful lies are published about the Clintons?

-- L. Sparks
Orlando, Fla.

Though its bio of George W. Bush was given the green light by two groups of lawyers, St. Martin's Press, a hitherto respected publisher, has chosen to suppress a book that lists negative charges about the man most likely, according to all polls and political cash registers, to become our next president.

If there is a lesson to be learned from the still ongoing Clinton-Starr encounter, it is that in a system like ours, where politics has become the year-round national sport, the charges against Bush will never disappear, and that they should be investigated thoroughly before the GOP nominations are in full swing. Once he takes office, who can doubt that till the end of his term, foes will provoke the sort of nonstop investigation that soiled the Clinton administration and deprived the nation of a full-time president?

Right now, Gov. Bush can best serve the country by calling for the establishment of a respected nonpartisan group that could investigate the allegations in the book by J.H. Hatfield. Hatfield appears to have been convicted 11 years ago of hiring a hit man to kill his boss. I can't excuse his crime, but I have read enough news stories to know that, at least with politicians, imprisonment always leads to born-again Christianity and a rededication to truth and American values.

-- Hy Brett