Cartoonists With Attitude

This cannonball tree (couroupita guianensis) is one of my favorite trees. It’s been growing at Fairchild Gardens, south of Miami, since the 1930s. My father used to love this tree. When I was a kid we would go to see it at least once every year. It has strange and beautiful flowers with a very distinctive smell, that I would recognize anywhere. My brother, mom and I saw it again last week.

My stomach still feels fine, so that shows that the noni fruit wasn’t what made me sick before. That’s good — now I can eat them. Here’s the plant:

and here’s an immature fruit (the ones I ate were a bit more ripe than this, a pale yellow):

This morning I walked around in the yard looking for any ripe fruits, and found a bunch of things. I ate two cocoplums, half a sugar apple that had fallen off the tree already, five kamquats, a big juicy carambola, and a third of a noni fruit. A nice breakfast!

The noni fruit is pretty new to me. The plant just started fruiting a little while ago. It has a reputation of being very healthy, but totally stinky and horrible tasting. The first one I tried wasn’t that bad, kind of bland and tart. But I didn’t eat all of it, and it apparently had to ripen more, because the next day it smelled like a dead animal. Really strong. I couldn’t even think of tasting it at that stage. No way.

So today’s noni was another unripe one. This is a bit of a test — after the first one, I had an upset stomach for two days. Now I’ve eaten part of the second one, and I’ll see if that happens again. Then I’ll know if the first time was caused by the fruit or something else.

Here’s one of my older cartoons translated into Arabic. It was published in Saudi Arabia, in a cartoon magazine published by the newspaper Al Eqtisadiah.

Here’s a link to the original English version, if you’re curious.

For really good analysis of Dr. Muhammad Yunus and the myths of micro-credit, please see these two articles in the important online publication Megh Barta:

Monga, Micro credit and the Nobel Prize, by Anu Muhammad

Nobel-Man’s Un-Noble Corporate Nexus, by Tarek Chowdhury

I know, I’m late blogging about this week’s cartoon. I’m still on vacation, and to be honest, I’ll probably continue to be somewhat scarce until after the new year. But you shouldn’t care, because it’s the time of year to be drinking liqueurs and hunting for the “easter eggs” on the complete eighth season of The Simpsons (yes, Mr. Slowpoke and I received this for Christmas).

This cartoon sprang from a jotting in my notebook about how the most amazing high-tech gadgets eventually become junk. My old laptop was a mean machine back in 1999, and an object of ridicule in 2006. (I am attached to my old laptop, and still use it on occasion despite the wisecracks of those around me.) How swiftly — and yet almost imperceptibly, not unlike the human process of aging — our sexy technology turns into laughable kitsch. I find it all rather poignant.

click for comic

Happy new year. I hope it doesn’t suck. And maybe Kissinger will follow Ford’s lead and fucking die already.

Next Week: Surge!