Cartoonists With Attitude

I think the entire progressive blogosphere is linking to this today, but this post summarizes our current political situation beautifully. It's long, but worth reading the whole thing. Grab a hot toddy and enjoy.

This is the front of Claire and Dave’s wedding invitation.

Now check out the second page of the invitation…

The award-winning invitation was designed by Chris MaClean. Damn, that’s good.

Along vaguely similar lines, I really like Taiwan’s recycle symbol better than ours¹ :

(I like stuff like this. I’m still impressed by the arrow hidden in the FedEx logo lettering, which took me years to notice.)

1. Even though I suspect it wouldn’t work in the US, because it’s too easy to see a swastika in the design.

At The Jaded Hippy.

Fifty! How neat.

nickmag_comics has some funny comics by some of the better comic people around. I like seeing the stages of a finished piece. They show a Jason Shiga comic through various stages of development. Pretty cool.

It's been a long day of opera writing... I met up with Will the Thrill Viharo to pick up a box of old TMCM mags he's been lugging around for a couple years. I was going to go out with Julie (ex-wife of Klaus Flouride) but my friend Carolyn Jones (Reporter for the SF Chron) said she wanted to see Will since they were old friends.... so I blew off calling Julie 'till late but Carolyn blew me off... Sheesh. Least Will introduced me to Jacque, who put together a book of 1960's Trash Movie Posters (oddly enough, I own. Great book BTW). He's now putting together a book for Fantagraphics with various artists re-imagining (his wording, not mine) old movie posters. Cool project. Al Columbia is doing Diabolique. Oddly enough, he recently dated the woman pictured below who just bought a dozen penis molds... Yikes, is it ever a small world.


(I took this picture on the drive down - but it looks like cheesy so it fits)
Then I drank beer alone at a pub in Berkeley and worked on the operatic death scene for the opera... One of my many kids suggested that not enough happens in the second act and TMCM should spend some time in heaven... dammit if he's not right. So I spent about an hour writing questions I'd ask God if I had the chance. It's about 6 pages of scribbles... mostly it boils down to 'why are we born only to die just as we begin to figure stuff out?' but it also includes questions about marrying and if you're still married in heaven then if you married twice do you get the better one or do you become a polygamist?' 'If you look like you do when you die then aren't those who die young have an unfair aesthetic advantage in the afterlife?' Those were the easy questions... there are tougher ones that aren't as funny. We'll see how it translates into opera...

Though my spider sense tingles when I think about opening this can of worms... I've had enough beer to not care.

This vixen-friend of mine won a local-benefit-auction and got a dozen penis molds (which she gave out as xmas presents (xxxmas?)). I started thinking... I don't have much use for a mold of my own member but it would be convenient to have the counterpart. Then I thought about what an embarrassment it would be caught with any sort of masturbation aid. But why? It's become common place for women to have multiple 'helpers' but there's nothing socially acceptable that's analogous for men.
The reasons, so far, I've heard:
• women need help masturbating, men don't.
• men make a bigger mess - there's a hygiene factor.
• women had a sexual revolution, men haven't.
Thoughts? I'm genuinely curious.

Please feel free to use this thread to discuss anything you’d like, or to post any links. Linking to your own stuff is definitely welcome.

My plan is to do almost nothing but image posts until 2008, btw. So for those of you who are sick of image posts from Amp, there is an end in sight.

(Part of Roadshow, by Robert Blanz).

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“The Contortionist,” by Original Ann.

And finally, a truly neat-wow animation; more information from the maker at Hipsters, Inc.

Hello? Is there anyone else on the internet this week? See you in the new year. Hopefully some fun things will be going on in the Big Fat Whale universe in 2008.

Next Week: Ask an Iowan

It was 11 hours of driving from Portland to Berkeley. I loved driving in the mountains in the snow.


I need to drink more coffee to finish my name though.

I've been spending the last couple days just writing Opera... opera opera opera.... the laptop hobbled by a dying hard drive. It's in Portland where the tech people tell me they can't retrieve the info. I was able to pull stuff off by making it a 'slave drive'. Seems if I can do it they should be able to do it. Blech. It's old-school; writing in notebooks and transcribing onto the computer at night... I just wrote TMCM's death scene... I think it's funny, we'll see.

Cartoon for December 27

Sartre said we're defined by our actions. If Americans murder and torture, and do it routinely, and Americans don't care, then how can Americans claim to have "values"?

Click on the cartoon to make it bigger.

The Jewish Defense League (JDL) called for a boycott of Will Smith’s new movie, and for movie studies to blacklist Smith, because Smith said:

Even Hitler didn’t wake up going, “let me do the most evil thing I can do today.” I think he woke up in the morning and using a twisted, backwards logic, he set out to do what he thought was “good.”

The JDL’s webpage (and, I suspect, press release) carries the ridiculous headline “Will Smith Thinks Hitler Was Basically Good.”

After Smith released a statement clarifying that he thinks Hitler is evil, the JDL retracted their call for a boycott and Smith’s blacklisting, but maintained that “we stand by our original assessment that his original comments were offensive.” They haven’t revised their headline as of this moment.

Of course, Smith’s argument isn’t novel; it’s the sort of philosophy that gets chatted about among friends and family, and in Sunday school, frequently. (This was true even of my childhood Sunday school — which was Jewish). Contrary to the JDL’s reading, by using “Hitler” as his example Smith implicitly acknowledged Hitler’s ultimate evilness (the philosophical conundrum Smith discussed only makes sense when the example is a figure everyone recognizes as vile).

As Marc Lamont Hill writes:

In his quote, Smith accurately pointed out that people rarely view themselves as the living embodiment of evil. Instead, all of us are shaped by ideologies, traditions, and regimes of knowledge that shape who we are and how we view the world. As such, Hitler likely didn’t see himself as evil, but as an agent of what he viewed as positive social change. This doesn’t justify the massacre of Jews, it merely explains how individual identities and practices are constituted by coherent (though often deeply problematic) worldviews.

While I’m sensitive to Antisemitism — I supported the JDL’s boycott of Mel Gibson– this is going too far. Every time someone does more than call Hitler the devil incarnate, they aren’t supporting the Holocaust. Every time someone challenges the Zionist occupation of Palestine, they aren’t antisemitic. This type of thin skinned and reactionary media grandstanding on the part of the JDL does a radical disservice to the legitimate work against antisemitism that is being done around the globe.

Two quick thoughts:

1) Smith has publicly supported Barak Obama’s candidacy (and the JDL called for Obama to repudiate Smith); I doubt that a right-wing celebrity who had said the same thing would have gotten an angry response by the JDL. But a chance to combine liberal-bashing with publicity-grubbing isn’t something the JDL is likely to pass up.

2) The JDL’s inane attacks on innocent statements trivialize actual antisemitism.

Bhutto Assassinated

This is huge.

I've been writing since 1999 that Gen. Musharraf's regime wasn't the prescription for, but rather the cause of, instability in Pakistan and South Asia. Here's where the rubber hits the road.

Now the only salvation for a post-Musharraf Pakistan--and Pakistan MUST get rid of Musharraf--is Nawaz Sharif. It's far from certain that he enjoys the political credibility and broad-based support to rule the country. But if he fails, my long-predicted nightmare scenario could be at hand. Fracture, disintegration, warlordism, full-on Talibanization leading to Islamists waging (possibly nuclear) war against India.

This is America's mess: we made Musharraf and we supplied him. Calls for military involvement there would not necessarily be legally or morally illegitimate.

Again: this is huge.