Cartoonists With Attitude

Once again, I was posting from outside the Flock browser, so I couldn’t share with you a couple things I have written recently. Or I could have, but I was too lazy to copy and paste code into livejournal. Here are links to two missing entries:

Over a Barrel – I post some comments made by Josh Fruhlinger on the use by political cartoonists of a person clothed only in a barrel to represent impoverishment.

Your Cheap Shot of the Day – In which I respond to the news that Alan Colmes is breaking up with Sean Hannity.

Wow, see what you’ve been missing? How could you ever have made it through the rest of the week without these pithy observations on totally marginal topics? Next week: nothing but belly lint.

I’ve been staying up way too late playing MarioKart….

anyone have their pin numbers? I’ll add you as a friend….

Joe Clark argues that the only way we’re going to get good captioning of online videos is if government steps in and regulates. Agree or disagree, it’s an interesting essay about a problem that — frankly — I haven’t thought about before.

Via Clark’s essay, I came across captioningsucks.com. I’ve never thought about how much captions suck, but they really do. Why aren’t they done in a decent font? It doesn’t seem like it should be that difficult to accomplish.

I’d tentatively favor government-mandated standards for captioning. I’d certainly favor legislation requiring videos produced by large companies to include good-quality captioning; for more garage-band productions, I don’t think I’d favor a mandate, but I would favor the government funding some resources to make captioning easy to accomplish even for folks with limited budgets and skills.

Hey, thanks to all who wrote in about the Darwin Fish Feet.  I'm embarrassed that the quality and thoughtfulness of the responses so far outweighed the gravity of the issue at stake.  Believe me, I'll keep that in mind if there's ever a question of real consequence I might need your thoughts on.

The result:  What the hell, I'll leave it as is.

Meant to post this to the blog earlier, but I was distracted by various tasks, such as procuring poultry. This cartoon was not actually inspired by real life, as Mr. Slowpoke and I will be practicing Thanksgiving by ourselves. I did, nonetheless, greatly enjoy drawing Mr. Perkins exposing his butt cheeks in triumph.

The famous video of Palin in front of the turkey executioner made the third panel of this cartoon somewhat more relevant than when I drew it (I hadn’t seen it yet at that point). I swear, that video is going to be shown in politics classes in the year 2050.

OK, I am really trying. I am trying to give Obama the benefit of the doubt. I am really trying to remember how much I totally hate and despise everything about Bush, and how he is so hateful and evil that I should still feel positive and excited about Obama’s election no matter what. I’m looking at the adorable photos of the Obama family and clinging to Obama’s mentions of FDR and trying not to cringe too much when he mentions Reagan in a positive light. I’m even listening to the audiobook of Dreams from My Father.

But it’s hard, people! Especially when Obama is appointing center-right misogynist racist deregulation-happy asshats like Larry Summers to cabinet posts… and when he promises to KEEP Bush’s Defense Secretary?! I have to admit I was kinda hoping that by “bipartisan” he meant “I’ll throw the GOP a small bit of something every now and then” not “I’ll keep the guy running Bush’s illegal and unjust wars.” What happened to Mr. Supposedly Anti-War?

I’ve also read that instead of getting rid of Bush’s tax cuts for the wealthy right away, he might just let them expire eventually. WTF?!

So yeah… um… let me go get that audiobook again!

FINALLY. Of course, that doesn’t help kids or prospective adoptive or foster parents suffering under Arkansas’ newly-approved ban, but still. I hope Anita Bryant is crying.

If you haven’t seen them before, you might want to check out a few of my adoption-related cartoons, including one specifically about the Florida ban: “Operation Heterosexual Freedom”, “Stop Republican Adoption” and “The Saved Children” (a reference to Ms. Bryant’s bigoted so-called “Save the Children” campaign).

Well, that was a short week, folks, wasn’t it? See you on Monday.

What?

Oh, fine. Here’s a kitten riding a Roomba.

Here’s an interesting use of Flash in a “poster” for the upcoming Terminator: Salvation.  I like short, relatively simple but interesting uses of Flash like this (that aren’t confined to pop-up ads)… 

I am a believer in the idea that the internet will be the future of newspapers, but something about this doesn’t sound quite right:

The TypePad Journalist Bailout Program offers recently terminated bloggers and journalists a free pro account (worth $150 annually) on the company’s popular blogging platform. In addition to the free yearly membership, the 20 to 30 journalists who are accepted will receive professional tech support, placement on the company’s blog aggregation site, Blogs.com, and automatic enrollment in the company’s advertising revenue-sharing program.

I’m sure TypePad is just trying to do something nice for recently laid-off journalists, and someday this might be a really cool offer.  But at this point in time, it would just seem to add fuel to the Huffington Post way of thinking about the internet… like, “hey, exposure is just as good as money!“