Cartoonists With Attitude

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There is no need to wipe your butt with old-growth forests.

*HERE WE GO AGAIN..
Looks like my latest K Chronicles strip has caused another campus uproar. It even made the local news!!

It’s becoming a yearly ritual.

I had to shrink this way down in the ‘toon, so I wanted to post it full size. I haven’t tried to draw Calvin in over 20 years…

That said, how pissed would I be if a piece of my work was ripped off (as Watterson’s has been) to serve as a commonly-recognized symbol of douchebaggery?

“Rosetta Rock“

More evidence for the Tom the Dancing Bug theory on the death of Hitler?

American researchers claim to have demonstrated that the skull fragment, secretly preserved for decades by Soviet intelligence, belonged to a woman under 40, whose identity is unknown. DNA analyses performed on the bone, now held by the Russian State Archive in Moscow, have been processed at the genetics lab of the University of Connecticut. The results, broadcast in the US by a History Channel documentary, Hitler's Escape, astonished scientists.

I hope the punchline is clear – that TMCM stops believing in everything so it all disappears… I don’t know. Good enough for this week I suppose.

Hung out with Tony Millionaire the other night. Conversation was tough because it was loud but I really enjoyed drawing with him. He’s since called me a wonderful person and gentleman which is giving me way more credit than I deserve. He was a blast to hang out with I wish we had a better chance to chat. It was a rare privilege to be able to draw with him.
He drew me in my Che-moving-toward-Hemmingway beard… or maybe I should call it my ‘please stop me at the airport’ beard. I love his drawing – makes me laugh.

Tony Millionaire drew me then I drew him:

Last week I saw the musical Ragtime and the La Boheme opera. Ragtime was great – amazing costumes, singing, etc. Everyone was noble and great except for the Irish. The Irish were stupid ugly fat drunken racists.

Boheme was great too. It was shorter and had less depth than I expected given it’s reputation. Without the two intermissions to stretch it to an afternoon it would have run about an hour. The story is; love, (unnecessary) rejection, heartbreak (likely causing death), and (tragically too-late) reconciliation. The music is in so many movies that one has the ‘oh, I’ve heard this before I didn’t know it from this’ moment over and over again. It is a powerful piece and Portland Opera did it justice.

This cartoon kinda brings together a few different ideas that didn’t quite fit into their own cartoon. Odds’n sods, you know.

On an email discussion group, a right-wing friend of mine gloated that youth unemployment in the US is currently at 52.2%. Glenn Reynolds reported the same statistic, and so have many other right-wing bloggers. They’re all relying on the same source, the New York Post’s Richard Wilner, who wrote:

The unemployment rate for young Americans has exploded to 52.2 percent — a post-World War II high, according to the Labor Dept.

Wilner is wrong. Wilner claimed his statistic was for those aged 16 to 24. According to the Labor Department, unemployment for young Americans aged 16 to 24 is 18.5%. (That’s the highest they’ve ever seen “in July”.)

One of Glenn’s readers wrote to tell him that current youth unemployment is 25%, not 52.2%. (Glenn’s reader was a little off-base. It’s 25% for folks in the 16-19 age group; it’s 18.5% for those in the 16-24 age group Wilner was talking about.) Glenn responded by asking “Anybody have an idea what’s going on?”

I have an idea. From the Labor Department’s press release:

The employment-population ratio for young men was 52.2 percent in July 2009, down from 57.9 percent in July 2008. The employment-population ratios for women (50.5 percent), whites (55.2 percent), blacks (36.4 percent), Asians (41.3 percent), and Hispanics (46.5 percent) in July 2009 also were lower than a year earlier.

So I’m pretty sure that what happened is that Wilner is so ignorant that he doesn’t know the difference between the “unemployment rate” — the percent of people who are looking for work without success — and the “employment-population ratio,” which is the percent of people who have a job.

It’s okay not to know that difference. Lots of smart people don’t. But if you’re going to write a column read by hundreds of thousands of people, it would be helpful to have a clue what you’re talking about.

(One last point: The economic situation sucks, especially for employment. We shouldn’t lose sight of that reality as the partisan bickering goes on. 18.5% is tragically bad, and it’ll probably get worse before it gets better.)

(Edited to reword definition of unemployment.]

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For all the nonsense talk about President Obama’s birth certificate, suddenly getting people to believe you’re from a different country has some advantages in America right now. I mean, if I could prove I was Canadian instead of American, I’d be getting free health care instead of paying out the rear for COBRA. Also, everyone would probably assume you’re smarter.

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Evangelicals always get upset when an edition of the Bible gets updated with more “PC” language. Maybe it’s god’s will.