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12/02-9/03
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12/18
Tomorrow I will bite through the crisp skin of the Big Apple and attend the Mad Magazine Christmas party, proof positive that I have, if not arrived, at least successfully checked my baggage.

This level of cartooning insiderness is a career high for me, and it has stimulated the atrophied success gland in my cerebellum to release a massive amount of cartoonatonin. This is a powerful mood elevator produced naturally in a cartoonist's brain in small doses usually once or twice a decade when we get paying work. It is truly delightful, filling your ears with the sound of butterflies making love and bringing a euphoric effect somewhat akin to the pleasure of melting a Hershey's kiss on your tongue and finding your first orgasm in the center, shiny and new again.

So why would I dilute this experience by allowing the cursed media to get its hooks into me again? Well, I guess I sorta hate myself. But its tough to look away from the orgiastic car crash that is the shape of modern news programs today. I speak especially of Wolf Blitzer's hideous "Situation Room".

For starters, rather than report while sitting at a desk, Wolf is forced to stand in the undignified manner of a common weatherman. Then there is the obscenity that is his sound stage, tricked out with so many monitors, control consoles and green screen effects that you'd think he was piloting his show through hypserspace. I suppose the idea is to put the viewer in mind of one of those stoic commanders from a thousand Hollywood spy epics, multitasking global operations transpiring on 12 Imax-sized television monitors like a maestro. This could not be more evident than when Wolf conducts interviews through a gigantic wall screen that is subdivided into a hundred irrelevant windows. The guest must share the viewer's attention with war footage, Senate hearings, flood victims and NASA telemetry. It is a glory of overproduction in which the stories are frankly meaningless. Less a journalist now than an air traffic controller, Wolf is the has-been warrior Jesse Ventura played in The Running Man, forced to wrap himself in the glittering, worthless trappings of cyber haute couture or drag his obsolete ass to PBS.

Of course, none of this is nearly as vapid as the actual content of television news, which now spends a good deal of time covering itself. And nowhere is this solipsism more evident than the War on Christmas.

We are in the third year of the War, which is the third front of the War on Terror (the other two being airports and Mary Cheney's womb). Originally launched by Bill O'Reilly and quickly adopted by the entire Fox Network as actual, coverable news equal to the Terry Schiavo imbroglio, it has become conventional wisdom now for the entire media landscape to treat this crisis as though it actually exists and to resurrect it every year, like Christmas itself, starting the day after Halloween.

The War on Christmas proffers the notion that Christmas--our most cherished institution marrying religion, custom and capitalism into one imperishable golden calf--is being diluted by shopkeepers wishing people "Happy Holidays" so as to rope in the good will of Jews as well as others (unidentified) who may not celebrate Christmas. This, feels O'Reilly, is the greatest menace baby Jesus has faced since Herod. The fact that the spiritually neutral term "Happy Holidays" is the seasonal greeting preferred not by average citizens but by the corporate class O'Reilly whores for, including (and especially) Wal-Mart, which is maintained by the right-wing Walton family, is lost in his denunciation of the phenomenon as slithering, Trotskyite political correctness.

What's worse, however, is that now that the existence of a War on Christmas has been entrenched in the public mind, with O'Reilly and his maggoty ilk staking out one fictitious side of it, an obnoxious counter-balance is arising to meet them on the field of battle. I'm speaking of Glen Beck's recent appearance on Good Morning America.

In a nutshell: Glen Beck appeared on GMA to remind Dianne Sawyer, Robin Roberts and all humanity that he is smegma on toast. No surprise there. What set me off was when Sawyer and Roberts dove into the War on Christmas (again, treating it as though it were a real conflict with real soldiers and goals and not a marketing meme invented by ABC's competitor) by challenging Beck on the notion that wishing the Dalai Lama or Muhammad Ali a Merry Christmas could be greeted as anything but an evangelical come-on. "Wouldn't you feel a little reluctant saying 'Merry Christmas' to people who are clearly not going to be at the party?" Sawyer asked earnestly, waving around placards she had constructed of Mr. Ali and Mr. Lama's faces as though they were fright masks.

Blood then shot from my left temple, soaking the teddy bear I was preparing to send to my newborn baby nephew in North Carolina. This was, finally, the the most idiotic thing I had ever heard on television. What party?? For that matter, What fucking war?! No one is offended by being wished a Merry Christmas! No Jew, Muslim or atheist who ever walked the earth is actually offended by this! I've never met one, YOU'VE never met one...they don't exist!

And yet here were the ostensible opponents of shitrags like O'Reilly and Beck going live to air dancing a jig at the end of those fuckers' strings! Apparently if an evil cunt says that we must all say Merry Christmas on his command long enough eventually an equal but opposite moron will arise to tell the nation that they'd better crap their pants at the infinitesimal possibility that the words "Merry Christmas" might distress our enormous Tibetan exile community!

The correct response is this: There is no War on Christmas. It is a canard, a wedge being driven between Americans by opportunistic snakes in the grass who have lost all sense of what the news is supposed to cover. Those who advance this agenda must be attacked in their homes, bleach poured in their eyes and then tied to electrified bedsprings while Bing Crosby and David Bowie's duet of "Little Drummer Boy" is blasted into their ears at 7,000 decibels for fifty unforgettable hours until they finally learn the true spirit of this wonderful motherfucking holiday!!
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It’s me Benito Fall directly within Thus It’s me Lorenzo

12/09
Color Me Happy when: the envelope from the lawyer is a check and not a lawsuit brought by Visa!

What better way to begin my tenure at my new apartment than to find the payment from a client I did some illustration work for last month sitting in my mailbox? No harassing phonecalls required, just payment in full. And with the high ceilings in my new crib the check looks even bigger and roomier! Everything is definitely coming up Milhouse.

My new place, which is only half a block from my old residence, features a nice large studio space that kicks the crap out of the cramped, chilly oubliette that I was cartooning from these last four years. I originally painted it Key Lime before the brightness overwhelmed me and I resorted to Celery Bunch. Those names are from the Behr "True Fag" line of custom colors that all seem to be named after food and/or ephemerality. Honey Moth, Pine Scent, Cucumber Crush, Frost Wind... if you've got an ice cream flavor and a love of Basho, they've got your hue. One of them is simply called "Distance". I believe it doubles as toilet water.

Now that I am neatly settled and my cardboard boxes crushed and curbside, I can finally get back to the only matter that really counts: chronicling Washington bullshit! Specifically, the Iraq Study Group, who turned in their highly anticipated term paper this week. If you've seen it you know it reads like the opening crawl to a Star Wars movie; sixty thousand words of story exposition and recaps of who the Sunnis and Shiites are, what's at stake, the composition of the Ewok insurgency, etc.

The report was not meant to turn any heads in Washington, really. It's constructed strictly for public consumption, the way Colin Powell's U.N. presentation laid out a justification for war in Iraq that was absent of any tangible proof. Leaders aren't meant to be convinced by its findings. All that matters is that the public sees a lot of facts laid end to end and sealed with the signet ring of Washington's mildewy Old Guard. This way they can convince themselves that at last someone with clout is doing something about that nasty Iraq business!

What we get is a lot of common knowledge gussied up to look like an agenda. So Iraq needs to come to a resolution on ownership of Kirkuk, huh? Why didn't I think of that! And who'd have guessed that the Turks don't like the PKK? That's $10,000,000 well spent! You can just see the President's eyes widening as he reaches page 25 and learns for the first time that the UAE has not offered Iraq any debt relief.

The first sentence of the report's executive summary pretty much expresses the only worthwhile conclusion it reached. "The situation in Iraq is grave and deteriorating." No shit, Sherlock Commission. And are we supposed to believe that Sandra Day O'Connor, Ed Meese, Vernon Jordan and the rest of that white-haired entmoot are really the ones to turn this ship around? What are their foreign policy chops? Do any of them speak Farsi? Maybe the Study Group should come to Rochester and use their healing skills to transform a single crime-ravaged neighborhood here before we set them loose on Mesopotamia.

Not that that is going to happen anyway. Despite Jim Baker's admonishments to the President not to pick over the recommendations like a fruit salad (and to stop hiding his brussel sprouts under his mashed potatoes), the fact is we're still dealing with Dum Dum here. He'll surely convince himself that the less caustic suggestions dovetail with his "you stand up/we stand down" duck duck goose strategy. But as for sharing a beer with Iran and Syria while asking Israel to give up the Golan Heights? "Don't let that door hit you, Jim. And say hi to Poppy for me."

You can tell the media knows this idea is dead on arrival. When they discuss the prospect of Bush negotiating with his enemies their words carry undertones of a mother trying to get a teaspoon of Robitussin down her toddler's throat. "Here comes the diplomatic airplane, sweety! Are you going to open your mouth and let the airplane land in Tehran? Come on pumpkin! Remember Daddy Reagan? He talked to the Iranians. Don't you want to be like Daddy?"

Don't they get it? En-Oh spells NO! Just because the national mood right now is set to 65 bipartisan degrees doesn't mean George has forgotten how to code the words "fuck off" for a prime time audience. That's what his promise to "take seriously" the report's "tough assessment" and "interesting proposals" means. And much to Jim Baker's chagrin, Bush has already removed the report's prime cantaloupe chunks from consideration.

So what was the point? A council of wrinkled elders, wise in the teachings of Oomok the Sage as recorded in the Scroll of Elbor, asks the President to make peace with the Stone Mountain Clan and gets a pat on their powdered wigs for their trouble. America was holding its breath for this?

This entertaining distraction was about the usual alignment of political cowards and ass-coverers teaming up to give bipartisanship a bit of the ol' spotlight, but only as little as circumstances demanded, and done in just such a way that both sides can eventually claim that centrism doesn't work. It was about Democrats and Republicans--surprise!-- agreeing to disagree, thus getting us all hot and sweaty for 2008, which is the next time a real Washington discussion will take place about changing course in the magnificent, unswerving clusterfuck that is Iraq.
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12/07
Bad Jason! Moving to a new apartment + last minute rush illustration assignment =dereliction of blogging duties! I can't even come up with a clever enough technical metaphor to construct my excuse around! That's how frazzled I am!

And believe you me, I am simmering with hate and wretchedness. It's killing me not to be jumping around with a flyswatter and an air horn over that Iraq Breakfast Club report. Look, if you'll just give me until tomorrow to get my shit together and stop threatening to take your patronage to your cousin's MySpace page, I promise a nugget of rancor so pure they'll have to pass a U.N. resoulution against it. Sound good?

No? Well read the fucking haiku again if that isn't enough for you. Jesus crackers!
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11/07
Election Day! Thank Allfather Zeus! I don't think I could take having one more half-baked scandalette crammed down my throat. Palsied actors! Cornholing evangelists! Playboy partiers! Phantom nukes! Insulted vets! I have never before witnessed such an earnest masquerade for the absolute poverty of integrity and imagination that distinguishes both parties at this point in history.

For those of you rooting for the Democrats, I've got a big sourball for you. The Dems ran on absolutely nothing this year. Nothing except the weasly hope that the Republicans would smell so bad by November that people would forget how aimless the vision of the Democratic party really is. Do you think if Pelosi and Co. take the House they will bring an iota of real change? All they want is their shot at the loot being offered by whoever stepped into Jack Abramoff's loafers when they sent that pig up the river. What stands have they taken? What 180° distinctions do they have with the Regime? Are they going to bring the troops home? Reverse Bush on torture or domestic spying? Root out the lobbyist humpers in their own ranks? Here's a short list of the bold changes the stars of campaign 2006 have in store for us:

Harold "my scalp is black, the rest of me is yours to decide" Ford (Tennessee, for Senate): Will support an amendment to ban gay marriage, but only thinks we "should have" a pay-as-you-go budget amendment. Thank God he knows America's priorities! His stance on healthcare is even more evasive. His website declares "We need to move to a system where adults accept responsibility to obtain coverage for themselves and their children. In short, it is time to give universal healthcare coverage, but only if people are willing to accept universal responsibility." Lemmee run that through the bullshit translator: "Universal coverage...as long as you aren't expecting a public plan." I have never heard such a craven reiteration of the status quo phrased so heroically.

Claire McCaskill (Missouri, for Senate): If Harold Ford's website is full of needs and shoulds, Claire is full of "belief." On the environment: "Claire believes in upholding and enforcing the Clean Air Act and the Clean Water Act so that Missourians can rely on healthy air, clean rivers and safe water for drinking, swimming and fishing." On Iraq: "Claire believes we must engage our traditional allies as well as the neighboring countries in the region who have an interest in a stable Iraq and an end to the conflict (...) our national security cannot be held hostage to Iraq's inability to make the difficult political choices and compromises necessary to form a credible government." On immigration: "Claire does not believe we need any new guest worker programs undermining American workers (...) she intends to hold Washington accountable for its failures to secure our borders."

Wow! A "blame the victim" approach for Iraq that is in lock step with the White House's evolving bug-out strategy, and a firm finger-wagging for those rapscallions in Washington who, like she, have no plan for cracking down on the number one cause of illegal immigration: illegal hiring. And she's against drinking poison too! Tough medicine indeed!

Darcy Burner (Washington, for House): Darcy's website is suspiciously light on detail. Just a list of key issues and a thin gruel of a policy for each. Consider her take on ethics reform: "I support tough ethics reform that will stop the revolving door between lobbyists and Congress, and put an end to secret meetings with lobbyists that give corporations huge subsidies. My plan is simple: no more secret meetings, no gifts, no lobbyist funded travel, no exceptions."

Is that a plan? Sounds like a few sentences of boilerplate to me. This grand scheme is not expanded on anywhere else in her website. We only have Darcy's word that when the party heavies start twisting her arm about not pissing off the money she will go to the stake like Joan of Arc over it. Well, not her word so much as her strongly implied commitment. All two sentences of it.

Jack Davis (New York, for House): Davis is running against Tom Reynolds in New York's 26th district, which is in Buffalo (my home town). Reynolds has been smeared in the Mark Foley scandal, so Davis has a shot, not that I am at all glad of it. I have been listening to this guy's lukewarm, dare to say nothing radio ads for months now. He's a millionaire who--surprise!--is against the Estate Tax, aka the Death Tax, which is only called that by the Republicans and people with multi-million dollar estates (the only Americans who are at risk of paying it). But don't confuse him with any friend of Bush, no sir! He has boldly, stridently staked out a position against the safely dead and moldering issue of privatizing Social Security, because "You deserve to know the truth", goddamnit!

Besides being firmly on the side of the angels on issues that only Koko the gorilla still supports, Davis' website features a head-scratching "Davis on the issues" section which does not include any of his positions at all, but rather transcripts of magazine articles on subjects Davis is interested in. There is also a horrifically bad cartoon which casts the elderly Davis as what appears to be a young, lasso twirling David, almost certainly drawn by the grandson of his receptionist.

I could go on and on, but you get the picture. Milquetoasts and Republican trade, that's who will comprise the incoming Democratic Congress. When you promise nothing, you need deliver nothing. We The People may be all up in arms about Iraq, but not to the point of demanding any specific action, and the Democrats have obligingly not offered any. Look for the pride of the blue states to keep beating that benchmark drum good and loud without ever threatening a dollar of the war budget while they go door to door on K Street with their business cards extended. Affordable health care? Credit card reform? I believe we deserve to support the feeling that universal responsibility for these issues will be taking the back seat on a very long bus.
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11/02
Alert! A Level 1 meme has escaped the clean room and entered the general population! All Omega 13 doomsday protocols should be enacted without delay. Those without functioning hazmat suits should crack open their failsafe packets immediately. Inside you will find a Walther PPK 9mm pistol and a single round of ammunition. Use as you see fit.

The genetically modified Level 1 political meme codenamed "Full Stop" takes the form of a self-replicating loaded question phrased as "Do you want America to win?", and is released automatically by infected Republicans within range of any microphone, camera or other telecasting device, usually against perceived opinion makers of a liberal bent.

Full Stop is an engineered mutation of the previously categorized Says Me or "Why do you hate America?" meme, and shares with it the same left-baiting properties. Our analysts believe that a pandemic of Full Stop is already in its early stages, and will turn most of the United States into a hot zone by November 7th.

Apprehending the original vector is paramount under these circumstances if an antibody is to be discovered, as patient zero is believed to be highly cynical and thus immune to the effects of the disease they are spreading.

The CDC has identified two likely candidates as the original host: Lynne Cheney was last seen releasing the meme during an interview with Wolf Blitzer mere days ago, and Bill O'Reilly showed clear signs of infection when he appeared on the View on October 18th and later on David Letterman's show on October 26th.

Warning! If exposed to this meme, do not attempt to answer it directly! The logical fallacy of the question is highly invasive. If queried with Full Stop, refuse to answer or, if necessary, respond with "Well, why aren't we winning already? It's been three fucking years, you know." Report to your nearest hospital after any contact with infected persons and turn over the first layer of your skin for study.
...

The tit-for-tat nature of the John Kerry/Rush Limbaugh "Mean Girls" debacles has left me with the eerie feeling that all politics in this nation are controlled by unfathomable Manichean forces. First, Rush ridicules a Parkinson's victim on the air, tipping the prospects of victory on election day ever so slightly into the Democrat's camp. Then, as if responding to a force of nature as irresistable as cruising a congressional page, John Kerry turns a purile jab at Bush into his own Dean Scream. How he managed to fit his foot in a mouth already stuffed with sour grapes is one for the scientists.

The fact that neither one of them could muster a genuine apology ought to demonstrate that Clintonian levels of ass-covering exist within the muddy souls of all politicians and wannabes. It makes more sense for Rush to waffle, since being a dyed in the wool prick is his bread and butter. If his stupidity costs the Republican's a little cred, so what? Fat boy at least gets his name in the papers. For Kerry, this is just another example of the kind of president he'd have made: classic phoney, and not above dragging people down with him.
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Clifton Jeffers wrote My name is. Can I ask you? Weird stuff, he points out

10/28
There was a time that I was a fan of Dennis Miller, when being machine gunned by his "I'm so hip it's giving me a hemmorhoid"" vomitus could knock me guffawing off my couch. His style befitted the been there/done that malaise of my generation when, of course, being there and doing that only meant that we'd seen as much television as Dennis, leaving us with the creeping suspicion that we'd wasted our entire lives being entertained. This is why Family Guy is so unwatchable. It's like Dennis Miller shat the Flintstones.

In the 90's Miller was the anti-Seinfeld, a man whose observations on culture were all tinged with malice and disgust instead of delighted bewilderment. That's because his technique was not to create the humor himself, but to let his wealth of obscure allusions paint a picture that resembled something profound he could only suppose at. If you were amused at all it was like being dazzled by a card trick performed at a cocktail party. "How the hell did he hotwire an Ed Muskie joke using nothing but Popeye Doyle and the album art from Breakfast in America? Amazing!"

Dennis Miller's brain works like a l33t speak generator. Type in a few subjects, out comes a bible of smugly sub-referenced gobbledy gook. And if smugness is delivered at 90 syllables a minute then it must be approaching the humor threshold, right?

Apparently he's too sharp for the butterknives of the Fox News audience, however. His latest "Real Free Speech" rants on Hannity and Colmes, replete with more non-sequitors than have been spoken by mankind in four centuries, now include visual aids. If you don't remember who the nosy neighbor on Bewitched was, or are unacquainted with Nefertiti's death mask, have no fear! The gloriously obnoxious new segments use movie clips, Photoshopping and other editing googaws to translate Dennis Miller's megalomaniacal barrage of pop flotsam into the only language consumers understand: video!

There's no need to guess what the Fox network thinks of its audience's brain power when you see a locomotive superimposed over Nancy Pelosi's head to illustrate "train of thought", but the last laugh (the only laugh) is on Miller, the wino-bearded crank himself. He will now get the telepath's point of view as to how his monologues hit the viewer's mind. And when Dennis Miller sees the unconnected stream of pure irrelevance that he mistakes for intellect whoosh by him like a TiVo set on puree, one of two things will happen. He will either have the flickering light of his ego puffed out like a candle, the emptiness of all things revealed like water pouring out of a cup into an ocean...

Or, he will see in his buffoonish efforts at cleverness that his twin soul is the blogosphere, and will invest his fortune in the technology that will allow him to mate with it, spawning a cyberchild who will use its bottomless well of Hollywood arcanna to overwhelm all conversation and dominate the world, like the Lawnmower Man armed with a Trivial Pursuit deck taller than Godzilla's Long Island Iced Tea, or like a post-monolith Dave Bowman with an Assur-nasir-apli complex, and we need that like R.Lee Ermy needs est or Fatty Arbuckle needed...um...an endorsement deal with Coke or... wait... I know I can... can form... gkk... Spiro Agnew...
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10/28
Yesterday as I listened incredulous to Bush's latest press conference I found my spirits buoyed slightly by the press corps gathering bravado, reminiscent of the ants at the end of A Bug's Life.

The Fourth Estate continues to stir in its slumber. They know that beyond their dream realm lies a genuine story to shake the world, the story of a nation led to calamity by a man who... seemed like them at first, but slowly began to speak in a tongue not of this earth. A language that began to irritate and unquiet the mind, like a Dilbert cartoon. Dilbert...you don't know why people find it funny. Dentists, you think, probably find it funny.

Here's a question no one has thought to ask the Redundant One: "Mister President, have you ever read the Koran? You know, Jesus is in there. We know you like Jesus. Are you at all curious what their boy had to say about our boy? Could be a good conversation starter at a summit in Jerusalem, don't you think?"

Christ the weed's good tonight. You know, I had a full head of steam worked up about Keith Olberman signing off a recent rant with "good night and good luck" that I had to drop when I learned he does that all the time. Am I supposed to believe that a man whose political commentaries are prepared like football game analyses (Keith Olberman presents the Pizza Hut Halftime Hot-button Huddle!) is the inheritor to Edward R. Murrow's mantle? I'm no Murrow historian, but I've got the feeling that Ed would have found that punctuating his editorials against McCarthy with organ music and a woman's recorded scream diminished his gravitas.
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Join the Anatrim Revolution Chavez launched Feel strong populace

I just responded to an e-mail inquiry from a writer in Canada who is reviewing the BBC fakeumentary "Death of a President". He wanted my opinion of the film, which fictionalizes the assassination of George W. Bush.

If you are familiar at all with this movie it is probably from the lone still image that has accompanied all coverage of it in print or on TV. The picture is an homage to the photo of Lee Harvey Oswald's assassination, and portrays the instant that a sniper's bullet deflates the President's left lung and, in my own fantasy, causes his mouth to fill with the sickly flavor of blood and 30 year-old hemp tar before he chokes to death gurgling the word "Squeezie", his pet name for Condi's snatch.

A month ago I watched Tucker Carlson, his head safely shielded in a box, roundly denounce the film on CNN while three other box heads played defense. The still was shown again and again and again for ten minutes, to the point where you'd have guessed that the movie was a documentary about the manufacturing of the still. Here is the happy moment:



The sender of the e-mail wanted my take on the questionable taste of portraying the murder of a sitting president. I realized after I had launched my reply that it was too reasoned, too practical. Although I have not seen the movie, how could any commentary on the premise not include the word "hallelujah"? I fear I failed to accurately communicate this to the questioner.

In my defense, I was not properly stirred up at that moment. I am capable of moods other than pure trenchancy, and the e-mailer caught me just before a twelve legged

My first thought was that there must be a better time to break out this contrivance than 9/11 Day. Here was the nation’s leading newsweekly transforming itself into the kind of sci-fi movie prop that an astronaut returning home from an orbit around the sun at light speed might find decaying on the newsstand of a barren, radioactively sterilized city. Was this really the opportune moment for Time’s editors to play Rod Serling?

Done correctly, of course, having a learned scholar with hundreds of years of historical context at his disposal pass a fictitious jeweler’s loupe over world events could be a refreshing eye-opener. How hard would it be for Niall Ferguson, an English academic and author with credentials from Oxford, Harvard and the Beef Wellington School of Starched Cummerbunds to read the chamomile leaves and tell us within a 5% margin of error whether we’ll be dropping bombs on Iran in a year or if we’ll let Israel do it for us?

Instead, Ferguson delivers a pusillanimous regurgitation of current event CliffsNotes that offers fewer and less daring predictions than a half-jiggled Magic 8-Ball. This is odd when you consider that Niall is a fan of counterfactual, or “what if” historical scenarios (he edited a book on them called Virtual History). “What might be” should not have been that much of a leap for him.

When it comes to faux-futurism however, Niall can’t seem to shed his role as historian to play prophet. Instead he dribbles out one no-shit-Sherlock observation after another, like “increasingly what was happening in Iraq was a sectarian war between the Sunni minority and the Shi'ite majority” as though this were fresh information from a time capsule unearthed beneath the Crater of Mecca, intended to be read by someone nibbling a zero-g everything bagel on the moon.

This is because Ferguson is not actually interested in forecasting the results of our current foreign policy maneuvers, but instead in fellating America’s ego in the manner so characteristic of those “special relationship” suck-ups who ooze over America’s “hyperpower”, seeing in it the reflected glory of Great Britain's own past.

“The Nation That Fell to Earth” is anything but what the title would suggest. Far from prognosticating where America’s cataracted vision of Middle Eastern democracy may be leading the world, Ferguson instead takes every opportunity to rub cocoanut oil on America’s big, bronzed shoulders, and to assure his readers that, one or two hiccups not withstanding, they’ll still be grilling Texas beef on the hibachis of the future. By all means read.
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9/8
Wuxtry! Wuxtry! Blogger works himself into lather over abducted Fox News reporters' release! Read all about it!
..

Behold! Three degreess of seperation!

The Greatest American Hero's emblem...

...The Dead Kennedy's logo...

...and the Bluetooth glyph!

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9/7
Good times were had this past weekend at Dragon Con. The joint was wall to wall Jedis, Narutos and Supergirls for four straight days, and into this geek soup I did crumble my crackers of Deep Fried, winning hearts and then losing them at the craps table.

I stayed at the Marriott Marquis, as swank a hotel as I could never afford (thank you, successful girlfriend!). The Marquis has 47 floors, all of which may be seen and enjoyed by riding a jet capsule up the hollow shaft that is the hotel's center. From the highest floor the lobby beneath resembled a view from Google Earth, with little blue sparks indicating faux lightsaber battles transpiring below.

Thanks to my executive leverage I enjoyed party after party in the Presidential Suite, which privilege was mitigated by the fact that a Doubleshot purchased from the food court cost twenty dollars and a bone marrow sample. The weekend also encompassed table dances, innumerable she-males and fe-men, and confrontations with Atlanta's Shaolin-trained panhandlers. But the real joy were the costumes, of which I have never seen such abundance. Dragon Con is easily the Mardi Gras of geek-kind, and though I tried to observe the natives discreetly, Margaret Mead style, I ended up having my usual difficulties with their species.

Despite multiple contusions I managed to function well enough to sell out of Weapon Brown and my trades, making Dragon Con one of my most successful shows yet. And how's this for an epilogue: just after returning home I contacted AppleCare to resolve last week's font calamity, and who should I get as my customer tech support buddy? None other than Rachel, a girl who had dropped by my table at the con wearing purple camouflage (one of about a dozen costumes she appeared in that weekend. Sorry! No photo!). Until now I only suspected I was being monitored by powerful forces outside this universe, but this was just too much of a coincidence. Way to tip your hand, Galactoids!
...

I have a whole bladder full of golden scorpion venom to spray as well, regarding certain individuals and the question of by who's coital activity they have presumed their identity, but I will dump that in my Touch of Ego section later. In the meanwhile, Stay moist, America!
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8/28
I intended to lead off this bloggin' with a clever "meme alert". I have noticed that the talk bite "Bush is not conservative, he's radical" has started to crop up in print and on radio, a weather vane indicating the jet stream current that the Dems hope they can ride to a squeaker victory in the House (Powerful stuff! Why not compare him to Hitler and shoot for the Senate too? And I just bet there's some mileage to be had in disparaging Dick Cheney! I suspect he's not nearly the Care Bear the media portrays him to be!)

Anyway, I was going to go into this at length, but instead I spent the last two hours trying to resolve the latest snafu to arise from my ineptitude dealing with my new Mac. Apparently installing a dumptruck's worth of new fonts from my old computer causes a Google search in Firefox to return results in the Cyrillic alphabet. Still working that out.

Instead, let me tease you with one of the new pieces of art I am offering for sale this weekend at Dragon-Con:

Keen, yes? That's DC's Death, the Che of the goth movement. This and many other pieces of my surplus genius will be available for purchase in the Artist's Alley section of the show. Come early and buy often! Full report when I return!
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8/25
Juicy, oven-roaster Deep Fried fan Tyson Durst drew my attention to a newly hatched scheme to cover the past with a layer of smiling bunny shelf paper by extracting all references to smoking from vintage Tom and Jerry cartoons on the Boomerang channel, a fiefdom in Ted Turner's empire.

The effort, part of a "painstaking review" undertaken by Turner Broadcasting, comes as a result of a single complaint to a British TV regulatory agency by a viewer who, we can be sure, has never passed a turd larger than a Tic-Tac through her pygmy-sized sphincter.

Mind you, not all hypnotic scenes of satisfying nicotine consumption will be extracted. Only those"where smoking could be deemed to be cool or glamorized". Other "cool" activities that may soon face the censor's black pen in the name of cultural hygiene will be using a mouse as a cork in a champagne bottle, employing a barking dog's chomping jaws to fashion a baseball bat from a piece of lumber and having your head compressed in a waffle iron until golden crispy.

Where would we be without these enlightened corporate barnacles who encrust the levers of power? Turner is going to recuperate the sins of our past the same way Lucas and Spielberg saw the light and digitally removed guns and pre-emptive Greedocide from their earlier works. Soon any child searching for forbidden vice on Boomerang (when they aren't trading donkey-fisting mpegs on AIM, that is) will only find good ol' Tom puffing away on a walkie-talkie. Thank God! Who knows how many juveniles would eventually have died of lung cancer by emulating that macho, rapier, Connery-esque feline?

The Cartoon Network, also a Turner entity, engaged in similar revisionist sodomy when they discontinued running Speedy Gonzales cartoons alongside other classic Warner Bros. cartoons several years ago. Apparently the Mexican rodent, who was never portrayed as anything less than courageous, smart and cool, was all along an insensitive stereotype (unlike, say, cracker hillbilly Foghorn Leghorn or that unbathed French rapist Pepe LePew).

How do we know that Speedy was hateful? Because Speedy was invented by whites in that caveman era before we all had bugs surgically inserted up our asses! Today we know that there must be, somewhere encoded within those cartoons, a pure, subliminal hatred for Speedy's race. Never mind that Speedy always won the day over the gringo cat. Never mind that Mexico is not lampooned in those cartoons any more than America ever was in a Bugs Bunny flick. Forget all that. Speedy was written by white men before white men had ever heard of tolerance. Somewhere in those cartoons there is hate. Best to shelve them until the supercomputers of tomorrow can extract the evil and launch it into the sun.

In fact, Speedy is the only non-white cartoon hero ever allowed to become popular in America in the last century. This is why he is feared: because there is nothing wrong with him. Because Warner Bros. once accidentally gave a voice to a minority character without focus grouping it for Rob Reiner and the NAACP and, holy shit! They got it right! And there is nothing worse than being ahead of your time. The people who claim to have been waiting for you all along are instantly jealous that they can't claim credit for you. Better to freeze an accidental success in carbonite than let the white world know that you can actually laugh with a minority and not at them, so long as your aren't bending backwards to apologize for recognizing their skin tone or their accent.

Idle hands, they say, do the Devil's work, and there are none more idle than the smug critics of the past, looking for a way to join the revolutions they were never part of, or will never launch. I'll never be able to write my congressman in favor of a bus boycott," they reason, "But by God I'll make sure an animated mouse never mocks our neighbors to the south again!" Or "I'll never protest forced abortion in China by divesting my portfolio of Google stock, but I'll make damn sure R.J. Reynolds' pact with Tex Avery, signed in blood under the full moon of Walpurgisnacht, doesn't yield them one more underage smoker!"

Give me a racist cat smoking a Macanudo over a fatcat with granola on his breath any day.
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8/14
Friggin' computers. Not only has my recent hard drive heart attack cost me six months worth of files—strips, illustrations, borrowed mp3's (I swear I'm going to buy Crazy In Love at i-Tunes, Beyonce! I just need a few more listens)— but thanks to my purchase of a Mac I have also been robbed of the use of half my software, Kazaa (the finest file-stealing engine ever invented), my scanner (no driver available for the Tiger OS) as well as all my favorite keyboard shortcuts, just so I could have the pleasure of downloading a Lost "countdown" widget and push a virtual button every 108 minutes. Brilliant.

It is not hyperbole to state that the bruises inflicted upon my brain by these successive hammer blows equals if not exceeds the collective psychic trauma of every homeless citizen in Beirut times a thousand trillion. The annoyance factor of having to purchase a new computer with an entirely new OS, plus the hassle of reinstalling my essential and expensive programs only to find out that the serial numbers have expired, then wrangling with Apple over the fact that they have shipped me two printers instead of one, finding out only after I have returned the excess unit that the one I kept is damaged...well, suffice to say that I would sooner contract to move the entire contents of the Taj Mahal to a bunker on the moon than go through this again.

All this has robbed me of my already Lilliputian competitive spirit. I was intending to vivisect a recent Jim Lileks column wherein he portrays himself as the Angel of History, hovering over Fidel Castro and waggling his fingers at him as he lay on his deathbed, when I asked myself, what's the point? If it makes an Izod beshirted Minnesotan happy to fantasize himself as the scold of the Maximum Leader in between cloying essays about 50s matchbook artwork and the cost of gutter cleaning these days, then let baby have his bottle! Far be it from me to disabuse his quaint, Cold War era rancor (kept in a mylar sleeve and stored in a white cardboard box in his den accumulating value) by reminding him that the porn movie that is our economic honeymoon with China has twined Western democracy with political torture and black market organs like a goddamn DNA helix.

I have similarly spared you another tedious exercise in self-fellation that was to be my critique of Ann Coulter's recent book "Godless". It's not that further critique of Ann is redundant now that her career has crested, although it plainly has (when the only ammunition you have left in your clip is calling Al Gore a fag, then even the most bloodthirsty liberals must, like the Predator, seek more exciting targets [no sport]). Nor is it that there isn't good fodder for indulgent intellectual exasperation on almost every left-baiting page of Ann's book. Sure, an aye-aye with an atrophied left brain hemisphere would have little difficulty laying waste to conservatism based on pronouncements from Ann such as that modern thinking has not improved one bit upon an explanation for Man's origins based on two naked teenagers, a magic apple and a talking snake.

No, it is just that I am so tired of it. All this sound and fury every day from millions of bored, bored Americans looking for a little adrenaline to compensate for the fact that they already have everything they need. We force feed ourselves entertainment—celebrity, musical, political—until our livers explode like foie gras. We even tolerate the fiction of an invisible war taking place behind the real one that we are losing, and accept Hollywood reenactments of what it might look like. Tom Cruise serves as our substitute terror warrior, his Impossible Missions become a cinema newsreel of what could be happening under our very noses. Phillp Seymour al Hoffman is down! The canister of Substance X is secured! America wins! Read Ann Coulter's latest to see how fags tried to thwart it all!

Nothing new has emerged from politics in the last two years except greater public disenchantment with how it works. The Democrats wait for Bush to eat just enough of himself that their timidity will suddenly seem like Renaissance thinking, and Bush keeps shaking salt on his leg. Call me when this is no longer the headline.
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8/14
Awww! I come back from my camping trip and what do I find? Israel and Hezbollah have baked me a cease-fire cake so I don't have to pretend I know something about healing wounds in the Middle East! Guys, you spoil me!

And what better way to ice that cake than with a foiled chocolaty skybombing plot! Mmm! And what are those rainbow crunchies sprinkled on top? Delicious Loserman funfetti?? Whoa! I can't wait to see what gets cooked up for my birthday in September!

(35. Yikes. Here comes the ground to kiss me hello.)

Things are going so well, and not just in the action packed Wide World of War! My cute p---y oopums Eva (sorry, I am not allowed to say in public what I call her in private. I'm not even allowed to say it in private!) has an exciting announcement on her website about a cool new sculpture being produced of her creator-shared vampire hottie Dark Ivory. This Buffy-whuppin' vampire teen will be featured in her own comic miniseries next spring, and will be all over T-shirts at Torrid and Hot Topic soon thereafter. Find out more at Eva's website so you can say you knew the trend when it was only a marketing scheme in short pants!

And how's this for cool? Fool-for- Deep Fried Ryan Thiessen has taken Zogg to the next level by actually printing out my parody's text, adding it to an actual Little Golden Book About God and giving it as a gift to a real-life Zoggling! See what happens when harmless fantasy becomes terrifying reality here.

I am still making the big crossover from my old PC to my new oober kootsie Mac, so I will keep this update brief. Gotta lotta transferring of data to do! I am thinking of taking another weekend off and seeing how that affects Iraq. Then again, all this vacation time has left me with little opportunity to seethe at the latest world shenanigans. Gosh life seems rosy when you don't know what the dickheads are saying. Give it a try, folks!
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8/10
I am back from Chicago, but can you believe I have to leave again for another weekend of fun and frolic? And who gets the short end of the stick again? You. Always you.

Next week: Back on schedule! In the meantime, here's this week's belated strip. Really, it's better this way. I've barely had time to hate Bush all week.
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8/02