Archive for the ‘O, Pine With Me’ Category

The medium is not the message

I won­der what exactly Jonathan Franzen is think­ing. I’ve read his The Corrections, and wasn’t that wowed by it, which doesn’t really mean much except that one book of his I read didn’t res­onate with me in the same way that his other books seem to res­onate with many other read­ers. But then he tells an […]

Chuck Asay: Bigoted homophobe, or bigoted homophobic sack of shit?

Chuck Asay is one of those old-​​​​timey white guys who has more than out­lived his use­ful­ness to the planet. Born in 1942, he’s the direct ben­e­fi­ciary of most of the social-​​​​support sys­tems that were erected dur­ing his youth, those same sys­tems he wants to see dis­man­tled now in the name of “con­ser­vatism” and — probably […]

Shame them

Last week some dis­turb­ing news broke in my neck of the woods. The long and short is that a school in Prescott, Arizona was paint­ing a rather joy­ous and exu­ber­ant mural that included some of the school’s stu­dents. Certain indi­vid­u­als drove past the school and shouted racist com­ments. A local dem­a­gogue got on the radio and fomented action. […]

In the interest of fairness…

…I took on a few other icons. Behold Jesus of Nazareth… …Siddhartha Gautama, also known as Buddha… …and one Chas. Darwin of Down House. Wanna guess who gets pissed off? SPOILER: It won’t be the athe­ists, and prob­a­bly won’t be the Buddhists.

I drew Mohammed!

If this makes you angry, you’re a moron. Via the fun folks at SP-​​​​Studio, for­merly Planearium.

Reflections of silver

I’ve been a Bowie fan for a while. It began when a friend intro­duced me to Labyrinth in the late 80s, and it’s never really ended; though lately it’s come to some­thing like fruition. I think Bowie was hard for heroin. Well, duh, it was the 70s, he did drugs; it is gen­er­ally pre­sumed that he did coke. But […]

No one is asking you to forgive Hitler.

The ques­tion is, can you for­give your­self? Crossposted from.

An interesting coincidence

This toon, by Patrick Chappatte and via Cagle, sums up pre­cisely what I think is wrong with “full-​​​​body” scan­ning at air­ports. What’s strik­ing is that I was think­ing it just this morn­ing. There is no way that a “body scan­ner” can pos­si­bly tell you any­thing about the per­son being scanned. Reliance on tech­nol­ogy to pro­vide us “safety” […]

I hate to have to admit it…

…but this lit­tle polit­i­cal toon by Cam Cardow is a hell of a lot closer to the mark than I would’ve believed, at this same time last year. Via Cagle’s pad.

Cameron’s Avatar: A big blue ‘meh’

This is an expan­sion on a com­ment I made on a post at BoingBoing about the movie Avatar. I fig­ured with some infla­tion it’d have the poten­tial to be a review. Yes, there are prob­a­bly spoil­ers here. Avatar is a lush, lus­cious movie set some­time in a more or less human future. We don’t know when, exactly, but a rough guess would be 100 […]

.45

This is not a threat, nor a warn­ing, nor any­thing else. (I will reit­er­ate it at the end of the post.) That said, and sure to be ignored any­way, here it is. There are two pud­dles of cat puke in my house, one on the stair­way (per­fectly arranged to be hit in the mid­dle of the night), the […]

Health care? Who needs it?

Arizona has its own health care sys­tem, AHCCCS, that is sup­posed to either take the place of or be sup­ple­men­tal to Medicare. I’m not actu­ally sure what the ratio­nale was for set­ting it up lo these many years ago, and it seems a lit­tle odd just from an economy-​​​​of-​​​​scale per­spec­tive. Medicare has to have more buying […]