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" or "security" is a fool's path, and will fail us. Machines can always be outsmarted — and the trained chimp running the machine is even easier to get past. Read the rest of this entry »
For those of you unfamiliar with the backstory, an Iranian man living in Arizona ran over — and killed — his 20-year-old daughter because he said she was getting to be "too westernized".
He was, of course, Muslim.
Now before you get twitchty about this, it's happened with all right-wing godtards. The Christians are every bit as bad. They even go to church, just to shoot doctors.
Of course, it wasn't a group of Christians that flew those planes into the WTC, and it's not Christian terrorists that have cells all over the Middle East.
Anyway, something from Steve Benson via Cagle. It nicely sums up why the US will never be able to get along with fundamentalists in general, and Islamic fundamentalists in particular.
I know, I know. Beasts of Delphos. I know! I will get back there. Crossconversting some parts of the text to HTML proveth tricky. Besides, I spent most of this week down with what I strongly suspect was the flu, and not just any flu, but H1N1 itself.
Why? Well, it hit me fast, and it hit me hard. Wasted no time at all stampeding directly into my lungs, and it partied there most mightily. It certainly wasn't a cold, and given the pandemic status of novel H1N1, well, you know. The odds are in my favor, if you want to look at it that way.
Anyway, I'm looking at some possibilities for a logo rework on something, and drew a couple things into my trusty Moleskine at the local café this evening. I figured I'd share them with you. To begin, we have a quail. Read the rest of this entry »
Issues with the internet connection have kept me from my Friday update. Ideally they'll be resolved today. Meanwhile, here's a lovely cartoon from Cagle's pad. Bill Day got it on the nose.
Can you tell me which thing is not like the others?
And I'll tell you if it is so.
You know it's only a matter of hours before the op-ed cartoons start, featuring Cronkite, Armstrong and MJ together on the Moon. Only one of them doesn't deserve to be lionized. You guess which one I mean.
It's weather like this that makes you feel a day lasts an entire month.
What the forecast doesn't show, of course, is the steady 20-mile-per-hour wind that blows in constantly from the west-southwest and feels about as comfortable as standing beside an open kiln for 16 hours at a time.
On the plus side, you only need to hang your laundry outside for half an hour before it's dry enough to preserve a mummy.
Always, always always, my preferred mode for illustration is pencil and paper, with inking. Of course in our ultra-modern age, that doesn't always work; Illustrator has taught many to expect very clean, slick graphics that are more or less entirely vector-based.
There's nothing wrong with the look per se; certainly I can work in that format myself.
I guess what I dislike about it is that it feels so damned sterile. Lines with precision-adjusted thickness, perfectly smooth solid-color and gradient fills, and curves created with mathematical precision do have a certain aesthetic value to them, but they also lose any sense of organic creation.
I've tried to deal with that by combining the process of drawing with converting the art to vectors in Illustrator. I begin with a pencil sketch — sometimes using blueline, other times not — that I then ink over. I scan the art into Photoshop, clean up the occasional bits of crud or damaged line, and pull the black-and-white line drawing into Illustrator. The art begins with this: Read the rest of this entry »
