The three chickens of the apocalypse
They mowed the field behind the house today (making hay while the sun shines — Summer is officially over at Badger House). The chickens took great exception to this and decided to drive the intruder away.
I’ve never seen more than one of them at a time do the alarm call. I had THREE of them at it, and one stalking along for the ride. They stand up very straight, goosestep slowly toward the threat, and scream bk-bk-bk-be-GAAK-bk-bk at it. In this case, a giant harvester.
Three of them. I almost busted something laughing. Something important in the internal organ department.
The illustration — just noodling around with a program called Manga Studio. With a name like that, you can guess it’s intended for comic creation, but it’s actually a very good pen-and-ink simulator. I got an email today offering me the high end version at a very deep discount, but the offer doesn’t seem to be on their website. Maybe it’s for registered users only. Anyhow, if any of you arty types badly want a copy, shoot me an email and I’ll forward you the offer (maybe it’ll be honored, maybe it won’t. Worth a shot).
Good weekend, everyone!
August 19, 2011 — 11:22 pm
Comments: 47
Oh, man
Did you see this thing in the National Journal? Seems White House aides are concerned about damage to what they call Obama’s “leadership brand.” Yeah, fellas. What you have there is totally a branding problem.
[Obama] then launched into a long reply that previewed what is to come after Labor Day. It is then, he said, that he will propose a “very specific plan” on the economy. And if Congress does not adopt it, “then we’ll be running against a Congress that’s not doing anything for the American people, and the choice will be very stark and will be very clear.” He concluded his answer stating that “the other side is unreasonable. And you … don’t want to reward unreasonableness. Look, I get that.”
Excellent. Because we have slipped sideways into an alternate universe where blaming other people for you problems doesn’t make you sound like a whiny crybaby bitch.
Wait, what? Labor Day??!? That’s three weeks from now. After another Vineyard vacation. Three years wasn’t enough time to come up with some specifics we can kick around?
According to the two senior officials, the plan to arrest that decline is for Obama to no longer be seen as above the fray. While they believe Republicans were both wrong and unfair to claim the president had no plan to bring down the deficit, they know it hurt him. So they will try to show the president as having specific plans and then show him fighting for them.
Does the wording of this strike you as distinctly weird? Not that Obama will actually be doing certain things, instead they will try to show him doing things. Like they’re going get the NY Times to run a picture of him holding a piece of paper marked SPECIFIC PLANS and another picture of him putting up his dukes.
No more will the president be focusing primarily on issues that can attract bipartisan support and appeal to a Republican House. And no longer will he be so willing to let Congress work out the details on its own.
Oh, now I get it. The new plan is to alienate the one third or so of the country that likes Republican ideas and turn off the one third or so in the middle that likes happy clappy bipartisanship to appeal to the one third or so of the country that was bound to vote for him anyway.
He so smart.
August 17, 2011 — 9:52 pm
Comments: 33
Diminished.
Wow. This guy just gets smaller all the time, doesn’t he?
So, he gives this press conference and asks us to call our Congressman? WTF? Can’t he just walk across the street and talk to them himself?
If you haven’t seen the compilation video of various people riffing on him, it’s worth your time (though why it ends with Colbert taunting West, I do not know).
Keep it up, Mr President. Little man graphics are easy.
July 27, 2011 — 10:10 pm
Comments: 20
Takin’ his ball, goin’ home
Sung to the tune of “fired up, ready to go!”
The backstory: Obama may (or may not) have stormed out of the budget meeting last night. Ace thinks it was premeditated theater, but I’m not so sure. That weird remark to the effect that “Ronald Reagan wouldn’t have put up with this”…what was that about?
Me, I think it made him look petulant and amateurish, but I suspect his side is eating it up. In fact I know so. Here’s my takeaway from the Politico article:
“Obama lit him up. Cantor sat in stunned silence,” said an official in the meeting. “It was incredible. If the public saw Obama he would win in a landslide.”
Bolding mine. Two things strike me about that: 1) they see everything — absolutely everything — through the lens of Obama’s re-election bid and 2) they think America would just love-LOVE-LOVE to see President Prettyniceguy morph into President Screamingjerk.
They’re wrong on the second point, and the first point scares me juiceless. Take it from a small, damp island on the edge of Europe: we are all of us together, trembling on the edge of an utter economic meltdown. And nobody has the slightest idea what that means.
Addendum: the word has gone out to hang the budget impasse around Eric Cantor’s neck. Let’s hope that works as well as that time they sank Limbaugh and that other time they made Palin irrelevant.
July 14, 2011 — 4:23 pm
Comments: 28
Osama be Coolin’
Aw, now, everybody is saying such ugly things today…I guess it’s up to me to post something pretty.
You know what? Today only — nothing but praise for the president. It was a tough, risky call and he made the right choice.
I’ve never been so pleased to lose a dick. Congratulations, Montenegro. Y’all know what this means — new Deadpool starts Friday!
May 2, 2011 — 6:43 pm
Comments: 40
Surprise! Not a chicken picture…
This one was an idea by reader OU_Gryphon. I can almost never pull off other people’s ideas (boy, that was really helpful in my career as an illustrator), but this was too easy. I love easy.
‘Nother day spent dozing and chicken rassling. I worried maybe Mapp was egg bound instead of broody, so I soaked her in a bucket of warm soapy water for half an hour. You know that expression, “mad as a wet hen”? Wow. Yeah. No shit.
Still broody. Still no egg. I’ll keep dunking her until morale improves.
Owing to England being an explicitly for-reals Christian nation, this is a national four day weekend, starting today. We have a whole bagful of hot cross buns in there. And…I dunno…Jew on a Stick.
Have a good Easter, everybody!
April 22, 2011 — 9:02 pm
Comments: 27
A big ask
You know, it is a huge thing we’re asking of the Middle East and Afghanistan. We’re asking them to catch up to, like, 400 years of Western cultural shift. Overnight.
We’re demanding they instantly accept attitudes toward self-government and religion that it took us hundreds of years and a few nasty wars to reach.
We’re asking them to adopt attitudes about women we’ve only reached in the last forty years and attitudes to homosexuality we’ve only realized in the last twenty.
And some of the stuff we’re pushing on them has to look pretty unattractive. They could be forgiven for thinking free speech and a secular society inevitably results in our current style of slutty, trashy popular culture. (I don’t think it is inevitable. I think it took a relentless campaign to eradicate shame to make that happen).
It’s not exactly sympathy. But I think we asking for a huge leap from…excitable people. I’ll be astonished if the Arab Spring ends well. Or soon.
April 12, 2011 — 9:49 pm
Comments: 23
Hey, nice wolverine
So this one day, one of my co-workers comes in wearing this huge, godawful ugly wig — forget matching her hair color, it didn’t seem to match her species. And my boss leaned over to me and said, “Ah. I see Christine has come to work with a wolverine on her head today.”
That’s how I always think of Trump — that guy with the wolverine on his head.
I share my vision with you. You’re welcome.
That’s all I know about him — rich, wolverine on head — so I don’t really have an opinion on a Trump presidential run. I’ll make a couple of predictions, though.
First, they’re going to call this “the most important election of our lives.” That’s an easy call; they always do. And it’s almost always true.
Second, the gosh-darned importance of this election will be cited as the reason Sarah Palin really shouldn’t run, there’s a dear (but somehow won’t be a factor with Donald Trump’s little vanity project).
April 6, 2011 — 10:06 pm
Comments: 27
Optics: FAIL
I know what y’all are thinking — you did this P’shop last week, Stoaty. Yeah, well, hey — HE DID IT AGAIN. His current political advisers flat out suck.
Anyway, shut up, I have some important news: Mapp laid her first egg today. She’s the little ginger chicken. You never heard so much clucking and be-GAK-ing. I told you she’d be a drama queen if she ever got around to laying an egg.
Actually, poor thing, it took her all morning and she shed a little blood over it, so I shouldn’t make fun. I wouldn’t care to blow large hard objects out my vent after breakfast. Especially if it took me by surprise.
In honor of Ovum Prime, I broke out the Oscar Mayer bacon I’d been saving and fried up a proper breakfast-lunch. Oh, don’t get me wrong — English bacon is lovely stuff. But it’s thick and chewy. Like Canadian bacon. But not round.
Oscar Mayer (made in Spain) is the only American-style bacon I can get — and I can’t always get it. I suspect English people think there’s something terribly, terribly wrong with it.
“Oh, I say, Clive, there’s something terribly, terribly wrong with this bacon — it shriveled away to nothing and left the most extraordinary pool of grease behind.”
Anyhow, if I picked up a dose of salmonella, I’m going to drop kick that silly ginger bird into the next county.
March 21, 2011 — 9:20 pm
Comments: 31
The Singing Cowboy
The Democrats must cringe every time Harry Reid opens his gob. As usual, Michael Ramirez was a day ahead of me and had a better punchline. Dude is my hero.
By the way, I know there are peculiar liabilities to every job, but how many of you have ever thought to yourself, “I’m drawing Harry Reid’s crotch right now”? Yeah, that’s why I gave him a gun.
Oh! And I talked to my chicken pusher this morning. He hasn’t hatched any Pekin Bantams this year on account of it’s been too cold. He’s got some in the incubator now, should be out in a week. I want them about six weeks old (so I don’t have to faff with heat lamps), so we’re probably talking early April.
And having read everywhere that chickens love cabbages — we have kzillions of cabbages that need uprooting before the Spring planting — Uncle B and I chased chickens all around the garden with cabbage today. I think it’s fair to say, they are fucking terrified of cabbage. And completely uninterested, even when it’s torn into little chicken-beak-sized bits.
But it did bring up an interesting question: do chickens fart? The answer is no. Probably.
Good weekend, everyone!
March 11, 2011 — 7:32 pm
Comments: 23