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
Millionaires’n’billionaires
I cut together all the times Obama mentioned the wealthy in his “budget” speech tonight (click for video).
Wow. I thought this would be funny. Actually, it makes me want to start slapping and then slap some more and then give him a big ol’ slap. Slappity-slappity-slappity, mister class warrior man.
Two observations — he frequently made references to “as long as I’m president” and things that will happen in 2014, as though his next term is in the bag. And he repeatedly used the brain-hurty expression “spending reductions in the tax code” which, apparently, means new taxes (update: Joe Collins tells me this means elimination of some deductions and shelters).
Did he think that would fly?
April 13, 2011 — 11:32 pm
Comments: 26
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
President SooperGenius
Cleek the peecture for veedio. I slung this together in a real hurry trying to get it out last night, and then YouTube let me down. So it’s not brilliant (a soundtrack would’ve perked it up considerably), but the video clip needs to be out there in as many forms as possible.
The AP originally reported this, then thought better of it and tried to airbrush it away: Obama advising a man with ten kids who is worried about gas prices that what he really needs is a new car.
For those of you who aren’t politically inclined — and by way of explaining why I didn’t spend today turning that video into something awesome — here’s one minute and forty seconds of my chickens walking around pecking stuff. Seriously, that’s all there is to it. I spent my whole day sprawled over a lawn chair in the sunshine with a glass of iced tea watching them walk around and peck stuff.
Try it. It’s hypnotic.
April 8, 2011 — 8:52 pm
Comments: 43
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
Big dumb boy
Wow. Lindsey Graham is a hard man to caricature. Turns out, if you exaggerate any of his features, the result looks less like him. Fundamentally, everything about the guy is squish.
So I just made him shiiiiiiny.
Dear future visitors to this post: Lindsey Graham has said that free speech should have limitations.
Dear Republicans of South Carolina: DO BETTER NEXT TIME. KTHXBAI.
Though, if I’m reading it right, “next time” is 2014? Oof!
While we’re on the topic of speech, you do realize if the crowded theater really is on fire, you have every right to shout “FIRE!” in a crowded theater — and, in some places, a legal obligation to do so? Which makes shouting “FIRE!” in a theater you do not believe to be on fire less of a speech issue and more of a fraud issue, as far as I’m concerned. Like saying, “I’m a doctor; let me give you a breast exam” or “will you assassinate my wife for $10,000” aren’t really First Amendment issues.
Sorry for the digression, but that whole “FIRE!” thing gets on my nerves. It’s lazy and sloppy.
April 5, 2011 — 10:35 pm
Comments: 19
Terry Jones has a kind of “faces of meth” thing going, hasn’t he?
Seriously, why was this even reported? Burning a Koran is both stupid and legal in this country, if not as stupid as giving a cracker attention whore nobody preacherman just what he’s begging for. Way to reward bad behavior!
Next thing you know, you got the United Nations, the European Union, Hillary Clinton, Angela Merkel, General Petraeus and who knows who else wringing their hands about it. Oh, way to signal that we think this is a big fucking deal, too.
We don’t. And pretending we do was exactly the wrong thing.
Asking rednecks not to do stupid things is like expecting water to flow up. Does the United Nations think Ray-Ray should buy those sweet-ass alligator boots if he can’t make his truck payment this month? Does Angela Merkel think Darlene should leave her kids in the car while she drops in for a couple of beers at the Lucky Seven?
So why make this bonehead a superstar?
Burning a book had not the slightest interest to an American audience. Even our Muslims didn’t seem all that wadded up about it. The only interested constituency was the excitable, primitive boo-boos in the back of nowhere.
So why does our media choose to serve THAT audience? It’s bizarre.
I have a theory. The MSM can no longer keep things hidden from us, so they’ve gone into the business of revealing things that we all agree would be better hidden.
What do you think? Too paranoid?
April 4, 2011 — 5:14 pm
Comments: 42
Spring!
At long last, Spring. Everywhere we go, the roadsides and hillsides are splattered daffodils. Thousands of them in their several colors, all along the main roads and down tiny country lanes. It’s spectacular.
Thing is, these things don’t grow wild. They spread a bit on their own, but first someone has to plant them, way out along sheep fields in the back end of nowhere.
The government doesn’t do it. Somebody — really, a lot of somebodies, over a lot of years — dropped a few quid, bought a few bulbs and spent an afternoon digging holes. They did the math and worked out that, for a couple of hours and a couple of pounds, they could do something everyone (selves included) would enjoy year after year.
Multiply that by an army, and you’ll have some idea of the show the daffs put on.
The word “community” is much abused in our time. When lefties use it — and they use it a lot — they mostly mean a group of people who share a grievance and band together to demand redress from the government.
No, this is community — this gentle, anonymous gift.
March 29, 2011 — 10:45 pm
Comments: 23
Yeeee-HAW
By now, I know you’re all asking yourselves, “sure, but what does Stoaty think about this here Libya adventure?”
In principle, I’m all for it. We should have smashed Gadaffi flat forty years ago.
Having such explicit anti-assassination policy is extremely stupid of us. And kind of unAmerican. In the case of Gaddafi (or Castro or Saddam), we’re saying it’s morally better to let millions of little guys suffer and thousands die than to kill the one raving nutcase princeling causing the problem. Doesn’t add up.
Not that we should travel ’round the world killin’ bad guys. That’s an idea for a comic book, not a foreign policy. But we also shouldn’t promise faithfully that we’ll never, ever target the man at the top, even when he has American blood on his hands.
Telling enemies in advance all the bad things you’re not going to do under any circumstances is strategically dumb.
But this thing? This has Operation Clusterfuck written all over it with a Sharpie. A few weeks ago, we might have made a big difference with a small intervention. Now? God knows.
Nobody’s in charge. Nobody knows what the mission is. Obama’s doing his best not to get any of it on him. Oh, and for all we know, the rebels we’re protecting are ululating Islamist douch-hats like we’re busy killing in other parts of the world.
So, yes, I’m against this operation just because Obama is in office. But it’s not about his politics, it’s about his naked incompetence.
March 23, 2011 — 8:59 pm
Comments: 82
This is just alllllll kinds of wrong
This is the fighting in Libya. This picture bugs the shit out of me, and I’m struggling to put together a coherent post about it.
I’m not calling fake. These photographers put themselves in actual danger. The photo is nicked from this article describing the four NY Times journalists (including the lady at the far left of this shot) who were later picked up by Gaddafi’s goons at a checkpoint and given a very rough week before being released.
And we certainly have a proud tradition of embedded journalists who show courage and provide a valuable service in times of war. So I’m not knocking that.
But this thing here, this smells wrong. That young man can’t be firing at anything significant, or they’d all be hauling ass for cover. So, he’s…what? Posing? Mmm.
I just. I dunno. When reporters seemingly outnumber the thing being reported upon three to one — and all the cameras point the same way — they aren’t so much reporting as shaping the narrative.
All the cameras but one. The guy who took this picture told me something a lot more interesting than an image of another angry young brown fellow with a shoulder-fired doo-dah.
March 22, 2011 — 10:08 pm
Comments: 33