Recent Comments

1. about 2 hours ago on Speed Bump

   Well, at least to be recognized as Jewish, one would think.

   (Apparently some say that the circumcision style at the time—either Michelangelo’s or David’s—was not as complete as it mostly is today; other suggest that Michelangelo “wanted to avoid controversy” or something like that. Clearly Coverley, or his editors, decided to follow the lead of Forest Lawn Cemetery and just cover up the controversy.)

2. about 2 hours ago on The Knight Life

   The first week I started graduate studies in Chapel Hill, my department had a “Welcome new students” barbecue. It was quite a production. A pit was dug in the ground and logs were burned in it to provide the coals for cooking. A pig was cut open and sort of splayed out between two frames of box wire, then put over the coals and turned over from time to time. While the pig was cooking, hush puppies and Brunswick Stew were prepared, and the pig was brushed with vinegar-and-spice-based sauce. When the pig was cooked a butcher was brought in to chop up the pig and apply more sauce.

   The barbecue ribs available here in British Columbia is mostly tomato-based, but I still try to get the North Carolina BBQ whenever or wherever I can.

3. about 2 hours ago on Dick Tracy

   It appears that Scardol just wrote the clues in the margin of his copy of the book. Croptop is apparently buying this copy from someone who ended up with it, possibly a biker nephew or someone who picked it up at an estate sale or something. The seller may not have had a clue that the marginal notes meant anything; Croptop may have just told him that a copy of the book owned by Scardol would have great sentimental value to her.

4. about 2 hours ago on Dick Tracy

   “Here’s a Galen the Saintly comic. . .”

   Thanks for this. I think that I’ve seen better from Jack Chick. (The art here is maybe a bit better than Chick, though. )

5. about 3 hours ago on Dick Tracy

   “We had to pay a “pretty penny” for my daughter’s favorite childhood book. . .”

   Note the shaggy-dog framing story in William Goldman’s The Princess Bride (the novel, not the movie).

6. about 10 hours ago on Clay Jones

   In Wilson & Shea’s Illuminatus! trilogy, it is pointed out that the justification by thugs and dictators everywhere is Oliver Hardy’s “See what you made me do!”

   After all, Kristallnacht was just a reaction to the assassination of the German diplomat Ernst vom Rath by Herschel Grynszpan, a 17-year-old German-born Polish Jew living in Paris, right? The US war on Vietnam was just a reaction to the possibly-never-happened Gulf of Tonkin incident, right? According to Wikipedia, White militia and mobs killed as many as 120 slaves and free African Americans in retaliation to Nat Turner’s Rebellion, which killed between 55 and 65 White people, “. . .without discriminating for age or sex”—were they justified? Were Turner’s forces?

   Israel’s actions in Gaza could be dismissed as mere overreaction to the Hamas atrocity if it weren’t already well known that the thugs in Netanyahu’s cabinet wanted the Palestinians gone so that The Holy Land could be Jewish “from the river to the sea.” I wouldn’t call it genocide, because, as far as I can tell, the killing is not so much the point as the driving-out. I’d call it “attempted ethnic cleansing.”

7. 1 day ago on John Deering

   I remember Bobby Seale, literally bound and gagged for alleged disruption. That might be politically advantageous for TFG in riling up his MAGAts, but it would also be entertaining for the rest of us.

8. 1 day ago on Jeff Danziger

   The war that TFG skipped was Vietnam, a racist and hegemonic war, based on a lie, and, in retrospect (see the Pentagon Papers), known from the beginning to be unwinnable. It was a bad war, one that many of us opposed from the beginning, and I congratulate any who ducked it so as not to become victims, murderers, or accomplices.

   The current war in Ukraine is one in which a democracy is being attacked by a dictatorship. I can understand those who want to avoid getting killed or injured or having their lives disrupted, but in this case my sympathies are with those who are joining the fight on Ukraine’s side.

9. 1 day ago on Mike Luckovich

   “. . . fund development of Space Lasers. . .”

   Gotta keep up with the Rothschilds, you know. . .

10. 2 days ago on Clay Jones

    Jim Jones’s poisonous drink was Flavor-Aid, buy the meme is Kool-Aid. Actual events and objects often get transformed in memes.