Cartoons

O. M. F. G. This is really awesome.

I direct you to the latest press release coming from the government run and financed website for the Committee on Energy and Commerce Republicans. It seems that Congressman Joe Barton has a hyperactive funny bone and since the SCHIP debacle broke out, he's been using the website as a place to issue his one-man smackdowns to any and all supporters of SCHIP.

Joe Barton uses The Simpsons for SCHIP-bashing: Republicans using their goernment websites for snarky purposes. Cool!

Here's the link to the first one I noticed, The ‘C’ in SCHIP Is for Children, Except When It’s Not. Today Mr. Barton issued a new release, Bipartisanship on SCHIP!. This one will go down into the annals of the US Congress history as not only an excellent example of Fair Use (something a lot of Republicans stand against), and the First Amendment, but it stands are proof positive that those stodgy conservatives are hip to the popculty times.

Starring "Republican" businessman Montgomery Burns and "Democrat" Mayor Joe Quimby, the press release goes on to depict how the bill is not about the kids but all about the greed. A bipartisan greed that, by the way, is aided an abetted by MoveOn.org and the head of the Democratic Caucus, Rahm Emanuel.

I. Kid. You. Not.

WTF!

The full bipartisan greedy fun after the jump :

Republicans using their goernment websites for snarky purposes. Cool!

I wish I knew who took this photograph of the Belligerent Four. This is not just a photo. It is a metaphor for the Bush Administration.

And, by the way, if you want to know all about The Decepticons, go to Wikipedia.

It's Friday, the perfect day for a time waster. So what did I find on YouTube while looking for silly cartoons? An awfully funny and definitely politically incorrect parody of Nickelodeon's SpongeBob Sqarepants.

Check out the totally not safe for work (NSFW) clip after the jump.

My campus is sponsoring a national contest. Here are the details.

Fundamentally Speaking

A Contest

What are the fundamentals?

This academic year, speakers have come to the Cortland campus to talk about religion, politics, science, literature, and teaching. They have or will address the issue of “fundamentals” as anything from intractable law to literal truth to cold, hard facts.

But what is a fundamental(ist)(ism)?

We invite college students to explore the issue of fundamentalism in creative form, and offer prizes of $250 for each of three categories:

PROSE: Essays may be fiction or non-fiction. 2000-word maximum.

ART: Photography, painting, digital images, drawing, collage, cartoons. All “still” art media welcome. Please submit artwork on cd or as image file.

VIDEO AND ANIMATION: Original work only (no montages of copyrighted images). All moving art pieces welcome—Flash, Video, etc.

DEADLINE: MARCH 1, 2007

SUBMIT ENTRIES TO: neovox.submissions@gmail.com

Additional details available at Neo Vox

This contest is sponsored by ) NeoVox, the student online magazine and the SUNY Cortland Cultural and Intellectual Climate Committee.

Any college student is welcome to submit.

You know you are part of the peripheral masses when the only exposure you had to classical music was through a Bugs Bunny cartoon.

It's weird. In my household jazz was a must along with all sorts of afrocaribbean music. Classical music? Nil. So growing up the only frame of reference I had for classical music was cartoons like The Bunny of Seville.

Ah good times.

Enjoy.

When you grow up on the periphery of an Empire such as the United States, the kind of consumable culture you are exposed to is not necessarily that which would be considered popular by the Empire's mainstream standards.

So, for example, I grew up watching a lot of what constitutes today's treasure trove of Warner Bros.' banned cartoons. It was so common to see every morning jazz jivin' sambos, looney dwarf-like Hitlers and wascally wabbits dressed in drag on TV that I was actually shocked to learn those cartoons were censored and outright banned here in the U.S.

GOLDILOCKS AND THE JIVIN' BEARS (1944), is part of the now infamous Looney Tunes/Merrie Melodies, Censored Eleven. I find it fascinating that the dogs of animation, Harman and Ising, are included in this list, as well as Fritz Freleng, Chuck Jones, Robert Clampett and Tex Avery.

Harman and Ising founded Merrie Melodies and Looney Tunes, and became famous for a little sambo-like character called Bosko. They basically translated the minstrel theater of the time into cartoons --and in the process made film and animation history.

I think it is unwise to ban these cultural gems from TV. Forget about the puritanical sensitivities of the political correctness police. I think that contextualized as part of the country's popular culture, they are invaluable tools for the world to understand the cultural development of the United States.

There is a whole process to vlogging that I find totally unsatisfying. I hate editing and I hate compressing files for better streaming because it takes too long and I want to put thing up on the web NOW! The upside of editing and going through frames is that you get to crack yourself up with the body language of your subjects.

Case in point : I could spend hours watching Christine Quinn talk ... with the volume off. Check the president of New York City's City Council ... she's an opera diva in making. Ok, maybe a Broadway musical --although I suggest she get a voice coach because she strains her voice during speeches. Girlfriend, breathe!

And then, there is Mark Green; who is running for attorney general...

More after the jump.

I wonder if the hipsters over at Jewschool have found out about Mel Gibson's "new movie" ... heh.

YouTube - Mel Gibson's Next Movie

It is a brilliant little gem of political incorrectness.

I love Scott Addam's Dilbert comic strip, for his pathologically flematic view of all things wrong with corporate America. It's for his morbid detachment from his subjects and his eye for detail that I found curious the following post.

From The Dilbert Blog: Another Run at the Nobel Peace Prize:

The Crazy-Ass Backwards plan doesn't work if you hold the common and somewhat racist U.S. view, that the people "over there" only understand brute force. In that case, any flexibility on the part of the U.S. looks like weakness and an invitation to be kicked some more.

But from what I gather about pride, it's a substitute for power in the Middle East. If you give people pride, they don't feel so much need to kill you. Is that true? Beats me. I have no pride myself so I confess to not understanding it. But I know that brute force isn't working, at least at the puny level we are willing to apply it.

As many of you will gleefully point out, I'm no expert on the Middle East. This thought experiment is only intended to make you think different about a so-far unsolvable problem. Sometimes that's useful.

I hear Naomi sent Cynthia McKinney a couple of these.

[via Gallery of the Absurd: The Naomi Campbell Cell Phone]:

One of the largest mobile device makers has teamed up with the aging supermodel to introduce the most fashionable phone to ever hit the runway.

Extra brownie points:
Why isn't on the same "level" this cartoon the same as the fro, Tennessee Guerrilla Women or the Danish muslim parody cartoons?

Today I'm admiring three women in the cultural eye who do better, with more to learn and balance, than I've ever attempted. I'm considering what their individual identity-crafting might teach me as I shape whatever complicated identities I might claim tomorrow.

I could argue my own identity as native American blue-eyed whitebread. I was born here, as were generations of ancestors.

I can speak no language except Americanized English, though God knows I've tried. My enthusiastic but inept efforts both in school and out to learn French were Dave Sedaris' Me Talk Pretty One Day-like as comedy. I was raised a polite and unassuming Sunday-Methodist because everyone else was too, with no party or doctrine in particular to set me culturally apart. Females are technically a majority, so I can't deny I grew up in cultural comfort.

It wasn't until I found myself a homeschooling mom that I felt real culture shock. Keeping my family completely out of school meant abandoning my cultural and professional homeland (public schooling) and moving to a foreign and somewhat frightening culture without a reliable guide.

Via Daryl Cagle.

The whole 22 minutes of The Boondocks' "Return of the King" :