As long as I was enjoying a rain delay, exercise-wise, I decided to see if I still remembered how to draw a cartoon.
I don’t think Gilbert Shelton, Pat Oliphant, or Bill Watterson have anything to worry about. But this doesn’t look too much worse than the stuff I used to get paid for, before the vulture capitalists et up and shat out all the bicycle magazines.
So I guess the ol’ muscle memory hasn’t gone completely senile. Yet.
Another shower of oddball dreams, and after two consecutive dinners of nothing spicier than a mild beef vegetable soup with cornbread, too.
The old MacSkull Air must be defragging its hard drive. Or just fragging it.
Why else would I be dreaming about three things I haven’t been doing lately — cyclocross, burro racing, and cartooning — all in one long dark night of the soul?
Maybe my cranial janitor came back from an extended coffee break to find a new supervisor scowling at him, with arms crossed and one foot a-tapping.
“Have you seen the state of this place? Acid flashbacks piled up here, empty liquor bottles scattered over there, and just look at this fantasy closet! No, on second thought, just nail that fucker shut. Nobody needs to see that shit. One quick peek and I had to book a double session with my shrink. So, deep clean, new carpet and drywall, and fresh paint all around. Chop-chop!”
When I arose and toddled into the kitchen in search of the Ebony Elixir of Life, Herself was fiddling with a Panasonic bread machine that she and her sisters found at some estate sale last fall, and I was onboarded as a consultant before I could decide whether I was actually awake.
A quick glance around took in zero sisters, so after two cups of the black velvety goodness and one fat slice of buttered cornbread I put my two cents’ worth into the project and now we await the results. If you hear of a mushroom cloud over Albuquerque and the Authorities say it smells like bread you’ll know the backstory.
The New York Times editorial board marches on with its “Overmatched” series. Today’s installment: “The Pentagon’s Gilded Fortress.”
An excerpt:
In 2011, the Army decided to get its soldiers new pistols. The odyssey that followed included a 350-page list of technical specifications, years of testing and a protracted battle on Capitol Hill between competing gun makers. The Pentagon won’t complete delivery until 2027 at the earliest. The Army could have raised an infantryman from birth to within two years of enlistment age in the time it will have taken to get him a new handgun.
Unsurprisingly, our elected representatives are part of the problem:
As the House and Senate work toward the country’s first trillion-dollar defense budget, over $52 billion is for things members of Congress added, unbidden, to the Pentagon’s wish list, according to the independent budget watchdog Taxpayers for Common Sense.
Jaysis. Planes that can’t fly. $13 billion sitting ducks. Millions for retrofitting Vietnam-era helicopters to carry and launch drones. For Ike’s fabled Military-Industrial Complex it’s like robbing the same bank, over and over and over again, because you have a guy on the inside. You don’t even need to bring that pistol you can’t seem to acquire for some mysterious reason.
The New York Times editorial board has some thoughts about the U.S. military and “the Pentagon’s overreliance on expensive, vulnerable weapons as adversaries field cheap, technologically advanced ones.”:
The late, great Jeff MacNelly had a few thoughts along those lines himself. This one is from his collection “Directions” … copyright 1984.
Ordinarily I’d be mildly excited about “Alien: Earth,” Noah “Fargo” Hawley’s take on Ridley Scott’s extraterrestrial horror franchise come home to roost.
But don’t we have enough real monsters down here already?
A handful of corporations battling over the remains of a dying planet? Check. Gazillionaire techlords acting on their every whim without let or hindrance? Roger that. The nice robot is your friend? Oh, hell, yeah.
Same goes for “Wednesday,” Tim Burton’s vision of the spooky daughter from “The Addams Family.” Steve Buscemi joins the cast this season as an educator with a whole Edgar Allen Poe thing going on. And while I love me some Tim Burton, Steve Buscemi, E.A. Poe and Charles Addams, not necessarily in that order, well … see paragraph no. 2 above.
Our real-life spooks are hellbent on robbing me of my sweet girlish laughter, is what. The sonsabitches will do that to us, if we let them. I’ve had to add some old Dan O’Neill comics to my bathroom library to remind me ’twas ever thus.
Corporate swine, gazillionaire techlords, and the politicians who serve them deserve all the mockery we can muster and then some. Just ask O’Neill, who went to war with Walt Disney Productions Back in the Day®. Disney proved a remarkably humorless and implacable foe, for an outfit that made bank on the antics of a cartoon rodent and his pals, but O’Neill kept on slugging, a smile on his lips and a song in his heart.
He lost, of course. But it wasn’t a knockout; the judges had to turn themselves inside out to declare Disney the champeen. And even in victory the Mouse was left coughing up a couple mil’ in legal-fee corpuscles.
Forty-five years later, thanks to the Innertubes, parody, satire — and yes, outright mockery — can spread a whole lot further and faster than a handful of underground comic books, if we’re not all too busy clutching our pearls on our fainting couches. Follow the lead of Stephen Colbert, Jon Stewart, and “South Park.” Hit ’em where it hurts with the ol’ one-two — the hee and the haw.
I don’t think Dan will be sprawled on his couch watching “Alien: Earth,” if only because it’s streaming on FX/Hulu, which is owned by — wait for it — Disney.
Between you and me, I hope O’Neill and the other surviving Air Pirates are busy working up a fresh parody of our modern monsters. Are you ready for Mickey Xenomorph? Game over, man … game over!
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