Cartoon Saturday

Welcome to May ...

Raging wildfires described as a "Devil's inferno" and "nearly uncontrollable" threatened thousands of homes near Los Angeles; a civilian-operated Boeing 747 cargo jet crashed in Afghanistan in a horrifying accident caught on dashboard video, while a few days later a KC-135 air refueling aircraft crashed in Kyrgyzstan; in Houston, a man armed with a semiautomatic pistol fired numerous shots into the ceiling of the airport departure area, fortunately not harming anyone else before killing himself; and a North Korean court has sentenced a U.S. citizen to 15 years of hard labor, charging him with committing unspecified "hostile acts" against the hermit kingdom.

Well, so much for May being an improvement over April. We need cartoons, and we need them now...

For our selection of theme cartoons this week, let's look at cartoons featuring numbers, letters, and symbols, which can be funnier than you might suspect ...

Who was behind the 8 ball here ...?

A little cosmetic surgery can help improve one's image in a lot of ways ...

I never completely understood the concept of imaginary numbers until I started watching members of Congress and political pundits throw statistics at each other ...

And lastly, I thought this one was a particularly clever pun on a lot of different levels ...

You need the right truck to carry the load ...

Do you suppose God would have fooled around with burning bushes and stone tablets if he'd had a Facebook page or an e-mail or Twitter account ... ?

Paging Congressman Paul ... Congressman Rand Paul ...

Two cartoons with a bit of a twist on life out on the range ... first from the perspective of the Bovine-Americans ...

and then from the cowboys ... the more modern of whom may not approach riding the range in the traditional way ...

And finally for this week, it pays to be careful nowadays, when even background checks on gun purchasers - supported by 90% of the public - are viewed by some as drastic infringements of their rights. You never know what rights you may be violating with a simple question ...

And so we end the first Cartoon Saturday of May, 2013. It looks as if it's going to be another weekend of fine weather here in Disneyland-on-the-Potomac, and for Agnes and I it will be the usual whirlwind of activity: getting up early tomorrow to work in the yard and the garden before spending much of the day with our local grandchildren, and then getting up early again on Sunday to take pictures and cheer for our friends who are competing at the Washington Open Dancesport Competition. These relaxing weekends will be the death of me yet!

Have a good day and a great weekend. More thoughts tomorrow.

Bilbo