Cartoon Saturday

And we come down to the last Cartoon Saturday for May, 2014 ...

Actor Brad Pitt was punched in the face by a defrocked reporter as he signed autographs at the premiere of his wife's film Maleficent in Los Angeles; a Pakistani woman was stoned to death for refusing to participate in an arranged marriage; two teenaged girls were gang-raped and hanged in northern India; legendary author and poet Maya Angelou passed away at the age of 86; and if you're looking for a fixer-upper in a gentrifying Transylvanian neighborhood, Bran Castle, the inspiration for Castle Dracula, is up for sale.

So long, May ... let's hope June will be better.

This week's collection of cartoons features everyone's favorite barnyard fowl ... the chicken.

When chickens rebel ...

Some questions just need a mystic to answer ...

There's free-range and there's free-range ...

And there's not quite free-range ...

And there's really free-range ...

Even chickens need to play by the rules ...

  

Turning to other topics, evidently the desire to bring deadly weapons everywhere was not limited historically to Second Amendment enthusiasts ...

Memories of my time in the dating pool ...

I think someone has cracked the Wall Street code ...

And finally, check out this cartoon and then this song by Mason Williams* ...

And that's it for another edition of Cartoon Saturday ... I hope you enjoyed my little game of chicken.

Have a good day and a great weekend. Come back tomorrow for Poetry Sunday.

Bilbo

* I tried to find a video clip of the live performance of this song on the old Smothers Brothers television show, but couldn't. If you can find it, be sure to watch it - it's wonderful.

Your German Lesson for Today

Languages have reputations.

English, for example, is notorious for the difficulty of its spelling (example: the word fish could be spelled ghoti if one used the f sound from the last syllable of the word enough, the i sound from women, and the sh sound from nation*).

Chinese is notorious for the complexity of its pictorial writing system and the difficulty of its system of tones.

French is notorious because of, well, the French. For a hysterical look at the difficulties of the French language, read Robert Benchley's classic essay "How to Speak French." You will learn, among other things, that there are five vowel sounds in French - a, e, i, o, and u - which are pronounced ong, ong, ong, ong, and ong.

And then there's German, which is notorious on many levels, one of which is the need to learn each noun's grammatical gender, which is designated by its definite article according to rules that make no sense. For example, when you set the table, you must lay out die Gabel (the fork, which is feminine), der Loeffel (the spoon, which is masculine), and das Messer (the knife, which is neuter). But the biggest reason for which German is notorious is the length of its words.

In German, when you need a word for something new, you create it by jamming together enough other words to describe the new thing. This leads to some amazingly complex, and yet very descriptive words, such as this one ...

which means "Floor Polishing Machine Rentals." Oy.

German compound nouns can be hideously difficult for speakers of other languages to deal with, although they do obey their own internal rules that make them easy to decompose once you know the secret. Here is an interesting chart that I ran across online the other day that shows you how to derive the names of various animals in German - click it to enlarge:

One word not on that chart is the classic German insult Schweinhund ("pig dog"), which you've probably heard some German villain hiss in a movie. Another is the term Teufelshunde ("devil dogs"), supposedly applied to the US Marines by German soldiers during World War I**.

Okay, that's your German lesson for today. And if you'd like to learn a little bit about German pronunciation as compared to that of English, French, Spanish, and Italian, you can check out this tutorial.

Ich wuensche Euch einen guten Tag. Morgen erscheint Cartoon Saturday ... kommt zurueck!

Bilbo

* Attributed to George Bernard Shaw, although he may not have been the original author.

** For an interesting look at the history of this term, go here.

Still Here!

Radio evangelist Harold Camping predicted that the world would end on May 21st, 2011.

Obviously, it didn't.

The world didn't end on September 6th, 1994, either, which was the previous time Mr Camping had predicted it ... and yet he had plenty of followers who believed in him and made millions of dollars in donations to his Family Radio organization.

Why do people believe crazy things in spite of all evidence to the contrary? Why do we have birthers, 9/11 truthers, religious fanatics, climate change denial, "creation science," flat earth believers, the objectivism of Ayn Rand, and people who believe that the answer to gun violence in America is to allow guns to be carried everywhere - including bars and churches?

There are a lot of possible explanations, one of the most compelling (to me, anyhow) being that when a person believes strongly in a particular idea, it becomes a part of their very being ... when you try to convince them that they're wrong, they interpret it as a personal attack and respond by raising their mental drawbridge to shut out conflicting information. This topic is explored very well in a short but interesting book by Michael Shermer titled Why People Believe Weird Things, and in one of my very favorite books, The True Believer, by Eric Hoffer.

I have learned by sad experience that it is utterly impossible to carry on a rational discussion of things in which people believe passionately. As I've noted here before, there is no room for doubt or nuance in some people's worldview - their clue chutes have been slammed closed, locked tight, welded shut, and painted over in an attempt to shut out information that might cause them to question their most deeply-held beliefs ... even when those beliefs can be demonstrably proven to be wrong. Author and columnist Thomas Friedman once wrote about the Middle East that if something can't be explained in terms of a conspiracy theory, it's not worth trying to convince anyone of it, because they'll never believe you. Sadly, I think that's where we're going in modern America.

Have a good day. Remember Bilbo's First Law*.

More thoughts tomorrow.

Bilbo

* "Don't let anyone else do your thinking for you."

Who Left the Overton Window Open?

Last week I wrote a post in which I reviewed my development of the National Stupidity Index - the DUMBCON. I lamented in that post that my two expansions of the original five-stage DUMBCON index, which added DUMBCONs 0 and -1 to account for ever-increasing levels of stupidity, were proving to be inadequate to keep up with the geometric rise in dumbassity in modern America. In response to that post, my friend Bob suggested on my Facebook page that we were dealing with an "Overton Window situation." Not being familiar with the term, I did some quick research and learned that it's a political theory developed by one Joseph P. Overton, which describes the range of ideas the public will accept in terms of a narrow "window." The idea of the Overton Window is that at any given moment, there is a range of policies considered politically acceptable in the current climate of public opinion - the "window" - which a politician can recommend without being considered too extreme to gain or keep public office.

As Bob elegantly summarized, "Go extreme enough, and what was extreme before seems normal by comparison."

So ...

The next time you see a strutting moron carrying a loaded assault rifle into a public place just to prove he can*, or some member of Congress reflexively opposing a policy out of spite and hatred for the incumbent president, think of it as a sign that someone left the Overton Window open. Too bad Mr Overton didn't develop any screens for his window. We could surely use them.

Have a good day. Don't listen to the extremists.

More thoughts tomorrow.

Bilbo

* Or, perhaps, because it helps to compensate for the minuscule size of his manly parts.

Memorial Day Weekend in Pittsburgh

You may recall that our family has a tradition of holding a small reunion each year in Pittsburgh over the Memorial Day weekend. It's not quite as large as it used to be, with my son Jason and his family living in Germany, but we've still kept it up, and so it was that early Saturday morning, Agnes and I set out with our daughter Yasmin and granddaughters Leya and Elise to visit my father and my sister Lisa and her family for the weekend. While we were en route to Pittsburgh from NoVa, my daughter wondered why we do this to ourselves on a traffic-miserable major holiday, rather than just picking some innocuous time to do it. Good question. I guess there must be a streak of masochism in the family.

But let's talk about the weekend, for which there are - of course - pictures.

When we arrived on Saturday afternoon, our first order of business was to visit my Dad. He lives in a nursing home where one of his joys is his annual tomato garden ... and this year, Leya and Elise were able to help him plant it. Here, Leya shovels her uncle Ed's good compost around the new plants ...

and Aunt Lisa helps Elise try to get more compost in the pot than on the ground, as Uncle Ed, Dad, and cousin Elena look on ...

Here's the finished garden. You may remember the cement plaque next to the lower pot that reads, "Bill's Garden" ... this is the one that all the grandchildren and great-grandchildren made for their (great) granddad a few years ago ...

Gardening can be exhausting work, and Aunt Lisa provided an ice cream bar snack for everyone. Since there weren't enough chairs, Leya made do with sitting on her lumpy Opa ...

Of course, Elise always has to play her favorite game, "Steal Opa's Hat." I think the look on her face says it all ...

On Sunday we took the trolley into downtown Pittsburgh, where Lisa had gotten us all reservations to take a duck boat tour of the city from both the land and the water. Here was our duck boat, "Dahntahn* Dottie" ...

We had a very nice tour through downtown, and learned a lot of interesting tidbits about Pittsburgh history. The Pittsburgh Pirates were playing the Washington Nationals that afternoon, and there was quite a crowd at PNC Park ...

Duck boats, as you may know, are amphibious trucks (originally called DUKWs) that were used by the Army in World War II. Nowadays, many of them are used as tour vehicles in cities with major lakes and rivers ... like Pittsburgh, where the Allegheny and Monongahela Rivers meet at The Point to form the mighty Ohio. Here's a view of Point Park from the river ...

A feature of the duck boat tour was that the operators allowed some of the passengers to actually drive the boat when we were on the water. Naturally, Leya volunteered ... and did a very respectable job ...

Unlike the other children who got to drive the boat, Leya didn't sit down in the seat ... she knelt so that she could see out the windshield. She got visibly irritated whenever the real pilot reached across to tweak the wheel!

Since it was a beautiful and very warm day, after the duck boat tour a stop for ice cream was almost mandatory ... and Elise wasn't going to let Oma get away with foisting off any measly single-scoop cone on her ...

 

After the ice cream break, we walked over to the lower terminal of the famous Monongahela Incline, one of the oldest working inclined railways (funiculars) in the country ...

The incline is 635 feet long and travels up a slope of more than 35 degrees at a speed of six big miles per hour to reach the summit of Mt Washington. Cars depart simultaneously from the top and bottom stations and pass in the middle on each trip, as you can see here ...

Here's a view looking up the track from our seats in the top end of the car as we made the ascent ...

The views from the summit of Mt Washington are, of course, superb. Here's just one of the many great pictures I took of my home town ... which is, I must admit, a great deal more beautiful than it was when I was growing up and the air and rivers were fouled by the output of the steel mills that used to line the waterfront ...

It would be remiss of me to not say something about the people who made the wonderful weekend possible: my sister Lisa and her husband Ed, and their children Eddie and Elena ...

Leya and Elise absolutely love their cousin Elena ...

And they love cousin Eddie, too ... especially because he gives good piggyback rides!

I actually took almost 400 pictures, but these are probably enough to give you the idea that we had a really great weekend. I am truly one of the luckiest men alive to have such a wonderful family!

Have a good day, and be safe as we start the summer season. I need all the readers I can get.

More thoughts tomorrow.

Bilbo

* If you speak Pittsburghese, yinz'll know what it means!

Memorial Day, 2014

Today is Memorial Day, the traditional start of summer, the day the swimming pools open and everyone flocks to the beaches and the amusement parks to celebrate life in America. It is also the day on which we honor those who died in the service of the nation, often in lonely and frightening places far from home and family.

That's what today is really about. Take a minute to remember those who gave their lives to make it possible for you to enjoy today's barbecues and swimming pools. The freedom you enjoy today wasn't purchased by the noisy dumbasses strutting into the local Starbucks with loaded assault rifles and nine-millimeter pistols on their hips, and it wasn't purchased by despicable traitors who flee to Russia and think they're heroes for exposing the nation's most sensitive secrets ... it was purchased by the men and women who now rest in long, quiet rows and wonder why they gave up their lives for all this.

Have a good day. More thoughts tomorrow.

Bilbo

Poetry Sunday

I remember a joke I heard long ago about a fellow who picked up a girl at a club and took her back to his apartment. As he told his friends the story the next day, "She started taking everything off. First she took off her dress and the high-heeled shoes. And then the false eyelashes and the makeup. And then the hair extensions and the press-on fingernails and the padded bra ... and all of a sudden she just disappeared!" This poem by Andrea Cohen isn't about that sort of truth in advertising, but it's a clever look at the kind of woman most of us wish we might meet ...

Truth in Advertising

by Andrea Cohen

If we'd moved her,
she'd still have 'em,

the ad for Acme
Moving says, with a photo

of Venus de Milo.
But who, intact,

would Venus be?
Some standard-issue

ingénue. Give me
a woman who's lived

a little, who's wrapped
her arms around the ages

and come up lacking: that's
the stone that can move me.

I prefer being moved by ladies with arms, of course. But you knew that already.

Have a good day. More thoughts tomorrow.

Bilbo

Cartoon Saturday

Just when you thought things couldn't get any crazier ...

The French national rail operator SNCF has discovered that 2,000 new trains it ordered at a cost of 15 billion euros (about $20.5 billion) are too wide for many regional station platforms and cannot be used until railway platforms all around the country are rebuilt accommodate them; the government of Thailand was overthrown by a military coup; the bullfight at the San Isidro Festival in Madrid was suspended for the first time in 35 years when three toreadors in a row were sent to hospitals after being gored by the bulls; dozens of people were killed and injured in a terror attack on a marketplace in the western Chinese city of Urumqi; and Toyota is recalling 370,000 Sienna minivans because salt water can corrode parts under the vehicle, causing the spare tire to fall off.

Boy, am I glad I've got a big cartoon library.

This week's theme cartoons deal with the law and lawyers ...  and we lead off with two takes on the right to a trial by a jury of one's peers ...

and ...

There's a simple key to understanding how the lawyer handles your case ...

Unfortunately, this is how a lot of cases end up being tried nowadays ...

Sometimes, you just wish you could see a jury decision like this one ...

Turning to other topics, some cartoons get less funny as I get older ... like this one ...

and this one ...

And you thought the correct answer was "Legislative, Executive, and Judicial" ...

It's that time of year when colleges and universities are scheduling commencement speakers who can deliver inspiring, upbeat addresses that make graduates feel good about their job prospects ... although it's easier for some than for others ...

And finally for this week, I see in the news that an environmentally conscious tycoon is preparing to spend about $100 million on a campaign to attack and defeat GOP "science deniers" in the fall elections. The simple fact that someone has to spend that kind of money to defeat stupid people is just wrong. And someday the "science deniers" may look out the window and find ...

And there you have it for another edition of Cartoon Saturday. I hope that you are enjoying the Memorial Day holiday weekend ... and that sometime amid the barbecues and swimming and such you'll take a few minutes to remember those who gave their lives so that you would have the freedom to enjoy the barbecues and swimming and such.

Have a good day and a great weekend. See you here tomorrow for Poetry Sunday.

Bilbo

Even More Editorial Gems ...

It's hard to believe it's been two weeks, but tempus is fugiting right along, and it's time to visit our biweekly collection of the strange things that appear in print ...

I suppose it's as appropriate a meeting place as any ...

I'm not squeezing that Charmin ...

I wonder if this is that "natural casing" I've heard about for sausages ...

Chinese menus have some very interesting translations ...

Or whatever ...

What does a cannibal have for breakfast? ...

Perhaps you should advertise for a spelling instructor as well ...

Truth in advertising ...

This must be the procrastinator's ball ...

Nothing says "Thank you, Mom!" like a good enema ...

And there you have it - our latest collection of Great Moments in Editing. If you run across one, send it to Ol' Bilbo for future use. I'll credit you in print ... and spell your name right at no extra charge.

Have a good day. Come back tomorrow for Cartoon Saturday.

Bilbo