Divine right and the four-way stop

(Updated below.)

The route of my morning commute for the last couple of weeks had four traffic lights and one four-way stop.

Two of the signals have sensors in the auto lane, but they don’t detect bicycles. One has a sensor in the bike lane, but it apparently doesn’t sense bicycles either, for reasons of its own. (I’m thinking about experimenting along these lines.) One has a sensor mounted on the light boom over the intersection, and it always seems to notice me. Ironically, it’s also the only intersection with easy access to the pedestrian-crossing button.

In all four cases my street is the less-busy cross-street, and the system seems to prefer giving the major street much more time on the green light. (Two of the intersections are among the most high-traffic spots in the county, I’ve been told.) This makes the cars around me impatient too (it's morning commute time, remember), and when they act on their impatience things can get difficult. As rhetorical theorist Kenneth Burke once wrote, whether the pitcher hits the rock or the rock hits the pitcher, it’s bad news for the pitcher.^*

Clocking it a few times and doing some quick mental arithmetic (you know me), I discovered that something like a quarter to a third of the whole commute time was spent at those lights.

But the risks and annoyance at these intersections are as nothing compared to that single four-way stop. It’s at the crossing of two wide, straight streets, no trees, no parked cars, and a well-marked bike lane. To the unschooled eye, it’s the intersection that seems best-designed for bike and auto traffic sharing. It’s also the intersection I fear most.

This intersection is of considerable theological significance, not unlike the location of the Garden of Eden, Noah’s ark, or the ark of the Covenant -- the only difference being that this intersection is on Google Maps but those other three, as far as I know, aren’t.

The significance is this: This is the intersection, alone among all the intersections in all of Creation, where God Himself sends those drivers He specifically wants to go through the intersection first.

The drivers all know they are among the elect whom the Divine Hand has placed there to enter the intersection first -- boy, do they know it. They also fully understand that it would be second-guessing Divine Will to use their turn signals. That might be interpreted as something less than perfect belief in their own exalted status as God’s Chosen Drivers. It would be like Noah taking out flood insurance. 

Cyclists, as children of a lesser god, enter that intersection at their peril. Many is the time I’ve stopped in the bike lane, put both feet flat on the ground, and waved the motorists through. Occasionally the driver seems to hesitate -- politeness? a crisis of faith? -- and I have to make it clear by pantomime that I’m perfectly prepared to sell the bike right there and go the rest of the way on foot rather than give them a clean shot at me by rolling out there in front of them.

^*Long time p3 correspondent Doctor Beyond -- who was reading p3 before Paul Krugman made reading p3 cool -- did the checking and found that the pitcher/rock line is actually from "The Man of La Mancha." I was certain it was Burke, so when I did my Google check, I left "burke" in among the keywords and never found it. But I ran with it anyway, figuring that Burke was just too obscure for Google. (Try finding mention of his "A Definition of Man" online sometime.) DB was pretty sure it was MoLM even before the search, just from listening to the cast album. Out-flanked on show tunes -- damn!

Sunday morning toons: Politeness, and Profits from Honor

(Updated below.)

I'm not even going to mention what went on at the National Mall yesterday.

Let's just go straight to Daryl Cagle's toon round-up for the week.

p3 Picks of the Week: Mike Luckovich, Mike Lester, Nate Beeler, Mike Keefe, Steve Sack, Adam Zyglis, Larry Wright, Joe Heller, Bill Day, Cal Grondahl, and Monte Wolverton.

p3 "House United" Medal: John Cole.

p3 "Dream" Award: Pat Bagley.

p3 Knight of the "Graveyard of Empire:" Jimmy Margulies.

p3 World Toon Review: Stephane Peray (Thailand), Tjeerd Royaards (Netherlands), Ingrid Rice (Canada), Alexander Zudin (Russia), and Cam Cardow (Canada).


Ann Telnaes considers profits with Restoring Honor.


It starts with "Once upon a time:" and it goes on to talk about fairies and little children, it's got somebody in a castle high on a mountain, and it ends up with "Happily ever after." But Mark Fiore's fairy tale might not be what you were hoping for, unless you live up on that mountain. You'll see.


Red Meat's Bug-Eyed Earl does something completely unexpected in panel #3: He smiles. It's there if you look closely.


This Modern World takes us to an alternate universe run by people with poor grasp of both history and language. (Oh, wait . . . . )


The K Chronicles recounts Uncle Owen's Last Adventure.


Tom the Dancing Bug asks: Will America be defeated by its own lofty principles?


Comic Riffs has a reminder: If you like a cartoon feature, speak up!


Update: Barry Blitt's illustration for this week's Frank Rich NYTimes column, on the agendas of the wealthy conservatives who fund much of the Tea Party initiatives, is priceless.


Portland homeboy Jack Ohman has a philosophical question.


As with most villains in the classic Fleischer 1940s "Superman" series, we never learn the name of the criminal who menaces the city in "Electric Earthquake," directed in 1942 with a palette of deep rich shadows by Dave Fleischer, written by Seymour Kneitel and Izzy Sparber, and with musical direction by Sammy Timberg. But he is certainly one of the oddest -- and definitely the most polite -- villains Superman ever faced. And yet, even overlooking the somewhat iffy physics of his infernal invention, there are two unanswered questions: First, why does his secret scientific lair look like a coffee urn? And second, what's the Daily Planet building doing in Manhattan?

p3 Bonus Toon: Jesse Springer sees a murky future for a state whose budget deficit may wind up being half a billion dollars more than the $577 billion already predicted. Will there be a morning after?

Remember to bookmark the daily political toon features at Slate's Slate, Time, and About.com.

Test your toon-captioning talents at The New Yorker's weekly caption-the-cartoon contest. (Rules here.)

Like a snake swallowing a Buick

Okay, I'd love to tell you I'm far too cool to post about this, but . . . no, I'm not.

I was not online much this week and so I only today discovered that Krugman -- yes, that Krugman, the Shrill One -- linked to a 2005 post of mine from his NYTimes blog on Tuesday. The consequences for my meager traffic flow were pretty startling. The consequences for comments on my blog were about the same as always.

A very gratifying experience, except for the thought that I might have peaked five years ago without realizing it.

I was angrier, more earnest, and more into my old precincts of language and politics in the first year of this blog.  Now I'm just more irritated.

Sun and moon

"The first day of the dwarves' New Year is as all should know the first day of the last moon of Autumn on the threshold of Winter. We still call it Durin's Day when the last moon of Autumn and the sun are in the sky together. But this will not help us much, I fear, for it passes our skill in these days to guess when such a time will come again."

The Hobbit

Durin’s Day would have landed somewhere between Thanksgiving and Christmas on our calendar; I’m not sure what the Dwarves’ calendar called the same day at the end of summer, but arrived here on Thursday morning, and it was absolutely beautiful.

Riding down 5th Street in the crisp, clear air at about 7am, the sun was up over Mt. Hood behind me; and there, straight ahead of me, at about the same elevation in the western sky, was a beautiful full moon, the last full moon before fall begins. It was as white and perfectly etched as the snowcap on Mt. Hood.

Next will come Harvest moon and Hunter's Moon.

An extra treat: That night, at about 9pm, I was riding downtown (in Northwest) and there was the full moon again, back in the lower eastern sky, just as beautiful as it had been 14 hours before.

Saturday morning tunes: Numa belissima performance

How's your Portuguese? YouTube poster guthera says:

O Gênio Ray Charles numa belíssima performance de I Can´t Stop Loving You, ao vivo no tradicional Dick Cavett Show, da TV americana, em 1973.

And that's hard to argue with. Numa belissima indeed.

My Summer of Cold War Reading, continued: "The Manchurian Candidate"

Continuing my summer of reading Cold War fiction (the local library just sent me a note that "Diamonds are Forever" has finally come in):

I finished "The Manchurian Candidate" several weeks ago. It was not what I expected, although it was fun. With the benefit of hindsight, I'm not sure if it was meant to be an over-the-top treatment or not. It's sort of like the anti-Strangelove: The novel "Red Alert," upon which Kubrick's "Strangelove" was based, is a thriller, but its tongue is nowhere near its cheek. The story I've always heard is that Kubrick found that the story was, on its face, so horrific that satire was the only way he could devise to make it bearable. (It's a very strange experience to read "Red Alert" and discover several passages that appear nearly verbatim in the film. There are no characters in the novel named Buck Turgidson, Bat Guano, or Jack D. Ripper.)

"Manchurian" is just the opposite: As much as you might think that the Frankenheimer/Sinatra/Saint film is pretty "out there" -- it had the bad luck to come out right around the time of the Kennedy assassination (the first one, before we knew we'd have to start numbering them like World Wars and Chicago albums), and was almost never seen for about a generation afterward -- I'm here to assure you it's not as far out there as the novel.

I can probably do no better than to point you toward the Introduction added to the 2003 version which I read:

The true artifact of cold war culture is the novel by Richard Condon that the movie was based on. Condon's book came out in 1959 and was a bestseller. It was praised by The New York Times (A wild, vigorous, curiously readable mélange") and the New Yorker ("a wild and exhilarating satire"); Time named it one of the Ten Best Bad Books -- which, from a publisher's point of view, is far from the worst thing that might be said about a novel."

Condon was a cynic of the upbeat type, not unlike Tom Wolfe: his belief that everything is basically shit did not get in the way of his pleasure in making fun of it.

Some people like their bananas overripe to the point of blackness. The Manchurian Candidate is an overripe banana, and delectable to those who have the taste for it.

Louis Menand, "Introduction"

The Manchurian Candidate (2003 edition)

Sunday morning toons: It's not really a mosque.

And, in point of fact, it's not really at "Ground Zero" either. And meanwhile, 2 million Pakistanis (a nuclear power, you might want to keep in mind) have been displaced so far by last week's flooding there. But what upsets Newt Gingrich and worries Harry Reid naturally gets higher priority. Ah, America.

Fine. Let's start with Daryl Cagle's toon round-up for the week.

p3 Picks of the Week: Mike Luckovich, Pat Bagley, R. J. Matson, Bob Englehart, Michael Ramirez,and Monte Wolverton.

p3 Legion of Honor: Steve Sack.

p3 Certificate of Achievement for Most Bizarre Concept: Daryl Cagle.

p3 Award for Best Adaptation from Another Medium: John Darkow.

p3 Recognition of Unsung Irony: Ed Stein.

p3 World Toon Review: Stephane Peray (Thailand), Tjeerd Royaards (Netherlands), Ingrid Rice (Canada), Frederick Deligne (France), and Cam Cardow (Canada).


It's an Ann Telnaes twofer this week: With friends like Newt and Harry, does the Constitution need enemies?


Wow, that must have been a big plane! Mark Fiore gives us Dogboy and Mr. Dan, wrestling with the logistical problems raised by the idea that every single Muslim on earth attacked us 9 years ago, and other dubious beliefs.


Slouching Toward Extinction: Political cartoonist Steve Greenberg traces the slow demise of the staff political cartoonist job.


Donk-donk! How does criminal justice work in Gotham City? Well, it's complicated. (Hat-tip to Ron.)


At Red Meat, Bug-Eyed Earl considers some of the advantages of the suburban lifestyle.


La, la, la, la! Tom Tomorrow considers what happens when we finally take the Afghanistan war seriously.


Oddly, I had a similar conversation only a day or two ago -- but without graphics! The K Chronicles reviews Times I Probably Should Have Died (but didn't).


The Comics Curmudgeon asks: What if you wrote a comic strip that nobody, not even your editors, read or cared about?


It's not really a mosque. And it's not really at "Ground Zero" either. But that isn't stopping the blather. Michael Cavna counts down the top eight eye-catching cartoons about . . . well, about the blather.


Here's the Barry Blitt illustration to accompany Frank Rich's NYTimes column today.


Portland homeboy Jack Ohman raises a valid point: You can't compromise what you ain't got.


I've said it before and I'll say it again: Goofy was a genius. Jack Kenney directed this 1944 gem for Disney, one of a classic series of the Big G explaining various activities such as sports and safe driving.

No p3 Bonus Toon again this week, but here's a Jesse Springer toon from three years ago this month. It was a simpler time.


Remember to bookmark the daily political toon features at Slate, Time, and About.com.

Test your toon-captioning chops at The New Yorker's weekly caption-the-cartoon contest. (Rules here.)

Saturday morning tunes: All my changes were there

Okay, here's a story. Thirty years ago yesterday, my expedition group -- 820M, meaning the 13th group to go out on August 20th -- left base camp at Philmont Scout Ranch for a week of hiking and camping in the Sierra Nevadas. Coming from central Indiana, the trip itself was almost as exciting as the destination. Our scoutmaster bought a new-used station wagon, with a camper-trailer, to get us there. The station wagon had an 8-track player, and the previous owner threw in one 8-track cartridge: Glen Campbell Live.

We made it as far as truck stop near Terre Haute, Indiana -- a little over an hour -- before the eight of us rioted. We pooled some of our spare trip money and bought CSNY's Déjà vu -- just released, and also in 8-track. We worked out a deal with our astonishingly patient scoutmaster: Every few re-runs of CSNY, we'd play Glen Campell. For 2500 miles.

Even so, it's a miracle he didn't throttle all of us. And I could be wrong, but I suspect that this might have been the cut, out of the whole album, that irked him most.

But I still love it. Big birds flying across the sky. Philmont was where I saw my first eagle.

The Unforgiving Minute: Too. Much. Meta.

I just unsubscribed from both Truthout and Reader Supported News.

I'll miss some of the articles they link to.

But I won't miss the complaining. At all.

Minute's up.

Why the rise of modern conservatism is like 'Star Wars'

And it has nothing to do with Reagan's "Strategic Defense Initiative."

This has been my Summer of Cold War Reading. I haven't written up all I've read, and I haven't done it in order, and I've taken some liberties with the whole concept of cold-war fiction.

It began with my decision to finally work through the canonic Ian Flemming/James Bond novels and short stories and -- here's the tough part -- in order. That means that I've been hanging out for a while waiting for 'Diamonds Are Forever' to come in on interlibrary loan.

It's in, but right now I'm in the middle of Rick Perlstein's history of the modern conservative movement -- Before the Storm: Barry Goldwater and the Unmaking of the American Consensus and Nixonland: The Rise of a President and the Fracturing of America. It's good, although it needs an editor (like me); it jumps around just enough that you can't be sure if you're in, say, late 1966 or early 1966 and, believe me, that makes all the difference. And its index is kind of spotty too, which is only a problem because he likes to spring now-well-known names on you in the context before they were well known, and sometimes that works and sometimes it doesn't. (I don't have either book in front of me, so the examples I've bookmarked will have to wait for another post.)

Both "Before the Storm" and "Nixonland" are good reads; Perlstein has a somewhat Tom Wolfe-ish gift for letting his narrative voice occasionally lapse into that of one of his historical objects, at which point the prose usually lets slip what you guessed the characters are thinking anyway.

But the experience of reading them now is a lot like re-watching "Star Wars" and "The Empire Strikes Back" (I refuse to use either "A New Hope" or any Roman numerals to refer to them; there's "the three good ones," and "the three crappy ones," and that's it).

"Before the Storm" is like "Star Wars:" Even though Vader (Nixon?) is able to escape the destruction of the Death Star (the 1964 apparent rout of the Goldwater/Nixon/Reagan/Birchite conservative movement?) at the last moment, it still looks pretty upbeat. Johnson wins by a landslide. The punditocracy declares the conservative wing of the Republican party dead as a doornail. The Princess and the leaders of the Rebellion give medals to Han, Luke, and Chewy, and you can leave the theater humming John Williams music with a bounce in your step.

Then comes "Nixonland," the "Empire Strikes Back" of the narrative arc. The story-telling is still fun, but you know where this one's going to wind up: the Revolution's been dealt a crippling blow, Han's encased in carbonite, Luke's got the whole lost-a-hand-gained-a-father thing to deal with, and Nixon's going to narrowly win in '68, and win big in '72. I'm only about 100 pages in, the chronology is in early 1969, and yet there is already, one might say, a sense of impending doom.

More later, including thoughts on the birth of the "liberal elites think they're smarter than you" meme.  (Hint: They did. They do.  It didn't help, and it still doesn't.)

The Good, the Bad, and the Fat

It was warm at the Tour de Fat yesterday, but still a good time. I always liked the non-stop fun of pouring/serving beer, but I now think that selling tokens is definitely my groove. I reached a point by the middle of the afternoon when I could point to people standing 50 feet away and pull them over to the token table by sheer force of will. A Jedi beer token mind trick.

Memorable moments:

1. There was a Port-O-Potty wired with a karaoke machine. Seriously. When I walked by, three women and a man were crammed in there watching the lyrics on the screen and singing "Lola." It's a mixed-up, muddled-up, shook-up world.

2. I sold some tokens to the girlfriend of Noah, the guy who received a custom cruiser bike as a reward for giving up his car. This is an annual event at the TdF, and the moment when the new bike floats down (on pulleys; you have to be there) is great.

3. Rob Williams, juggler, street performer, and faithful observer of the grand traditions of Vaudeville. The culmination of his act -- again, seriously -- is he makes a baloney sandwich with his feet, just his feet, and invites someone from the audience to come on stage and eat it. Sounds so wrong, but it works so right.

4. Some jerk stole the computer off my bike. Regular readers know I had some emotional history with that device. Since I logged the miles on the old one last night, I only lost the mileage to the MAX station, then from the Zoo down through Washington Park to the Waterfront Park, then back to the MAX and from the Transit Center to my bike guys, where I bought a Cateye Strada wireless CC0RD300W (since my old model hasn't been made in years). The bike rack area wasn't fenced off, and I actually thought about pocketing my old computer when I locked up my bike, but figured -- it's a bike festival. There are hundreds of bikes here. Who  would steal an old computer off my bike?

Turns out someone would. Whoever took it, I hope the new CR2032 battery, which I just put in about 2 weeks ago, leaks out, eats a hole through your clothes, and burns you at the most socially awkward time and place possible. From then on, it's your karma. It won't even work without the rest of the hardware, which you didn't take. You shmuck.

Sunday morning toons: Contents of the overhead bins may have shifted during the flight

Jet Blue flight attendant Steven Slater lost his job for doing what anyone who's ever flown would love to have done in his place. That and more, beginning with
Daryl Cagle's toon round-up for the week.

p3 Picks of the Week: Mike Luckovich, Nate Beeler, Bob Englehart, John Darkow, Jimmy Margulies, Adam Zyglis, Larry Wright, Rob Rogers, and Monte Wolverton.

p3 Best in Show, Flightless Division: Jerry Holbert.

p3 Legion of Merit: Steve Sack.

p3 Palme d'Or (with scales): Bill Day.

Good to know I'm not the only one who finds airline travel a pain: You know the story already. Here's the treatment by John Trever, Joe Heller, Jeff Stahler and Steve Breen.

p3 World Toon Review: Stephane Peray (Thailand), Ingrid Rice (Canada), Christo Komarnitsky (Bulgaria), and Petar Pismestrovic (Austria).


Now I definitely want Elizabeth Warren to be confirmed, if only because I like the studied, Jack Benny-esque stare that Ann Telnaes gives her.


Just when you thought it was safe to sit down to breakfast: they're here! They're everywhere! And Mark Fiore has the story.


Reality: Overrated? That's what Tom Tomorrow wants to know.


Disneyland after dark? The headline is alarming: Did Tigger and Donald Duck Grope Women at Disneyworld?, but at least the word "acquittal" does turn up if you read far enough.


Ben Sargent salutes the honest approach.


"I was reading Ms. Magazine, but also Bride magazine: Romance in Doonesbury has taken a funny turn.


Here's this week's Barry Blitt illustration.


No legacy strips, no classic re-runs: Cathy Guisewite, the creator of the daily strip "Cathy," is closing up shop.


Portland homeboy Jack Ohman jumps on the bandwagon.


Ala Bahma -- get it? The studio let the copyright slip on this one from 1942. I especially like the sword and basket bit. Directed by Chuck Jones, here's "Case of the Missing Hare."

No p3 Bonus Toon: from Jesse Springer this week.


Remember to bookmark the daily political toon features at Slate's Slate, Time, and About.com.

Test your toon-captioning chops at The New Yorker's weekly caption-the-cartoon contest. (Rules here.)

Saturday morning toons: In the village, the quiet village

If you're looking for me this afternoon, I'll be selling tokens at the Tour de Fat down at Waterfront Park. My shift starts at 1:30pm.

It's a great annual fundraiser for the Bicycle Transportation Alliance, so by all means -- stop by and say hi.

And speaking of tokens:

If you're wondering why MAX/Trimet service on the west side is messed up:

"Faller," indeed. Condolences to the friends and family.

Sunday morning toons: A tough week for frogs

It's been quite a week for all of us. You can't find work (unless you work inside the beltway or in lower Manhattan). If you're gay, you can get married in California now (unless you want to get married right now, in which case you can't -- it's complicated). The US stands for peace (unless you're worried about cluster bombs, which the US seems okay with). Newt Gingrich is Osama bin Laden's enemy (unless the topic is a mosque anywhere near Ground Zero). And it hasn't shaped up to be a good week for frogs, either.

(Why frogs? Stay tooned.)

Let's begin, as always, with Daryl Cagle's toon round-up for the week.

p3 Picks of the Week: Mike Luckovich, Nate Beeler, Pat Bagley, Bill Schorr, Joe Heller, Jeff Parker, Jimmy Margulies, Henry Payne, and Monte Wolverton.

p3 Best of Show: Cam Cardow.

p3 Bitter Truth Award: Dave Granlund. (Is it me, or is this becoming a tough week for frogs?)

p3 p3 Good For the Goose Certificate: Steve Sack.

p3 World Toon Review: Stephane Peray (Thailand), Ingrid Rice (Canada),
Pavel Constantin (Romania), and Victor Ndula (Kenya).


Ann Telnaes unveils Sharron Angle's media strategy. It's so . . . simple.


Wingnuts of the past: This week, Mark Fiore asks: What if Andrew Breitbart had been around in 1863?


There is only one true Yogi Bear movie. And it ain't this. It's this. (Hat/tip to Michael Cavna of Comic Riffs, who notes the utterly pointless use of 3-D for this movie. Hell, Hanna-Barbera barely managed to exploit 2-D for the cheaply animated original Yogi Bear cartoons.)


Do we get enough Zippy the Pinhead here at p3 Sunday toons? No, we do not.


Wingnuts of the future: Don't wait for the next faked scandal to seep up through the ground; Tom Tomorrow's already on it.


You're on the road, and things . . . you know . . . happen: Wrapping up his Comics-Con victory lap, Keith Knight does right by someone with whom he shared something very, very special.


Hint: The jumbled letters are SYBEEERANL. This is gratifying: The Comics Curmudgeon had the same problem with Friday's Jumble and Luann that I did.


Tom the Dancing Bug makes a good point: Who better to decide how to memorialize the 9/11 attack on a multicultural eastern city than white, western right-wingers?


Here's this week's Barry Blitt illustration to go with today's Frank Rich NYTimes column.


Portland homeboy Jack Ohman had us with the title: Backroom Rangelling.


Missing in action: Olive, Bluto, and the spinach: But "Me Musical Nephews" (one of the best of the otherwise-dreary 1942 releases) remains one of my favorite Popeye cartoons. Directed by Seymour Kneitel (who was also directing the beautifully rotoscoped Superman animated toons at about the same time), and with great musical direction -- no one's mentioned in the credits but I'm betting it was Fleischer/Famous Studio's stalwart Sammy Timberg. I was reminded by  Wikipedia that the final break-the-third-wall gag originally featured Popeye seeking sanctuary on the Paramount mountain-top logo (the Popeye theatricals were released by Paramount), but that bit was cut when they were re-released by a.a.p. Here it is, in glorious black-and-white and state of the art 2-D:

p3 Bonus Toon: So what if Oregon GOP gubernatorial candidate Dudley had the worst free throw record in the history of organized sports when he was in the NBA? Jesse Springer says he's not having trouble hitting the basket now:

Remember to bookmark the daily political toon features at Slate's Slate, Time, and About.com.

Test your toon-captioning chops at The New Yorker's weekly caption-the-cartoon contest. (Rules here.)

Quote of the day: The one vote

Charles Pierce (scroll down to Part the Ultimate):

How is Rand Paul not languishing on some parks and rec commission as the one vote against bike paths?

Saturday morning tunes: Oh, this is the night, it's a beautiful night

No comment necessary:

Except to say that the Charlie Sheen parody of this in "Hot Shots Part Deux!" was hilarious.

Drinking Liberally meetings for August in Oregon and SW Washington

Have you got your copy of 538 Ways to Live, Work, and Play Like a Liberal yet? Here's author Justin Krebs, Executive Director of Living Liberally, at the FireDogLake book salon earlier this week.

And here's the run-down for Drinking Liberally chapters in Oregon and SW Washington this month. (Click on the chapter's link to join their email list.)

Corvallis: Next meeting: Thursday, August 5th. (That's tonight!)
Meetings: First Thursday of each Month, 5pm - 7pm at Squirrels, 100 SW 2nd St.

Vancouver: Next meeting: Tuesday, August 10th.
Meetings: Second and fourth Tuesdays, 7pm, at the Back Alley Bar and Grill, 6503 E. Mill Plain Blvd. (West of Andersen, in a strip mall 1/2 block west of Safeway on the south side of Mill Plain. It's deep in the lot.)

Portland Metro-West (aka: Portland Left Side): Next meeting: Wednesday, August 11th.
Meetings: Second Wednesday of every month, 7:00pm at Ringo's, 12300 SW Broadway St, (just east of Hall Blvd).

Portland: Next meeting: Thursday, August 12th.
Meetings: Second and fourth Thursdays of the month, at the Lucky Lab Brew Hall at 19th and NW Quimby, Thursday at 7pm.
Note: They may be switching to 6pm-9pm (from 7pm-10pm) to take advantage of the outdoor seating and the finally-arrived summer weather. Be sure to check the chapter email next week!

(The Salem and St. Helens chapters are on summer hiatus.)

There are over 300 DL chapters around the country; to find the one near you -- or to start one in your neighborhood--go here.)

And if you appreciate Living Liberally promoting progressive action through social interaction -- including keeping the whole Drinking Liberally network up and running -- consider sending them a little love via Tipping Liberally. Or check out becoming a regular pledge donor.

So wherever you are, join the Drinking Liberally gang for drinks and political conversation.

And remember: DL encourages everyone to drink, and vote, responsibly.

(Cross posted at Loaded Orygun.)

Before "Glee," before "American Idol," before Karaoke Tuesdays at the local bar

There was Mitch Miller:

Mitch Miller, who was a jolly sing-along elf on television and a controversial, hard-nosed music executive when the cameras were turned off, died Saturday at Lennox Hill Hospital at the age of 99.

His daughter Margaret said he had suffered a short illness.

As head of "artists and repertoire " for Columbia Records in the 1950s, Miller had an enormous role in shaping the popular music of his era.

He helped rescue Columbia by producing records that were generally bright, upbeat and accessible. He gave the producer a much greater role in shaping the sound of recorded music.

In the process, he infuriated artists like Frank Sinatra and Rosemary Clooney, who felt he was disregarding musical and songwriting quality in favor of cheap, trivial novelty songs like Clooney's "Come On-A My House" or Sinatra's "Mama Will Bark. "

He also hated rock 'n' roll, calling it "a disease, " and he generally kept Columbia out of rock 'n' roll for its first decade by passing on artists like Buddy Holly.

He did have an ear for potential commercial value, however, and he made a small unsuccessful offer in 1954 to sign Elvis Presley. In the early 1960s, he joined in signing Aretha Franklin and Bob Dylan. But he tried to make Aretha a pop singer and he left Dylan in the company's "folk " division.

It wasn't until the success of the Beatles in 1964 that Columbia finally reduced Miller's power and started signing artists like the Byrds.

Be kind to your web-footed friends, for that duck could be somebody's mother.

"Unwilling to engage the writing process"

Here's something I don't miss from my perfessin' days:

Professors used to deal with plagiarism by admonishing students to give credit to others and to follow the style guide for citations, and pretty much left it at that.

But these cases — typical ones, according to writing tutors and officials responsible for discipline at the three schools who described the plagiarism — suggest that many students simply do not grasp that using words they did not write is a serious misdeed.

It is a disconnect that is growing in the Internet age as concepts of intellectual property, copyright and originality are under assault in the unbridled exchange of online information, say educators who study plagiarism.

I was lucky; I got out of the biz before Yahoo!, before Google, before Wikipedia. It was easier to spot plagiarism, and -- since plagiarism was at the time merely less work than actual authorship, not ridiculously less work, as it has become now -- it was easier to discourage too.

The NYTimes article raises several different forms of the issue. If a commercial writer wants to get away with it, with fatuous shrug-offs like "there's no such thing as originality anyway, just authenticity," that's between her and her publisher, and between her and her readers. (Having just finished the excruciatingly dull Arthur C. Clarke's "3001: The Final Odyssey," in which the author blithely recycles brief descriptions, paragraphs, and entire chapters from the earlier books in the series, I'm feeling more jaded than usual on that subject right now. Perhaps it's not that there's no such thing as originality, just that for some people there's no need for it.)

But in education, it's different, or at least it still was at the time. When I assigned papers on classical rhetoric, or persuasion and the media, it wasn't because I had a need to know about, say, what Aristotle would have said about the strategies of political influence in Bruce Springsteen videos. It was because I needed to know if the students understood the course material, and one of the best tests of such understanding is the student's ability to restate it in their own words (and their ability to choose apt cases for analysis). You can no more answer that question by turning in a cut-and-paste pastiche of internet sources than you can show what you've learned in a cooking class by ordering a pizza.

Although I did get a perverse chuckle about the dim student who simply wanted to learn how to switch font color. You'll see.

Sunday morning toons: Back to school!

(Updated below.)

Football season has started, and stores are promoting back-to-school sales! Sounds to me like the first day of August! The World Series, Tax Day, and the 2020 census must be just around the corner.

In addition, we've got WikiLeaks and a small glitch in the Arizona anti-immigrant law. And in case you didn't notice, we're still in Afghanistan. All this and more, beginning with Daryl Cagle's toon round-up for the week.

p3 Picks of the Week: Mike Luckovich, Pat Bagley, John Trevor, Jimmy Margulies, Steve Sack, Milt Priggee, Ed Stein, Rob Rogers, and Monte Wolverton.

p3 Best of Show: Mike Keefe.

p3 Legion of Honor: John Darkow.

p3 Historical Perspective Certificate: David Fitzsimmons.

p3 World Toon Review: Cam Cardow (Canada), Patrick Chappatte (Switzerland), Frederick Deligne (France), and Herbjørn Skogstad (Norway).

More pencils, more books, more teachers' dirty looks: Is it just me, or does the return of the school year seem to be less about learning and more about, you know, money? Here's Joe Heller, Thomas Boldt, Gary Varvel, John Deering, Steve Kelley, and Jeff Koterba.


Ann Telnaes reminds us of the old adage: When you get to the end of your rope . . .


Mark Fiore brings us this patriotic message: Loose Lips Sink Slips!.


He was "sick" before "sick" was cool: Last week was the funeral of Portland cartoonist John Callahan.


Garfield and Pearls Before Swine have their "Johnny Cash moment: The legendary singer once joked that it was a mixed blessing to have your albums selling like hotcakes . . . in Federal prisons. The two daily comic strips now can have a little taste of that. Takeaway quote:

"While I have you here, my friends and I would like to request that you bring back the comics, Pearls Before Swines and Garfield. Thank you."

Update: Almost forgot your weekly bit of Barry Blitt from the NYTimes.  Here it is.


"Comic Book Confidential" comes to the NW Film Center today at 4pm: The classic 1988 documentary features interviews with some of the gods of the history of comic books.


Okay, okay, we get the picture! Have to say, Doonesbury has been in a weird place for the last week or so, but the wrap-up of the Sarah Palin fantasy is pretty funny.


This Modern World explores a strange, alternate universe, where a whipped administration falls for faked hot-button stories as fast as the right can cook them up. (Hey. Wait a minute . . . !) Yargle, bargle!


Less Stuckeys, more Crackerbarrels: That's only one of the insights when the K Chronicles takes a cross-country tour.


The Comics Curmudgeon uncovers one of the most creepy, throw-the-concept-out-the-window "Marmaduke" cartoons ever. Will the Great Dane's next film be a "Twilight" crossover?


Portland homeboy Jack Ohman says, climate change is only a problem depending on where you sit.


Cats and mice are pals: Tom and Jerry (and Topsy) go back to school in the 1948 MGM short "Professor Tom," directed by Joseph Hanna and William Barbera:

p3 Bonus Toon: Hm. Not sure what Jesse Springer wants to see the state money spent on, if not jobs and infrastructure (tax cuts for the top 5%?), but he doesn't seem pleased this week:

Remember to bookmark the daily political toon features at Slate's Slate, Time, and About.com.

Test your toon-captioning skills at The New Yorker's weekly caption-the-cartoon contest. (Rules here.)