Oh, murder! RIP Leslie Nielson

[For some reason, Blogger has taken to arbitrarily delaying scheduled posts, so imagine that this came out at a few minutes before 9 this morning.]

Surely, he'll be remembered more for his post-"Airplane!" career as shameless self-parodist and collaborator with the Zucker brothers, but Nielsen was originally a romantic leading man. (Professionally speaking, William Shatner went to school on his putting.)

Matt Zoller Seitz at Salon.com has a nice appreciation of Nielson, arguing that going goofy wasn't his Plan B; it was just an opportunity the big lug had never gotten.

BTW, no one specifically asked my opinion, but "Forbidden Planet" was every bit as much a jump forward from the science fiction moviemaking and storytelling of its day as were "Star Wars" and "The Matrix" in their day.

Sunday morning toons: The peculiar American tradition

America's a funny country: This week North and South Korea took pot-shots at each other, the GOP did its best to derail nuclear disarmament talks (out of spite), the economies of Ireland and Portugal cratered, and airport security reached new depths of intrusive paranoia -- but we insist on reserving the term "Black Friday" for the day of frantic shopping beginning before dawn. A funny country.

Today's selections have been carefully selected and packaged, like leftovers pulled from the Thanksgiving turkey carcass, from the week's political cartoon pages at Slate, Time, About.com, and MSNBC.com:

p3 Picks of the Week: Mike Luckovich, R. J. Matson, Mike Keefe, Adam Zyglis, Jeff Danziger, Tom Toles, and Monte Wolverton.

p3 Best of Show: Lalo Alcaraz.

p3 World Toon Review: Cam Cardow (Canada), Petar Pismestrovic (Austria), Ingrid Rice (Canada), and Bill Leak (Australia).


Ann Telnaes reminds us: A sigh is just a sigh.


Mark Fiore presents Thanksgiving travel tips from Suzie Newsykins.


It's been a couple of years since we said farewell to Opus, but his creator Berke Breathed is back -- where you'd least expect him. (Have I ever mentioned my theory about movie trailers that tell you the whole plot?)


It's been locked in the vaults for 10 years, but Disney is coming back out with a Blu-ray edition of the love-it-or-hate-it 1940 classic "Fantasia." From the NYTimes review:

What’s genuinely daring about “Fantasia” is Disney’s decision to forgo an overall audience-grabbing narrative in favor of a discontinuous series of episodes, each operating in a different style. Rather than depend on linear, what-next storytelling and characters that invite audience identification, “Fantasia” shifts through a series of moods. It goes from the playful (“Dance of the Hours,” directed by the great character animators T. Hee and Norm Ferguson, and probably one of the greatest pieces of full-scale cel animation ever committed to film) to the diabolical (“Night on Bald Mountain,” directed by Wilfred Jackson with references including Universal horror movies and medieval woodcuts).

If you didn't know any Mark Trail plot points in the first place, how would you know if they've started repeating -- without The Comic Curmudgeon?


Tom Tomorrow reveals the awful secret behind stepped-up airport screening procedures. And trust me: Whatever you thought it was, it's worse!


The K Chronicles explores Team USA -- the dysfunctional football team.


Call it "The Persistence of Money:" This week's Barry Blitt illustration for Frank Rich's NYTimes column (about why our Congress is so dysfunctional) is also the winner of this week's p3 Award for Best Adaptation from Another Medium.


At Red Meat this week, Ted makes a fashion statement.


Taiwanese animation studio Next Media Animation is back, with coverage of a peculiar American tradition.


Portland homeboy Jack Ohman compares first class and coach.


"Some of them are cogs on the wheel, while some are just plain nuts!" "Daffy Doodles" () is the first Warner Bros animated short directed by Robert McKimson, featuring not only great Daffy-Porky bedevilment, but lots of throwaway sight gags featuring famous advertising images of the time. (To get the final gag, you'll need to know who Jerry Colonna is.)

p3 Bonus Toon: Jesse Springer says, there are cuts -- and then there are cuts.

Test your toon-captioning chops at The New Yorker's weekly caption-the-cartoon contest. (Rules here.) Bonus: This week you can pit your captioning skills against Roger Ebert.

Saturday morning toons: Everybody wants to be your long-lost friend

Dedicated to all my friends who've lived the life of a millionaire, and those who began to fall so low.

The p3 Thanksgiving tradition continues

It builds the tension, eases it momentarily with cross-cutting, then builds it up more, all leading to one of the funniest long-form punchlines out there. Arguably second only to the funeral of Chuckles the Clown as the funniest moment of 70s sitcom history:

In the unfortunately-somewhat-likely possibility that the Hulu embed code doesn't work quite right, the episode is here, and the critical sequence begins at 17:12 and runs until 23:30.

Doctor No will dine well tomorrow

Here's the menu, courtesy of The Shaker Gourmet.  Mm-MMM!

Looking forward to seeing TSG's new digs at long last, too.  Details after I come out of my tryptophan-induced coma sometime over the weekend.

Thankful for the whole package, I am.

Forty-seven years ago today, at 4pm London time:

Sunday morning toons: The TSA has added three new terms to our language

First there was"security theater."

Now there's "porno scanner" and "gate rape."

Could not be prouder. No sir.

As you might guess, inappropriate touching on the at the Delta concourse is this week's political toon chart-topper, but there's more, including the dim prospects of a START treaty win for the White House, the report of the Catfood Commission on Deficit Reduction and Social Security Elimination, the House GOP leadership planning to party like it's 1994 -- and there are turkeys all over the Beltway in Washington DC!

Here they are, in all their toony goodness: the highlights from the week's political cartoon pages at Slate, Time, About.com, and Daryl Cagle's political cartoon index at MSNBC.com:

p3 Picks of the Week: Mike Luckovich, Mike Lester, R. J. Maston, John Cole, Tom Toles, Glen McCoy, Nick Anderson, Steve Kelley, Clay Bennett, and Monte Wolverton.

p3 Fourth Amendment Nostalgia Award: John Trevor.

p3 Two Artists With But a Single Metaphor Award: Rob Rogers and Jeff Darcy.

p3 World Toon Review: Cam Cardow (Canada), Patrick Chappatte (Switzerland), Tjeerd Royaards (Netherlands), Michael Kountouris (Greece), and Ingrid Rice (Canada).


Ann Telnaes shows who may have gotten the ultimate government pat-down this week. Honk!


Mark Fiore gives us a peek at the hottest new game show.


Taiwan's Next Media animates the news, darkly. And this week they bring us the passenger backlash to the new TSA "safety" procedures. (This is Next Media's second appearance at p3 Sunday Morning Toons, by the way.)


Tom Tomorrow breaks the third wall of cartooning to explain the Catfood Commission on Deficit Reduction and Social Security Elimination's report.


The K Chronicles laments -- gently -- life's tiny tragedies.


It's an odd premise, but I like it: Several US political cartoonists, including p3 regulars Garry Trudeau and Mike Luckovich, recently toured US bases in Afghanistan with the USO. Good on 'em.


Here's this week's illustration by Barry Blitt, to accompany Frank Rich's NYTimes column on what Sarah Palin can see from her kitchen window these days.


Portland homeboy Jack Ohman commends the open-mindedness of the Catfood Commission on Deficit Reduction and Social Security Elimination.


"I've got my whole life ahead of me -- love, travel, good books!" Certainly all things to be thankful for . . . if only Tom Turkey can convince Daffy Duck to help him prevent Pilgrim Porky from turning him (that is, Tom) into the entrée for Thanksgiving. You probably know where it goes from there. (Directed in 1949 by Arthur Davis.)

p3 Bonus Toon: And just in time for Thanksgiving, Jesse Springer notices that not every high ranking for Oregon is a good thing. (Click to enlarge.)

Match toon-captioning wits: at The New Yorker's weekly caption-the-cartoon contest. (Rules here.)

Screening Liberally/PDX Left Side presents: "The Fog of War: Eleven Lessons from the life of Robert McNamara"

This month's PDX Left Side/Screening Liberally pick is director Errol Morris' critically acclaimed 2003 documentary "The Fog of War: Eleven Lessons from the Life of Robert McNamara."

"Fog of War" won the Academy Award for Best Documentary Feature and the Independent Spirit Award for Best Documentary Feature. It was screened out of competition at the 2003 Cannes Film Festival.

Join everyone Sunday at 7pm at Ringo's Bar and Grill, 12300 SW Broadway (across from the Beaverton Bakery) in Beaverton.

Here's an excerpt from Roger Ebert's review:

Morris is uncanny in his ability to bring life to the abstract, and here he uses graphics, charts, moving titles and visual effects in counterpoint to what McNamara is saying. There's also a lot of historical footage, including some shots of Curtis LeMay with his cigar clenched between his teeth -- images that describe whatever McNamara neglected to say about him. There are tape recordings of Oval Office discussions involving McNamara, Kennedy and Johnson. And archival footage of McNamara's years at Ford (he is proud of introducing seat belts). Underneath all of them, uneasily urging the movie along, is the Philip Glass' score, which sounds -- what? Mournful, urgent, melancholy, driven?

Saturday morning tunes: The "Breezin'" summit

George Benson's "Breezin'" was part of the soundtrack for the great summer I spent rooming with my pal Ben in his row house on Wareham Drive in the Mt. Adams area of Cincinnati.

Yes, England Dan and John Ford Coley in the park, late evenings at the Blind Lemon, waltzing in the art museum when the guards weren't looking -- those were all good too, of course. But the musical signature of that summer was Benson's "Breezin" (plus a double-live album with Doc and Merle Watson, the name of which I can't remember, and Leon Redbone's "On the Tracks").

Here's a great performance featuring Benson with -- and I did not see this one coming -- Carlos Santana.

The secret, I think, is the white suits.

Great opening lines in literature (special "severed body parts" edition)

I find I have to stretch the concept of "greatness" a bit for this one, but it's a sentence that it's certainly tough to read without having a strong sense that here is a short story that is definitely going somewhere.

It's the opening sentence from "The Head" (the title's another pretty conspicuous signal, right there), by Manuel Komroff, reprinted in The Third Omnibus of Crime, edited by Dorothy L. Sayers (1935).

On the same day that Handsome Dan shot the seargeant of detectives, the newspapers announced that some Russian scientists had made a wonderful discovery.

(The Third Omnibus is devilishly hard to track down online. I have a fairly decent copy that I found in a little bookshop in Multnomah Village about 15 years ago. Here's a summary, including a microreview of the Komroff story.)

The Omnibus of Crime (also edited by Sayers, creator of Lord Peter Wimsey), was published in 1929, at a time when the Golden Age of mystery writing was in full flower, but it found itself in much the same self-conscious position as hip-hop music before MTV finally launched "Yo! MTV Raps" around 1990: It was hugely popular commercially, but still struggling to prove that it was a legitimate artistic form. The first Omnibus establishes its subject's pedigree by tracing its literary descent from the equivalent of the Flood: the short mystery stories by Edgar Alan Poe, including "The Murders in the Rue Morgue" and "The Purloined Letter," written some 80 years earlier. The first Omnibus struggles to set forth the respectable characteristics of the genre, including the all-important principle of Fair Play.

By the time of the Third Omnibus, only six years later, the biggest issue facing Sayers appeared to be differentiating the mystery story from the horror story (hence the presence of odd bits like "The Head" in that volume.)

And there things stood for some time, even though Dashiel Hammett had published The Maltese Falcon in that interval. (One likes to imagine, on the day that Falcon appeared in print on the other side of the Atlantic, Ms. Sayers writing in her diary, "Nothing of interest happened today.")

Raymond Chandler's magnificent The Simple Art of Murder (written in 1944, republished in 1950) was the Declaration of Independence for that uniquely-American creation, the hard-boiled detective. Chandler provided the rationale for separating the detective story from its older, more genteel British cousin, the mystery story, and instigated his readers to chuck overboard all those train schedules, exotic poisons and candles guttered on the side closest to the open window. The emphasis would henceforth be, instead, on the pleasures of the gun, the bourbon, the femme fatale, and -- O, this above all -- the mean streets.

Sunday morning toons: Belated Veterans Day

This week's selections have been lovingly hand-selected from the week's political cartoon pages at Slate, Time, About.com, and Daryl Cagle's political cartoon index at MSNBC.com:

p3 Picks of the Week: Mike Luckovich, Daryl Cagle, Joel Pett, Clay Jones, Jim Morin, Scott Stantis, Chris Britt, and Monte Wolverton.

p3 Best of Show: Pat Bagley.

p3 Legion of Merit: David Fitzsimmons.

p3 Cross de Guerre: Adam Zyglis.

p3 Norman Rockwell Award: R. J. Matson.

p3 Doomed to Repeat History Medal: Steve Sack.

p3 World Toon Review: Ingrid Rice (Canada), Julius Hansen (Denmark), Pavel Constantine (Romania), Michael Kountouris (Greece), and Cam Cardow (Canada).


Ann Telnaes notes how GOP homophobes celebrate Veterans Day.


Mark Fiore looks ahead to compromising with the uncompromising.


Here's Barry Blitt's illustration for this week's Frank Rich NYTimes column: "Who Will Stand Up to the Superrich?"


Two words: Serenity: Downtime.


Tom Tomorrow looks at the aftermath of an election in which voters largely shun the party unable to fix the economic mess in favor of the party that caused it.


The K Chronicles has a message that was too late that time, but maybe not next time: Get help. (Warning: Not fun like the "Life's Little Victories" strips.)


In a strip that may have more political overtones than you might like to think, Red Meat looks at what happens when you screw with a hand puppet.


This is absolutely fascinating: Three top-of-the-chart caricature artists show how they'd draw Pablo Picasso.


The Comic Curmudgeon looks at how Funky Winkerbean celebrates Veterans Day in the most libido-killing way imaginable. Remember when FB was a harmless, high-school version of Doonesbury? Yeesh.


Portland homeboy Jack Ohman sez: The voters have spoken!


Here's why you never tear your prescriptions in half! "Naughty but Mice," was the 1939 debut of Sniffles the Mouse, one of Chuck Jones' minor creations (actually, Sniffles' original design work was done by a Disney artist who specialized in cute, and it shows). In this rarely-shown-on-TV-for-obvious-reaons short, Sniffles gets -- there's no way to put this delicately -- hammered on cold medicine.

By the way: Notice that in the background at around the 2:20 mark is a box labeled "Radium Hair Pins." There's a story behind that reference.  There are several similar "high-tech" home-remedy products along the shelf at the same time. Also, the music that begins at that point is "You Go To My Head." Musical director Carl Stalling could never resist a pun like that.


p3 Bonus "News of the Future" Toon: Jesse Springer looks at where the Kitzhaber re-election may eventually lead Oregon (click to enlarge).

Match toon-captioning wits with other buffs at The New Yorker's weekly caption-the-cartoon contest. (Rules here.)

Simple answers to simple questions

Glenn Greenwald asks: Is terrorism being used to erode First Amendment rights?

Yes.

This has been a special p3 edition of Simple Answers to Simple Questions.

(Acknowledgment.)

Saturday morning tunes: "Y siempre estaré llorando por tu amor"

Right up to the point where it gets very weird and then takes the film to a place that even David Lynch fans spent a year trying to sort out, Rebekah del Rio's Spanish acapella cover of Roy Orbison's "Crying" in "Mulholland Drive" is one of the most darkly beautiful moments in the whole film.

Oh yeah -- about that moment that comes just before the three-minute mark? At the club Silencio, No hay bando!

Treading that fine line between hope and dispair

The return of the rainy season brings an extra hazard for bicycles: Sharp debris from the roadway may cling to the wet tire for a couple of revolutions, giving little bits more than one chance to cause trouble.

This morning at about 6.30am I picked up a piece of glass a little smaller than a paper match-head in my rear tire, and that was enough to bring the commute process to a near-standstill.

I should explain, though, it was a Continental Ultra Gator Skin tire, purchased in August 2007, and it had about 4700 miles on it, which ain't shabby but is also past the recommended usage time. (CUGSs are almost too good; I just about never get a flat, so I don't carry my patch kit with me like I should. Tsk.)

Insight from last night's DL meeting

"The Shining" might be one of those rare good movies whose best bits have been so thoroughly absorbed into popular culture and then fed back again from every possible direction that it may no longer actually be necessary to have seen it.

A special post-election p3 Separated at Birth, just for Oregonians

One was an artificially-manufactured fellow whose big smile, earnest demeanor, perfect hair, and natty attire could almost make you overlook that his head might be fundamentally empty and that he only works when he's operated by unseen figures off-camera . . . and the other was a famous Muppet.

Mad props to Carla, who saw it first.

Sunday morning toons: You gotta be a football hero

Here's what you missed in all the election hubbub:

• Keith Richards slid into his new public role as memoirist.
• The only party Americans dislike more than Democrats just recaptured the US House of Representatives.
• The 2012 election campaign officially began on Wednesday morning.
• Chris Dudley, narrowly losing his chance to create greater wealth for the rich as Oregon's next governor, returned to his previous full-time occupation: creating greater wealth for the rich.
• And there was something about college football too . . . let me double-check that one and get back to you.

Once again, today's selections have been lovingly hand-picked from the week's political cartoon pages including Slate, Time, About.com, and -- as always -- Daryl Cagle's political cartoon index at MSNBC.com:

p3 Picks of the Week: Mike Luckovich, Jeff Parker, Nate Beeler, David Fitzsimmons, Jerry Holbert, John Cole, Tom Toles, Steve Breen, Michael Ramirez, Lisa Benson, and Monte Wolverton.

p3 Best of Show: Joel Pett.

p3 Special Prize for Literature: Mike Keefe.

p3 Best Adaptation from Another Medium, Special Tea Party Edition (tie): Clay Bennett and Adam Zyglis.

p3 World Toon Review: Ingrid Rice (Canada). Cam Cardow (Canada). Patrick Chappatte (Switzerland), Stephane Peray (Thailand), Tjeerd Royaards (Netherlands), Christo Komarnitski (Bulgaria), and Manny Francisco (Philippines).


Ann Telnaes looks ahead to the unhealthy future of health care in the US. (Bonus microdocumentary shows AT creating and animating one of her pieces.)


Mark Fiore show how to survive the post-election blues, no matter which side you're on.


Double-secret second bonus microdocumentary: See Nate Beeler (above, remember?) drawing and talking about his political cartoons. (H/t to Comic Riffs.)


Here's Barry Blitt's illustration for this week's Frank Rich NYTimes column on the chances for an Obama comeback (and you thought Obama was still president? Silly you.).


Tom Tomorrow watches as the banking industry unveils a series of innovative new financial products. More then just figures of speech; theyre the new way to leverage your future!


Here's a Keith Knight twofer: (1) How to give mom a heart attack, and (2) Bipartisanship in the new Congress.


And Red Meat, in which Ted Johnson and his wife share a moment. (Yeesh.)


The Comic Curmudgeon investigates resignation slowly sliding into soul-wearing sadness -- and it has nothing to do with American politics!


Portland homeboy Jack Ohman proposes a new flag for the new state of Oregon. The change is subtle, but it's there. (Hint: No matter how strong the breeze or from which direction, it doesn't move.)


You gotta be a football hero: This goes out to all my Duck (and Joe Paterno) fan friends. Here's a surprisingly sharp copy of "You Gotta Be a Football Hero" (directed by Dave Fleischer in 1935). The title tune, written a couple of years before this film came out, was one of the most popular football anthems of its time -- before "We Are the Champions," before "Who Let the Dogs Out," it was YGBAFH, and Fleischer Studios didn't hesitate to cash in. I love the little J. Wellington Wimpy cameos. According to Wikipedia, this is the last film in which Popeye is voiced by original voice artist William Costello; after this it was Jack Mercer, the voice most people remember. (And does Popeye say what I think he says when he's trying to get his head out of the stadium chair just after the 1-minute mark?)

p3 Bonus Toon: Let the Kitzhaber Restoration begin! But, as Jesse Springer points out (slickly finessing his early-in-the-week deadline problem), whoever won the Oregon gubernatorial race this week would be in a nasty place:

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

Saturday morning tunes: You can live a lie until you die

Here's something I noticed near the end of the 2010 midterm campaign: Unlike 2008, there were pretty much no stories about GOP candidates co-opting pop songs for their campaigns and campaign events -- without the permission of the rights-holders (for examples of their more typical behavior, see here, here, and here).

Have they learned their lesson, that the rules they want to apply to everyone else have to apply to them as well? Yeah, I know: Not bloody likely.

But whatever the reason, when this song accidentally popped up on my mp3 player's randomizer yesterday afternoon, the first thought I had was: Well, here's a song the GOP won't be appropriating for themselves any time soon.

Without further ado, here's "Crippled Inside" from John Lennon's 1971 "Imagine" album:

Quote of the day: Needle, pursed, and prim

Matt Tiabbi:

With his needle nose, pursed lips and prim reading glasses, [Senate GOP leader Mitch McConnell is] a proud wearer of the "I'm an intellectual, but I'm also a narrow-minded prick" look made famous by George Will.

(See also; and also.)

Come to kindly terms with your ass, for it beareth you

This is actually a bicycle story, so stay with it; but first:

Long before the "Idiot’s Guide" (to everything) series became a license to print money, there was the original idiot’s guide: How to Keep Your Volkswagen Alive: A Manual of Step-By-Step Procedures for the Complete Idiot. First published in 1969 and still chugging along over four decades later (the 19th edition is out there, and the book has outlived both author John Muir and illustrator Peter Aschwanden, to say nothing of air-cooled VWs), the Idiot’s Guide (air-cooled VW owners never call it anything else) offers this pithy adage from olden times:

Come to kindly terms with your ass, for it beareth you.

Muir’s point -- in those pre-Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance days -- was that, if you’re going to depend on a vehicle (especially a VW), you’d probably better try and understand it, at least a little.

Thou art that, after all.

(Some VW engineering purists argued that Muir’s advice, steeped as it was in hippie quintessence, could tend a little too much toward the improvisational, the approximated, and the MacGyver-esque, sometimes recommending techniques that would get your bug or bus back on the road in the short term but at the risk of harm to its well-being sometime down the road. YMMV.)

I mention that to prepare the ground for this observation:

In what were quite possibly the last warm sunny days in these parts until next spring, a lot of drivers seemed to peer through their windshield at the bright, multi-colored autumnal terrain in front of them this week and suddenly realize that they had no interest -- none whatsoever -- in looking at a cyclist’s backside in front of them, even if only for the next 40 or 50 feet in a parking lot. During those three warm and sunny days, I had more drivers try to pass me inappropriately – oh hell, let’s say it: dangerously and usually illegally, in intersections, on single-lane streets, and for no apparent reason other than to see me in their rear-view mirror rather than through their windshield -- than I’ve experienced in quite a while.

I can’t say what terms they were on with their own asses, but they certainly weren’t coming to kindly terms with mine.

After some thought, I decided it might be the motorist’s version of raging against the dying of the light.

Then I thought about it some more, and began to wonder if -- perhaps -- their problem wasn’t so much with the presence of bicyclist qua bicyclist within the horizon of their sensorium, but rather with the ass that beareth me specifically.

To be painfully candid, here was the bicycle saddle I was riding on (click to enlarge -- if you dare):

It’s over 6 years old, and had beareth-ed me for over 10,000 miles, and although I hated to face facts, there's no denying it’s been falling apart for over a year. At first I resisted the idea of replacing such a fundamental interface with my beloved ride, and I didn't feel much better about mending it with duct tape and whatnot. And then I decided that its resulting theft-deterrent ugliness might be a net plus. But the rainy season is gradually asserting itself again in these parts, and as a result the exposed padding and old shop rags inside the thing were starting to exude the funk of old sweat socks, making it arguably an assault upon both the eyes and the nose of the fastidious driver.

Who knows: If I saw that thing in front of me, maybe I’d try to run it off the road myself, simply as a gesture against urban blight.

Well, anyway. What with one thing and another I found myself in my local Bike 'n' Hike (a completely gratuitous plug for my one true bike shop) on other business yesterday, and there, hanging on the wall rack, quietly humming "Tat Tvam Asi . . . Tat Tvam Asi . . . " at me, was my new bicycle saddle, although I didn’t immediately recognize it as such.

Really, it's the same specs as the old one, with the original manufacturer’s WBT brand on it this time rather than the bike manufacturer’s (Giant) -- and at a surprisingly decent price. To get from seeing it to grokking it to paying for it was the work of a moment, and after installing and road-testing it I discovered another benefit: Six years of beareth-ing my ass had slowly but inexorably pounded almost all the cushion out of the old saddle. The new one is much, much kindlier where it counts (as the original probably was, back in the day).

That left only the question of what to do with the old saddle. After some discussion at the bike shop, the consensus was to put it in the garden to keep crows away.

One last related item: In Ireland, ”iron donkey” is slang for bicycle (a completely gratuitous plug for the best bike tour I ever took).

Living Liberally calendar for Oregon and SW Washington in November

(Updated with new locations for St. Helens, below!)

Okay, the election's over, so everyone take a couple of days to reacquaint yourselves with your family and pets, then everyone meets back here for 2012. But you know where to go to relax: Drinking Liberally. Am I right?

Yet again, the first of the month snuck up on me. So tonight I send my sheepish apologies again to Ann and everyone at DL/Corvallis, who will just about be winding up tonight's meeting as I finally get this drafted last night. (Consider this the early promotion for the December Corvallis meeting: First Thursday of the month, address and time below!)


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



Corvallis: Tonight! Oops!

Meetings: First Thursday of each month, 5pm - 7pm at Squirrels, 100 SW 2nd St., in Corvallis.


Vancouver: Next meeting: Tuesday, October 9th.

Meetings: Second Tuesday of each month, 7pm, at the Fatty's Sports Page, 11606 NE 71st Street (Located at the south entrance to Lowe's)


Portland Left Side (aka: Portland Metro West): Next meeting: Wednesday, October 10th.
Meetings: Second Wednesday of every month, 7:00pm at Ringo's, 12300 SW Broadway St, (just east of Hall Blvd), in Beaverton.


St. Helens: Next meeting: Wednesday, October 10th.

Meetings: Second and fourth Wednesdays of every month, at the Village Inn, 535 S. Columbia River Hwy (We have a room off the bar), in St. Helensin the Cantina at Ixtapa Mexican Restaurant in Scappoose.


Portland: Next meeting: Thursday, October 11th.

Meetings: Second and fourth Thursdays of the month, at the Lucky Lab Brew Hall at 19th and NW Quimby, Thursday at 7pm.


Salem: Next meeting: Thursday, October 14th.

Meetings: Third Thursday of the month at Browns Towne Lounge, 189 Liberty St NE # 112 (Old Sportstop next to Read Opera House) in Salem.

And Portland West Side Screening Liberally is having its next meeting 7pm Sunday, November 20th at Ringo's, 12300 SW Broadway St, (just east of Hall Blvd.--easy parking and MAX access). Vote at the Facebook page or drop me a note for your choice: Either The Fog of War: Eleven Lessons from the Life of Robert S. MacNamara (2003) (last month's runner-up), or To Kill a Mockingbird (1962). Suggestions for future movies are also welcome.


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 Living 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 Living Liberally gang for political conversation, drinks, and great films.

Remember: DL encourages everyone to drink, and vote, responsibly.

And don't forget there's still time to purchase your copy of 538 Ways to Live, Work, and Play Like a Liberal.

No!

No sun--no moon!
No morn--no noon!
No dawn--no dusk--no proper time of day--
No sky--no earthly view--
No distance looking blue--
No road--no street--no "t'other side this way"--
No end to any Row--
No indications where the Crescents go--
No top to any steeple--
No recognitions of familiar people--
No courtesies for showing 'em--
No knowing 'em!
No traveling at all--no locomotion--
No inkling of the way--no notion--
"No go" by land or ocean--
No mail--no post--
No news from any foreign coast--
No Park, no Ring, no afternoon gentility--
No company--no nobility--
No warmth, no cheerfulness, no healthful ease,
No comfortable feel in any member--
No shade, no shine, no butterflies, no bees,
No fruits, no flowers, no leaves, no birds--
November!

-- Thomas Hood (1844)
(sometimes quoted by
Rumpole, the Old Bailey
Hack, even though it
doesn't appear in his
Quiller-Couch edition
of the Oxford Book 
of English Verse)

Fifty-one days until the days start getting longer again.