p3 Crime Week concludes: The joys of real estate fraud

Some people prefer the infamous floating Volkswagen ad; for others, it's the legendary "If you don't buy this magazine, we'll kill this dog" cover.

But for me, I think it will always be "The Miracle Monopoly Cheating Kit," by Christopher Cerf, from Issue #38 (May, 1973) of National Lampoon -- the "Fraud" issue.

It was inspired. Because sometimes capitalism needs -- you know -- a little help. A little nudge forward. An edge.

Okay, fraud.

The kit contained deeds for fake properties, which could be mortgaged for quick cash or used as trading stock in real estate swaps (in this, the MMCK was a quarter-century ahead of the game).

It also had fake Chance and Community Chest cards creating ridiculous advantages for the cheater ("Go to Jail and Stay There for the Remainder of the Game") and calamity for opponents ("Railroad Strike Bankrupts All Your Railroads").

All of these hacks were printed on authentic paper and card stock, using the right fonts and ink  colors. The MMCK even included an extra double-sided page of rules (justifying the gambits above, plus many more, for the would-be Master of the Universe) that would slip, undetectable, into the rule booklet provided with the game -- because control over the regulatory environment is also necessary for capitalism to flourish.

It even included fake bills in $1000 and $5000 denominations, useful in leveraging big real estate deals or simply for the psych factor (e.g., at a critical moment, interrupt and ask the player on your left to break a $5000 bill).

The kit also offered tips on such important matters as how to palm cards and slip them onto the Chance and Community Chest piles, as well as distraction techniques to cover moving larger forgeries on and off the board.

My favorite cheat: The "Shoot the Moon" card, a Chance card (or maybe Community Chest -- alas, I can't find an image anywhere) that, when drawn, immediately turned the game into a race to see which player could go bankrupt first. It was a handy way to turn a bad situation to one's advantage, and once again a nice foretaste of 21st century change-the-rules capitalism.

(And, while this doesn't have anything specifically to do with either fraud or Crime Week, here's the pewter penguin I like to bring out as my token in Monopoly while the other players are still squabbling over the cannon and the race car. Heh.)

Crime week continues at p3: The Portland Pub Crawl of Infamy

Only a faint trace or two in the ether remains of Portland indie mag Oregonizm ("Culture on the Edge"), which is too bad.

From their May-June 2007 issue, p3 is proud to present "The Infamous Pubcrawl Checklist," the definitive bar-hopper's guide to the nexus of Portland demimonde and Portland bar scene, written by Ryan Arch and illustrated by Bobby Madness.

Interested in such essential bits from the dark side of Portlandia as:

• The bar where Tonya Harding went to dispose of the evidence?
• The bar with the jukebox where Kurt Cobain and Courtney Love first met?
• The bar where a couple of anarchists were arrested by the feds for plotting a presidential assassination?
• The bar where the I-5 killer stalked his prey?

Face it, Portlanders: Your bucket list just got a few items longer. (Click images to enlarge.)

(Thanks to Ryan.)

p3 Crime week continues: Scenes from a failed novel

The avatar

(Excerpt from a manuscript discovered in 1956 by a demolition crew worker in a time capsule placed in the cornerstone of the C. M. Jones Building in Burbank CA. The author of the manuscript is unknown. The demolition crew worker died, penniless, several years later under unexplained circumstances.)

She dumped the contents of her book bag onto the dining room table and poured herself a glass of wine. Where to start? The Hetrick book? No, too many fresh and nasty memories there. Besides, what she needed was a task she could finish in the next hour or so, a quick victory to regain her psychic momentum. Reading and taking notes on one of the articles she copied would be a more manageable task for the short time she had to work in. She pulled the two photocopies out and hefted them, one in each hand. The Durbin article on the skyrocketing price of modern art auctioned by Christie's and Sotheby's during the 1980's felt almost twice as heavy as Selinski's account of the forged Vermeer paintings of the 1930's. The Vermeer forgeries it would be. She slung the longer article back into her book bag.

Careful reading was, for Maggie, a pleasurable activity. It could be less pleasurable if the writer was not very good, and that was the case with many scholarly articles. But Selinski was a historian of some prose skill, and the topic was fascinating enough in its own right. She was soon deep in concentration, making occasional checks and notes in the margin with a pencil.

Han van Meegeren was a painter in Amsterdam at the turn of the century. His early career was successful, but he was soon overtaken by the rapid changes sweeping Dutch and European art of the early twentieth century. Once a darling of the art world, by the end of the 1920's van Meegeren was out of fashion, and had lost his support among dealers and critics, whom he came to regard with deep, if understandable, resentment.

Resentful and disappointed artists are not normally the objects of careful later study, but van Meegeren was different. At the end of World War II, van Meegeren was charged with wartime collaboration. Specifically, he was accused of helping arrange for German Air Marshal Hermann Goering to purchase The Adulteress, a recently discovered work by the seventeenth century Dutch master Jan Vermeer, for his private collection.

Van Meegeren's claim to an asterisk in the art history books was his defense against these charges. He floored his accusers by insisting that he had not, as the prosecution claimed, turned over a national treasure to the Nazis -- for he himself had painted The Adulteress and passed it off to Goering as a genuine Vermeer, recently discovered. In the course of the interrogation, it came to light that several of the "Vermeers" hanging in the best collections of Europe during the previous two decades, and a handful of works attributed to other artists as well, were also forgeries by the industrious van Meegeren. Van Meegeren even painted yet another "new Vermeer" while in police custody, just to make his point. At worst, he argued in his own defense, he was guilty of fraud, and perhaps even heroic fraud at that, considering the infamy of his victim in the case of The Adulteress.

Well, yes, retorted the prosecution, but for each of these "acts of heroism" he certainly had been well compensated, hadn't he -- since the forged Vermeers had all sold for handsome prices? Van Meegeren shrugged modestly; it had been his desire simply to create paintings that would appreciated again, and this he could no longer do under his own unfashionable name. He would happily have given the paintings away, he insisted, just to have them enjoyed. But to do this he was instead forced -- sadly, he allowed one to gather, and reluctantly -- to misrepresent his own works as Vermeers. And how could he possibly pass off these forgeries without arousing suspicion if he did not charge the buyers an authentic-sounding price?

Yet few historians rule out another motive: the sweet taste of revenge taken against the experts and dealers who had abandoned him years earlier, however cold the dish when it was finally served (van Meegeren died of a heart attack only a few weeks after he was eventually convicted and given the minimum sentence). True, not all critics had been taken in: Even at the time of their original "discovery" several experts had been nervous about the "new Vermeers," pointing out that they showed very un-Vermeer-like problems of perspective, color, and form. But these voices were soon in the silenced minority. Once he began producing forgeries, Van Meegeren even found he could fool a given expert more easily if he first studied that expert's published essays, and then used subjects or techniques that would appear to corroborate his prey's pet theories about Vermeer and seventeenth century art. Thus, in a perverse dance, the critics and the forger used one another to bolster the reputations of their own work.

Maggie looked up from the article and chuckled to herself. Han van Meegeren may have been convicted as a forger, but he was her kind of forger. Whatever else he accomplished, he had clearly provided a brisk tutorial in humility for the dealers, historians, and critics of his time. Maggie lifted her wine. "Here's to you, Han," she said softly, and drained the glass.

Crime Week continues at p3: Private eyes are watching you

More quotes from Raymond Chandler, the perfector if not the inventor of the hard-boiled American detective story:

I thought he was crazy as a pair of waltzing mice, but I liked him.

- Killer in the Rain

Steiner was wearing Chinese slippers with thick white felt soles. His legs were in black satin pajamas and the upper part of him in an embroidered Chinese coat. The front of it was mostly blood. His glass eye shone brightly and was the most lifelike thing about him.

- Killer in the Rain

Delaguerra shook his head, stood up off the stool. "Racket beer, sonny," he said sadly. "Tasteless as a roadhouse blonde."

- Spanish Blood

So far I had only made four mistakes. The first was mixing in at all, even for Kathy Horne's sake. The second was staying mixed after I found Peeler Mardo dead. The third was letting Rush Madder see I knew what he was talking about. The fourth, the whiskey, was the worst.

It tasted funny even on the way down.

- Goldfish

The gun looked about a .32, but had the extreme right-angled grip of a Mauser.

After a while she said, very softly, "Police, I suppose."

She had a nice voice. I still think of it at times.

-Try the Girl

Tony's soft dark eyes were open and they held the quiet brightness of a cat's eyes. They had that effect that the eyes of the new-dead have of almost, but not quite, looking at you.

- Guns at Cynano's

There was a desert wind blowing that night. It was one of the hot dry Santa Ana winds that come down through the mountain passes and curl your hair and make your nerves jump and your skin itch. On nights like that every booze party ends in a fight. Meek little wives feel the edge of the carving knife and study their husbands' throats. Anything can happen. You can even get a full glass of beer at a cocktail lounge.

- Red Wind

Crime week at p3: Crime scene tape in Forest Park

(Updated below.)

It involves my pal and fellow DL'er Roy, something of a local history buff, on what will almost certainly turn out to have been the last sunny day in Portland in 2010.

Roy had read The Peyton-Allan Files, by local journalist/writer Phil Stanford, chronicling a more-or-less unsolved Portland double-murder in late November, 1960. (The publication of the book was timed to the 50th anniversary of the killings -- that's show biz.)

Roy wanted to share his fascination with the story and its local details with someone. His patient wife, who's been down this road before, had already passed on the opportunity to view the Eisenhower-era crime scene, and was none too pleased with our Roy when he got her out there on the pretext of an end-of-autumn hike in the wooded hills west of downtown and she finally realized exactly where she was. (Not sure if she knew this at the time, but Roy already studied 1960 Portland telephone directories and talked to Stanford himself to verify the exact location.)

The precise chronology and cast of characters in Stanford's book can be a little hard to track at times (a heartbreaking truth when good editors are going begging for work around here), but the overall arc is clear as a buttonhook in the well water: Two teenagers, parked on a secluded road one night, were murdered -- not at the same time, not in the same place, and not remotely by the same method -- and a determined cop and an ambitious D.A. were eager enough to close the book that they arrested and tried three men, convicting two of them, with a case that depended more on what you were willing to ignore than on what you noticed. And the evidence of the two's innocence was sufficiently clear, even at the time, that both were quietly paroled in an astonishingly short time given the notoriety of the crime. Stanford's contribution is a brace of tortured metaphors and a lot of recent evidence strongly suggesting the real killer had briefly been in police hands on a tangential matter and slipped custody -- but didn't give up his homicidal ways, or even his modus operandi, for years. And he's still alive.

Roy loaned me the book and actually wanted to go find the scene right then, but I asked for time to read the book before we took the tour. (The book is a fast read, but not that fast.) So we set the date for the following weekend.

So, picture this "Twin Peaks" moment: A sunny Sunday morning in November, riding along in the winding roads off Cornell -- some of them little more than barely-paved century-old logging roads -- Roy driving, me shotgun, armed with Stanford's book and Java Nation coffee (Earl Grey tea for me). The area is built up a little more in the last half-century, but not very much. It couldn't have looked that much different.

Roy parked his car and we walked back to what he is pretty certain must have been the locus in quo, within no more than a few feet one way or the other. The car had been pointing back downhill, said Roy. The uphill bank that would have partly blocked access to the passenger door was a mixture of ferns and brown, fallen leaves. It dropped down to the pavement edge with no shoulder to speak of. The downhill bank had a trail head (marked now, but not then) and descended steeply into a wooded ravine where The Lost Eyeglasses were discovered -- evidence eventually leading to the closing of the case but almost certainly, as Stanford argues convincingly, not the solving of the mystery.

Roy was delighted to poke around with me, but before long we had to go (he had to do some Christmas shopping with his wife. Not sure if she knew where he was, although as long as she didn't have to be there herself she was probably willing to look the other way.)

On the way back to town, Roy and I talked about the weather and the dearth of road shoulders for cyclists to travel safely in that beautiful area.

But in the back of my head I kept thinking about those teenagers, and the old logging road into the forest, and a cast of characters, some terribly ordinary, some downright bizarre -- and always seeming to hear this echoing reverb bass guitar playing on the soundtrack.

Update April 11, 2011: Edward Edwards, the unlikely-named suspect Stanford convincingly pegs for the Peyton-Allan murders, died of natural causes in an Ohio prison last week, where he was on death row after being convicted of five murders in Ohio and Wisconsin.

Sunday morning toons: Like Boxing Day, but without the leftovers

(Updated below.)

Today's selections have been frantically picked out at the last possible minute from the week's political cartoon pages at Slate, Time, About.com, Mario Piperni, and Daryl Cagle's cartoon page, then hastily wrapped in a late-night, egg nog-fuelled frenzy of paper-cuts and recriminations and shoved under the tree. Season greetings.


p3 Picks of the Week: Mike Luckovich, Tom Toles, Jim Moran, Glen McCoy, Jim Sherffius, and Monte Wolverton.

p3 Best of Show: Steve Benson.

p3 Award for Best Adaptation from Another Medium (tie); Pat Bagley and Bob Gorrell.

p3 Certificate of Harmonic Toon Converence: David Fitzsimmons and Mike Keefe.

p3 World Toon Review: Cam Cardow (Canada),Christo Komarnitski (Bulgaria), and Ingrid Rice (Canada).


Courtesy of Ann Telnaes: America's favorite former failed governor reminds us that nothing will blind you to irony like a studio spotlight.


Mark Fiore's Dogboy and Mr. Dan wonder if Christmas -- perhaps! -- doesn't come from a store.


A special p3 shout-out goes to Non Sequitur for perfectly capturing the wish I wish for Christmas every year.


Don't miss the winners of the 2010 Animate William Shatner contest (approved by Shatner himself, naturally)!


Yes, as a matter of fact, there was a "Hellboy" Christmas card from Dark Horse Comics, drawn by "Hellboy" artist Mike Mignola circa 1998-1999, and here it is.


Here's Part 1 of Tom Tomorrow's annual The Year in Crazy. Undermining America through graphic design!


Update: And here's Barry Blitt's illustration for this week's Frank Rich NYTimes column on the death of those economic-equality dreams from the late 1950s.


Keith Knight discovers the crossover point between Holiday Cheer and Alternative Fuels!


Tom the Dancing Bug presents Children-Acting-Like-Adults Funnies, and other treats from Super-Fun-Pax Comix. (And it ain't pretty!)


Wallopin' Web-snappers! The new Spider-Man Broadway musical (music by Bono and the Edge -- why should Sir Elton be the only one to cash in?) is hanging by a thread, and Taiwan's Next Media Animation brings you the story. (Hard to believe -- after all, didn't this 1975 masterpiece pack in the audiences?) Here's more from Comic Riffs' Michael Cavna about the seemingly-doomed show.


Red Meat says, the best Christmas gifts are the ones you make yourself!


And as long as Spider-Man is taking his lumps this week, The Comic Curmudgeon has something to say about Aunt Mae's latest romance -- with the Mole Man! (This is an old, old Marvel wheeze; I remember once when Aunt Mae's wedding with Doctor Octopus [!] was interrupted by a nuclear detonation on the island where his secret laboratory was located -- but Peter still insisted that telling her he was Spidey would have been too much of a strain on her weak heart.)


Portland homeboy Jack Ohman muses on the awkwardness of hearing from relatives at the holidays.


It's "Boxing Day" -- get it? Ahem. Anyway, Olive Oyl gets her Adrian-like scene at the end of "Let's You and Him Fight," directed by Dave Fleischer in 1934. Uncredited voice work: William Costello as Popeye, William Pennell as Bluto, and Bonnie Poe as Olive. Ya ain't never seen none better!

(Note to Facebook friends: For reasons of its own, when FB Notes reposts a blog post it disables any video embeds. If you're reading this via FB, you'll need to click View Original Post, below, to see the video.)


Bonus animation: Just because I think it's funny. (Hat-tip to James the Elder.)

p3 Bonus Toon: Even with the Ducks playing for the championship, a lot of Oregonians didn't get the one thing under their tree they were hoping for, and Jesse Springer shares their disappointment.

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

Saturday morning tunes: Hooh! Hah!

Watching the Ukulele Orchestra of Great Britain cover -- indeed, possess -- its pretty unlikely repertoire of music is a lot like watching Schroeder play Beethoven: How does he get all those notes when the black keys are only painted on?

A lot of UOGB's selections are played for droll humor (not to say for laughs), but this one -- from Ennio Morricone's classic film score -- makes it to the last bar without so much as a musical punchline in sight.

(Well, almost.)

Wait for it . . . wait for it . . . just 60 more seconds

The winter solstice hits at exactly 2.38pm today, Pacific time.

We get one extra second of daylight today -- and, trust me, I'll be able to tell you exactly which one it is, because I've been counting every second of daylight for weeks now.

It starts slow, only a few seconds more each day right now, but by the third week in March we'll be gaining a little over 3 extra minutes of sunlight a day. Then the rate of increase will slowly back off again (those of you who took solid geometry can explain why to everyone else) at about the same rate until by the middle of next June we'll only be gaining a second or two of sunlight a day.

Then it'll balance on the knife's edge for a moment, and then . . .

But no -- that part's too awful to contemplate right now. Just enjoy that extra second today.

How far p3 has traveled in 5 years

From the p3 archives, December 18, 2005.

Context is everything.

Sunday morning toons: What year is it again?

The US is having about the same success in Afghanistan that Alexander the Great had two thousand years ago; the Department of Justice wants to get medieval on Wikileaks' ass; the GOP's House Speaker-elect has taken to weeping like a 19th century romance heroine; Time Magazine celebrates the arrival of 2007 with its choice for Person of the Year 2010; and Congress stuns America by entering the 21st century with the DADT repeal.

It's all so confusing.

But today we're going to sort it all out, beginning with a tasty selection from the week's political cartoon pages at Slate, Time, About.com, and MSNBC:

p3 Picks of the Week: Mike Luckovich, Pat Bagley, Tom Toles, Jeff Parker, John Cole, Mike Keefe, and Monte Wolverton.

p3 Best of Show: Walt Handlesman.

p3 Legion of Merit (with clusters): Jeff Danziger.

p3 Award for Best Adaptation from Another Medium (shared): Cam Cardow, John Darkow, Stuart Carlson, Dan Wasserman (a two-fer!).

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


Ann Telnaes reminds us that, when it comes to Afghanistan, everything old is new again.


David Allen Coe famously claimed that the perfect country and western song had to mention Momma, or trains, or trucks, or prison, or gettin' drunk -- but Mark Fiore reminds us there one other thing you have to have: A grown man crying.


Last week Dilbert taught an ugly truth.


Tom Tomorrow says that sometimes words mean pretty much what they seem to mean -- unless of course it's a George Soros plot!


The K Chronicles exposes the shocking secret of LA playgrounds!


Tom the Dancing Bug watches them welcome the new fish to Cell Block D (in another universe!)..


More boring than the average bear: Here's an ugly statistic via Comic Riffs, albeit a statistic that nevertheless gives me a certain tingle of smug satisfaction:

More people have viewed a darkly parodic online video of Yogi Bear this week than have seen the new feature film, based on Friday's box office.
Warner Bros.'s CGI/live-action hybrid "Yogi Bear" grossed $4.6-million domestically Friday, according to estimates from boxofficemojo.com.

"Boo Boo Kills Yogi" -- the violent two-minute-plus spoof of a scene from "The Assassination of Jesse James by the Coward Robert Ford" -- had amassed more than 2.6-million views as of Saturday. Maryland native Edmund Earle, a New York-based animator, posted on the video on YouTube midday Monday.

You can see "Boo Boo Kills Yogi" here -- if you think you're tough enough.


Taiwan's Next Media Animation takes on the retirement of Larry King.


It's a Cartoon-Riffs twofer! Michael Cavna reviews the definitive stocking-stuffer for that toonophile on your list: The New Yorker: Cartoons of the Year.


When Bill O'Reilly complains about the "war on Christmas," this is exactly what he's worrying about! -- via Red Meat.


Talk about devotion to duty: Friday, the Comic Curmudgeon spends more energy psyching out a baffling "Hägar the Horrible" punchline than the strip's writers probably spent writing it. I feel his pain; I could have simply typed "Hagar" in the previous sentence, but I went the extra mile to find the special "ä" character. When it comes to our readers, no effort is too great.


Here's Barry Blitt's illustration to accompany this week's Frank Rich NYTimes column: "The Bipartisanship Racket."


Portland homeboy Jack Ohman asks, Who's crying the blues?


What year is it again? In "Wacky Wabbit," directed by Robert Clampett in 1942, Elmer Fudd makes his entrance singing the Gold Rush-era song "Oh Susanna," but the song's chorus ends, "V for Victory!" -- a nod to the cartoon's release during WWII. Go figure.

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p3 Bonus Toon: Is it an omen? This week Jesse Springer identifies the only phenomenon as rare in Oregon as a shot at the national championship.

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

Screening Liberally tomorrow night: "Every War Has Two Losers"

Join the Washington County Peace Vigil and PDX Left Side/Screening Liberally tomorrow night (Sunday 12/19) at 7pm for a holiday film event to honor Peace on Earth.

Tomorrow night we'll be screening Every War Has Two Losers, a poet’s meditation on peace based on the journals of William Stafford. Stafford was an American poet and pacifist who moved to Oregon and taught at Lewis and Clark. He was named Poet Laureate of Oregon in 1975.

(Note to Facebook friends: For reasons of its own, when FB Notes reprints a blog post it disables video embeds. If you're reading this via FB, you'll need to click View Original Post, above, or go to http://everywar.com/, to see the video trailer.)

Join us tomorrow night, December 19th, at 7:00 pm at Ringo’s Bar & Grill, at 12300 SW Broadway St (across from the Beaverton Bakery). Admission is free.

A Saturday morning toons twofer: Beefheart and Cave

Yesterday we lost Don Van Vliet, better known (when known at all these days, alas) as Captain Beefheart. High school friend and later musical associate of Frank Zappa, inventor of a brand of blues/rock/avant-garde sixties music "too weird for the hippies," and influence on Nick Cave, Tom Waits, Franz Ferdinand, Oasis, Red Hot Chilli Peppers and The White Stripes and many others:

Here's the Oregon connection (citations in the original):

Cartoonist and writer Matt Groening tells of listening to Trout Mask Replica at the age of 15 and thinking "that it was the worst thing I'd ever heard. I said to myself, they're not even trying! It was just a sloppy cacophony. Then I listened to it a couple more times, because I couldn't believe Frank Zappa could do this to me - and because a double album cost a lot of money. About the third time, I realised they were doing it on purpose; they meant it to sound exactly this way. About the sixth or seventh time, it clicked in, and I thought it was the greatest album I'd ever heard." Groening first saw Beefheart and the Magic Band perform in the front row at the Arlene Schnitzer Concert Hall in the early 1970s. He later declared Trout Mask Replica to be the greatest album ever made. He considered the appeal of the Magic Band as outcasts who were even "too weird for the hippies". Groening served as the curator of the All Tomorrow's Parties festival that reunited the post-Beefheart Magic Band.

And while we're on the subject of influences, here's the song I was originally going to feature today: of all things, the Nick Cave song from the soundtrack of the latest Harry Potter movie:

Quote of the day: Always/never consequences

From Steve at No More Mister Nice Blog:

Anti-deal Democrats have thrown in the towel. Well, there were consequences for Democrats in not getting the deal done -- there always are. And there were probably not going to be any consequences for Republicans either way -- there never are.

Marionette

"Marionette," last week's episode of "Fringe," is one of the most well-plotted and magnificently disturbing stories I've seen since "The X-Files" was in its prime.

It's got everything: Enthusiastic but tasteful gore; a perfectly-paced unwinding of the mystery; allusions to classic horror, some of them blunt, some extremely sly; seriously unresolved sexual tension; and, above all, a couple of rich and creepy master metaphors -- there's a surprisingly long set-piece scene that brings the title home in the most visceral way (un)imaginable.

Even when the villain, fleeing his pursuers at the end, runs like the British Upper-Class Twit of the Year, it's funny, but it also somehow makes things just a little more horrible.

Must-see.

Sunday morning toons: Apparently there's no subtitle this week

This week: Obama fires up his base and Wikileaks gets talked about a lot in the US (but Julian Assange gets talked about a lot more in other countries).

All this and more, scientifically selected from the week's political cartoon pages at Slate, Time, About.com, and MSNBC:

p3 Picks of the Week: Mike Luckovich,Nate Beeler, Tom Toles, Clay Bennett, Nick Anderson, Ben Sargent, Jim Morin, and Monte Wolverton.

p3 Best of Show: David Fitzsimmons.

p3 "2 plus 2" Certificate: Adam Zyglis.

p3 World Toon Review: Cam Cardow (Canada), Patrick Chappatte (Switzerland), Frederick Deligne (France), and Ingrid Rice (Canada).


Ann Telnaes reminds us: It's not safe to run (off at the mouth) with scissors. (Just because, through some accident or miracle, Joe's on the right side of DADT, don't kid yourself. He still is who he is.)


Mark Fiore brings us into the Dojo of Political Self-Defense. Tax-on! Tax-off!


Good news from Tom the Dancing Bug: our long national nightmare is almost over (h/t to Stephen P.)


Tom Tomorrow presents The Further Adventures of Middle-Man!


Uhm, sir -- there are demonstrators in front of the building. They say they're from The K Chronicles.


Four new graphic novels for your holiday shopping/reading list: Although the NYTimes Books section still calls 'em "Comics."


Well, it's a good question! What do they do when super-heroes need health care?


Alternate-Universe Archie: Slate.com calls it a truly bizarre artifact: a teen magazine with the soul of a Russian novel. How can you resist a peek?


Don't tell me you thought it was something you just picked up a pencil and did? Nope. New York Magazine teaches you how to doodle.


He created movie posters from "Casablanca" to "Alien:" And now there's a collection of the work of artist artist Bill Gold. The slide-show has some amazing images.


Via Comic Riffs After 70 years covering her beat, Brenda Starr, Reporter is accepting the newspaper buy-out.


At Red Meat, Bug-eyed Earl learns a valuable lesson.


Here's Barry Blitt's illustration for this week's Frank Rich NYTimes column on the lightning-fast cave-in by the Smithsonian -- the freaking Smithsonian! -- to the über-homophobes of the Catholic League.


Portland homeboy Jack Ohman celebrates the report of the Deficit Commission (aka the Catfood Commission).


It's not "Sarah Palin's Alaska:" It's "Klondike Casanova," the 1946 Popeye short directed by Izzy Sparber. Olive Oyl's "I Don't Want to Walk Without You," isn't exactly Madelyn Kahn's "I'm Tired," but it's still pretty good. And am I the only one who thinks the maraschino cherry scene might have been about more than just maraschino cherries? (The bears' song is borrowed from a well-known Pepsi-Cola jingle of the the time.)

Reminder: You can see clips of most of this year's Oscar-nominated animations at Comic Riffs.


p3 Bonus Toon: Jesse Springer promises: "I've held off the whole season-- here it is, my Ducks are great cartoon. Guarantee another one in January if they win."

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

Saturday morning tunes: On a cold December evening

This letter reminded me of this:

Chocolate bunnies and white horses: I know you know

"Psych" can go over the top, but I've always had fun with -- admired, even -- their quirky tradition of occasionally re-imagining their opening titles with music, shots, and even font to match that week's episode (the "Bollywood" version was priceless). In an age when TV theme songs have mostly been reduced to nothing more than a three-second clip from Massive Attack or They Might Be Giants, and opening credits are absorbed into Act I at the bottom of the screen, this deserves recognition.

Would I be willing to watch the opening credits of "The Rockford Files" or "Hawaii Five-O" again rather than an extra 60 seconds of "House MD" or "Malcolm in the Middle?" Yeah, probably.

I confess: I was a pretty serious "Twin Peaks" fan back in the day. That being said, the recent TP/Psych parody/pastiche episode wasn't all that much fun for me, at least not in proportion to the work they clearly and honestly put into all the intertextual references, including casting. They pushed 'way too hard.

Still, when it opens on a chocolate bunny and the credits end with a white horse, you know someone's worn their 20-year-old VHS bootlegs to a frazzle. And good lord -- you forgive almost anything when they recruit Julee Cruise (the chanteuse from the TP Road House) for the breathy Angelo Badalamenti-esque bass-reverb reworking of the "Psych" theme song in "Twin Peaks style.

Another Thomas Jefferson-derived reason this blog might have been called "p3"

"The most effectual means of preventing the perversion of power into tyranny are to illuminate, as far as practicable, the minds of the people at large, and more especially to give them knowledge of those facts which history exhibits, that possessed thereby of the experience of other ages and countries, they may be enabled to know ambition under all its shapes, and prompt to exert their natural powers to defeat its purposes."

Thomas Jefferson: Diffusion

of Knowledge Bill, 1779

[via Digby.]

p3 turns 6: Internet stunned

"Seriously -- he's still doing that?"

Scenes from a failed novel: The heavy

Excerpt from a manuscript discovered in an abandoned cellar in a west coast city. Neighbors insist that the cellar has been boarded up since the early 1990s.

Edmond Volker's toupee was widely, if tacitly, regarded as the most pitiful example of a hairpiece in all of the Pacific Northwest Conference. If someone had torn the upholstery out of an old Chevy pick-up and fastened it to the man's head, in the dark, with loops of duct tape, the effect could not have been much worse. Yet, like Cyrano's nose, it was an extraordinarily dangerous feature even to notice, let alone to comment upon.

New grad students in his seminars were always easy to spot: Unpracticed but already warned by their peers, they diligently tried to focus their gaze anywhere but there. The result was a look of watery-eyed desperation, of glances darting here and there but always slinking home to that awful rug.

A year or two before Maggie had entered the program, a promising grad student named Calvin Bender had been washed out during his second semester. The first day of Volker's class, Bender had had the mortally bad luck to be seated directly across from him at the seminar table.

Witnesses later reported that, as the minutes ticked by, Bender slowly grew red-faced, the cords in his neck tightened, a thin sheen of sweat appeared on his face, until finally his whole frame began to shudder almost imperceptibly with the terrible strain of ignoring it. After about twenty minutes, his self-control abruptly cracked, if only for a split-second, and from that tiny chink emerged a sputtering giggle that in another second would have burst into a full-blown guffaw. Bender made an inspired but unsuccessful attempt to disguise the outburst as a sneeze. The result was a strangled paroxysm that sprayed his notebook with spit and snot and sent him tottering and reeling out of the room.

Volker had been answering a question from another student, and Bender's fit had caught him amid-sentence like a torpedo. He stared, white-faced but immobile, until the echo of Bender's footsteps had died away in the hallway. Then, with only the slightest twitch below one eye, he resumed precisely where he had left off.

It was over in an instant. Volker made no mention of the incident, then or ever. Bender had recently moved to the region from Arizona, and so the official story was that it had been "a reaction to the high local concentration of allergens." A few months later, of course, his unceremonious departure was explained by another official story: "Mr. Bender, despite his early signs of promise, just hadn't quite measured up to the program's standards after all." But everyone knew what had happened; everyone understood. Calvin Bender had snickered at the dean's hairpiece, and he had paid the price.

Sunday morning toons: I just wanted you to know, we're all counting on you.

Here's what we've got this week:

• The return of War Against the Made-up War on Christmas
• Fifty-seven variations on the same basic Wikileaks joke
• John McCain holding DADT hostage
• The Catfood Commission holding the future of Social Security hostage to the deficit, toward which Social Security does not contribute as a matter of law.
• Congressional Republicans holding the President hostage
• North Korea holding world peace (such as it is) hostage

All this, plus the return of Wile E. Coyote.

Using the same system that determines college football rankings, today's selections have been scientifically selected from the week's political cartoon pages at Slate, Time, About.com, and MSNBC.com:

p3 Picks of the Week: Mike Luckovich, John Trevor, John Cole, Randy Bish,
Tom Toles, Joel Pett, Steve Sack, Greg Varvel, Chuck Asay, and Monte Wolverton.

p3 Best of Show: Pat Bagley.

p3 Award for Best Adaptation from Another Medium: Joe Heller.

And a special p3 Certificate for Harmonic Toon Convergence is surely due to these artists.

p3 World Toon Review: Petar Pismestrovic (Austria),Cam Cardow (Canada), Ingrid Rice (Canada), Tjeerd Royaards (Netherlands), and Patrick Chappatte (Switzerland).


Ann Telnaes examines The Incredible Shrinking John McCain.


Mark Fiore is on a roll this week. Follow the bouncing ball!


Taiwan's Next Media Animation is back, and this time it's war -- with Conan O'Brian!


Fringe, the FOX TV scifi series that features war between multiple Earths and a cow named Gene, has launched a graphic novel series. Meanwhile, any show that has two Olivia Dunhams, one of whom is evil and has red hair, has got to get my vote. Just sayin'.


Artist James McMullan discusses (with images) the process of conceiving and creating the theatre poster for "Ten Unknowns," the 2001 play starring Donald Southerland. It's fascinating.


Bipartisanship: it's all so simple when Tom Tomorrow explains it.


Keith Knight has this season's hot holiday item.


At Red Meat, Ted Johnson has the holiday season figured out. Tell me the same idea hasn't occurred to you.


Here's Barry Blitt's illustration for this week's Frank Rich NYTimes column on the president taken hostage by the GOP. (And I keep forgetting to mention BB's web site.)


The Comic Curmudgeon finds calf-massage fetishism making not one but two appearances in the comics page this week. (Seriously -- any place else on your Sunday morning reading have link text like that?)


Portland homeboy Jack Ohman notes the presence of flying elbows.


Coyote Falls, the newly released 3-D Wile E. Coyote short directed by Matthew O'Callaghan, is heavy on the 3-D lunges toward the viewer, but short on the characterization that made some of the carefully-paced (2-D) originals so much fun. This one trades in the meticulous Jack-Benny-ish sense of timing of Chuck Jones's stories for the duck-and-dive freneticism of a chase scene "The Bourne Identity." I'm on record as having my doubts about the wisdom of this from the beginning, but it's good to have Wile E. back, and some of the gags are funny.  I dunno, maybe this is more of "everything in pop culture that happened after I was about 16 was crap," which everyone experiences if they live long enough. See what you think.

"Coyote Falls" is one of 10 animation shorts nominated for an Academy Award: you can see 9 of them at Comic Riffs.


p3 Bonus Toon: As Jesse Springer notes, there are "higher powers," and then there are higher powers.

(And refresh my memory: Was there much talk about Portland reversing policy and joining the Joint Terrorism Task Force when this local terrorist attack -- a successful attack, mind you -- occurred?)


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

Saturday morning tunes: The Million Dollar Quartet

That would be the 1956 session -- little more than a legend for years, until the tape saw the light of day a generation later -- at Sun Records with Carl Perkins, Jerry Lee Lewis, Johnny Cash, and last-minute arrival Elvis Presley, from which this gospel standard eventually emerged:

From History.com:

The studio at 760 Union was run by Sam Phillips, the legendary producer whose Sun Records had launched Elvis Presley on his path toward stardom two years earlier with the release of his first single, "It's Alright Mama" (1954). Phillips' decision to sell Presley's contract to RCA Victor in 1955 for only $35,000 is easy to question in retrospect, but it provided Sun Records with the operating capital it needed in order to record and promote the parade of future stars who had descended on Memphis hoping to follow in Elvis' footsteps.

Among those stars was Carl Perkins, the rockabilly legend who was in the studio on December 4, 1956, to record a follow-up to his smash hit from earlier that year: "Blue Suede Shoes." Hanging out in the booth was Perkins' good friend Johnny Cash, already a star in his own right after his breakthrough hits, "Folsom Prison Blues" (1955) and "I Walk The Line" (1956). And playing piano for a $15 session fee was the brash, wild, but not-yet-famous Jerry Lee Lewis, whose career-making Sun single "Whole Lotta Shakin' Goin' On" was set for release just a few weeks later. Four songs into Perkins' session, all work came to an end with the arrival of an unexpected drop-in guest: Elvis Presley himself.

While recording engineer Jack Clement ran a tape that would not be discovered for more than 20 years, Sam Phillips—ever the promoter—had the presence of mind to summon a photographer from the local paper to capture images of Elvis Presley, Johnny Cash, Jerry Lee Lewis and Carl Perkins gathered around a piano singing the kind of music they'd all grown up on: gospel. The caption under the photo that ran in the next day's Memphis Press-Scimitar was "Million Dollar Quartet." The label quickly caught on among rock-and-roll fans who would not actually get the chance to hear the recording made on this day in 1956 until 1981, when the first portions of the lost tapes were discovered and released.

Abbreviated Living Liberally calendar for December

Holiday schedules are going to bump up against the standard meeting schedules for Oregon and SW Washington chapters this month.

So to make sure we know who's meeting when this month, let's just go right to the source. Here are the web pages for the DL chapters in Oregon and SW Washington:

Vancouver WA

Portland Left Side (aka Beaverton OR)

St. Helens OR

Portland OR

Salem OR

And the fledgling Portland West Side Screening Liberally chapter is going to take December off -- we'll see you in January. Remember to drop me any suggestions for films. Meanwhile, what could be more apropos for the season than this?

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.