(Acknowledgement to W. C. Sellars and R. J. Yeatman, Richard Minadeo, Robert Royal, and a sufficiently long list of authors over the years that we feel no particular sense of guilt for re-appropriating their gimmick for the title here.)
I'm predicting that in ten years -- tops -- September 11th will be just another day when you can get a deal on home appliances.
Seriously. That's how comfortable we've gotten with it.
It only took eleven years for the Republican Party to go from (a) insisting that insufficient willingness to roll over for their neo-con/national-security agenda was proof that their enemies were insufficiently respectful of the memory of that tragic day to (b) fielding a presidential nominee who sees it as a nothing more than this week's excuse to bait the incumbent president.
I'm telling you it's just a matter of time until, if you didn't get the deal you wanted on an HD TV over Labor Day weekend, you won't have to wait until Black Friday anymore.
Today's toons were chosen from the week's pages at GoComics, McClatchyDC.com, Slate, Time, About.com, Daryl Cagle, and elsewhere:
p3 Picks of the Week: Mike Luckovich, Ted Rall, Gary Varvel, Pat Oliphant, Chad Lowe, R. J. Matson, and Monte Wolverton.
p3 Best of Show: Lee Judge.
p3 Certificate of Harmonic Toon Convergence: Jim Morin and Kevin Siers.
p3 Legion of Extreme Merit: Tom Toles.
p3 World Toon Review: Heng (Singapore), Roar Hagen (Norway), and Cam Cardow (Canada).
Ann Telnaes reminds us: Strictly speaking, it's not called a “stumble.”
Mark Fiore celebrates the government jobs program of the future -- be sure to stay for the final tag line.
Taiwan's Next Media Animation gives next year's remake of “Carrie” the full NMA treatment.
Okay, three things: First, Facebook was foolish to cancel The New Yorker's FB account over a fairly funny Mick Stevens cartoon set in the Garden of Eden, putatively on the grounds that Eve's nipples were visible. Second, Stevens was exactly right about this:
“When something is as ridiculous as the misguided Facebook guidelines, the most effective remedy is ridicule,” Mankoff tells Comic Riffs. “Huge organizations such as Facebook are deaf to argumentation but derisive laughter makes their ears perk up.”And third, now that “nipplegate” has passed from being a one-off reference to Janet Jackson's 2004 Superbowl flub to another crutch for lazy commentators, can we all agree that, after almost 40 years, the “-gate” gimmick has been done to something beyond death and should never be used again? Next time a tempest like hand-drawn nipples brews up in a teacup like Facebook, let's forthrightly call it what it is: A foofaraw.
Oh, and hey Facebook: Here's Eugène Delacroix's “Liberty Leading the People, 28 July 1830.” Wanna do something about it? I didn't think so.
I've tried since Wednesday afternoon to come up with a suitably knowledgeable-yet-ironic lead-in to this bit, but I've come up blank. So here: The time Superman disarmed a bomb by disco dancing. Deal with it.
Cartoon Riffs puts the tough question to some of America's top political cartoonists: Regardless of your personal political preferences, would Romney's election or Obama's re-election make your job easier for the next four years? The answers will utterly astonish you!
In the fifties (that would be the 1950s), America's moral scolds devoted a lot of their energy to worrying that “sick humor” (like MAD Magazine,, the musical satire and parodies of Tom Lehrer, and so on) would rot the brains of America's youth. Well, we survived. And the moral scolds lost. Heh.
p3 regulars Kevin Kallaugher and Patrick Chappatte discuss the freedom to be insulting.
Tom Tomorrow pays tribute to the tough questions, the expert insights, and the real reasons that make for hard-hitting convention coverage.
Keith Knight presents a special War-Zone edition of Life's Little Victories. Yes!
Tom the Dancing Bug reviews some of the reasons no one ever called the current GOP nominee a jolly old elf.
Red Meat's Ted Johnson and his son discuss the reason some people forsake science for the comforts of superstition.
Wild turkey surprise! “Bedeviled Rabbit,” directed in 1957 by Robert McKimson (who created the Tasmanian Devil character and also had charge of several Foghorn Leghorn and Porky Pig shorts from the same general time frame), is one of my favorite TD toons. You can notice that the stylized, abstract forest backgrounds by background artist Richard H. Thomas showed some of the experimentation that WB artists were engaging in to get around the lower production budgets that started in the early 1950s. Both the rolling-pin gag and the Wild Turkey Surprise gag were shortened sometimes for TV distribution, but the general level of violence was never changed much. Go figure. And if the complete diet of the Tasmanian Devil went by too quickly for you to catch, go here.
If your browser won't display the embedded version, click here.
The p3 Big Oregon Toon Block:
Jack Ohman observes that there are lies, damned lies -- and one more thing.
Matt Bors gazes in awe at the many powers of Paul Ryan.
Jesse Springer celebrates freedom of expression as the basis of healthy exchange of ideas between cultures and nations:
Test your toon-captioning powers at The New Yorker's weekly caption-the-cartoon contest. (Rules here.)
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