Some jokes about food, drink, and doo-doo water. A tenuous link to the news can be made with this one because of the Oklahoma state senator who wants to ban human fetuses in food, which kinda-sorta applies to my stem-cell Taco Bell gag, but I drew this before that happened. I just wanted to make a juvenile damaged sphincter joke, but some jagoff made it timely.
But yeah, don’t eat fetuses.
Since SOPA and PIPA were shelved following last Wednesday’s blackouts, this comic is kind of late to the discussion, but the bills’ backers will attempt to trot out a revised version sooner rather than later. I also wanted to draw Chris Dodd’s man-boobs. You’ll notice that since this was for the New York Times, I avoided coloring his nipples and going crazy with veins and hair. Because I am RESPONSIBLE.
Anyone who thinks it’s just Republicans who cravenly do their donors’ bidding should have been enlightened by who continued to support these bills following the widespread online opposition. Sure, supporting Hollywood’s mad grab for extending copyright privileges isn’t as bad destroying the economy, environment, and everything else, but it’s still shitty.
As for reducing (you can never stop it) online piracy, the solution’s simple: Price your shit fairly, and make it easy to use. I pay $8 a month to both Hulu and Netflix instead of a pricey cable package, and that keeps me pretty much up-to-date with pop culture. As for sports, that’s why bars were invented. Paying more than $10 a month for any content-related thing is obscene. It generally costs $30-$50 to get internet access, so if you think your one thing is worth more than a third of the Internet, you have seriously overvalued your product. And yes, that also applies to a certain newspaper with a soft paywall.
I’m still confident cartooning under the assumption that Romney’s getting the nomination, despite this week’s crazy fluctuations in South Carolina polls. He’s the only one with the money and establishment backing to move onto the bigger primary states. And yes, Ron Paul will continue to come in second, but he is running for the Republican nomination. They love wars n’ stuff. No way they’re nominating an isolationist.
Mitt Romney’s rich. Insanely rich. Besides being out of touch, it also means he has always gotten his way. Notice how whenever he’s challenged, either in a debate, town hall meeting, or news interview, he gets really snippy. If his poll numbers get desperate, we might see that snippiness escalate into a rich person’s version of a punch: the limp-wristed tossing of silver dollars at his target, complete with tennis-style grunting.
Check out Jen’s comic about Romney’s strapped-on-shittin’-setter. She managed to make a point about it, whereas I just referenced it, for giggles.
Funyuns are gross. My emergency vending machine snack of choice is peanut butter and cheese crackers, because I’m not a $250 million douche who likes fake onions.
The Consumer Electronics Show was last week, and in between fluff pieces about ultralight laptops, cars connected to the cloud for no discernible reason, and dozens of other gizmos, a few stories about worker conditions at Foxconn trickled through. If you haven’t heard it already, the This American Life episode about it is probably the best overview, although the focus on Apple glosses over the fact that pretty much every electronics company uses parts made by the same company.
The bad press might have been enough to spur Apple to do more, since they announced they’ll be more open about their supply chain over the weekend. It’s obviously not a cure-all, but at least people are starting to become aware what the invisible hand of the free market has been up to in China.
The asshole in the rotary phone panel is Robert Rector, who wrote this charming bit of stupid last year. In addition to being an asshole, he has the worst mustache in the world.
UPDATE: I merely gave it a fleeting mention in the comic, but The Daily Show’s Foxconn segment on Monday was perfect.
During my mini-vacation, I caught up with season three of Sons of Anarchy, a dumb show I watch on Netflix when I feel like gettin’ stupid. I was a couple episodes in, when suddenly Stephen King appeared, doing a pretty shitty impression of Harvey Keitel in Pulp Fiction, which was directed by another guy who likes to act even though he’s perfectly good at the thing he’s famous for doing.
Congress’s record unpopularity is old news, but the recent jackassery surrounding the payroll-tax holiday and Obama’s recess appointments (and yes it’s a recess if nothing can actually be voted on) have taken it to new and disgusting levels.
I’m not exactly taking the centrist “everyone’s to blame equally” position, but the Democrats haven’t been helping themselves either. By twisting the parliamentary rules to require a filibuster-proof super-majority to do even the most basic governmental tasks, they’ve turned the Capitol into nothing more than a political theater, performing a play only Moe Phelps would approve of.
We’re not even a full week into the new year and deadlines are piling up. At least I’m back to posting new BFWs every Friday.
If you think the campaign is dumb now, wait ’til the primary dust settles. Romney and Obama will spend close to a billion to pretend they have widely different opinions, when they’re only really in disagreement about a few minor tweaks of the status quo.
I took a mini-vacation over the holidays because I needed it. Now it’s a new year and I’m back to the fart joke grind.
It’s been a while since I’ve drawn the ol’ Iraq-PNAC gang, and the official departure of troops from the war that really sucked me into editorial cartooning seemed like a good occasion.
After staring at Cheney’s newly gaunt face, I’m amazed that warmongering fucker outlasted Kim Jong Il. I’m aware there’s not much substance beyond a bunch of (rightfully deserved) name-calling in this cartoon, but once I got the idea of Dubya in a class photo with lasers behind him, I had to will the rest of the comic into existence. And you have to admit, “Office of Special Poops” makes a real classy name for the shitter.
There were already plans to forgo a Sunday Review cartoon on Christmas, so don’t think the Judith Miller swipe in this comic got me shit-canned. If all goes according to plan, there should be another BFW up here on Friday, finally putting the neglected alt-weekly strip back on schedule. There will also be another BFW up on the 30th, since vacations are for folks with lives.
If I knew how to animate my way out of a paper bag, and the copyright stuff wasn’t an issue, I’d try to set this cartoon to the opening credits of Freaks and Geeks.
I’m not against Amazon’s “Price Check” app itself, just the ridiculously dickish promotion to get customers to spy on their brick and mortar competition. I couldn’t find a funny way to work in their uncompetitive tax-dodging ways, but those stink too.
Thankfully “Adopt-A-Pup” doesn’t exist yet, and it doesn’t need to. All the cutest puppies, kittens, bunnies, and every other animal that needs a forever home can be found at Animal Protection Center of Southeastern Massachusetts, APCSM. And if for some reason you can’t adopt a pet now, or live in some part of the world that’s not southeastern Mass, you can always donate some cash, and since they’re a non-profit, it’s a charitable deduction, and you can dodge your own taxes in a totally ethical way!