Today's "Family Circus" is alarming. . .

. . . if only because I worry these Gargantu-ants won't get their "DEVOUR DEVOUR DEVOUR" pheromones keyed up quickly enough.

"Oh, Palin!" Alaska governor resigns, possibly to star in a sitcom about a bungleheaded former politician

Sarah Palin was for the wasteful "Bridge to Nowhere" before she was against it, and proudly defended Alaskans' sharing of local resources and profits before attacking Obama's "socialism." Her campaign behavior was a confounding mix of confused, cautiously generic statements and self-righteous attacks. She seemed taken aback and offended when forced to explain herself, and has always seemed most comfortable with sympathetic interviewers who wear hypocrisy blinders.

Here is a woman who frequently looks as if she has no idea what she is doing at any given moment, but everybody else seems obliged to go along for the ride. And now she's resigning her governorship for a multitude of confusing, possibly conflicting reasons. There's talk that she might be considering a run for president, but it's a given that she's resigning in disgrace. I'm betting on both.

She seems like a nice person going through a hard time, so I'm willing to forgive all unless she gives any hint that she'll be making a presidential run, in which case I'll be wearing the following T-shirt every day:


Palin resigns ("I reject the conventional lame duck status!"

Beautiful 3D Image

Click the preceding image, then cross your eyes to align the two images (you may need to move your chair back a couple of feet). The illusion is really quite striking, and has me looking for 3D animations, which I know exist but can't quite find the terms for.

EDIT: They're called "animated stereograms" and they vary in quality.

Absurd TSA disclaimer

In response to recent events (and a few older ones) I began a brief correspondence with a senior regional TSA agent at one of our nation's larger airports in an attempt to get the Administration's side of the story. I'm used both to reading and writing incendiary assaults on government organizations when an infringement on basic freedoms is suspected or agents misbehave in the performance of their duties, yet I realized that the TSA side of the argument was likely a little more sophisticated than the "Security Through Slavery" zealots many of us are used to imagining.

As I'd hoped I found the man's comments good-spirited and even informative, though most of my original concerns as a Bill of Rights/civil liberties nerd remain. But I can't discuss any of what we discussed due to a backward, ridiculous disclaimer at the bottom of each of his e-mail messages:

WARNING: The information in this email is confidential and may be legally privileged. Access to this email by anyone other than the intended addressee is unauthorized. If you are not the intended recipient of this message, any review, disclosure, copying, distribution, retention, or any action taken or omitted to be taken in reliance on it is prohibited and may be unlawful. If you are not the intended recipient, please reply to or forward a copy of this message to the sender and delete the message, any attachments, and any copies thereof from your system.

So the part of his message that reveals him as a man concerned with security while remaining conscious of the problem of preserving individual liberty is "classified," while the ridiculous, restrictive disclaimer that ties my hands is fair game. I can't talk about what we discussed here, reproduce it or even show it to anybody without fearing some possible reprisal, but I can tell you that I can't.

I don't understand - the contents of his e-mail were transparent discussions of TSA policy, with nary a factoid that might jeopardize our nation's security - in fact, they served to humanize his organization significantly in my eyes. But they've decided that they have the authority to restrict each and every message they send, and I've never been one to create undue trouble for myself.

Too bad.

Artist detained for writecrime

In another reminder of why individual suspicions can never be used to justify detention or arrest, artist Mark Sable was detained last week at LAX for a script to a comic found in his luggage. That's right - not a weapon, not pepper spray or an incendiary device, but a script.

Considering our First Amendment protections the content of the script is immaterial, but it involved terrorism and a burgeoning government police state. Regardless of whether the uncreative minds of the TSA agents thought this an appropriate subject for a script, or even subversive is also immaterial - printed words represent no threat to a plane or my nation, while using personal suspicions and biases as an excuse for oppression and harassment does incalculable damage to any civilized nation and to its values.

If you in opposition to the Fourth Amendment allow mere "suspicion" to be a suitable cause for a search or detention, it will be used inappropriately and it will result in further First Amendment violations as the subjective judgments of sometimes-corrupt, sometimes-stupid agents become law and trump any semblance of due process.

Comics artist Mark Sable detained for Unthinkable acts (SFScope)

The BBC Reviews "Transformers: Revenge of the Fallen"

I wish I had thought of this. The page makes it clear that this is actually a review of all of Michael Bay's work, a sort of appropriate retrospective. Had I not edited the inch-long footer out of existence you would have seen that without my telling you.

Choose Your Own Adventure

To continue reading this post, continue below.
To read something a great deal more interesting, turn to page 177.

I remember reading the Choose Your Own Adventure series (and its spinoffs) ravenously as a kid, to the extent that I'm convinced they were the first paperback fiction I ever read. As a child unable to see the flaws and cracks in a system, they seemed to offer me the illusion of choice without the obligation of seeing a particular plot thread through to the end.

To the uninitiated (and you can see a more complete explanation here), the books were standard schlocky kid's comic book types of stories, with titles like You Are Microscopic (the first I ever read) and Prisoner of the Ant People, with the twist that the plot was comparatively fluid - after a few introductory pages, the story would begin to branch off and allow you to have a sort of control over your character's actions.

For example, after learning that your aged uncle is a mad scientist who has discovered the key to immortality, you may have the option of taking a swig of the serum or offering it to him first, with page numbers for each decision. You'd follow the appropriate page and continue reading, having made a limited choice of the plot's progression. Anyone familiar with these types of stories should recognize the inevitable events that follow depending on your choices (for example, you might take the serum, becoming immortal. Your uncle dies of a heart attack before being able to make any more, and you become a sort of filthy rich eternal celebrity, starring in films and endorsing whatever products immortal people still need, until the book closes in the year 3000).

Usually these books followed the ". . . with a HORRIBLE twist!" style of writing, however, so it's likely that about 80% of the endings would involve your being crushed or shrunk to nothing or left floating forever in space. It was fairly difficult to find the ending where your character is surrounded by a pool full of jewels and bikini babes, so most of us learned to save our places with our fingers when making a decision. In fact, the finger contortions involved in making a decision three or four levels deep (while trying to avoid having your character eaten by a spider or run over by a car) probably gave the young generation much of their motor control, directly leading to the computer age. (Hey, a quarter billion of those books were sold, let's not underestimate their impact.)

Anyway, these books offered only the illusion of choice, as I said above. Most of the choices fizzled out quickly, ending in your character's death or a similar unhappy ending. And most of the choices were fairly simple to accommodate the fact that it was really only possible to cram a few dozen into a 130-page book. Character development was more or less out of the question, so the illusion was precarious enough that most of us moved onto other things in middle school (Goosebumps! Animorphs! Boy Wizards!). Still, I admire the series for pushing the boundaries of fiction as we knew it, touching the video game receptors in kids' minds as they read books, and teaching us that free will was an arbitrary, impossible notion. Hooray!

The End
(Flip back a couple of decisions and leave that ancient skull alone.)

Eh, I'll get another fifteen minutes of fame in a couple of months. . .

I posted a semi-sly bit of editorial imaging onto Reddit about five hours ago, and came back after some Father's Day stuff to find it the top link on Reddit and on the front page of Digg, submitted by another user. It took me about a day to think of asking Alan Schaaf, the creator of Imgur, to include a watermark with my blog address in the image. He was familiar with it and glad to help.

EDIT: It was, in fact, the #1 link on both Reddit and Digg for the day.

Direct link: http://imgur.com/gQouk.jpg

Or click the image to view in fullscreen below:


Funny how Photoshopped borders and twenty minutes can get this kind of response.

Oh, and the attentive among you may notice that I've edited the image here. Frankly that particular word, however hilarious, isn't in my normal vernacular. Imgur doesn't allow you to edit submitted images so I'm stuck with it. (Ignore my explanation here if you don't care in the slightest.)

More Jibjabbery (He's Barack Obama)

JibJab can be hit or miss, but it's hard to argue that the production values on their political shorts have ever been less than stellar. The Spiridellis brothers have a grasp of Flash animation that's practically second to none, and their videos have gotten increasingly more epic, at least the ones that mattered.

The timing on this video seems odd, coming as it does a few months after the election, but I prefer to see it as a slightly sarcastic, still respectful take on our president. His sense of humor being what it is, I think he'd get a kick out of this.

Artist/Jailer Quandary

Though I believe that opening up your work to a wider audience always results in higher profits, I'd like to pose the following decision for artists, struggling or otherwise:

If, by releasing your work with a copyright license that allowed copying, sharing and the adaptation of your work into other mediums, your profit levels remained the same but some form of your work reached twice as many people, would you make that choice?

For the purpose of this exercise, we'll assume that the choice is in your hands rather than the hands of a label or syndicate which controls distribution rights. Even in our modern artist-side, independent climate such groups have a role, though they control much of the debate regarding intellectual property and tend to neglect both artist and consumer rights. So we'll ignore them for now.

I guess the question is: Are you an artist or a jailer? The question isn't even "artist or businessman," as independent artists are rapidly proving that it's possible to make a profit without controlling access to your work. The model is changing and many of us are changing with it.