Andy Burnham’s early promises to end rough sleeping and sort out social care won’t surprise anyone who’s followed his political career, but his apparent interest in the structures of Whitehall was less expected. To discuss what we know so far about the direction of Britain’s new government, James is joined by Stephen Bush of the Financial Times and Sienna Rodgers of the House magazine. They talk through what the exclusions from Burnham’s cabinet reveal about his political intentions, and why the tax and spending plans inherited from the last government might push him to call a general election next year.
Read the latest LRB: https://www.lrb.co.uk
Subscribe to the LRB: https://lrb.me/youtube
ABOUT THE LRB
The LRB is Europe’s leading magazine of books and ideas. Published twice a month, it provides a space for some of the world’s best writers to explore a wide variety of subjects in exhilarating detail – from culture and politics to science and technology via history and philosophy. In the age of the long read, the LRB remains the pre-eminent exponent of the intellectual essay, admired around the world for its fearlessness, its range and its elegance.
As well as essays and book reviews each issue also contains poems, an exhibition review, ‘short cuts’, letters and a diary, and is available in print, online, and offline via our app. Subscribers enjoy unlimited access to almost 15,000 articles in our digital archive. Our website features a regular blog and a channel of audio and video content, including podcasts, author interviews and highlights from the events programme at the London Review Bookshop.
'The are things the Odyssey does that are not things that Nolan specialises in, such as dialogue.'
Emily Wilson, translator of the Odyssey, discusses Nolan's film on the LRB Podcast: https://youtu.be/onDDNKHXMTA
ABOUT THE LRB
The LRB is Europe’s leading magazine of books and ideas. Published twice a month, it provides a space for some of the world’s best writers to explore a wide variety of subjects in exhilarating detail – from culture and politics to science and technology via history and philosophy. In the age of the long read, the LRB remains the pre-eminent exponent of the intellectual essay, admired around the world for its fearlessness, its range and its elegance.
As well as essays and book reviews each issue also contains poems, an exhibition review, ‘short cuts’, letters and a diary, and is available in print, online, and offline via our app. Subscribers enjoy unlimited access to almost 15,000 articles in our digital archive. Our website features a regular blog and a channel of audio and video content, including podcasts, author interviews and highlights from the events programme at the London Review Bookshop.
Conductor – A. Končius (tracks: A1, B2)
Orchestra – Lietuvos Televizijos Ir Radijo Lengvosios Muzikos Orkestras (tracks: A1, B2)
Trombone – Tauras Adomavičius
Tracklist:
A1 Pjesė
A2 Muzika Tikiu
B1 Milžinai
B2 Prisiminimas
'The goal of the travels is for Odysseus to get back to where he started, to achieve something parallel to Penelope's weaving.'
Emily Wilson, translator of the Odyssey and the Iliad, talks about Homer's poem and Christopher Nolan's film on the LRB Podcast: https://youtu.be/onDDNKHXMTA
ABOUT THE LRB
The LRB is Europe’s leading magazine of books and ideas. Published twice a month, it provides a space for some of the world’s best writers to explore a wide variety of subjects in exhilarating detail – from culture and politics to science and technology via history and philosophy. In the age of the long read, the LRB remains the pre-eminent exponent of the intellectual essay, admired around the world for its fearlessness, its range and its elegance.
As well as essays and book reviews each issue also contains poems, an exhibition review, ‘short cuts’, letters and a diary, and is available in print, online, and offline via our app. Subscribers enjoy unlimited access to almost 15,000 articles in our digital archive. Our website features a regular blog and a channel of audio and video content, including podcasts, author interviews and highlights from the events programme at the London Review Bookshop.
I’m Dan Piraro, the creator of the Bizarro newspaper comic, and this is my weekly blog post. The large Sunday comic above is mine, as are all of the below-cartoon comments to follow.
Since January 2018, the Monday-Saturday Bizarro comics have been written and drawn by my comics partner, Wayno. For more fun, check out Wayno’s weekly blog post.
Hello again, Jazz Pickles, or for the first time, stranger.
My partner Olive Oyl and I returned this week from our two-week sojourn up the coast of Southern California. We visited various family members and friends along the way, and, before heading back to Mexico, we spent a couple of days in San Luis Obispo, a charming little town in Central California that we wish we could afford to live in.
It’s not that San Luis Obispo is a gated community for millionaires, but these days, you have to be a millionaire to live in any city in the US that O2 and I would want to wake up in daily. Prices on everything from gas to groceries, and housing to antifa algae-propagating supplies have gone crazy since the Führer Wannabe “lowered prices on day one.” Lucky us.
Here are some photos that do not capture the highlights of our trip.
This atypical house is in a typical residential neighborhood of San Luis Obispo, and I think it’s really cool.
Left: Two human constructions and some tiny humans. Right: Two seagulls with three legs.
Left: A few minutes from San Luis Obispo is Morro Rock Beach. Not sure how it got its name. Right: Olive Oyl points at the Pacific Ocean in Malibu.
O2 and me too.
Thanks for caring about what Wayno and I do here each week. If you’d like to help us scrape by in these tough times, we hope you’ll consider some of the links at the end of this post. We appreciate your readership and your support.
This seems like a great time to review one of Wayno’s rare thematic weeks of Bizarro cartoons…
He would probably enjoy the proverbial train at the end of the tunnel, too.
Okay, son, but don’t be careful.
This drawing is as close to an Oscar as Wayno or I are likely to get despite our convincing portrayals of slackers doing our best to avoid Walmart jobs.
Have you spotted the theme of this week’s cartoons yet?
Even a dummy can see it coming.
One point in favor of self-driving cars is that they don’t text or check email while driving.
That concludes this week’s crash course for dummies, Jazz Pickles. If you enjoy that we do this for free each week, please consider helping us keep it that way via the links below. We’ll put in a good word for you with the head of Antifa.
Super fun BIZARRO SWAG from ComicsKingdom, including women’s V-neck styles! (And some weird shit from other comics that doesn’t even belong in our shop. Sorry about that.)
It could be argued that Christopher Nolan has been remaking the Odyssey for his whole career, and his latest film revisits many of the themes of his earlier movies, as once again a male protagonist embarks on a desperate quest to recover a female love object. But, as Emily Wilson argues, while Homer’s Odyssey might seem the perfect source material for Nolan, the ancient Greek poem also excels at many things the director isn't so good at, not least dialogue and characterisation.
Wilson, who has translated both the Odyssey and the Iliad, joins Thomas Jones to talk through the new adaptation, discussing its echoes of Nolan’s earlier films and his use of the Trojan Horse as a parable about wars built on lies. They also look at the compositional history of Homer’s poem and consider why this archetypal journey narrative is also a story about stasis and the desire to resist time.
Read Emily's review of The Odyssey film here: https://lrb.me/wilsonodysseyyt
Listen to Emily and Tom's Close Readings episode on the Odyssey here:
GET 50% OFF a 12-month Close Readings subscription with the code 'SUMMER50' when you sign up here:
https://lrb.me/atasummer50
ABOUT CLOSE READINGS
Close Readings is a multi-series podcast subscription from the London Review of Books which looks at different periods and themes in literature through selections of key texts, covering poetry, fiction, history and philosophy from Ancient Greece to the present day.
ABOUT THE LRB
The LRB is Europe’s leading magazine of books and ideas. Published twice a month, it provides a space for some of the world’s best writers to explore a wide variety of subjects in exhilarating detail – from culture and politics to science and technology via history and philosophy. In the age of the long read, the LRB remains the pre-eminent exponent of the intellectual essay, admired around the world for its fearlessness, its range and its elegance.
As well as essays and book reviews each issue also contains poems, an exhibition review, ‘short cuts’, letters and a diary, and is available in print, online, and offline via our app. Subscribers enjoy unlimited access to almost 15,000 articles in our digital archive. Our website features a regular blog and a channel of audio and video content, including podcasts, author interviews and highlights from the events programme at the London Review Bookshop.
'Palantir present as at the cutting edge of everything. The reality of what they actually do is so different. They don't build things, they're not at the cutting edge of AI.'
Peter Geoghegan talks to Thomas Jones about Palantir's origins, rapid rise and expansion into the British state, on the LRB Podcast.
Watch the full episode: https://youtu.be/usR9lZoXaqY
ABOUT THE LRB
The LRB is Europe’s leading magazine of books and ideas. Published twice a month, it provides a space for some of the world’s best writers to explore a wide variety of subjects in exhilarating detail – from culture and politics to science and technology via history and philosophy. In the age of the long read, the LRB remains the pre-eminent exponent of the intellectual essay, admired around the world for its fearlessness, its range and its elegance.
As well as essays and book reviews each issue also contains poems, an exhibition review, ‘short cuts’, letters and a diary, and is available in print, online, and offline via our app. Subscribers enjoy unlimited access to almost 15,000 articles in our digital archive. Our website features a regular blog and a channel of audio and video content, including podcasts, author interviews and highlights from the events programme at the London Review Bookshop.
The US tech giant Palantir ‘holds public contracts worth hundreds of millions of pounds in everything from financial regulation to local government’, Peter Geoghegan and Lucas Amin wrote recently in the LRB. The newsletter where they work, Democracy for Sale, ‘has been looking into Palantir’s business in the UK, and particularly its contracts with the NHS’. On this episode, Peter joins Thomas Jones to discuss the company's origins, rapid rise and expansion – with the help of Peter Mandelson – into the British state. They talk about the risks of handing our most personal data over to a company whose billionaire founders have poured millions into right-wing political campaigns in the US, and ask whether the software’s actually any good at doing what it promises.
Read Peter Geoghegan and Lucas Amin on Palantir: https://lrb.me/palantirpod
Subscribe to the LRB: https://lrb.me/youtube
ABOUT THE LRB
The LRB is Europe’s leading magazine of books and ideas. Published twice a month, it provides a space for some of the world’s best writers to explore a wide variety of subjects in exhilarating detail – from culture and politics to science and technology via history and philosophy. In the age of the long read, the LRB remains the pre-eminent exponent of the intellectual essay, admired around the world for its fearlessness, its range and its elegance.
As well as essays and book reviews each issue also contains poems, an exhibition review, ‘short cuts’, letters and a diary, and is available in print, online, and offline via our app. Subscribers enjoy unlimited access to almost 15,000 articles in our digital archive. Our website features a regular blog and a channel of audio and video content, including podcasts, author interviews and highlights from the events programme at the London Review Bookshop.
I’m Dan Piraro, the creator of the Bizarro newspaper comic, and this is my weekly blog post. The large Sunday comic above is mine, as are all of the below-cartoon comments to follow.
Since January 2018, the Monday-Saturday Bizarro comics have been written and drawn by my comics partner, Wayno. For more fun, check out Wayno’s weekly blog post.
Olive Oyl and I are still on the road, but we’ll be returning to our Mexican hideout in a few days. Our trip has been fun and relaxing, despite the health app on my phone reminding me daily that I’ve only been walking a fraction as many steps each day as I normally do, and asking me if I’ve broken an ankle or been taken hostage. I’m refusing to answer, which I think is making it angry, but I don’t care. I’m not letting that damn thing run my life.
Have you been following the World Cup? I enjoy some sports, but prefer ones in which things happen more quickly and more often than they do in soccer (futbol). I can’t shake the feeling that if it were not for baseball, soccer would be the world’s most boring sport. Sure, every now and then, there is a brief string of exciting seconds, but it cannot be denied that 95% of the time, it’s just people jogging in a big field with a ball nearby. That’s the one thing that makes it less boring than baseball, which is mostly men standing around scratching their crotches and spitting.
I know nothing about the game of cricket, but I’ve heard those games can last for days. I’m sure it’s great if you’re into it, but to me, that sounds only marginally more interesting than watching the grounds crew mow the lawn in the days before the game.
While on the road this week, I managed to dodge traffic well enough to post my latest article to The Naked Cartoonist. This one is titled “Do You Think a Lot of Modern Art is Bullshit?”
One of my subscribers, Susie Somebody, said this about it:
“Wow! Your amazing display of creativity in this week’s Naked Cartoonist is one of my all-time favorites. Thank you so much!”
I have no idea what she is referring to, but I’m glad she enjoyed it. Thanks, Susie!
If you’d like to be encouraged to think and chuckle while supporting my writing habit (which is no less life-consuming than a drug habit, but somewhat less damaging), you can start here for a mere $5 a month. I always keep my prices low because I don’t like how expensive everything is getting.
One thing that isn’t getting more expensive is our latest batch of Bizarro cartoons. Let’s see what Wayno coughed up for us this week…
You’ll never grow up to be a cowman if you don’t practice.
This image used to represent the human conscience, but since we’ve stopped thinking for ourselves, we can now see it as the “facts” and “alternate facts” of the internet competing for our attention.
But everyone knows that if time travel for potatoes were possible, the fact that those fries exist in the future means Mr. P Head did not heed their advice, and…oh, never mind.
This is a cautionary tale. Children need to learn to recognize a brutalist before they’re old enough to get romantically involved with one.
That fact that the creature thinks the platform is a train speaks volumes.
I lived in NYC for ten years and must have said that a thousand times each year. No wonder the apartment was full of bees.
That wall we just hit is the outer limit of our comedy enclosure this week. Thanks for stumbling through the dark with us. If you enjoy what we provide here for free each week, please consider helping us keep it that way via the links below. We’ll cast a beneficial spell over your life, and everything will instantly improve.
The Founding Fathers knew how fragile republics were, and would probably marvel at how long the one they set up has lasted, argues Gary Gerstle.
Watch the full episode: https://youtu.be/O6uyU0exLdw
ABOUT THE LRB
The LRB is Europe’s leading magazine of books and ideas. Published twice a month, it provides a space for some of the world’s best writers to explore a wide variety of subjects in exhilarating detail – from culture and politics to science and technology via history and philosophy. In the age of the long read, the LRB remains the pre-eminent exponent of the intellectual essay, admired around the world for its fearlessness, its range and its elegance.
As well as essays and book reviews each issue also contains poems, an exhibition review, ‘short cuts’, letters and a diary, and is available in print, online, and offline via our app. Subscribers enjoy unlimited access to almost 15,000 articles in our digital archive. Our website features a regular blog and a channel of audio and video content, including podcasts, author interviews and highlights from the events programme at the London Review Bookshop.
Would the Founding Fathers recognise the modern United States as the republic they declared in 1776? The nation formed from Britain’s North American colonies has become the most powerful and prosperous in the world, but the muted celebrations on 4 July reflected a divided country in which, for many of its citizens, the principles of the Declaration of Independence are hard to square with what’s happened to its democratic institutions.
James is joined by Gary Gerstle, a professor of history at Cambridge, to reflect on some of the major changes in the political evolution of the United States, including the expansion of federal power in the 20th century, the perpetual state of war since 1941 and the voluntary ceding of influence by Congress to the executive under Trump. They also look at the past and future of the US ‘special relationship’ with the UK and what could come next for American democracy following this year’s midterms and the 2028 presidential election.
Subscribe to the LRB: https://lrb.me/youtube
ABOUT THE LRB
The LRB is Europe’s leading magazine of books and ideas. Published twice a month, it provides a space for some of the world’s best writers to explore a wide variety of subjects in exhilarating detail – from culture and politics to science and technology via history and philosophy. In the age of the long read, the LRB remains the pre-eminent exponent of the intellectual essay, admired around the world for its fearlessness, its range and its elegance.
As well as essays and book reviews each issue also contains poems, an exhibition review, ‘short cuts’, letters and a diary, and is available in print, online, and offline via our app. Subscribers enjoy unlimited access to almost 15,000 articles in our digital archive. Our website features a regular blog and a channel of audio and video content, including podcasts, author interviews and highlights from the events programme at the London Review Bookshop.
Visualizer Oficial de "Mono No Aware" de Hamilton de Holanda, Paulinho Da Costa, Pedro Martins feat. Salomão Soares, Thiago Big Rabello.
Ouça em todas as plataformas: https://SMB.lnk.to/Nova
Canais oficiais de Hamilton de Holanda
Inscreva-se:
Site: https://hamiltondeholanda.com/
Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/hamilton.de.holanda/
Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/hamiltondeholanda/
X: https://x.com/hamiltonholanda
--
Mono no aware (Hamilton de Holanda/Salomão Soares)
Hamilton de Holanda - Bandolim 10 cordas -
Salomão Soares- Teclados
Thiago Big Rabello - Bateria
Convidados Especiais:
Paulinho da Costa - Percussão
Pedro Martins - Guitarra
Video
Direção: Nando Chagas, Marcos Portinari e Lucas Bittencourt
Edição: Nando Chagas e Lucas Bittencourt
Sony Music
CEO: Fernando Cabral
Label Head: Cristiane Simões
Diretora A&R: Taísa Rennó
Gerente A&R: Yasmin Torres
Especialista A&R: Beatriz Valentim
Gerente A&R Audiovisual: Roberta Salomone
Coordenadora A&R Audiovisual: Luiza Catalani
Diretor de Marketing: Ricardo Bertozzi
Gerente de Marketing: Stephanie Correa
Analista de Marketing: Gabrielly Sobrinho
In the sixth episode of their series, Sarah and Sandeep look at poems that explore the complexities of money and its metaphorical power: Frederick Seidel’s ‘In Late December’ starts with an image of degradation in the symbolic heart of global capitalism but ends with an ambiguous vision of the undead in an apparent appeal to common humanity; in Ella Fears’s Goodlord, an email from an estate agent triggers a stream-of-consciousness tour through a series of barely-habitable rental properties and a reflection on a financial system that traps people in dehumanising accommodation; and Danez Smith’s ‘C.R.E.A.M.’ provides a satirical exploration of the relationship between race, poverty and systemic exploitation, describing a compressed history of the evolution of oppression from slavery to sharecropping to the modern exploitations of capitalism.
Read Frederick Seidel's 'In Late December' in the LRB:
Get 25% off a 12-month subscription to Close Readings with the code ’POETRY25’ at checkout here: https://lrb.me/crpoetry
ABOUT THE LRB
The LRB is Europe’s leading magazine of books and ideas. Published twice a month, it provides a space for some of the world’s best writers to explore a wide variety of subjects in exhilarating detail – from culture and politics to science and technology via history and philosophy. In the age of the long read, the LRB remains the pre-eminent exponent of the intellectual essay, admired around the world for its fearlessness, its range and its elegance.
As well as essays and book reviews each issue also contains poems, an exhibition review, ‘short cuts’, letters and a diary, and is available in print, online, and offline via our app. Subscribers enjoy unlimited access to almost 15,000 articles in our digital archive. Our website features a regular blog and a channel of audio and video content, including podcasts, author interviews and highlights from the events programme at the London Review Bookshop.
I’m Dan Piraro, the creator of the Bizarro newspaper comic, and this is my weekly blog post. The large Sunday comic above is mine, as are all of the comments to follow.
Since January 2018, the Monday-Saturday Bizarro comics have been written and drawn by my comics partner, Wayno. For more fun, check out Wayno’s weekly blog post.
Hey there, Jazz Pickles. I hope you’re all hanging in there and riding out the Tangerine Torment comfortably. Olive Oyl and I are taking a little time off this week and next to visit family.
We spent yesterday morning in shuttle vans and airports, and the afternoon in what felt like a cramped utility closet where they store metal folding chairs. O2 tried to persuade me that it was a commercial airliner, and the gigantic man in the folding chair next to me, who kept his right elbow and knee pressed firmly against me for three hours while snoring loudly enough to nearly drown out the wind storm outside, almost convinced me.
As I looked behind me, there were dozens of rows of tiny, uncomfortable chairs smooshed together, full of sleeping people in various embarrassing poses, with gaping mouths and slack jaws.
That sounds like a plane, but it still didn’t make sense. People have to pay big money to ride on commercial airliners, and there’s no way my wife and I were stupid enough to have paid for that experience. All I can think is that somehow, we accidentally locked ourselves into a vibrating storage facility with hundreds of others who’d snuck in there to sleep off their Friday night drunk.
Whatever the case, we’re out of the closet now and sitting in properly cushioned chairs, so it’s all good.
Before I go, I’d be as stupid as a person who pays hard-earned money for a flight on a cheap-ass airline if I didn’t mention our splendid new products in the Comics Kingdom Bizarro shop. Run over there right now as fast as a Mario Brother escaping some sort of animated danger and nab some for yourself and your loved ones. You’ll permanently be one of our loved ones if you do.
Lastly, but not leastly, next Friday’s article in my subscription creative writing thing, The Naked Cartoonist, is titled “Do You Think a Lot of Modern Art is Bullshit?”
Here’s one of the several comics within my clever and amusing essay.
This story is snarky and funny, but also open-minded, so you can decide for yourself if modern art is for you. I think you’re going to love it. (My article, that is; I’ve no idea if you’ll love modern art.)
That makes it time to peek under the comedy curtain and see what mischief Wayno’s Bizarro comics for the week include…
Sheet happens.
I love a park bench with a pie shelf. It keeps the pie where the pigeons and squirrels can enjoy it without having to bend over.
When you’re tired of watching lame sit-coms try an intentionally lame sit-chuck.
Good idea. Since none of the commandments mention a prohibition against molesting women, how about Bill Cosby, Harvey Weinstein, and His Obfuscating Orangeness?
A reader demanded we apologize to the descendants of those who died in the famous 1975 sinking referenced above. This seems an unusual request since we aren’t making fun of the wreck or its victims, only mentioning it as something that happened and was written about in a popular song.
Still, we’re sorry that anyone was offended by this comic. That’s never our intent. There’s an adage that is famous among humorists: Comedy = tragedy + time, but nobody tells you how much time has to pass. We thought 51 years would be enough.
If I had a cargo suit, I wouldn’t need to carry a purse.
And that brings down this week’s comedy curtain to a standing ovation. (I’m standing as I type. You may remain seated.) If you’re into what we do here for free each week, please help us keep it going via the links below. Thank you for your attention to this blather.
'Frankenstein seemed to predict things that it couldn't possible have imagined and one of them is this terrible gothic moment of opening a child's grave and finding instead the body of an unknown adult.'
In this episode from their Close Readings series 'Man Behind the Curtain', Tom McCarty and Thomas Jones look at Frankenstein and the machinery that Mary Shelley used to assemble her immortal creature and bring it to life.
Watch the episode: https://youtu.be/_s4w5yIHA6I
ABOUT THE LRB
The LRB is Europe’s leading magazine of books and ideas. Published twice a month, it provides a space for some of the world’s best writers to explore a wide variety of subjects in exhilarating detail – from culture and politics to science and technology via history and philosophy. In the age of the long read, the LRB remains the pre-eminent exponent of the intellectual essay, admired around the world for its fearlessness, its range and its elegance.
As well as essays and book reviews each issue also contains poems, an exhibition review, ‘short cuts’, letters and a diary, and is available in print, online, and offline via our app. Subscribers enjoy unlimited access to almost 15,000 articles in our digital archive. Our website features a regular blog and a channel of audio and video content, including podcasts, author interviews and highlights from the events programme at the London Review Bookshop.
'Weather is such a vast resource for poets, and has been for as long as poetry has existed.'
In the latest episode of their series 'Poetry and the Turning World', Sarah Howe and Sandeep Parmar look at the ways in which weather has functioned as a poetic tool and consider three recent poems that describe the intimate and communal effects of atmospheric events: Maureen McLane’s ‘Rocks’, Jake Skeets’s ‘Surface Mapping’ and Ishion Hutchinson’s ‘After the Hurricane’.
Watch the full episode: https://youtu.be/31cuqEHHCXg
Subscribe to the LRB: https://lrb.me/youtube
ABOUT THE LRB
The LRB is Europe’s leading magazine of books and ideas. Published twice a month, it provides a space for some of the world’s best writers to explore a wide variety of subjects in exhilarating detail – from culture and politics to science and technology via history and philosophy. In the age of the long read, the LRB remains the pre-eminent exponent of the intellectual essay, admired around the world for its fearlessness, its range and its elegance.
As well as essays and book reviews each issue also contains poems, an exhibition review, ‘short cuts’, letters and a diary, and is available in print, online, and offline via our app. Subscribers enjoy unlimited access to almost 15,000 articles in our digital archive. Our website features a regular blog and a channel of audio and video content, including podcasts, author interviews and highlights from the events programme at the London Review Bookshop.
I’m Dan Piraro, the creator of the Bizarro newspaper comic, and this is my weekly blog post. The large Sunday comic above is mine, as are all of the below-cartoon comments to follow.
Since January 2018, the Monday-Saturday Bizarro comics have been written and drawn by my comics partner, Wayno. For more fun, check out Wayno’s weekly blog post.
Thanks for stopping by, Jazz Pickles. It’s always nice to see you sense your presence.
The title and topic of today’s post will doubtless turn off some readers. Most of you regular visitors know who I am and read my stuff because you like how I think and what I say about it.
But that’s not true for everyone. Judging by the comments I still occasionally get, some readers just come here for a light-hearted laugh and wish I’d leave topics like politics out of it.
That’s what Garfield is for. Here at Bizarro, Wayno and I often give you lighthearted fun with no difficult thoughts attached, but occasionally we express an opinion or truth that makes some readers uncomfortable.
We think that’s a good thing, as the image and quote by James Baldwin below express rather poignantly.
I understand the sentiment; the world is overwhelming, and comics are an escape. Accordingly, polite suggestions are understood and appreciated, but when someone objects in a less-than-polite manner, I tell them, “If someone is forcing you to read our work, tell your parents or a trusted teacher.”
Regarding the seaside comic above. Scientists report that up to 75% of large fish are gone from the ocean as a result of overfishing and other causes, and many fish populations are on the brink of collapse. Meanwhile, certain politicians are more concerned with bringing back “all-you-can-eat shrimp night” at Red Lobster.
Additionally, in the late 1950s, the average American adult looked like the fisherman on the left in my cartoon above, while the average American today is overweight or obese.
As our behavior threatens our food supply on numerous fronts (over-fishing, climate change, right-wing political policies for short-term profit, etc.), obesity among Americans is becoming epidemic, while farms are failing right and left. What’s wrong with this picture?
Yesterday was our nation’s 250th birthday. What should have been a grand celebration of the American Experiment from sea to shining sea was extinguished like a campfire in a tsunami by unrelenting, textbook fascism and grifting over the past 18 months.
A certain malignant narcissist who would be king has frantically attempted to cement his place in history in embarrassing ways, including attempting to build gawdy monuments to himself that no one but his own ego has asked for.
He had a huge chance yesterday, on the 4th of July, to ensure that his name would forever appear alongside Thomas Jefferson and John Adams.
They both died within hours of each other on July 4th, 1826, exactly 50 years after the signing of the Declaration of Independence. If Trump had done yesterday what they did exactly 200 years ago, he’d have secured his place in history, at least on a Wikipedia page about political coincidences. And what could’ve been a better anniversary gift to America than that?
But once again, he missed his chance of being remembered for something other than being the person who made the most tragically convincing proof of reincarnation who ever lived. Or, maybe it is just a coincidence that he was born a mere 13 months after Hitler committed suicide and has used Adolf’s biography like a cookbook recipe for (temporarily) destroying a republic.
Oh well. His place in our nation’s history will definitely be cemented, but not for the reasons he hopes.
In better news, as promised in last week’s post, we’ve got the new V-neck ladies’ style shirts posted on Comics Kingdom’s Bizarro swag shop! Treat your neck to some V-freedom now!(All of the latest products are available on those two pages, not just V-necks.)
Let’s cleanse our hearts and minds now with some chuckles from Wayno’s Bizarro comics from the week!
That hand would also be quite handy while driving, although with a different finger extended.
Wayno already made a joke about applying for a job at Monster(dot)com, so I’ve got nothin.’
I don’t even wanna know where a zombie baby came from or what you’d feed it.
For those of you who love oddball indie films, I highly recommend “Listers,” available for free on YouTube. It’s a charmingly hilarious documentary about a couple of brothers who are real-life characters like “the Dude” in The Big Lebowski deciding to take up bird watching. So fun.
This is one of my very favorite bits of punnery from Wayno and a perfect example of the aphorism, “Comedy equals tragedy plus time.”
It could also be “couples massage” if they hired that guy to let them massage him together.
That’s douses this week’s comedy campfire, Jazz Pickles. Thanks for stopping by for some s’mores. If you enjoy that we do this for free every week, please consider helping to feed the Bizarro Bunny via the links below. Our income from newspapers has gone the way of civil political discourse in recent years. Either way, we appreciate you pointing your seeballs at us.
The most popular modern food poem is probably William Carlos Williams’s ‘This Is Just to Say’, in which the speaker confesses to eating the plums his wife was saving for breakfast. Food has often been a means for poetry to represent intimate relationships, but, as Sarah and Sandeep explore in this episode, it has also provided ways of thinking about alienation, societal change, survival and displacement. In Tony Harrison’s 'V.', supermarkets and food providers become central motifs in a discussion of Britain’s changing landscapes; Bhanu Kapil’s How to Wash a Heart uses the memory of a grandfather planting yogurt under a tree as a means of understanding the aftermath of Partition; and in Yousif M. Qasmiyeh’s ‘Communion’, set in the Beddawi refugee camp in Lebanon, lentils become part of a living archive through which experiences are transmitted across generations.
Read Tony Harrison's 'V.' in the LRB:
https://www.lrb.co.uk/the-paper/v07/n01/tony-harrison/v
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