The Baconatrix

This week's image isn't so much a strip as it is just a completely silly painting. This is the Baconatrix, the nightmare fantasy of vegetarian males everywhere. With her two demon steeds, "Cat Pig" and "Deviled Ham", she sews a unique brand of emo-laced burlesque/goth/ballerina Halloween mayhem in costume parties around the season's hipster parties throughout all the trendy neighborhoods.

I have no idea where this came from, honestly. It was just going to be a silly picture exercise and I started liking it more and more so it evolved into a full project. The original image was made at 72 dpi and about 2000 pixels tall so it will likely never see print but oh well. The pet pigs really make it for me I think. It is the contrast they have from her lanky frame probably. Anyhoo, as I said, no punchline or pun, or anything like that this week, just me goofing around with the joy of sketching a silly idea.

Second Prototype

I guess I have a thing about the "right to privacy" that we're supposedly guaranteed in this country. Whenever the technology we have for transmitting personal data is penetrated by yet another government domestic spying program, I envision it as rather "personal". So today's news about an Australian company hawking a spying technology that would allow ISPs to inspect the transmissions of all communication on their network (even encrypted data they claim) was not a nice way to end the day. It doesn't matter HOW they try to justify this or even implement it, it is nothing more than institutionalized datamining. George Orwell might have had less of a sense of humor about it than I do but we both imagine no good coming from a government taking up the power to monitor its citizens' remotely all the time.

Totally hot debate

What can I say, the folks at SNL have it nailed when it comes to Sarah Palin in many regards... ...she's either completely muzzled by her handlers or she actually doesn't know what to do with a direct question, particularly ones having to do with international politics. She may be a great leader but it doesn't come across that way when everything she says is just a generic colloquialism.

Biden's no better but there's no male equivalent Tina Fey to make fun of him with. Biden's a career politician who has been a voting member of the national machine which has brought us these trials. What was his vote on the Patriot Act? What was his vote on the No Child Left Behind Act? What was his vote on going into Iraq? What was his vote on the banker bailout package? To put it bluntly, he is as opposite of the promises of the Obama campaign as you can get. I really kinda get the idea that the reduction of these debates where voters SHOULD be getting to know the kinds of policies that the candidates support from informative or at least combative into wishy-washy sound-bite strings is only going to result in them being judged by how entertained people were by them in the first place. I bet if you took a survey of Twitter, Digg, Fark, and other aggregators that are based on user contribution for their content, you'd notice that folks basically don't care if the candidates actually say anything real, they just care whether their candidate came out more popular than the other one.

Even though I know he couldn't be impartial if he wanted to, I'd prefer the next Presidential Debate be moderated by Jon Stewart.

First cold of the season

Okay. It is no fun getting sick and staying home from work. I wish I could say that taking 2 days off because of a head-cold was fun and relaxing but it is hard to enjoy it with this throbbing numb greyness clouding all my thoughts, with my sinuses filled to capacity (and often above capacity) with phlegm, and with the utter inability to breath through my useless nose. I was supposed to do a strip about Biden selling out for his political career but really, I couldn't pull that off the way I was feeling this week. So you get this self-portrait. OOH! It's in color though!

After speaking with my wife about the strip earlier this week, it became apparent that the direction we were going to take it may have been funny in conversation with Chris and myself but didn't express any truth specific to the subject of the strip. If we're going to do topical humor, we may need to understand our topic a little better. Either way, I'm completely stuffed up and my body is telling me that it is time to go to bed and sleep through another fitful night attempting to get rest.