Time for more catching up on the links list reorganizationizaning. Ing.

www.thatguywiththeglasses.com Home site of the Nostalgia Critic, Linkara, the 5 Second Movies, and other pop culture commentators. Loads of fun to watch.
www.titane.ca/igod/main.html IGod--a diverting method of time-passing, dialogue with a computer with a God Complex.
notalwaysright.com The customer is sometimes wrong, and sometimes they are stupefyingly so. This site dedicated to collecting and displaying the worst of the worst.
tvtropes.org Fact: TV Tropes Will Ruin Your Life. Xkcd has learned this lesson all too well.
the-dark-cat.livejournal.com Batman and Sons: take the amount of win in in all the DCAU series (TV and comic book) combined. Stir gently. Shake. Square it. Square again. Cube. Square once more. Congratualtions, you now have 1% of the total win in this reimagining of the Bat-Family. The facial expressions alone are to die for. Also has a blog.
And so long to Being Five, Chuck Norris Facts and JKRowling.com.

TODAY'S BOOK: "Saucer", by Stephen Coonts ((c) 2002)

Labels: the blog

"There are plenty of Mets-related sites on the interwebs, that are connected with the 'official' media coverage of them--MLB.com and Mets.com, and all the online newspapers. But there are four websites, personal and unoffiliated, that I consider ansolutely essential to my Web reading on the team. And each of them offers something different. Today, I shall categorize them by comparing each website to a certain player in Mets history.
Mets by the Numbers is like Rusty Staub. MBTN is the only one of the four websites that does not update daily, and deals with a more esoteric aspect of the game (namely, uniform numbers), but it's still a well-run crowd-pleaser. Le Grand Orange, meanwhile, was a fan favorite in any city he played, including New York, which brought him back as a sentimental choice in the twilight of his career. Due to the briefness of his tenure his overall impact on the team is lessened, but while with them, he did it well, he did it with style, and he did it while being adored by the fans. Go up to a Met fan of a certain age and say 'Rusty Staub' and you'll be sure to elicit a grin.
Faith and Fear in Flushing is like Tom Seaver. No contest. Watching Seaver pitch or reading FAFIF gives you the same feeling: splendour, a joy at watching a master craftsman at work. (If you want, we'll throw prime Dwight Gooden into the metaphor, because it's a two-author blog, and we'll let Jason and Greg fight over who is who.)
Metstradamus is like Marv Throneberry. Now, bear me out on this one: I am in no way implying that Metstra is anywhere nearly as incompetent as his spiritual counterpart. But Marvelous Marv was lovably incompetent, famously so, and will elicit smiles from Met fans of any generation, bigger than those given by Staub. 'Damus, like Jason & Greg, is a blogger, but in contrast to them his blog is usually content with short, pungent, and extremely memorable posts, with lavishly Photoshopped images. It's like comparing a four-course dinner (when you're relaxing after a long day at work) to a nice juicy hot-dog-in-a-bun (when you're on the move and famished); or, to change the Met-aphor here to match blogs with pitchers, like Tug McGraw, the always-scrappy Met reliever who gave fans one of their favorite rallying cries: 'Ya gotta believe!'
And to cap things off, what else could The Ultimate Mets Database be other than Casey Stengel? The Ol' Perfesser of baseball and the Online Professor of Mets minutiae are a match made in virtual heaven.

TODAY'S BOOK: 'The Jewish Mothers' Hall of Fame', by Fred A. Bernstein ((c) 1982)"
--159th post, 8/10/08

Labels: reprint

Labels: :(, cartoon

Today marks the 40th cartoon I have submitted to The Jerusalem Post. So far, 22 of them have been published, 5 of those exclusively in the online edition.
The subjects of these 21 'toons break down as follows:
General security issues (3)
Iran (3)
Haredi riots (3)
The settlers (2)
The "peace" process (2)
Sweden (2)
Sports (2)
Crime (2)
Syria
Lebanon
A death

And these are the figures, political and otherwise, that I have caricaturized:
Israeli PM Binyamin Netanyahu (nine times, four times unpublished)
US President Barack Obama (six times, thrice unpubished)
PA chairman Mahmoud Abbas (six times, twice unpublished)
Bernard Madoff (four times, twice unpublished)
Iranian President Mahmoud Ahamdinejad (thrice)
Ayatollah Ali Khamenei (twice)
Syrian President Bashar Assad (twice, once unpublished)
Former Israeli PM Ehud Olmert
Fatah strongman Muhammad Dahlan
Arab-Israeli MK Ahmed Tibi
Jerusalem mayor Nir Barkat
Iranian politician Mir Hossein Mousavi
Holocaust denier David Irving
Levy Rosenbaum
Michael Vick
Batman
Laurel & Hardy
The Keystone Cops
Me

Plus all of the following who did not make it to print:
Former PA chairman Yassir Arafat
Israeli Defense Minister Ehud Barak (twice)
Hamas leader Ismail Haniyeh
US VP Joe Biden
British PM Gordon Brown
Scottish Justice Secretary Kenny MacAskill
Israeli Minister of Trade and Labour Binyamin Ben-Eliezer
Saudi Arabian Foreign Minister Prince Saud al-Faisal
Kenneth Roth and two other members of HRW
Libyan leader Muammar al-Gaddafi
Abdelbaset Al Megrahi
Incoming Director General of the IAEA Yukiya Amano
Christer Nordal
Czech Minister of Foreign Affairs Jan Kohout
Reverend Jeremiah Wright
Uncle Sam
Lady Justice

And for your general amusement, here's my favorite of the 18 pics that did not make it:


LOLzer.

TODAY'S BOOK: "Fields for President", by W.C. Fields ((c) 1941)

Labels: cartoon

Since I am a very bad boy, I didn't look at all at the JPost.com website between Thursady and today, which would have meant this news wouldn't have surprised me this morning. Abigail Radoszkowicz, op-ed editor of The Jerusalem Post, died of cancer. She was 53.
When I opened up the paper and saw the article on the front page, I had an Heroic BSOD. This was compounded by the fact that last night, I'd watched Shrek (actually, I was just in the same room. Long story), so the songs from the movie were still reverberating around the empty space between my ears. What was playing in my head when I saw the headline? Leonard Cohen's "Hallelujah".
So yeah, it was basically like this scene from The West Wing.


(Songs kicks in at 2:14.)

I'm one sad bunny now. Abigail was the one who hired me as a Post cartoonist, and regularly wrote back to me about submissions she found nice or funny. I whipped up a memorial cartoon that got into the online edition, and wrote a sorrowful letter to the editor (Edit: that got printed tomorrow). I never got to meet her face-to-face--and now, sadly, I never will.
And even though/It all went wrong/I'll stand before the Lord of Song/With nothing on my tongue but Hallelujah... Hallelujah, Hallelujah...

Labels: :(

They are Alina X, Milagro Reyes and Lian Harper, and they will KICK YOUR BUTT.

TODAY'S BOOK: "Zombies of the Gene Pool", by Sharyn McCrumb ((c) 1992)

Labels: cartoon