Since all the other bloggers seem to be doing it. Here’s possibly the most bizarre Betty Boop cartoon ever made, and that’s really saying something for the old, pre-Hays Code Betty Boop cartoons. This one is from September 1932.
It’s interesting to consider that this was just before the third and most brutal wave of Great Depression bank failures were about to hit. Times were pretty bad when this cartoon was made. These cartoons were produced under mostly grind-them-out conditions as inexpensive “shorts” for the movie houses to run between features. Before the Hays Code the film industry in the U.S. was pretty free-wheeling and it was all still new enough that creative producers felt free to experiment. All that would soon be crushed by the Hays code, not to be rediscovered in America anyway, until the 1960s.
This cartoon pokes fun at a patent medicine and health craze that was sweeping the country at the time. Anyone could sell anything as a wonderful cure for damn near everything that ailed a person. Considering a lot of those little bottles contained opiates and cocaine it’s no wonder a lot of the customers felt simply marvelous afterward. But most of them did absolutely nothing. Kinda like the zillions of pill bottles you see in the Diet Supplement section of your grocery store today. Betty’s sales pitch for Jippo is a hilarious take-off of the song Now It’s Time to Fall in Love
The ukulele riff at the end of the cartoon…when things Really start getting weird…is Nobody’s Sweetheart by either Billy “Red Pepper Sam” Costello or Cliff “Ukulele Ike” Edwards, who voiced the character of Jiminy Cricket in Disney’s Pinocchio – my sources disagree here. I had no idea until recently that this song was about a prostitute (I told you this was pre-Hays Code). Which shouldn’t have surprised me because at the end of Betty Boop’s Snow White (another very surreal cartoon) the clown sings (and dances to a rotoscoped Cab Calloway) The St. James Infirmary Blues, which is about a man dying of syphilis he’d caught from an unfaithful lover. Take that Cartoon Network…
The kid at the end who gulps down Jippo is turning into Frederic March’s Mr. Hyde. That film had just been released and was a big hit. It probably gave all the kids in the audience nightmares. But then that damn clown gave me nightmares. Those old Max Fleischer cartoons were like that. They had a gritty feel to them that the Fleischer’s lost when they moved their studios from New York to Florida. And they could peer into our dark fears in a way that Disney never went near. A really good example of that is Play Safe, about a kid who likes trains too much for his own damn good. The dream sequence in it is very, very creepy.
A conversation with a co-worker reminded me just now of the fact that I haven’t ever traveled overseas and I really should. The continental U.S. is the only place I’ve ever roamed.
I need to visit Europe one of these days, before I’m too old to travel. And South America. And Australia or New Zealand (New Zealand probably, as long as the government in Australia is so goddammed homophobic…). The only thing is I’m afraid of the language barrier most places. I’d absolutely love to visit Rio at least once in my life. From the pictures I see of it, it’s beautiful. And the Netherlands. And Germany. And Italy. And Switzerland. I really want to go see them. I want to see the Alps. I want to see the places that Van Ruisdael painted. I want to see Rio. I want to look up at night and see the other half of infinity that I don’t see here in the northern hemisphere. But I’d need a guide. I guess I’d have to do a travel package or something. Problem with those is you probably don’t get to talk to the locals, or see the day-to-day environment too much.
But then I can’t speak Portuguese anyway. Or German. Or Dutch. Or Italian. Or Swiss. Or French. Or any of the other languages in the places I’d like to visit. Too bad I’m not living far enough in the future where they have translation devices you can buy and wear. Something like one of those little Blackberry things maybe. And with a geo-positioning thing built in too, so you can find your way around a foreign city all by yourself. Then all the tourists can walk around looking like Borg.
Just Not Something You Thought Was Worth Paying Attention To Was It?
They caught a serial rapist who was preying on guys in the Houston area. I’d seen this story some weeks ago while they were still looking for him and found it disturbing enough to be on the lookout for any follow-ups. Today there was…well…first the good news…
BAYTOWN, Texas — A man arrested on suspicion of rape may be a suspect in the rapes of several men in the Houston area over the past year, police said Wednesday.
The man, whose identity was not released, faces charges of kidnapping and sexual assault in a case from May, said Baytown police Capt. Roger Clifford. He said police were withholding the identity until other victims are able to see the suspect in a lineup.
Police for months have been investigating five cases in which young men were surprised at or near their homes by a gunman demanding money. The last reported attack was in November.
One of the victims pointed investigators to the man, Clifford said.
The suspect was arrested late Tuesday after DNA tests linked him to the victim in a May attack, Clifford said.
…and now the bad…
The investigation was complicated, in part because profilers don’t have a basic standard for investigating male-on-male rapes, Clifford said.
No fooling? And why would that be? Let me guess. Because male on male rape is a homo thing and so it’s really not worthy of police attention. And especially not the attention of the Texas police. Am I close?
I can’t find the reference now, but a book I was reading some years back, I think it was a Randy Shilts book, either And The Band Played On or Conduct Unbecoming, contained a brief scene of a young gay man who’d gone to get medical attention after being sexually assualted by gay bashers, and after he confided in the doctor what happened to him, the doctor simply looked up at him and said "Well, you’re a homosexual aren’t you?" The attitude was, and in a lot of places still is, that if you’re gay and you’re violently assaulted, well it’s your fault for being gay in the first place isn’t it. That’s why they don’t have clue one in Texas about how to profile serial male on male rapists. For decades nobody gave a flying fuck. Assuming they do even nowadays.
Via The Daily Gotham… Are you a republican candidate facing a tight race? Well then play the gay bogyman card for a few quick last minute votes…
Note in particular, this comment from a poster in Wisconsin…
Be aware that above brochure is the exact same template used against several Democrats in campaigns around the country over the last several election cycles, including here in Wisconsin. I believe the "source" for the brochure template ("just add your name and you opponent’s one the respective dotted lines and print") is Donald Widemon’s AFA.
They probably have a print shop dedicated to turning out those, and other anti-gay pamphlets. When I refer to the anti-gay religious right as a hate machine I am not being melodramatic. I’m serious. It’s a big business with them, and they treat it exactly like a business would, complete with dedicated subsidiary operations that exist only to support the parent’s business operations. They have "think tanks" and publishing houses and consumer research operations that do nothing but work on demonizing gay people in order to bring money into their bank accounts, and votes to their chosen political candidates. And its all funded by the same handful of right wing billionaires. I often wonder if the Holocaust came to Germany and Europe via similar means.
Locked in an eternal embrace
Their loving embrace has lasted an eternity – well 5000 years to be precise
It is the city where the exiled Romeo dreamed he died and Juliet’s kisses breathed life back into his body…Yesterday at Mantua, in an amazing echo of that heartrending story, archaeologists revealed the discovery of a couple locked in a tender embrace, one that has endured for more than 5,000 years.
The find was unearthed by experts digging at a neolithic site at a less than romantic industrial estate
…
"They are face to face and their arms and legs are entwined and they are really hugging."
Five thousand years ago the area around Mantua was marshland and criss-crossed by rivers and the environment has helped preserve the skeletons in their near perfect state.
The tribes of the area thrived through hunting and fishing and travelled along the waterways in boats but even then the simple hunter gatherer lifestyle was being replaced by livestock rearing, weaving and pottery.
There’s a bit more detail on the Daily Mail site, including a completely unnecessary linkage to the story of Romeo and Juliet. We don’t know how these lovers died or why. The archaeologist opines that the female was sacrificed after the man was killed, but they died of arrow wounds in random places and that suggests to me that it was some sudden violence that got them. Perhaps tribal warfare or thieves. But look at the position of the two bodies, and in particular their faces. Those bodies were not posed for burial. They died holding onto each other. And thousands of years later, we understand perfectly what they meant to each other. Even if we never know another thing about these two, we know that. Love lives on.
The Rev. Ted Haggard emerged from three weeks of intensive counseling convinced he is "completely heterosexual" and told an oversight board that his sexual contact with men was limited to his accuser.
…
[Rev. Tim Ralph of Larkspur] said three weeks of counseling at an undisclosed Arizona treatment center helped Haggard immensely and left Haggard sure of one thing.
"He is completely heterosexual," Ralph said. "That is something he discovered. It was the acting- out situations where things took place. It wasn’t a constant thing."
Why Haggard chose to act out in that manner is something Haggard and his advisers are trying to discern, Ralph said.
I’ll hazard a guess…because he’s gay. This is the guy after all, who said he didn’t even know the guy he was paying for sex, right up to the moment the answering machine tapes came out. Not your most trustworthy source, this guy.
On the other hand, this could also just be the usual ex-gay double-speak too. Haggard isn’t gay, because according to ex-gay dogma nobody really is anyway. He’s just in therapy to control his acting out behavior. But the human identity isn’t a blackboard anyone can scribble their will upon. His acting out was on the order of seeking sex under less then wholesome circumstances. But that was because of denial, not homosexuality.
Sex is one of the strongest of all instincts, and you can’t bottle it up inside a person without damaging consequences. Haggard’s adventures with the prostitute were eminently predictable. You see that kind of behavior all the time in married, closeted homosexuals. The ex-gay solution is merely to bottle it up even more. So it looks like Haggard’s first step out of therapy is taking him right down the same old road he was on before he got caught with his back being rubbed. No wonder they were encouraging him to stay out of the ministry.
What emerged from the gay adoption business is that the issue of homosexuality is terribly dangerous to the Roman Catholic church. It comes away from such a debate with its public image damaged. And of course this is true of the Anglican Church too. Indeed, it seems to me that the debate about homosexuality poses such a serious threat to organised religion in this country that it is not absurd to compare it to the reformation of the 16th century.
Some will reply that the churches have always faced difficult moral issues, and they have muddled through: the gay issue is nothing unusual. Until quite recently I would have agreed. But it becomes ever clearer that the issue of homosexuality really is different. It has managed to tie the finest Anglican theologian of his generation in knots, effectively disabling him from leadership. And more widely and more seriously it is undermining the churches’ claim to the moral high ground.
…
Firstly, this is an issue that shuns compromise. It has a stark "either/or" quality. Either homosexuality is a fully valid alternative to heterosexuality or it is not. There is no room for compromise, no third way: poor Rowan Williams is trying to make himself a perch on a barbed-wire fence. You don’t find such absoluteness in other moral debates, such a complete absence of shared assumptions and aims.
I think you do, and the obvious example of it is the fight over abortion. But here’s the critical difference, even with that bitter struggle:
The public change in attitudes towards homosexuality is not just the waning of a taboo. It is not just a case of a practice losing its aura of immorality (as with premarital sex or illegitimacy). Instead, the case for homosexual equality takes the form of a moral crusade. Those who want to uphold the old attitude are not just dated moralists (as is the case with those who want to uphold the old attitude to premarital sex or illegitimacy). They are accused of moral deficiency. The old taboo surrounding this practice does not disappear but "bounces back" at those who seek to uphold it. Such a sharp turn-around is, I think, without parallel in moral history.
These factors have combined to make the gay issue the church’s perfect storm, perhaps even its nemesis. Because previous shifts in public morality have been slower, and more amenable to compromise, the Church has been able to move its clunky stone feet, and keep standing. This shift has floored it. By resisting the new moral orthodoxy on homosexuality, and hardening against it, the church is fast losing the aura of moral authority it has more or less retained all this time. When a bishop defends discrimination against homosexuals he is, in the eyes of most of the population, displaying a lamentable moral deficiency.
So the issue of homosexuality has the strange power to turn the moral tables. The traditional moralist is subject to accusations of immorality. And this inversion is doing terrible damage to the Christian churches.
(Emphasis mine) And there it is. At least in the abortion fight, there are two plausibly moral sides to it, that of concern for the life of the unborn, verses concern for the lives of women. And there is a more general question of who decides how your own body is to be used. But in arguments over homosexuality, there is only the judgment that same sex relationships are either damaging in some way, damaging enough to justify acting against them, or they are not. You can take a stand for the rights of women to decide for themselves how and when to give birth, and still be forced to concede that the other side in the fight may well feel compelled to fight for the lives of the unborn, even against the lives of the living. You can disagree with it, you can disagree profoundly with it, but there it is. But in the case of homosexuality, there is only the damage that is done to gay people. Either homosexuality is destructive or it is not. And if it is not, then what have you been doing all this time to homosexual people? Every same sex relationship torn asunder is either two souls saved, or two loving hearts cut to ribbons.
One side in this fight, has a lot of human misery and grief to answer for. And the time is long past for claiming that you couldn’t have known the damage you were doing. Back in the 1950s, when gay people were still living their lives in the shadows, and at least plausibly throughout the 60s and much of the 70s, when gay people were just beginning to step forward in society and demand their place at the table, you could argue that you didn’t really know any gay people, nor much about their lives other then what you heard in the newspapers and from the guy thumping his pulpit in church. But there is no excuse from ignorance today.
And yet you see otherwise decent and intelligent people digging in their heels over it, to ridiculous lengths nowadays, and in the face of overwhelming evidence that not only there is nothing necessarily damaging about homosexuality, but that same sex romantic love and intimacy is just as necessary and life affirming for gay people, as it is for heterosexuals. It’s startling to look at sometimes. The opposition to this is essentially boxing itself in the same coffin made of junk science and religious dogma that the creationists have. Why? For some I’m sure it’s fear of loosing their brittle faith, the only thing keeping them afloat in a rapidly changing world. But for others, the ones who are otherwise more flexible in their spirituality, more able to cope with change, it’s something far more disturbing then the loss of one’s inner bearings. They can feel a mountain of guilt hanging just over their heads.
What have we been doing to these people all this time? What have we done? What have I done?
…I think I have enough material now, both in the cartoon archive, and in stuff I never posted to the site because it wasn’t topical when I did it, to consider doing my first book of political cartoons.
A co-worker who also cartoons recently showed me a book he’d done, using a printer who takes small job orders (100 or so copies). For the past several years I’ve been gathering material on how to go about getting an ISDN number and such. The mainstream media won’t review stuff by self published creators, but this is a new world now, and I can simply bypass the commercial publishing world if I want to. And there are online sellers, big ones including Amazon.Com, who will take orders for books from self publishers. Scribus is an open source page layout program that I keep hearing good things about. My co-worker used it to do his book.
Typically, a book of political cartoons is just one page after another of recent cartoons, with the occasional explanatory text written beside them. What I want to do is something more like what Herblock did with his books. Every four years, during a presidential election cycle, Herblock would publish a book of his previous four years work, organized into chapters by topic that started out with his really killer essays about the times he was living in. He was every bit as good a writer as he was a cartoonist. I may not be at his level, but I’ve always thought that was the way to do a book of political cartoons.
I probably need to re-work some of my early stuff, and that will take some time. I need to figure out how to divide the material into chapters, and what I want to say in the essays for each one. But I’ve already got a title for it, and a cover page. It’ll be the cartoon I did for March 4, 2002, reworked a tad to fit on a book cover. The title of the book will be Deviant Signs.
NEWS ITEM: Michigan Court Of Appeals Says No To Benefits For Same Sex Couples.
The judges said that a the ban on same sex marriage, voted into the state constitution back in 2004, applies to domestic partner benefits. "The marriage amendment’s plain language prohibits public employers from recognizing same-sex unions for any purpose," the court said.
This wasn’t exactly what the voters were being told would happen back in 2004. Marlene Elwell, campaign director for the Amendment was emphatic, stating that "This has nothing to do with taking benefits away. This is about marriage between a man and a woman." But that was double talk. The clear intent of the groups working to pass the amendment, was to insure that same sex couples could only be legal strangers in the eyes of the law, and the language of the amendment reflected that intent precisely. When they told the voters that their intent wasn’t to take benefits away, they were only telling a half truth, if that. Their intent, was to take everything away from same sex couples that the law might legally provide…not benefits specifically.
Their rhetoric during the campaign was tactical and dishonest and it worked. And the proof of that is their silence now, as the rights they kept insisting would not be taken from same sex couples are now being stripped relentlessly away by the courts, who are only following the plain and unambiguous language of the amendment.
A January news article in The Christian Science Monitor quotes Ian Douglas, professor of Mission and World Christianity at the Episcopal Divinity School in Cambridge, Mass., on the troubles now facing the Episcopal church as it continues to schism over homosexuality. Observing that the Anglican Communion’s tradition of inclusion is being put to the test, Douglas goes on to say, "Part of the problem with the Anglican community today is that the different constituencies are so convinced of their own truth, that they say they have no need of others – and that goes against Anglican tradition."
In other words, the blame for the hostility toward homosexuals now raging through the Episcopalian Church is at least partly the fault of gay people, who are too convinced of their own truth to listen to others. On the other hand, you could argue that gay people have been beaten over the head with the viewpoint of people like the Archbishop of Nigeria Peter Akinola (who supports a proposed Nigerian law which would ban gay people in that country from so much as sitting down together in a public restaurant) for generations. What part of their own truth, should gay people renounce in order to accommodate others like Akinola?
Every time the homophobes put one of those all embracing anti-same sex marriage amendments forward, the ones that ban Any legal recognition whatsoever of same sex couples, they take pains to reassure the public that their amendment isn’t intended to strip everything away from same sex couples. Oh no…they say…it’s only about keeping marriage between a man and a woman. The gays will still have rights too, they claim. Just not the right to marry.
Public universities and governments can’t provide health insurance to the partners of gay employees without violating the state constitution, the Michigan Court of Appeals ruled Friday.
A three-judge panel said a 2004 voter-approved ban on gay marriage also applies to same-sex domestic partner benefits.
"The marriage amendment’s plain language prohibits public employers from recognizing same-sex unions for any purpose," the court said.
The decision reverses a 2005 ruling from an Ingham County judge who said universities and governments could provide the benefits.
A constitutional amendment passed by Michigan voters in November 2004 made the union between a man and a woman the only agreement recognized as a marriage "or similar union for any purpose." Those six words led to a fight over benefits for gay couples.
Gay couples and others had argued the public intended to ban gay marriage but not block benefits for domestic partners.
But the court said: "It is a cornerstone of a democratic form of government to assume that a free people act rationally in the exercise of power, are presumed to know what they want, and to have understood the proposition submitted to them in all of its implications, and by their approval vote to have determined that the proposal is for the public good and expresses the free opinion of a sovereign people."
In Michigan, Citizens for Protection of Marriage repeatedly stated in its literature and in press interviews that a ban on same–sexmarriage would not affect domestic partnership benefits.
“This has nothing to do with taking benefits away,” Marlene Elwell, campaign director, told USA Today on October 15, 2004. “This is about marriage between a man and a woman.”
The campaign’s communications director was equally adamant. The proposal would have no effect on gay couples, Kristina Hemphill told the Holland Sentinel. “This amendment has nothing to do with benefits,” she said.
To secure and preserve the benefits of marriage for our society and for future generations of children, the union of one man and one woman in marriage shall be the only agreement recognized as a marriage or similar union for any purpose."
And that’s standard operating procedure for the religious right: lie through your teeth…Jesus won’t mind if you’re doing it for him.
But look at what the judges decided. Even though the rhetoric coming out of the mouths of the amendment supporters was telling the voters one thing, the voters are assumed to have meant to vote for what they were repeatedly told they weren’t voting for anyway.
And, in a sense, you can’t blame the judges here, because it’s right fucking there in the text of the amendment: "…the union of one man and one woman in marriage shall be the only agreement recognized as a marriage or similar union for any purpose." What part of "For Any Purpose" didn’t you understand when you voted?
And you have to figure that a lot of voters Did intend this result, even as they were nodding their heads and saying to themselves yes, yes, yes…this isn’t taking anything at all away from the homos… Hypocrisy is how you save face, when you’re busy putting a knife in your neighbor’s back. But given the results in Arizona, I expect that just enough people were fooled by the rhetoric, that the amendment might have failed if they saw clearly what it was they were voting for. Maybe.
And of course, that’s exactly why the religious right lies.
Adventures In Home Ownership: Hey, Where’d That Leak Come From…?
I feel lucky to have caught it. I had shirts that I’d left in the dryer overnight, and I went down into the basement to flip the dryer on for a few minutes to de-wrinkle them so I could wear one. When I came back about ten minutes later to take them out I noticed a trickle of water across the floor that hadn’t been there ten minutes before. It was coming from the bottom of the hot water heater.
Learning about hot water heaters was another one of those things I’d never really appreciated, having spent nearly my whole life in rental apartments: just like a roof, the damn things will eventually start leaking. But unlike a roof, a hot water tank will leak with the force of your municipal water system pressure behind it. I’ve heard stories about those things failing all of a sudden and flooding basements, and between that and supply hoses on washing machines (which I’ve also heard these stories about) it’s kept me very nervous about my basement. Since I bought the house I’ve developed this tick of checking for leaks every time I go down there.
So I turned off the hot heater and shut off the water supply to it. Then I called around for a replacement. I’d been hoping to replace the tank when it’s day came with one of those new "tankless" hot water heaters, not only because it appealed the techo-geek in me, but also the waste-not-want-not side of me. They don’t waste energy keeping a tank full of water sitting around at temperature waiting for you to use some. But when I asked I discovered that the price of one of those things, installed, was around four grand. Yikes! I’m still paying off the new furnace I had to buy last year. The top of the line water tank for my size house (just 40 gallons) cost eight-hundred installed. Which was still more then I’d expected to be shelling out this month. But better that then a flooded basement. I still feel lucky.
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