What a difference eight years makes...

The first cartoon speech bubble at right would now probably read:

You’re not going to hold up a vial of powder representing anthrax at the U.N. to suggest that the dry anthrax attacks on Americans through letters in 2001 came from Iraq—even though only the Americans and the Russians have weaponized dry anthrax, are you?!?!?

Of course, me being a liberal commie pinko faggot, makes me incapable of seeing the obvious logic that the reason we’ve not had any more anthrax letters in these United States since 2001 is BECAUSE we’re in Iraq and we’re WINNING, and if I love terrorists so much I should just move there.

Read the following as the indignantly screaming puffy red-faced conservative media pundit of your choice: “I’m sure the Taliban would just love your little prissy cartoons, and you could enjoy drawing them with your teeth, as they’ll have cut off your hands, THEN just when you can adjust to that, they’ll cut off your head. IS THAT WHAT YOU WANT? IS IT? IS IT?!?!? You can tell us all about how there’s no link between the two from that gurgling bloody stump above your shoulders!!!”

So in the meantime again we retreat into our airy fairy cartoon world. Turn on, tune in, drop out. Which does not allegedly mean “Get stoned and abandon all constructive activity.” As Timothy Leary explained in his 1983 autobiography “Flashbacks”:

“‘Turn on’ meant go within to activate your neural and genetic equipment. Become sensitive to the many and various levels of consciousness and the specific triggers that engage them. Drugs were one way to accomplish this end. ‘Tune in’ meant interact harmoniously with the world around you—externalize, materialize, express your new internal perspectives. ‘Drop out’ suggested an elective, selective, graceful process of detachment from involuntary or unconscious commitments. Drop Out meant self-reliance, a discovery of one’s singularity, a commitment to mobility, choice, and change.”

Makes sense when you're high, man.

Anyway for those who pay entirely too much attention to every word on this site, you vividly remember the last paragraph from a couple of month’s back, the mentioning a of Big Little Book from 1934. Which is where the background image this month comes from.

It’s the adorable Ella Cinders—read it again, last name first, get it? A cartoon character I was TOTALLY unfamiliar with, even though I thought I knew more than the average person amount about such topics of global importance.

Ella has been pretty much overshadowed historically by Betty Boop, but in terms of cartoon crushes, there is no contest, as to which large-eyed waif has stolen my heart.

I am obviously not right in the head. Which shouldn’t stop you from reading more of my babbling prose by clicking on the black and white cartoons on this page, as I edge closer and closer to forty one years of age.

Still,