10 January 2018

Un-Puzzling

Oh, dear. It's another of those dreadful teaser posts, in which we find vague or overly dramatic references to an upcoming topic. I suppose the real mystery here is why i keep doing that.
But we'll just pretend that our puzzle today is a simple matter of identity.

Do you know this man?


Perhaps this might help?


However, i suspect that many readers of Cyrillic lettering can likely ID this individual without the text help, even if this image will be 40 years old next year.

09 January 2018

Inventing The Funnycar

I had planned to run the first full length Funnyman adventure, featuring teen fans mobbing celebrities to steal from them. A fair tale, perhaps a bit ahead of the cultural curve. But the second issue featured this oddball story that shoved its way up to the front of the queue, and i'm disinclined to argue with it. Somewhere between the Black Beauty and Silver lies Jet Jallopy, the Funnycar!


I hear a lot of talk these days about smart cars.
They've got a long way to go to catch up to Jet Jallopy!

tale by Jerry Siegel & Joe Shuster for Funnyman #2 (1948)

A Sixpack Of Funny

Still having trouble focusing outward, so we're breaking the post into parts to get it going.
Just a batch of covers this time - all six issues of Funnyman - with the awaited reveal on our creators - Jerry Siegel and Joe Shuster, creators of Superman (And The Spectre, of course) *







Alien protector, supernatural avenger, bored clown.
You can't accuse the boys from Cleveland of simply trying to retread their previous ideas.

===

*(Thanks to our favorite Mindbender for unbending my recollection on The Spectre. Only Jerry Siegel was involved in that creation, not Joe Shuster)

covers from Funnyman 1-6 (1948)

08 January 2018

Gloomy Times? Who Ya Gonna Call?

Look!
Out in the gloom!

It's a Fool!

It's a Clown!

It's -


And once again, Larry David is so close, but left out in the cold, cold shadows...

But, you remember Funnyman, right? From one of the most famous creative teams in comic history, you know he had to spawn imitators-


-even if he spawned 'em in his own book.

As far as i know, the above story is the only one on which the creator's names were not prominently featured. Even the one page origin at the top is actually a two pager - i left the full page splash with credits in the wings. More fun for those who enjoying puzzling over such things.

Next time, we'll see those names as we take a closer look at our Heroic Harlequin.
...our Crime-busting Clown?
...our Jokester of Justice?
...our...

Oh, look! What a can of worms.
Think i'll tamp that lid back down.

credits next time. we don't want to ruin the fun for those who enjoyers referenced above (70 years ago)

Hey! Look Behind The Curtain

A brief follow-up before we continue.

An overview of the Social Security situation.
When you hear politicians in Washington talking about Social Security as an "Entitlement Program", you are listening to criminals trying to cover up their crimes, or the crimes of their colleagues/predecessors. Social Security is a mandatory insurance program in which we were all forced to participate. As usual, our  government doesn't like the idea of living up to their deals once it's no longer profitable for them.

Some may want to talk about how much of the budget gets eaten up by that obligation, but the real question is Why is so much of the budget going towards those payments?
In the 1980s, it was clear where we were headed, and so the withholdings for Social Security were dramatically increased to build a massive trust fund to finance the deal. Last time i looked, it was between 2.5-3 Trillion dollars. That's 15 zeroes. How much interest do you suppose that much capital in a trust fund generates?

How about none.

In the 90s the government got to looking at all that cash just sitting there doing nothing. (Serving the needs of the citizenry counts as "doing nothing," of course) So they decided to embezzle it. They raided the fund and replaced the cash with Treasury Notes. They called it an "Economic Miracle" and claimed the budget was balanced. And all they had to do was steal the future from the citizens whom they had conned into trusting their money to them. As near as i can tell, this raiding of the actual cash has continued, because - money.

So now, not only does the budget have to cover cashing out those Treasury Notes to pay back our money they stole, but they also have to pay for the interest generated on said notes. So instead of our money earning interest or dividends to fund what we were promised, it generates more debt for our budget.
Instead of cash generating earnings to pay for the program, we have debit statements racking up more debt to be paid out. It's the theft that keeps on thieving.

The government STOLE the money, replaced it with IOUs, and is trying to punish the public for wanting the government to deliver on their promises, promises that we already paid for.

When you hear politicians in DC talking about the Social Security "Entitlement Program", call bullshit and demand they return our stolen funds.

===

Okay. I'll lighten up now.
I know just the hero to call for help, and we'll be back in a short while.

Blue Monday Calendar 2018 Week 02

This week's Gil Elvgren calendar painting is Phone-a-Vision from 1964 -

05 January 2018

How It Works In The USA

I'd like to continue on the topic from this morning, but today seems to be one of those all too frequent occasions when my internet access provider is testing their slow lane or something. Once or twice a month i have a day when any websites without corporate backing enter a connecting/loading loop from which they never break out.

I miss Qwest, the old company. But when the US government went hogwild grabbing up new power in the last decade, the owner of Qwest was one of the few who stood up for Rule Of Law and refused to illegally just hand over what the government wanted. So he was rapidly set up, prosecuted and destroyed, breaking the company and allowing a more compliant organization to take over. As is usually the case these days when one doesn't cooperate with a criminal government order.

Not surprisingly, things went down hill, and we now have very low expectations for the future when it comes to having our rights and access protected.  The funny thing is, they think i'll still pay full price for half access - and typically the half that holds no interest for me. Jack the costs up and drop the service and a whole lot of us are going to start doubling and tripling up, sharing service to cut price.

When the Soviet Union was a going concern, people used to talk about how Communism works on paper, but once you get people involved the inherent corruption always manifests to destroy the potential. Of course, the very same holds true for Capitalism which is how you wind up with what we have under the label of "capitalism" these days. (More often called "American Style Capitalism" elsewhere) We have corporations that operate as admitted terrorists and extortionists while buying laws to prevent prosecution, or even civil suits. Our high courts have declared the government officially for sale. We have jails that rent better facilities to prisoners who have money. We have debtors prisons making a resurgence as a profit mechanism for our current corrupted style of crony capitalism. We have pathetic medical care that costs almost much as the other 9 in the top ten list combined while providing inferior care, and our solution to the problem is to let the profiteers write new laws to move the costs around instead of fixing the corruption. We've gone from politicians working to avoid the mere "Appearance of Impropriety" to the point that felony convictions are no longer necessarily an issue. On some international freedom scales we don't even rank in the top 30 while idiots run around asking "How Free Are You On A Scale Of 1 To America?" Social inequality is reaching Dickensian heights, with corporate leaders making 500-1000 times what their workers earn. (For reference, in the middle of the last century the ratio was about 50 to 1) We have self-labelled "Christians" who worship Money so hard that they've started a branch of the religion that teaches that Christ was a bit of a twat who didn't know what he was talking about, and his Daddy really wants you to be rich and rule over the filthy masses. (Yes, this is the church to which our current Executive Tweeter belongs) We debate what is or is not torture now, while only a couple generations back we executed foreign soldiers for using the exact same practices on our soldiers which we now embrace as "tools of freedom," even though anyone who isn't an idiot or evil will understand that torture doesn't make people tell the truth, it makes them tell whatever the torturer wants to hear to make the torture stop. And then they can't figure out why people think they're evil idiots, reinforcing both notions.

Let's not even start on the bad joke of the "Freedom Lite"* two party system choking our politics. The current state of politics is akin to watching a couple of gangs fighting a bloody turf war and being told to pick one and pretend they're the good guys. Such is the binary nature of our ingrained cultural thinking.

Three pages of information to which i seek access have continued to attempt to load for the duration of this typing. The NY Times obituary loaded in seconds. The personal sites run by fans are all access blocked at the moment. Perhaps it's nothing more than a system glitch. But, as i said, this is a regular ongoing occurrence, and that leaves a great deal of trepidation for the future as our current greedy governors grab for more money and control.  Again. Yet again.

It's funny when we hear the FCC talk about how the rules and restrictions they keep changing are no longer a reflection of modern business.
Of course not! They were set up as protections. Protections from business interests trumping social needs and from information distortion. Protections for the citizenry, and for the proper functioning of a free society. NONE of those are a concern today, in fact - they're considered liabilities, impediments to acquisition and consolidation of power (as they were intended to be) so they've got to go. When the majority of the information media outlets are concentrated into a half dozen corporations, you don't even need conspiracies to skew information. With numbers that small, mere common interest with bias reporting, or the lack thereof. (It's probably worth noting that they all have major "defense" industry interests)

And while they might spout some very nice sounding reasons at times, it's important to remember that they take hundreds of millions of dollars from the public to spend on research to learn what to say to make us give more, accept more, and bend over more readily.


Some day soon we should talk about identity. How many people even know who they are? Are you more than just an echo?


No wonder i'm a hermit, eh?
And i just wanted to look at Cats.


===

* (Here's how the two party system works, and why it's considered to be "Freedom Lite":
You want to go out for dinner and you're given two choices - Did you want a Big Mac or a Whopper?
Pizza, chicken, steak, fish, lobster, salad, or anything else is not up for discussion. It's been decided you're going to have hamburger, now you have the "freedom" to choose between char broiling or frying, and to pick your condiments.
That, in essence, is the two party system of politics.)

Poems 5¢

Still not quite here, even when i'm here. So just going to run a short teaser now, and hopefully i'll be more functional after sleepage.

People may remember B. Kliban for creating Cat memes that fascinated folks in the USA to the point of obsession and near madness decades before the web, but how many remember him as one of this country's great poets of the '70s?

Let us look (as parsed through his comics) -








Hopefully more better brain in head later, with words and things.
See you  then.

cartoons by B. Kliban from Whack Your Porcupine And Other Drawings and Never Eat Anything Bigger Than Your Head & Other Drawings (1976-7)

04 January 2018

Masters Of A Different Domain

Just back from my monthly supply run and submitting myself to the med techs, and i'm knackered. It turned out a good day for it, though. The winds died down and the temperature warmed up to freezing, so the trek wasn't as bad as it might have been. But still, i'm off to bed soon after putting this in the queue, and we're keeping it right simple today.

You perhaps have heard that there's a new Masters Of The Universe movie in the works for 2019?

With all the various reboots and movies based on old 80s properties, this one might actually have some of the greatest potential.
Oh, sure - it didn't work out so great last time. We had a game cast working with what they had, but in those days they weren't going to get much from the studio. So they ended up trying to imply a huge world without actually being able to show any of it. This time... who knows?

Maybe we'll get something more like...













Well, if that's the case - I'll pop the corn, bring it on.


He-Man and the Masters Of The Universe visiting from Calendar year 1986