In case you missed it, my cartoons are back in print … in Print, Pittsburgh’s East End newspaper. Look for “Pen Avenue” on the editorial page in upcoming issues.
If you want to read Print online, you can’t … you’ll need to buy a physical copy at select stores in the East End (including the Giant Eagle in Squirrel Hill) or visit the website.
Continue reading “Did you see his name in the local paper?”Bye bye, Bluesky. Besides, how can they miss me if I won’t go away?
From the “This is Not an Airport, There is No Need to Announce Your Departure” Department:
After about six months of using Bluesky — one of the many social media apps proposed as a replacement for X-Twitter — I ditched it over the weekend.
So if you were one of my teeming legions of followers on Bluesky (I think I was in danger of breaking 50 people), well, I’m gone from there, at least for now, and you’ll have to follow me here, or on Facebook or Mastodon.
I was skeptical of Bluesky from the beginning. Any service where you had to be “invited” to use it kind of gets up my nose a little bit. It seemed like most of the people being “invited” were people in the media who had large followings on X-Twitter. The kewl kids, in other words.
Being neither kewl nor popular, I received an invite from an old friend — I certainly didn’t merit one from Bluesky on my own.
I also was suspicious of Bluesky because of the involvement of former Twitter CEO — and Elon Musk buddy — Jack Dorsey. Dorsey, whose net-worth is estimated at more than $3 billion, has the same questionable ideas about politics, public service and free speech as a lot of Silicon Valley billionaires, and anything he’s got his booger-hooks into is sus, in my admittedly blinkered view.
But I tried Bluesky, and I tried to give it a fair shake, and frankly I didn’t like the vibe. There seemed to be a lot of Important People With Bold-Faced Names there who are used to others Listening when they talk.
Not everyone, mind you — and not even a majority, I’m sure. But it had a definite undercurrent of mansplaining, sealioning, and whataboutism.
(Some people have said they’ve experienced the same thing on the aforementioned Mastodon, another social media service. That hasn’t been my experience over there, but I can respect that it’s happening to other people. Maybe it’s just social media that’s intrinsically bad.)
Anyway, I stuck it out. I never seemed to get more followers, even after Bluesky dropped the “invitations” and opened the app up to everyone.
(The same thing happened to me, come to think of it, when I was on another X-Twitter replacement, Post.News. I have checked my breath and my armpits just in case. It has also occurred to me that maybe no one gives a crap about anything I have to say. Trust me, it’s not the first time I’ve been told that.)
Over the weekend, an attention-seeking Washington Post writer did an interview with the operator of a loathsome YouTube channel that targets LGBTQ students and teachers for harassment. The channel has been blamed for a number of people being hounded out of their jobs, and now, at least one death — that of a non-binary teenager in Oklahoma who suffered weeks of harassment by other students before being beaten to death in a high school restroom.
The Post writer — who is making a cottage industry out of doing profiles of “edgy” (meaning “bigoted” and “neo-Nazi”) Internet personalities — defended the profile of the crank on the grounds that she was “exposing” this person’s vapidity and evil ideology. It’s the theory that says “if you give someone enough rope, they’ll hang themselves.”
I’ll get into that another time; but briefly, there is absolutely no evidence that “exposing” these cranks and kooks strips them of their power. In fact, for the past 20 years, we’ve seen quite the opposite — it tends to mainstream them and make their views seem more normal. If you put Alex Jones on network TV often enough, then suddenly — even if you still think his ideas are lunacy, and you’re trying to show people that he’s a lunatic — your audience starts to get used to him and accustomed to his lunatic ideas.
And thus is America’s Overton window inching ever closer to Nazism.
(Malory Archer voice: “Do you want Trump? Because that’s how you get Trump.”)
Anyway. The kewl kids of Bluesky in the New York City and Washington, D.C. media quickly circled the wagons around the Washington Post writer, defending her decision (and the newspaper’s decision) to platform a dangerous lunatic crank.
“You don’t understand how journalism works,” was a common tut-tut expressed all weekend by various columnists and pundits, many of whom are pulling down six-figure salaries, to any ordinary people who raised objections to one of the world’s most important newspapers giving a valuable platform to someone who has been called a literal terrorist — and who is, frankly, putting evil into the world at a frightening rate.
I posted my own criticism, figuring that my 40 or so Bluesky followers might be interested.
Well, despite the fact that all of my readers on that service could fit into a PRT bus and still leave 20 vacant seats, I started to get hammered by nasty comments. Apparently Bluesky’s algorithm was putting my comments in front of a lot more people than were actually following me. Pretty soon, Saturday night, I was blocking comments as fast as they could be posted. I was called a pervert for defending transgender kids. I was called an idiot who didn’t understand how the media works.
Bluesky is struggling with moderation, according to Wired — Black users have reported that the N-word is being slung around with wild abandon, including in user’s screen names — so I’m guessing I’m not the only one who’s had these problems.
There was a time when I would have argued with these chucklefucks, or at least made fun of them, but honestly? Life is short. Who needs to spend a single moment fighting with losers on social media — especially on a platform like Bluesky which is brand-new, driving absolutely no traffic to my radio show or other work, and so far is only exposing me to the opinions of people I already knew about anyway?
With two clicks on my phone — bloop, bleep — I nuked my account.
I’m an avid listener of the “Omnibus” podcast produced by “Jeopardy!” host Ken Jennings and The Long Winters frontman/guitarist John Roderick. Roderick was a power-user of X-Twitter until he posted a thread about trying to teach his pre-teen daughter to use a can opener to open a can of beans.
It was a cute story (I thought at the time) that quickly became not-cute when Roderick was accused of child abuse (a Twitter user actually reported him to child protective services, which investigated him) and was dubbed “Bean Dad.” He lost a co-hosting gig on one of his other podcasts and for a brief moment, there was an effort to get Jennings fired from his “Jeopardy!” duties.
Last week, on an episode about the food pyramid, Jennings and Roderick joked about what the latter called his “explosive ejection” from social media.
“You know what was very good for me?” Jennings said. “When Twitter finally auto-updated on my phone and I got the ugly black X (logo). I just don’t want to click on it … if that was a cute blue bird, I’d be like, ‘oh, this is the cute blue bird that tells me jokes and brings me news,’ but I don’t want to click on that X.”
“I think (social media) is the most toxic thing in my life,” Roderick said.
I continue to marvel at longtime users of X-Twitter who call themselves “the Twitter resistance,” who somehow are committed to staying on the service even it turns into a miasma of Nazis, edgelords, trolls, low-quality advertisers and glitchy customer service. They seem to believe that they can somehow “fix” the culture of X-Twitter although its billionaire sole proprietor is devoting ever-increasing amounts of his own time and money to make the culture worse by all available metrics.
It reminds of the joke about the two little old ladies who eat lunch at the same restaurant every day.
“I don’t know why we come here,” the first lady says, “the food is terrible.”
“I agree,” says the second lady, “and the portions are so small!”
The food on Twitter is terrible (and getting worse). Why would you want to keep coming back?
Anyway, regarding the supposedly new, shiny, better alternative. Pink Floyd sang:
Did you ever wonder why we had to run for shelter
When the promise of a brave new world
Unfurled beneath a clear blue sky?
I have no idea, but I have a hunch it was probably caused by social media.
There is enough negativity in the world already; I don’t need to have it delivered to me over my phone, unbidden, from random dum-dums wearing Oakley sunglasses in their profile photos so that Jack Dorsey can buy another $21 million compound in San Francisco. Bye, bye, Bluesky.
Stop saying ‘wait ’til next year,’ Pirates fans. There is no future as long as the owner makes more money being mediocre
The Athletic came for Pirates owner Bob Nutting this week. Just shoot this straight into my veins:
Nutting, whose family made its money owning newspapers before buying a ballclub and ski resorts, has always asked his management team to do more with less … But conversations with more than 20 current and former players, coaches and club officials, some of whom were granted anonymity in order to speak freely, revealed numerous issues plaguing the Pirates:
Years of misses in the draft and amateur international market. Conflicts between old- and new-school philosophies in the coaching ranks. Distrust among some players in the development process, including a situation last season in which third baseman Ke’Bryan Hayes secretly sought help from the Pirates’ then-Double A hitting coach, who the team let go a short time later. Most of all: A front office handcuffed by a frugal owner.
I drew this cartoon in 2009. What’s changed since then?
Absolutely Nutting. Er, I mean, nothing.
Continue reading “Forces of evil in a Bozo nightmare”Help, help, I’m being cancelled, just because I’m a terrible person!
MyPillow founder and mustache enthusiast Mike Lindell says that Fox “News” Channel has cancelled his company’s advertising with no explanation.
Lindell — former crack addict turned Trump addict — took to a podcast hosted by fellow conspiracy weirdo and serial shirt wearer Steve Bannon to complain that he was the victim of “cancel culture.”
One of the leading proponents of various bizarre election theories (he refers to Trump as “our real president”), Lindell was apparently banned from being a guest on Fox “News” after the makers of voting machines sued him and the network over false allegations they were making.
But until December, commercials for Lindell’s overpriced pillows were welcome on the channel, because Cash Rules Everything Around Murdoch. Not any more.
“Everything is just alarming and suspicious,” Lindell said. “Why now, just out of the blue, ‘you’re canceled’?”
Well, smiley, stop paying your bill and see what happens:
A source with knowledge of the situation confirmed to Rolling Stone that the network’s partnership with My Pillow “was paused due to the fact Mike Lindell hasn’t been able to finance the commercials and this was communicated to his media agency at length.”
Lindell is rather famously out of money as a result of the aforementioned lawsuits.
Continue reading “Don’t you know that I still care for you?”Congratulations, Dave Chappelle: You now have One Joke.
Has anyone thought about slipping Dave Chappelle some fresh material? Maybe “The Official Polish Joke Book” or “101 Uses for a Dead Cat”?
I can see him now, paging through old “Garfield” paperbacks, trying to come up with ideas: “Man, people really hate Mondays. Write that down!”
I said this on the bird site years ago, but it bears repeating, especially since I’ve deleted my presence there. I was a big Dave Chappelle fan, and I especially admired the fact that he was willing to walk away from his Comedy Central show when he felt it was becoming unhealthy. That took guts.
Watching his descent into being a right-wing troll is sad. It’s a little bit pathetic. Congratulations, Dave: You now have One Joke.
His latest special is another jeremiad against transgender people. He also takes shots at the disabled. I’m not going to link to it; no need to give him the clicks and the attention.
One of the interesting things about Chappelle is that he famously relocated to a farm outside of Yellow Springs, Ohio, in order to regain some sense of privacy and avoid the spotlight.
Over the past 20 years, I’ve spent a fair amount of time in Yellow Springs, which is the home of Antioch College and a pretty good public radio station, WYSO, which I’ve toured.
Yellow Springs is also a very liberal and gay-friendly town. It’s an oasis of tolerance in a part of Ohio that’s otherwise deeply MAGA.
So Dave Chappelle is basically deliberately picking a fight with his neighbors. But this isn’t the only fight that he’s picked with them. During the COVID lockdown, he also started holding “socially distanced” concerts on his farm, which was a really nice gesture, except that he didn’t tell the people on the surrounding farms, who rightly got bugged by the noise and the traffic.
Chappelle also blocked a plan to bring 140 units of affordable housing to Yellow Springs, threatening to pull his investments in several proposed businesses if the local governments approved a developer’s plans. He has since bought the vacant property.
When we were in Yellow Springs in 2022, I saw Chappelle standing in front of a bookstore, talking to a group of people, while wearing a shirt advertising his own concert tour. (So much for wanting to stay inconspicuous.) I thought about going over to shake his hand so that I could at least say I’d met him, but decided against it.
He’s become a crank. And like I said, as a fan (I guess, former fan), it makes me sad.
When I posted something about this on Facebook, a friend who’s retired from the U.S. Army said, “I had the privilege of watching Bob Hope when I was deployed. He told many jokes over nearly two hours and there wasn’t a single racial one in the mix. Were comedians just better 50 years ago?”
Well, Lord knows Bob Hope stayed well past his prime, so I don’t know that I’d hold him up as an exemplar.
I don’t think comedians were better. Plenty of them did lean on ethnic stereotypes and anti-gay stereotypes. I can remember Johnny Carson and others doing “Puerto Rican” jokes and imitating gay people by mincing around and letting their wrists go limp. Those days are best left in the past.
But I do think comedians needed to have broader appeal. There were only three TV networks and a limited number of radio stations. Being too outrageous or crude condemned you to playing crummy nightclubs and doing “party records,” like Redd Foxx and Rusty Warren.
Because there are so many outlets now — basically an unlimited number of TikTok, YouTube and Instagram “creators” — the only way to break away from the pack is to say and do terrible things. No one ever goes viral by being polite and nuanced.
Dave Chappelle either has a deep-rooted prejudice against transgender people — again, some of the very same people who he sees regularly on the streets of Yellow Springs — or he’s decided that the best way to break through the clutter and keep his name in the news is by being an asshole to them.
Maybe it’s a little bit of both. That’s his choice. My choice is to ignore him. Bob Hope may have overstayed his welcome, but he had a successful career for 60 years before he became irrelevant and a object of pity.
What’s Chappelle’s excuse?
If only there was a word to describe people who spend all day hanging out with Nazis.
The thing about freedom of speech is — it’s the government that’s required to permit unpopular speech. Not private individuals.
If you show up at the local borough council meeting and decide to unlimber your opinions during the “public comment” session, go nuts. The government can’t stop you. And I’m sure the South Park Township commissioners will be delighted to hear about how the squirrels in your backyard are actually secret agents sent by George Soros to inject you with COVID vaccines.
But if you show up on my front porch and decide to harangue me about how Hunter Biden is fluoridating your underpants, I’m going to turn the hose on you.
Same thing if you show up at my place of business. Sir, this is an Arby’s, and we are not required to let you make a speech. Take your horsey sauce and get off of the premises.
This brings me to Substack, the newsletter and blogging distribution platform.
Continue reading “They got free speech tourists, police in trucks”Slap a toilet seat on the front and call it the “Cyber Edsel.”
I’m not an Elon Musk hater. Yes, I’ve exited Twitter (aka “X”), and if Elon Musk were the man of the hour, I’d have someone watching him every minute. I think he’s a sleazeball.
But I also think he’s arguably done as much to advance the acceptance of electric cars as Henry Ford did to advance the cause of internal-combustion automobiles in the 1900s. Without Tesla, it’s unlikely that GM, Ford, Toyota, VW and Stellantis — who spent decades explaining why electric vehicles couldn’t be successfully built — would be currently tripping over themselves to rush their own electric vehicles to the market. Tesla embarrassed the big carmakers, over and over again, just as Henry Ford ran circles against the other carmakers in the 1910s and 1920s.
Alas, after the wild success of the Model T, and the almost-as-successful Model A, Henry Ford became convinced of his own infallible genius and launched one crackpot idea after another — a rubber plantation in Brazil, cars made of soybeans. Worst of all, of course, were Henry Ford’s efforts to mainstream antisemitism by promoting the hoax, “The Protocols of the Elders of Zion,” which influenced Nazis in the 1930s and continues to poison minds today around the world.
By the time World War II rolled around, the Ford Motor Company was functionally bankrupt. The Roosevelt administration ordered Henry Ford’s grandson to be released from the military so that he could come home and save the old man’s company from the founder. Henry died a lonely, isolated, frustrated man.
Elon Musk is speed-running Henry Ford’s career now — including, it must be said, the antisemitism.
Continue reading “You’ll know it’s me when I come through your town”In which I start to read a fun story about an old-timey car factory, and stumble over a giant race riot
(This started out as kind of a history/car post and turned into a political rant. You have been warned. If you want to skip this, go check out “Love Is” instead. It’s about two naked eight-year-olds who are married.)
I’m a big car nut, and a major history buff, and one of my favorite topics is defunct car brands — you know, the kinds of cars that haven’t been made for years and are mostly punchlines to jokes, like Fozzie Bear in his Studebaker and the dad buying an Edsel in “Peggy Sue Got Married.”
I was sitting in a waiting room on Tuesday with several hours to kill, started surfing old-time car blogs, and fell down a wormhole, reading about the Packard car company and its giant factory in Detroit.
Of all of the defunct car brands in the U.S., perhaps none has a stronger fan base than Packard. Before the Great Depression, it was considered one of the “three P’s” of American luxury cars — Packard, Peerless and Pierce-Arrow — that rivaled Rolls-Royce in prestige and quality.
When the demand for luxury cars collapsed in the early 1930s, Peerless and Pierce-Arrow exited the business, but Packard soldiered on, mainly by moving down-market and making cheaper cars. During World War II, Packard, which was famed for its high-quality engineering and manufacturing standards, supplied aircraft engines for fighter planes.
After the war, unfortunately, Packard reintroduced the same cars it had been making in 1941 and 1942. Though fashionable before the war, styling trends had moved on. The company quickly got a reputation for being too conservative and stodgy. Increasingly, its cars were bought by little old ladies, retired bankers and clergy.
Packard’s motto was (the not-very-inclusive) “Ask the Man Who Owns One,” but the man who owned one was likely to be an elderly doctor driving a plain black one with no radio and rubber floor mats. (When I wrote my G.C. Murphy Co. history book, one of the people I interviewed remembered her father, the company president, driving a Packard in the 1950s. His kids would hide on the floor when they saw their friends. “It looked like a hearse,” she told me.)
Continue reading “Hey, wake up, your eyes weren’t open wide”I don’t know anything except for the fact that I don’t know anything. Someone give me a TV show, quick
Former President Donald Trump says “I may go to Israel.” My God, hasn’t everyone over there suffered enough already?
All I have to say about the Israel-Gaza conflict is that a hell of a lot of people need to get the hell off of social media and touch grass.
Everyone’s so quick to pick a team, like this is football, and we’re supposed to root for one side, no matter what they do.
At her Substack newsletter, The Present Age, Parker Molloy hears echoes of 9/11, when another former President, George W. Bush, asked the world, “Are you for the terrorists or against them?”
Well — and this is me talking — who the f–k is “for” the terrorists?
But similarly, who the f–k is in favor of apartheid?
And as for the people who insist on bringing this conflict home — and taking out their fears and prejudices on their local Jewish or Muslim neighbors, either in-person or on social media, in the form of antisemitism or Islamophobia — I think they’re deeply damaged, whether by cable TV or social media or God knows what.
Continue reading “Look out kid, it’s something you did—God knows when, but you’re doin’ it again”Listening to the new format on one of the local AM radio stations this morning made me wish for a thunderstorm. Loud static would have been more enjoyable
Today’s get-up-and-get-moving jam is from the little-known 1978 disco movie, “Thank God It’s Friday,” starring West Homestead’s own Jeff Goldblum and Donna Summer:
I wouldn’t know the song if it weren’t for Barry Banker, formerly at WHJB (620) in Greensburg, who used it on Friday mornings.
Set in a fictional Los Angeles disco called “The Zoo,” the movie was more or less a box-office bomb. The film was produced in part by Motown Records, and it definitely proved that Motown should stick to records.
Today’s trivia question: What movie critic, reviewing “Thank God It’s Friday,” said, “When you describe it, it sounds like a lot more fun than it is when you see it”? Answer at the end.
Speaking of radio: Over the pandemic lockdown, when I was working from home every day, I discovered that 910 AM in Apollo, Pa., had switched to an oldies format and was billing itself as “Westmoreland Gold.” Believe it or not, even though I do an oldies show, I generally don’t listen to oldies during the week, but I enjoyed what they were doing — which included local newscasts and DJs.
A few months ago, the station and a sister station in Latrobe were sold to something called “Disruptor Media,” which promised to convert the stations to “conservative talk,” because Lord knows, there’s not enough conservative talk radio in the United States.
I punched the station up this morning and caught a little bit of the “John Frederick Show,” where I learned that Hillary Clinton is a Maoist who wants to put Republicans into re-education camps “just like the KGB did.”
(This was prompted by an interview that Clinton did with CNN in which she compared Trump’s followers to members of a cult. “Maybe there needs to be a formal deprogramming of the cult members, I don’t know,” she said.)
Frederick’s guest said, “She’s been spouting Sal Alinsky ever since she was a kid.” I think he meant “Saul,” but who knows, maybe he meant “Sal.” Considering that Hillary Rodham was a volunteer for Barry Goldwater’s campaign and a member of the Young Republicans in high school and college, that information surprised me a little bit, but I continued listening.
Continue reading “Mr. Programmer, I got my hammer, and I am going to smash my radio”