Good clean fun

Alexa, press my Tide Dash Button

imgur

"[Amazon] Prime shoppers who know exactly which products they buy regularly should check out Amazon’s Dash Buttons. For $4.99, you get a Wi-Fi-enabled gizmo that places orders for you. For example, you can buy the Tide Dash Button and attach it to your washing machine. When you’re running low on laundry pods, just push the button, and your order is placed on Amazon.

You get a $4.99 statement credit for each Dash Button the first time you press it, essentially making the button free. Dash Buttons are available for household items, health and personal care products, pet supplies, groceries, and kids’ and baby needs."

https://www.nerdwallet.com/blog/credit-cards/making-the-most-of-amazon-com-prime-store-card/

Book Club Bouncer

Anyone else? https://t.co/ZOcsvigrYy else? https://t.co/6QIRQhs2EN pic.twitter.com/u976kuTPfd

— goodreads (@goodreads) July 29, 2016

Prescient Satire

link to original

Drawn by Barry Blitt and published as satire to "show it as the fear-mongering ridiculousness that it is," every aspect of the work perfectly captures the Obama legacy.

It's come to this: Is Thomas The Tank Engine racist?

Sky News is debating whether Thomas The Tank Engine is racist and if it has enough “multi-ethnic trains" pic.twitter.com/HUsNuZwVxW

— James Cook (@JamesLiamCook) April 6, 2016

Simpsons

MTV Greatest Party Stories

This is a new series on MTV. Teenagers or post-teens are recalling their most outstanding teenage story. All of the stories are set to cartoons with elements provided as the oration develops accommodating changes as they go, thus the girl and a woman together at the end of a sofa that elongates off screen to allow for another woman not previously mentioned. The stories are great and so are the cartoons.

KLEM AM

Betty or Veronica...?

link in case the video doesn't load

....It's the animated version of the eternal question: Ginger or Mary Ann?

Another question:  Did you have one of these?

Wolf Blitzer Would Not Approve

The Tex Avery cartoon "Blitz Wolf" is from an era when Americans recognized a common enemy and were not afraid to name it.

Link to a higher quality version

The cartoon was nominated but lost out in the Oscars to a Donald Duck cartoon, Der Fuehrer's Face. These were all from a time when moral distinctions were more clearly and more easily drawn.

 The Wiki page on Blitz Wolf

The Wife of Pi

The Wife of Pi. #pi #math #humor #lol #funny pic.twitter.com/B9RMLO3YSS

— Tech-FAQ (@tech_faq) May 6, 2014

Rub my Belly!

The Disney Studio was always in crises. You see it's first and greatest star was one of the most difficult people in Hollywood. Mickey was jealous of all the other characters. Even though he was the star and focal point of many, many movies he wanted to star in all of them. He tried to play the Daffy Duck roles but he couldn’t handle the accent. He demanded to star in the Lady and the Tramp but he couldn’t learn to suck the spaghetti. He even wanted to play Prince Charming but Walt had to lay down the law and let him know that the Prince couldn’t be a rodent. Or black. Things were different in those days.
(The Cracks in Magic Kingdom, The E True Hollywood Story of Mickey Mouse)

I wish I could be a cartoon character!

Just so they would tickle my Elmo.

Just sayn'

Trump to Lex Luthor

A simple shave would do it. An eyebrow trim and darkening would complete the transformation. An additional tightly maintained goatee severely trimmed to shadow surpasses the stylish control of Superman's arch villain. Imagine; a whole world of fresh direct straightforwardness opened once risible pretense is abandoned.

"A boy is a political animal"

"At its simplest level, the strip is about the friendship between a bright 6-year-old misfit (Calvin) and his pet tiger (Hobbes). Its “trick” is that Hobbes is a lifeless stuffed animal when others are present and a rollicking, witty companion when they are not. So the story can be understood on many levels. It is about the richness of the imagination, the subversiveness of creativity and the irreconcilability of private yearnings and worldly reality. Where Calvin sees a leaf-monster trying to swallow him, Calvin’s father sees his troublemaker son scattering the leaf-piles he has spent all afternoon raking."

The late political scientist James Q. Wilson described “Calvin and Hobbes” as “our only popular explication of the moral philosophy of Aristotle.” Wilson meant that the social order is founded on self-control and delayed gratification—and that Calvin is hopeless at these things. Calvin thinks that “life should be more like TV” and that he is “destined for greatness” whether he does his homework or not. His favorite sport is “Calvinball,” in which he is entitled to make up the rules as he goes along.

Day-in, day-out, Calvin keeps running into evidence that the world isn’t built to his (and our) specifications. All humor is, in one way or another, about our resistance to that evidence.

“Calvin and Hobbes” would have faced big challenges if Mr. Watterson had decided to carry on. The Internet has cut a swath through the press. There are no longer hundreds of independent newspapers to which a cartoonist can syndicate his work.

And today’s cultural climate might have made it more difficult for him to render a boy’s imaginative life in a realistic way. Calvin fantasizes not just about dinosaurs flying F-14s but also about shooting up his school with a tank. At one point, he tells Susie Derkins—his neighbor, rival and secret crush—“I’m sure it’s frustrating knowing that men are bigger, stronger and better at abstract thought than women.” That these are all jokes matters little. Enforcers of taste are not known for their humor.

loaves and fish

Kevin Sorbo had this cartoon in his Twitter timeline but he does not say who drew it. Tineye provides 101 results and none of the ten or so that I checked have the cartoonist's name either. It is old. So old the cartoonist disappeared.

The original is a single frame. I added to it.

Clarence dollars.

Clarence is a new cartoon on the Cartoon Network that I've managed avoiding quite well until yesterday when I chanced to notice in passing the main character handing out his own version of dollar bills at his school. That got my interest. As the cartoon developed I realized, hey, this is actually some degree of sophisticated insight to economic reality here. It could serve as intro to college level macro economics 101. It shows how paper currency takes the place of metal-backed currency, how something fake stands for something real and how that currency is manipulated to the point of being worthless, that is, how by manipulation currency becomes worth less. Therefore how your behavior is controlled.  The reality of faith-based M1 type currency is revealed when Clarence dollars are traded for real things, three Clarence dollars for a notebook, now Clarence dollars have meaning in the real world contained in the school, the next scene the whole school is trading Clarence dollars for everything imaginable. Later the unreality of faith-based currency is revealed through manipulation.

But now Clarence dollars behave as real dollars.

The episode begins with dissatisfaction with the present "buddy star" system of rewards for good deeds and grades, and de-merits for misdeeds that leave some students behind, namely Clarence. He devises his own system based on his own sense of behavior worthy of reward. He passes out his own hand-drawn currency for ordinary things, like wearing matching clothing, and even for negative things like a boy picking his nose and another wiping his butt.

Demand for Clarence dollars increases throughout the school presenting a problem for production. They can no longer be hand drawn, they must be copied. Thus the value of currency as individual pieces of art is destroyed by superabundance and now the currency becomes diluted.

The kill joy straight kid depicted with a square head and with the most buddy stars explains to Clarence the nonsense of Clarence dollars must stop.

"Sorry, Jeff, money talks."

"What does that even mean?"

Clarence holds Clarence dollar in front of his face and changes his voice,
"It means, I ain't going anywhere. Clarence dollars are here to stay."

That night Clarence dreams of swimming in Clarence dollars in the style of Scrooge McDuck. Swimming through dollars, the bills form into a threatening monster, he sees his school nemesis the petty bully school odd ball using a Clarence dollar for a snack machine purchase and wakes up within the dream shaken with fright and admonished by his dream mom, then wakes up for real actually frightened by his creation.

Clarence goes to school and finds the whole place in chaos. All comity is gone as students and teachers fight over the excess of Clarence dollars. Square head Jeff explains the whole school is gone crazy over Clarence dollars, he must do something.

Square head Jeff still protecting the buddy star system explains Clarence must end it the only way possible by taking the excess to extreme and flooding the school with Clarence dollars, diluting their value completely rendering them worthless by copying them in bulk to destroy their face value utterly until nobody cares to have them. The episode ends with a single boy at home on his bed rolling in Clarence dollars, well pleased, the last child, slowest of all on the uptake, last to amass his fortune, childishly unaware his pile of dollars have become worthless.

Not bad for a cartoon.

Besides explaining how real currency works on thread bare evanescence of faith in it, by faith in the governing body behind it, the show likewise explains scrip of the sort used by companies and by military bases overseas. It is just paper that represents the same thing that money represents, but has no value whatsoever outside its miniature contained system, in this case, the school.

It also explains the phenomena such as Pokemon trading cards, the actual currency of prepubescents who have little use for government currency, their real-world value dependent of an overarching real government currency.

The whole episode is available here at yourepeat.com if you care to view it. There are adorable and amusing touches throughout. I was impressed with this episode.

The Unbearable Lightness of Xmas: #XmasAMovie

What a day....stop and laugh...😜 pic.twitter.com/Y3UpiMAhFS
— Rhonda Barket (@RhondaBarket) December 17, 2014

ChipA Inspired Post

"Make Mine Freedom" (1948)

Meade makes a brief cameo at 1 min 15 sec; don't skip through.

The theme of "isms" as a problem in American politics is very old now; see for example this old clip from "You Can't Take It With You" (1938).

The admonition of against an ever more powerful State is no less true today.

All of the dated industrial examples (e.g., the auto industry) can be supplanted with more recent examples.

grammar chiseled in stone

Was this shown already? Man, try to get a word in edgeways around this place sometimes.