Author: Dennis

When does observation become racism? Browsing around some websites, I happened across video of someone named Tramm Hudson running for political office somewhere who is now being vilified across the internet for making supposedly racist remarks: he said that in his experience blacks weren’t ‘the greatest swimmers or may not even know how to swim.’…

Due to Eric’s vacation and my own isolation from the outside world (I’m trapped by various things academic) I thought I’d post some sketches I made a while back for a cartoon I never completed because of time constraints and quality concerns. At the time I didn’t think the drawings were very good, and I…

I can’t be Eric in his absence, so I apologize for those accustomed to detailed, well-researched essays on the culture war. All I can offer at the moment is a few thoughts, and one that’s been bugging me for awhile is the demonization of Joe Lieberman. My best friend has always voted Democrat but has…

That ought to quiet the naysayers.

Fidel Castro is alive and doing quite well. Well enough even to read the paper in his favorite casual wear: Cuban printing, not to mention photography, is truly remarkable. The text is so crisp it almost looks like it should have one of those disclaimers they always have in print ads and TV commercials, ‘simulated…

Links at the top of the Drudge Report point to two preliminary stories: WNBC and Breitbart. There’s nothing on the local news in Philadelphia save a feed on CBS 3 from a chopper showing billowing smoke, but this is done picture-in-picture while the regular program continues. Details are few and sketchy (from WNBC): A three-story…

A BBC headline reads “Ten Taleban fighters ‘killed’” and I read ‘so they say.’ What else could the scare quotes mean? Supposedly? In a manner of speaking? Is this meant as a direct quote? It’s possible that coalition forces used precisely the word ‘killed,’ but there’s no reason to quote the word unless you want…

Mahmoud Ahmadinejad gets a little advice from Hugo Chavez.

Some credit is due here. I’m still warming up my old skills, and I decided to do this one with real pens (crow quills, speedballs, india ink, and all that). I splattered some ink and butchered the lettering, but wanting to get this up and move ahead, I decided to use a font rather than…

This was pretty much done Saturday, but I didn’t have a scanner over the weekend. Now that I’ve drawn a donkey and an elephant I think I’ve covered all of the basics of drawing political cartoons.

It’s been awhile since I’ve drawn anything, and this was more or less an exercise to brush up, but I was impatient and didn’t put in much effort. The concept was my girfriend’s … and she’s a Democrat! What do you think? For awhile I’ve been toying with the idea of drawing cartoons for this…

And I have irrefutable proof. Behold what my Google start page presented to me when I got home this evening: Ardmore, PA 74?F Bryn Mawr, PA 122?F A difference of forty-eight degrees in only three miles? This truly is an inconvenient truth, as I must brave those temperatures in the morning to pick up and…

Glenn Reynolds is tsk-tsking along with others, but how many people have seen the cartoon rather than read a lurid description? I think the spin is more than a little misleading, particularly because the drawings, while bad, are fairly accurate caricatures, and also because the anti-christ line is given in quotes and referenced to ‘Information…

Joey Vento, propietor of Philadelphia’s legendary Geno’s Steaks and the son of Italian immigrants, is being labeled a racist for posting a sign asking customers to order in English: “I think what’s coming out of his mouth is racist,” said Santiago. “He is saying, ‘I don’t like these brown faces in my community and I…

I imagine readers of Classical Values are more on top of current events than I am because I spend so much of my time trying to get a handle on ancient texts (a consuming task made easier with the aid of commentaries), so you’re probably already aware of John Bolton’s anger over remarks made concerning…

People who can’t write shouldn’t. At least not for publication. Dialogue (or monologue, as the case may be) is notorious because idiom shifts and is never easy to capture even by those for whom the idiom is natural. That’s why Mark Twain’s achievement is so remarkable: his characters, particularly in Huck Finn, are detailed, dialectically…

I don’t know how many people have read Ahmadinejad’s letter, but I’ve had trouble finding a transcript and happened upon one while reading Le Monde this morning. It’s an odd piece of propaganda. As you read, note how Ahmadinejad essentially equates the ‘Arab street’ with the anti-Bush left while hinting at all sorts of Chomskyan…

I didn’t think much of it when I saw the headline ‘Pumps go dry at some gas stations…‘ posted on the Drudge Report. Little did I know it was on the electronic edition of the Philadelphia Inquirer. I left for Bethesda, MD the same day and to my consternation passed by gas station after gas…

Tim Spalding, a prolific web presence who has helped to make a lot of material related to classical literature and history available on the web (and much more), runs one of my favorite sites on the internet, LibraryThing. It’s a great site for cataloguing and keeping track of your books (I have over a thousand,…

THE ANCIENTS were good at resisting seduction. Odysseus fought the seductive song of the Sirens by having his men tie him to the mast of his ship as it sailed past the Siren’s Isle. Socrates was so intent on protecting citizens from the seductive opinions of artists and writers, that he outlawed them from his…