It’s Cartoon Friday, again!

My spoon is too big!

Don Hertzfeldt at work

For those who have watched, this simple phrase will immediately bring to mind Rejected, Don Hertzfeldt’s Oscar winning short cartoon film. Taking the form of a series of short promo cartoons supposedly created for cable networks, each succeeding segment gets weirder and more disturbed. This cartoon continues to be influential today, as Wikipedia notes:

Rejected has a cult following and has grown into a pop culture icon that is frequently quoted or referenced. In 2009, it was the only short film named as one of the “Films of the Decade” by Salon.com. In 2010, it was noted as one of the five “most innovative animated films of the past ten years” by The Huffington Post.^[4]

Hertzfeldt’s almost childish style combined with absurdist, edgy content has made him a top name in animation and a major influence on modern cartoons, particularly the kind of shows one sees on Adult Swim and its relatives. As Ad Week points out, his outspoken hatred of the advertising industry meant it was only a matter of time before they ripped him off for Pop-Tarts.

What are your favorite cartoons? If I can, I’ll use your suggestions in future installments.

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Photo from Wikimedia Commons, released under a Creative Commons Share Alike license.

Update: There were 14 arrests of activists from CODEPINK at the White House for protesting Guantanamo on the 100th day of prisoners’ hunger strike. Protesters had deliberately staged themselves on a swath of pavement directly in front of the White House where tourists are allowed but protests are banned. I’ve replaced the livestream link with an archived video from @UnToldCarlise‘s stream.

Prisoners in Guantanamo Bay have been on hunger strike for 100 days now, drawing activists to protest for freedom and justice both online and off. @UnToldCarlisle is livestreaming from the White House, where acts of civil disobedience are expected soon.

Meanwhile, a “twitter storm” has begun under the hashtag #GTMO17, making it one of the top trending topics this morning.

Tweets about “#GTMO17″

Hi, y’all.

You there: sit up, in the name of the law! -The NYPD

Here’s Whiskey Shivers performing “Jealous Heart” from their album Rampa Heart. This group is playing a free show tonight in Austin at the Scoot Inn (supposedly our city’s oldest continuously operating bar) at the end of the Thursday Night social bike ride — so if you’re local and want to hear them, hurry on over around the time this post gets published.

Gothamist reports on video evidence that with fewer Occupy Wall Street protestors to bother, police in New York City’s historic Union Square have resorted to harassing people for bad posture:

Solomon Seagal, a Brooklyn resident who videotaped this interaction, tells us the officers were patrolling the park ordering multiple people to sit upright. ‘Then they ordered this man [in the video] to simply leave the park,’ Seagal tells us. ‘One person checked the park’s rules and found there was nothing they were doing wrong, so it was clearly the police harassing them for no reason. It is ridiculous how much the NYPD think they can get away with.’

Meanwhile, members of “Bloomberg’s Army” are regularly seen violating local law by smoking in public parks.

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Photo by Ed Yourdon released under a Creative Commons Share Alike license.

Hi, y’all.

A 51-year old woman was a key player in Anonymous' fight against Steubenville rapists.

We started off the day talking about poop — that is fecal transplants, care of Over Easy – so it seems appropriate to share this story I ran across during my browsing today: apparently the FDA is putting the brakes on (but not entirely ending) fecal transplants pending further study. From RawStory: 

The agency said in a press release, that “the efficacy of this intervention has not yet been demonstrated in controlled clinical trials. Such controlled trials are needed to demonstrate the safety and effectiveness of FMT products for C. difficile infection.”

…

Some doctors consider it an annoyance that the FDA is attempting to regulate the new procedure, and argue that bureaucratic hurdles will only make it harder for patients who need the therapy to obtain it.

The FDA has designated Fecal Microbiota for Transplantation (FMT) therapy an “investigational new drug,” meaning that physicians who apply to the federal board may perform the procedure, but some doctors feel that their access to a promising treatment is being overly complicated by the new rules.

Mother Jones reports on the 51-year old woman who was a key player in Anonymous’ fight against rapists:

Disgusted by the rape and the lack of outcry in its aftermath, McKee spent weeks calling and emailing national journalists, urging them to write about the assault and the lawsuit against her blogger friend, who had hammered away at the football team and the community for their silence.

After striking out, McKee eventually stumbled upon #OpAntiBully, an Anonymous subgroup that goes after cyberbullies. Members of the operation had recently orchestrated a dramatic takedown of a clan of high school Twitter trolls who’d urged a suicidal 15-year-old to cut herself and drink bleach. McKee was deeply impressed. “People from Anonymous came and kicked their ass,” she recalls, speaking out about her involvement for the first time. “And I’m thinking, this is what [the rape victim] needs.”

So McKee nervously reached out to the Anons on Twitter. “I thought they would either get involved or get pissed, and my online life is over,” she told me. But where she expected a bunch of impetuous hackers, she instead encountered people who were willing to listen and to trust her—especially after she shared her own stories of being bullied and abused.

On December 10, she became the first second person to blast out the now-famous Twitter hashtag #OpRollRedRoll, a reference to Steubenville High’s beloved Big Red football team and its fansite, RollRedRoll.com (Update: McKee says the first tweet of the hashtag was from @KYAnonymous but isn’t visible because his account is suspended).

“Once it became an Anonymous op,” McKee says, “it was no longer in my control. It was kind of like being a baton runner and handing it off to the next person.”

Tonight’s musical selection is from nerdcore rapper MC Frontalot and some of his friends. It’s a sendup of classic 80′s anime like Voltron called “I’ll Form the Head” from the album Solved.

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What’s on your mind tonight? You can talk about anything in the comments.

Photo by Ben Fredericson released under a Creative Commons license.

Welcome back!

Breaking Bad ends in August. Are you excited too?

Thanks for your patience with the recent Firedoglake outage. You can bet it was frustrating & upsetting to all of us on the staff, especially since it was entirely out of our control.

But at least our lives aren’t as bad as the poor, miserable creatures in tonight’s video selection — oh the humanity (or perhaps felinity)!

I’m a big fan of Breaking Bad, which concludes starting in August. Vulture has a lengthy interview with creator Vince Gilligan about the end of the series. The part of the article generating the most buzz is the way he calls out haters of wife Skyler White:

[W]ith the risk of painting with too broad a brush, I think the people who have these issues with the wives being too bitchy on Breaking Bad are misogynists, plain and simple. I like Skyler a little less now that she’s succumbed to Walt’s machinations, but in the early days she was the voice of morality on the show. She was the one telling him, ‘You can’t cook crystal meth.’ She’s got a tough job being married to this asshole. And this, by the way, is why I should avoid the Internet at all costs. People are griping about Skyler White being too much of a killjoy to her meth-cooking, murdering husband? She’s telling him not to be a murderer and a guy who cooks drugs for kids. How could you have a problem with that?

I think something similar happened with Betty Draper on Mad Men especially in the early seasons — I find January Jones to be an extremely capable actress but she catches a lot of flak for being the moralizing response to Don’s lothario, and in general I think she gets criticized because she makes us uncomfortable — her characterin many ways represents the silent victims of patriarchy.

And did you know there’s now a phone app which helps you fight the Koch Brothers and other corporate bad guys at the supermarket? It’s called “Buycott.” From Forbes:

You can scan the barcode on any product and the free app will trace its ownership all the way to its top corporate parent company, including conglomerates like Koch Industries. 

Once you’ve scanned an item, Buycott will show you its corporate family tree on your phone screen. Scan a box of Splenda sweetener, for instance, and you’ll see its parent, McNeil Nutritionals, is a subsidiary of Johnson & Johnson JNJ +1.3%.

Even more impressively, you can join user-created campaigns to boycott business practices that violate your principles rather than single companies. One of these campaigns, Demand GMO Labeling, will scan your box of cereal and tell you if it was made by one of the 36 corporations that donated more than $150,000 to oppose the mandatory labeling of genetically modified food.

According to Twitter, Buycott is a victim of its own popularity — if you try it out, give them a few days to work out growth problems!

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It’s Cartoon Friday, again!

McLaren created innovative animation techniques such as drawing directly on film stock.

Blinkity Blank is an award-winning film by pioneer animator Norman McLaren, best known for his work with the National Film Board of Canada, which has funded many great works of animation over the decades.

Created in 1955, the film uses the innovative technique of scratching designs directly onto film. From the National Film Board description:

This experimental short film by Norman McLaren is a playful exercise in intermittent animation and spasmodic imagery. Playing with the laws relating to persistence of vision and after-image on the retina of the eye, McLaren engraves pictures on blank film creating vivid, percussive effects.

The Wikipedia article points out McLaren’s deliberate use of blank frames:

McLaren also left some frames blank, which he described as ‘sprinkling on the empty band of time.’

Given the prolific nature of National Film Board animation, I am sure we’ll visit the work of their animators again on Cartoon Friday.

What are your favorite cartoons from any country? I’ll use them in future installments if I can.

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What’s on your mind tonight? You can talk about anything in the comments.

Public domain photo by Jack Long/National Film Board of Canada, via Wikimedia Commons.

Hi, y’all.

Hi, I'm a gratuitous picture of a cute cat.

Some good news — Mother Jones has the uplifting story of a small town that took on fracking and won:

There was a time not so long ago when the most contentious issue in Dryden, New York, was hiring a new dog catcher. Situated in New York’s Finger Lakes region, Dryden is a rural town with a population of just 14,500 spread over 94 square miles. It’s “a little more progressive than your average upstate town,” explains town supervisor Mary Ann Sumner, because it gets some spillover residents from nearby Ithaca, a college town. “But we’re still just an upstate town,” best known for dairy farms and cornfields.

But everything changed in August 2011, when Dryden became one of the first towns in New York to ban fracking. Natural gas interests swiftly sued, putting the once sleepy spot in the middle of a nationwide debate over gas drilling. Last week, after a spending a year and a half in court fighting to protect its ban, Dryden became the first town in the state to prevail over the gas industry—in a case that could set a precedent for other towns that are trying to keep frackers out.

If you’re a geek like me, you really want to see the photo in this tweet. Make it so!

Tonight’s musical selection is Brown Bird performing “Thunder and Lightning.” If you’re near Austin, Texas, you can see them perform Saturday.

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What’s on your mind tonight? You can talk about anything in the comments.

Photo by Eva Prokop released under a Creative Commons license.

Rosemary Lehmberg was released from jail this morning.

Travis County is home to Austin, Texas and well over a million residents. The county’s district attorney, Rosemary Lehmberg was released from jail about 1am this morning after serving half of a 45-day sentence for driving under the influence of alcohol.

From the Austin American Statesman: 

Lehmberg, who was sentenced April 19, served half of her jail term under a law that gives two days credit for every day served for good behavior. Travis county jail records no longer showed Lehmberg booked by 3 a.m. Thursday.

Predictably, in this Republican-led state there have been calls for her resignation from the right, even satirical bumper stickers that lampoon her behavior on the night of her arrest. Looking deeper, the situation is far more complex.

First, while the office of Travis County District Attorney is elected, if Lehmberg resigns than Republican Governor Rick Perry will appoint her interim replacement. But more so, many reports suggest that Lehmberg is suffering from an illness — alcoholism — which may benefit from treatment rather than further punishment.

Sources write that Lehmberg had a known drinking problem, and a Point Austin editorial in the Austin Chronicle argued for compassion and treatment over judgment:

Ours is a culture (including a cop culture) rampant with binge drinking – and it too often has deadly consequences – but if everyone who received a first-offense DWI also lost his job, the drinking wouldn’t stop, and the unemployment rolls would be staggering as well.

…

[O]ne can only wonder what might have happened to Bob Bullock or Ann Richards (or a host of other officials) had the Internet been available to chronicle and repost their every bibulous indiscretion. Anonymous trolls would be demanding their immediate ejections from office, and editorial writers (hardly squeaky clean themselves) would be anonymously chiming in. Yet we have long known that alcoholism is a treatable disease, and that reflexively treating alcoholics as criminals only fills our prisons without addressing the underlying problems.

Though the kind of reckless behavior Lehmberg engaged in is never acceptable, KVUE suggests that grief exacerbated her behavior:

Sources confirmed Lehmberg was distraught the night before her arrest on April 12th after attending the funeral of a dear friend and employee.

Investigator Lorraine Kerlick died in a motorcycle accident April 7th. Friends say Lehmberg appeared extremely emotional and depressed at the funeral.

As of now, Lehmberg intends to complete her term as well as seek treatment:

Lehmberg, who was released before 3 a.m. Thursday, also thanked the Travis County jail staff for their ‘professionalism and dedication’ in a statement issued shortly after 5 a.m.

‘In the coming days, Rosemary will be making arrangements to seek professional treatment and better understand her behavior,’ the statement said. ‘She will also meet with members of her staff with whom she been communicating throughout the last 3 weeks.’

Jason Stanford, in a sharply worded Statesman opinion argues the situation is representative of overall corruption in the Texas legal system:

But just because she’s a drunken mess of political entitlement doesn’t mean Lehmberg doesn’t have a role to play when she gets out of jail. The Travis County district attorney heads the Public Integrity Unit, which by law has jurisdiction over corruption in state government. Unless the Obama-appointed U.S. attorney decides to make a federal case out of something, the only one who can prosecute any of these Banana Republicans in elected state office is Lehmberg.

And if she resigns, Rick Perry gets to appoint her successor, explaining why local Democrats want her to stay on the job.

But should she? Making corruption charges stick is hard enough with one’s credibility intact. Ronnie Earle found this out when he tried to prosecute Kay Bailey Hutchison. It’s hard to imagine Lehmberg withstanding the political backlash that comes with trying to hold powerful public officials accountable. It says a lot about Texas ethics when the only check on political corruption is currently sitting in jail after pleading guilty to drunken driving.

Ken Anderson, District Attorney before Lehmberg and now a state district judge is facing charges of corruption. Ross Ramsey of The Texas Tribune argues that state officials are no longer untouchable:

Texas DA’s used to be indestructible. The political potshots at long-serving former prosecutors like Dallas County’s Henry Wade, Harris County’s Johnny B. Holmes Jr. and Travis County’s Ronnie Earle were part of their jobs. But each left on his own.

…

Times have changed. In the 1980s, crime was the major issue in many local and state elections. In the early 1990s, the people who won those elections went on an epic prison- and jail-building spree.

Voters are worried about other things now. Wrongful convictions and prosecutions have shaken public faith in the criminal justice system.

And, it turns out, in the people at the top.

Update: The Austin-area coordinator of the Texas Department of Public Safety resigned today after a DUI arrest.

Publicity still of Rosemary Lehmberg from Facebook.

Hi, y’all.

Michael Pollan's newest book urges Americans to reclaim cooking for health and sustainability.

Tonight’s video selection is a little spicy — what do old people think about gay sex? The answer may surprise you. Or at least make you laugh and smile!

I just started reading Michael Pollan’s Cooked: A Natural History of Transformation on Kindle. Even though I’m a kitchen devotee already, it’s inspiring stuff. There’s a chapter devoted to each of the “elements” of cooking — fire (cooking), water (cooking in pots), air (baking) and earth (fementation). Check out this long interview with the author on Democracy Now! if you missed it the first time around.

Some housekeeping notes:

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What’s on your mind tonight? You can talk about anything in the comments.

GetEqual TX activists block traffic at 11th and Congress, in front of the Texas Capitol, in support of SB237.

More on GetEqual TX and SB237 Now: Capitol Sit-In Liveblog and 5 Arrested for Workplace Equality

Members of GetEqual TX are blocking a major roadway in downtown Austin at 11th and Congress, directly in front of the Texas Capitol. They continue to demand passage of the “Fair Employment Act,” which would make it illegal for Texas employers to discriminate on the basis of sexual orientation or gender identity. With only a couple weeks remaining in the legislative session, time is of the essence.

Update: Apologies for those who tried to follow this earlier, we had a coding error so that it did not pull my tweets correctly. Here is an updated version of the post!

Update #2: One of those arrested, Carey Dunn, posted an open letter on MyFDL earlier today.