The Mongrel Dogs Who Teach

Blog

  • More from the First Interworld War

    Researching for this(!). I came across a great book called You Back the Attack — We’ll Bomb Who We Want, billed as “remixed war propaganda”. An artist named Micah Ian Wright took World War II propaganda posters (some from the Bad Guys) and reworked them to put a Bush Jr. spin on them. It’s snarky, obnoxious, and really hilarious — though sobering in a way, too.

    As a bonus, Mr. Wright included all the original, unmodified posters as an appendix. So it’s easy to see how these were used and how they could be used. I expect I’ll be pulling a lot of inspiration from this book. The first such brainchild is offered below.

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    Researching for this(!). I came across a great book called You Back the Attack — We’ll Bomb Who We Want, billed as “remixed war propaganda”. An artist named Micah Ian Wright took World War II propaganda posters (some from the Bad Guys) and reworked them to put a Bush Jr. spin on them. It’s snarky, obnoxious, and really hilarious — though sobering in a way, too.

    As a bonus, Mr. Wright included all the original, unmodified posters as an appendix. So it’s easy to see how these were used and how they could be used. I expect I’ll be pulling a lot of inspiration from this book. The first such brainchild is offered below.

    (more…)

  • Defending, Defunding, and the Strength of Madness

    Well, for reasons that escape me at 1:33 AM, I am off on our school’s Senior Trip to Florida for the next few days. But before I head out, I felt compelled to jot down my own thoughts on the recent decision by the Democrats to send Bush a war-funding bill without any of the strict timetables that led to his veto of the previous ones.

    I make no secret of the fact that I fall on the political left and that I believe this Administration is, very likely, the Very Worst Ever. I think it’s time to end this war and to begin healing the massive wounds that have been dealt to our prestige abroad, our civil liberties at home, and indeed the very soul of our democracy. I would support, without reservation, a move to impeach this President for abuse of his office and betrayal of the American people and, worse, the betrayal of core American principles that have made this nation a beacon of hope for humanity.

    So naturally enough, the blogs I read and the people I pay attention to have been in a furor over the recent decision by the Democratic Party leadership. Outraged, and shocked, and hurt, these commentators lament that the Democrats “caved in” to the President and handed him his first legislative victory since November. It will be taken, they say, as a sign of weakness. I felt the same visceral revulsion, the same sense of abandonment, when I realized that the timetable-stripped bill was the one that would reach the President’s desk. After that mind-blowing adrenaline high of sweeping Congress, of finally getting real oversight going, this did seem like a crash back to the dark depths of the Bush supremacy, circa 2004. I did feel that the leadership let me down.

    And yet…
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  • More propaganda

    from a war that was never fought. 🙂 I haven’t really decided if all of Mars is noxious (in this reality) but since Well’s had “the Black Gas”, I figure the TEF had better have gas masks. And while it might seem unthinkable that women would carry arms in Victorian/Edwardian society, it’s a fact of the 20th century that major wars break down mores, and a truly interplanetary war fought with turn-of-the-century technology would conceivably accelerate that process. Plus, I needed another model. 🙂

    That You May Breathe Free

  • New, if silly, pursuit

    So I haven’t stretched my creative muscles very much lately, and I’ve been looking for something to do. Playing around with Poser and some models I got from the Net, I decided I was going to make propaganda posters from the First Interworld War, loosely conceived as the follow-up to H.G. Well’s War of the Worlds. I know it’s far from unique but it struck my fancy and I’m going to try my hand. The first, very rough, effort is below. The tagline is “Take the fight to them… Sign Up For The Transplanetary Expeditionary Force”

    Take the Fight to Them — propaganda poster from the First Interworld War

    I’m certainly open to suggestions for future posters. Right now, all I have is the image of a man or woman in Vitcorian space gear and gas mask, with the tag “He risks breathing poison… So you can breathe free… Support the Third Planetary Bond Drive”.

  • Pondering Hate Crimes and Hate-Crime Laws

    Apparently there’s something afoot in the House that has brought this back into national focus. Reading about it, I wandered across a blog post in Orcinus from 2005 January (!). I have to say, for the first time in many years, it gave me something to think about on this issue. I have always been rather cool to the whole idea. I think I agree with Danny Concannon: A crime’s a crime and no murder is any worse or any better than another. But I’ll admit that Orcinus’ argument from mense rea is compelling. Moreover, I hadn’t even viewed hate crimes through the prism that they are crimes against the community as well as against an individual. Put a different way: The purpose of a murder is to kill someone. The purpose of a lynching is to divide a community against itself, to undermine the very idea of the community — in short, to attack society in toto. That’s certainly a different crime and, conceivably, a worse one.

    I still think I come down against hate crime laws. Once you begin criminalizing what someone is thinking, we start down a very dark and dangerous road, and I’m not sure we come out the other side. But for the first time in a long while, I have something new to chew over. I’m not as sure as I was yesterday.

  • Nothing But a Dream

    One of the things that goes along with advising Student Council at my school is orchestrating the annual Talent Show. For the past four years, that’s included performing as the first act — largely because I badger my fellow faculty into performing, and I feel I shouldn’t ask them to do something I’m not willing. Also, because secretly I am a ham. The song is always something of my own writing and always a capella, because I don’t know anything about playing instruments or writing music for them. I like this because it gives me a chance to demonstrate that I am every bit not a singer as I am not a songwriter. 🙂 This year’s offering was called “Nothing But a Dream”. Because I have no shame I’m including a Quicktime movie of it as well.

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  • More Meta: Fancy Pull Quotes and Javascript Pull Quotes

    In my never-ending quest to overload my WordPress installation with a billion gadgets, today I’m adding Fancy Pull Quote. Fancy pull quotes make any dumb monkey look like a Pulitzer Prize winner! But I’ve decided to run it head-to-head with JSPullQuotes, a javascript implementation, to see which I like more (= is more easily customized). Currently I like JSPullQuotes a teeny bit more because it doesn’t require HTML commenting. On the other hand, it’s harder to use for pulling “quotes” that don’t appear in the main text.

  • Testing subscriptions 2

    More testing, this time with the correct category. 🙂

  • more testing of subscribe2

    Let’s see what this does.

  • Testing subscriptions

    You can just ignore this post — I’m trying a new feature.
    Where should I put the subscribe message?