An off-duty pirate is a good pirate in my book. They're not all swashbuckling and whatnot, trying to charm you with their faux-rowdy ways. Who decided we neede strolling pirates in our lives, anyway? At least mimes are quiet.

The new Town Point Park is a lot flatter and has a lot fewer trees, and that's about it, as far as I could tell. The end result is that Harborfest looks more like the Suffolk Peanut Festival than it used to.

Popeye Doyle chased some surrender monkeys down this stretch, I'm told. Or, to be more accurate, Gene Hackman. Or, to be even more accurate, a stunt driver pretending to be Gene Hackman pretending to be Popeye Doyle. Not that being accurate has anything to do with blogging. Apparently it's been Written, by whoever does the Writing these days, that bloggers are going to be our source for news in the near future. We're all fucked, you know that, right? We're going to know all there is to know about Michael Jackson's enlarged probate and Obama's secret basement Muslim temple and Susan Boyle and Jon and Kate and nothing about why the economy collapsed. Kind of like now, I guess. News organizations are abdicating their place in society. Cable news has become a noisy freak show. Give a hundred monkeys a hundred megaphones and they'll eventually come up with the Fox News channel. How will we ever produce another Edward R. Murrow when immoral assholes like Geraldo Rivera and Glen Beck are considered worthy of a soapbox on national tv? Sorry, I'll go take my meds now.

We had just come out of the Bacon exhibition. I love bacon. Just a scribbly drawing because it was rilly hot out on the steps, and I was hankering to find a mobbed-up bar with zebras on the wall. And so we did.

Larger here.       More photos here.

If I were ever given the task of torturing someone, and although the call hasn't come yet you never know, what I would do is I would strip them down to their skivvies, throw them to the ground and subject them to intense heat until they gave me bin Laden's street address, and if that didn't work, I would throw in clouds of mosquitos and maybe a boombox playing Eye of The Tiger. Just so you know where I was coming from when Amanda pranced into the room screaming "Fire Island! Fire Island! Fire Island!" At first, thinking she was raising an alarm, I frantically looked for the nearest exit. Then, when I realized what she was suggesting, I looked for the nearest exit with increased urgency. But cooler heads prevailed, and we hit the expressway, only to discover that 4,507,989 other New Yorkers had been struck by the very same impulse. After three or four days, we arrived at the ferry with only one soiled diaper and no left-coast vomit, for which we were grateful, and soon found ourselves in paradise, new york style. And here the snarkiness ends, because it was really quite nice. Good food, wine, and conversation was provided by A & J's friend Tory. It was great fun walking the little boardwalks and sitting on midnight beaches and whatnot. So I'm still not a beach person, but I'll make an exception like that any time. I guess nature in small doses can't hurt. Plus now I know every Michael Jackson joke that ever was.

What's all this then? I can't leave you people alone for a few days without you trashing the joint? The Comments section is a privilege, not a right, people! It's for serious, thoughtful discussion, not for juvenile folderol. Maybe next time I'll have to hire a babysitter. A babysitter named Ruben.

The smartest thing liberals can do is let conservatives talk as much as they want. Give them a forum, put them in the spotlight, give them enough of the proverbial rope. Set a microphone in front of a conservative and step away. He'll start out talking about fiscal responsibility, but within twenty minutes will be extolling the joys of torture or alienating the entire Hispanic community or accusing Michael J. Fox of faking his illness. This morning on NPR there was a panel of banking experts, one of whom was from a conservative think tank, and at one point, when the term "predatory lending" was mentioned, he said "what about predatory borrowing? Predatory borrowing is just as bad!" He elaborated: evidently there were untold numbers of people who bought adjustable rate mortgages knowing full well that they would be unable to meet the ballooning payments in ten years. Those poor innocent bankers, hoodwinked by these devious criminals! Do conservative think-tankers really think that great hordes of people signed up for ARMs, knowing full well that they would default in ten years and be thrown out of their homes, which apparently would fulfill some insane master plan known only to them? That they would be laughing all the way to the homeless shelter, snickering at the bankers they forced into collecting giant year-end bonuses despite plunging the nation into a deep recession? I encourage all you right-wingers out there to lard your conversation with the term "predatory borrowers" as much as you want, revealing your shriveled little hearts for all to see.

I wonder who invented "ew"? People didn't say "ew" thirty years ago. Somebody had to be the very first person to do it. Talk about unsung heroes. They're probably laboring in obscurity somewhere, all bitter and whatnot for not getting the recognition they so richly deserved. I'd like to find them and ask them how they did it. Did it just come to them spontaneously, or did they have sheets of notebook paper with hundreds of odd sounds written on them, most of them crossed out? This is just one of the many things I wonder, so you don't have to.

There's a slot in the front door of Naro Video, where you can drop off returning videos before they open at noon. This morning I returned the first season of Extras, which I have now viewed 158 times, allowing me to recite the dialogue along with the actors, a skill which will allow me to Mildly Annoy© anyone who chooses to watch it with me, which is the fly in the ointment, since anyone who might be remotely interested in doing so will already be aware of my predilections and who will have to wash their hair on that night. Be that as it may, and don't you hate people who say 'be that as it may'? Perhaps it makes you Mildly Annoyed©? Be that as it may, when I dropped said video in the slot, a Boston Terrier immediately appeared, snatched it up, and trotted back into the dark recesses of the store with it. Now that's service! Just try that at Blockbuster! I think we should all demand that Boston Terriers retrieve our returned videos. That's the only way we're going to effect change, by voting with our mouths. Instead of our index fingers, I guess. I kind of lost the thread here.

Anyone who knows me well knows that I like to keep a clean house. Like to, but don't. So why then did I draw this little scene, thus exposing my miserable failure to live up to my ideals, you ask? You impertinent twit! How dare you ask me such questions, even in my own head! The truth is this: yesterday afternoon, in the face of an impending thunderstorm, I shut down my computer so that it wouldn't be suddenly converted to a giant platinum Cheeto by that Rascal in the sky who, if He exists, loves nothing better than sprinkling terror and suffering like sugar onto breakfast cereal among his devoted followers, of whom He demands nothing more than total devotion, sending up tender supplication as they dodge His meteors. Is this a dysfunctional relationship, or what? Anyways, where was I? Oh yes. So I turned my attention to what I can do while I wait for the storm to pass that involved the smallest expenditure of energy on my part. So I turned my head ever so slightly, and voila! A sketching opportunity! The result of which you see before you. Twit.

By the way, the topmost item on the right is a print by the famous Amanda Kavanagh, whose work can be purchased here. You might think it's hard to tell what the artwork is like from my rough sketch, but it's actually pretty accurate.

You lot don't know how lucky you are. I guess I was thinking that any show that called itself "The Welk Stars" must have a pretty sharp sense of irony. I was wrong, as I am with disturbing regularity these days. This was nothing more than an hour-long commercial for an excruciating DVD, possibly developed by the CIA to take the place of waterboarding, and a compelling argument for immediately revoking any and all government moneys from PBS and giving it to hedge fund managers, no strings attached.The only redeeming moment for me came when a sparkly lady named Norma Zimmer said this: "As the years go by, our relationship will only grow more aggressive." I swear, that's what she said. So I answer, bring it on, osteoporotic rhinestone lady. Show me what you got.

Locally-based editorial cartoons are practically unintelligible to out-of-towners, which is just a bonus for me. It's so much more rewarding to annoy people than to please them. And a whole lot easier, too. Evidently my Sandbridge cartoon last week even had some locals scratching their heads, so I get to have my cake and snicker at it too.

The more perceptive among you will notice that there seems to be a paucity of figure models and a corresponding surfeit of drawers. It was just an off night for me, figure-drawing-wise. Perhaps I was thrown off balance by the fact that Artmark's easel was not thrown off balance. I've grown used to the comfortable sounds of splintered wood skittering across the floor in my direction. Whatever the cause, the drawings emerging from my computer screen were of a hideous, misshapen alien hag whose anatomy violated all known laws of physics and decency. So I got out the sketchbook and spent the evening sketching my fellow sketchers, which insured that any grotesqueries on my part would pretty much go unnoticed.

Larger versions, and a few more, can be found in this vicinity.

This guy might be perfectly sentient. He may be a Rhodes scholar, for all I know. But I can't get past that backwards ball cap. It screams "lout" to me. Not that I have anything against louts. Some of our most prominent figures are louts. The fashion statement made by that hat is "I'm dim-witted and proud of it. And probably drunk." And then you've got those Bermuda shorts. Why don't they put people like this in Guantanamo? I realize that this blog entry is not my finest hour. Don't think I don't realize it. Unfortunately, my finest hour came when I was sound asleep.

Cats are like lawyers. No matter how roundly you criticize them, no matter how much opprobrium you heap on them, they just keep blithely going about their business, just as if they weren't behaving disgracefully. As always, I issue the following caveat: any of you out there who happen to be attorneys, or happen to be married to one, and you know who you are, I'm not referring to you or your loved ones, I limit my impotent rage to every other attorney who was ever born. No cat I've ever met, however, deserves a Get Out Of Scorn card from me. They're all worthless wastrels who dig holes in your grocery budget and poop in your house and who, if you died in your sleep and they got hungry, would eat your face off. I wish I hadn't stepped on my cricket. I miss you, Wardell, my brother.

Those of you who believe that Dr. Research exists only as a hapless foil to my mordant wit will be surprised to learn that he is, indeed, a bona fide human bean, albeit not one whose description you'd want to represent us on a space probe looking to make contact with other life forms, if you get my drift. He is, in fact, Chris Bonney, a mighty fine shutterbug and raconteur. His shutterbug skills have long been on display on Flickr and other places, but it just now occurred to him to combine them with the stories he tells about the shots. Which he has done, admirably, on his brand new blog. So go look.

Yes, I know it's a ridiculous meaningless title, and has nothing at all to do with the sketch, but there are only so many ways you can say "people at the coffee shop", and I've used all of them at least ten times. And that's what these are, just your garden variety coffeeshop habitués, which term invests them with unearned glamour, being French and all. They're just your average Joes, the type who, if pressed, will admit they believe torture is wrong, but let's not make a federal case of it, for God's sake. As opposed to the hard-core types who are making the cable-tv rounds claiming that torture is okay because it works. What? That's a claim that "beside the point" is horribly inadequate to describe--it's so far away from the point as to be in an entirely different universe from the point. Public beheading works, for god's sake! When our predecessors signed up for the whole morality thing, they didn't add a caveat saying "unless things get really hairy". It's easy to be moral when nothing's going on. It's precisely when things get hairy that we're called upon to live by our principles. I'm really getting tired of irony, but I can't resist tossing out this bit: it's the most vocal followers of the guy who said "do unto others..." who are quickest to dump such wishy-washy commie platitutes when they get frightened.

Well. Where was I? Oh yeah, these are just your ordinary salt-of-the-earth people, getting their coffee fix on a lazy Sunday afternoon in Norfolk.