Archive Listing
February 16, 2007 - February 9, 2007

Tuesday, February 14, 2006

A SCOOP FROM THE XOFF REPORT. For generations now, the psychology profession has used inkblots to tap the subconscious minds of human beings. It only took 50 years or so of data collection and tabulation to discover that whenever you show someone an inkblot, he always associates it with sex. To Dr. Gerhard Carschach, this phenomenon suggested that it's time -- for doctors and patients both -- to stop pretending that inkblots are houses or insects or cats on the mantlepiece. This just wastes time and muddies the waters. That's why he has developed a new set of eight blots that he regards as complete and sufficient for all psyches.

"Now that we know we're all of us always looking for sex in abstract images," Dr. Carschach explained in a recent interview, "we can ask a question much simpler than 'What does this make you think of?' We can ask, rather, which one of these blots turns you on the most? Sexually, I mean."

InstaPunk readers can experience the absolute insights of the new inkblots for themselves. The procedure is simple. Study all the blots on this page, including the one above, and after careful review and comparison, select the ONE that seems to you the most sexually suggestive and appealing. Then click on THAT inkblot for a detailed analysis of your sexual persona. But please don't be hasty. The results are correct 99.9 percent of the time, and the psychological damage can be immense and permanent if you inadvertently become one of the 0.01 percent of those who choose too quickly.

That small warning given, have at it and enjoy your voyage of personal discovery.

Monday, February 13, 2006

REWORK THE CARTOON. On Groundhog Day, we started the ball rolling:


It's taken us longer than anticipated to collate and consider what turned out to be a big pile of entries. Our apologies for that, but not for anything that follows. Yes, we know that some of you were offended by the mere fact of the contest; for example, here are the thoughts of commenter "Sean":


Several of the contest entrants also identified the original blank version we created as the only variation from the original they could stomach submitting. We understand their sensibilities, but there is value in carrying out a live attempt to turn a sow's ear into a silk purse. While many of the entries are clever, none succeeds in rising above the repugnant image to become truly funny. In short, the collected entries prove that regardless of Toles's attempt to depict the original as a harmless conceptual construct, his drawing  is truly offensive. His error is very much like that of writers and filmmakers who insist on using the F-Word in their work to achieve verisimilitude. The effect of that word in print and on film far outweighs its effect in casual conversation. Toles conceived an idea that was abstract in its imagined form, but far too real and resonant in its emotional impact. His cartoon and all the reworkings of it we received are in bad taste.

Focusing on one exceptionally clumsy example reminded us that Toles and other political cartoonists are especially susceptible to this kind of misstep. There is a wide gulf between political cartoons and New Yorker cartoons -- i.e., cartoons that are honestly meant to be funny. Political cartoons are self-conscious allegories rather than slices of life, and their images are almost exclusively symbolic. They do not refer to authentic human experience except by (usually unfortunate) accident. They are at best witty, and at worst a deadly expose of the artist's own pretensions. We are forced to the conclusion that political cartoonists make up the bush league of both the art and humor worlds.

Most of our entrants understood this and acknowledged, explicitly or implicitly, the impossibility of extracting real humor from the Toles drawing . A few did not. Despite our admonitions, quite a few lefties offered submissions that retained the identity of the patient as the U.S. Army or a soldier in that army. A couple of thoughtless righties did the same. We were surprised by all instances of this.

We are getting to the winners, but just a few more observations first. We offered entrants the opportunity to submit text rather than filled-in cartoons, but this resulted in almost nothing usable. Particularly with regard to lefties, the text versions turned into sentences and even paragraphs of lecturing rhetoric. These are never funny, and they are almost always directly counter-productive to their authors' purpose. You can see many examples of such leaden non-starters in the Comments section of the Contest announcement page, where it should be obvious that as a group the lefties have no emotional connection of any kind to the troops they affect to save through surrender and appeasement. They don't see the soldier in the bed as anything but a chess piece in their attack on Bush. Are you listening, Tom Toles and WAPO editors? Of course not.

Now for our (dis)honorees. We selected this one because the submitter went to the trouble of revising the drawing on his own, and it does succeed in tapping into a culturally shared image that's less real and repellent than the original.



You can also see a larger percentage of the total entries, broken out by category, on a separate page here. If you choose to go there and look, don't bother telling us how offended you are. You looked.

There. We did what we promised, and also as promised, we have no prizes to give other than continuing anonymity for our contributors and a stubborn refusal to apologize for this object lesson. Thanks to all who participated.

Thursday, February 09, 2006

THINGS CHANGE. Yeah, it's authentic. From Germany. Is there any remaining hope for the survival of western civilization against the barbarian hordes? No.

Wednesday, February 08, 2006

PSAYINGS.5A.19. We frequently disagree with Sean Hannity, but never more so than yesterday, when in characterizing Jimmy Carter's disgraceful performance at the funeral of Coretta Scott King, he referred to Carter on his radio show as the "second worst president of the twentieth century after Bill Clinton." Hannity is dead wrong. Jimmy Carter is, bar none, THE worst president in American history, and it is a source of national shame that he has been allowed to continue screwing things up on the world stage as the worst ex-president in American history. Here's what he did yesterday at the King funeral:


The wizened little trailer trash pipsqueak omitted pointing out that Martin Luther King was wiretapped by Robert Kennedy, the attorney-general for his sainted brother, John F. Kennedy (why has nobody ever cared about that particular gangster appointment, by the way? Just how many decibels would the screaming amount to if GWB named Jeb AG? Right. Shudder...).

This Carter creep is the guy whose stewardship gave us 13.5 percent inflation, a prime rate of 22 percent, 10 percent unemployment, de facto surrender to the thugocracy of the Soviet Union, and -- TA DA! -- the U.S.-sponsored rise of Islamic fascism in the Middle East. It was Carter who took no action of any kind while Pol Pot was murdering a third of Cambodia in the aftermath of the Democratic Party's assassination of South Vietnam. It was Carter who connived at the oveerthrow of the Shah of Iran and enabled the bin-Ladenesque Ayatollah Khomeini to seize power. It was Carter who failed to rescue American hostages taken in a blatant act of war by the Khomeini barbarians, and it was also Carter who presided over the most humiliatingly incompetent military embarrassment in American history.

No matter where you look, Carter's fingerprints are all over every foreign policy crisis we've experienced since he first defaced the Oval Office. It was Carter who backed the communist Sandinistas over the capitalist rebels in Nicaragua. It was Carter who managed to sabotage even the minimal stand the Clinton administration had taken against North Korea's nuclear weapons program. It was Carter who... well... backed the anti-American side in every instance he poked his head into global politics after the electorate hurled him out of the White House in an epic landslide.

And he has the nerve to despoil a funeral for the purpose of sniping at a sitting President who has ten times his guts and twenty times his understanding of world affairs. He should be punched right in the face. For starters.

To call Jimmy Carter a deliberate traitor to his country would be a compliment, because that at least would grant him him the assumption that what he has tried to do he has succeeded in doing. The truth is far worse. This tiny, contemptible, presumptuous, conceited moron has done -- in the name of patriotism and under the influence of a loathesome self-aggrandizing hubris -- more damage to this nation than Benedict Arnold, John Wilkes Booth, and Nathan Bedford Forrest combined.

It's way past time to send this classless, witless, clueless little outbreak of national melanoma home. Back to the Faulknerian nightmare that spawned him. Back to the trailer park. Even they might not accept him. But if that's the case, they will still know how to deal with him.

That's what we're counting on, anyway.

P.S. Shame on you, Sean.

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