…but my ranch dressing wrote the number “99” earlier today.
If you’re having trouble seeing it, try this:
I haven’t yet been able to figure out what the salad bar at the Cici’s Pizza on Saddle Creek was trying to tell me.
WOODSHAFT 2002
This picture is of the Auburn 125th anniversary float in the Nemaha County parade. I drew that logo, so it’s kind of cool to see it blown up like that.
I was out at Blick today, picking up some Prismacolor markers (the official gray shading marker of Neal Obermeyer cartoons) and some kneaded erasers, and I couldn’t help but overhear one of their staff talking with a young boy and what I imagine was his grandma. The little guy, probably middle school age at oldest, was interested in drawing comic books, and his grandma was taking him shopping for supplies. The Blick guy was showing them some instructional books on drawing superheroes and whatnot.
It made me a little bit sad, because it reminded me of when I was a little kid and how supportive my grandparents were. Now, when I visit my grandma, I just like to talk to her about stuff. But back when I was a kid, whenever I visited my grandparents, it usually involved getting out paper and pencils and just drawing.
Even though they probably had no idea why I just wanted to draw Transformers and superheroes non-stop, they were all very supportive in their own way. My mom’s parents always made sure that there was a nice pad of paper for me, and my grandpa always had plenty of mechanical pencils to choose from. He even made a drawing board so that you could sit in a comfy chair or recliner and it would rest on the arms, providing a big drawing surface. My dad’s parents kept a drawer full of scratch paper that was pretty much just there for me to draw on. They would often sit up at the kitchen counter with me while I drew.
So I just wanted to go up to these people and say “Stick with it, kid” and “Thanks for being such a supportive grandma,” but I thought that might have been kind of weird. I thought maybe the best way to honor the support my grandparents gave me would be to get home and get to work on all those art projects I’ve been putting off.
Right-wing pundits like to borrow the phrase coined by Rush Limbaugh to describe a media that is much more interested in grabbing the juicy bits and ignoring the details of a story.
Well on Bill O’Reilly and Glenn Beck’s programs tonight, they brought on guests to discuss the Chris Benoit story, including the fact that Benoit had been injecting his son with HGH. Both O’Reilly and Beck pushed conclusions that Benoit was doing this because his son was undersized and that the mean old meathead wrestler wanted to have a jacked-up 7 year old like dad.
Both hosts chose to either ignore or omit the fact that Daniel Benoit had Fragile X syndrome, which is commonly treated with HGH. And much like a diabetic child’s insulin shots, parents can routinely give these shots without the supervision of a doctor.
There’s plenty to criticize when it comes to this Benoit story and plenty of legitimate scapegoats and fingers to point. But I can’t imagine that folks like O’Reilly and Beck – who love to demonize the evil, liberal media machine for their convenient inaccuracies – are going to apologize to anyone for misleading the public about Benoit and this non-existent size fetish being projected onto his son.
This is precisely why the WWE’s exploitation of Eddie Guerrero and Owen Hart’s deaths was so horrible. I wrote about this a few days ago, and here and elsewhere people were like “It’s just like when a character dies on any other TV show – it’s entertainment – get over it.” But it’s NOT just like any other TV show.
WWE promoted the fake “Vince McMahon is dead” storyline by going through the exact same motions they go through when people really die, and now a person is really dead and how is WWE reacting? With a lead story on wwe.com and a three-hour tribute tonight on Raw, in which the announcers will act all somber, wrestlers will break character and cry, and there will be a 10-bell salute. In other words, it will be EXACTLY the same way they reacted for McMahon’s storyline death.
So Benoit’s death will be cheapened and probably written off as a storyline hoax by many, because the tasteless cretins in WWE thought it would be fun to have a hokey, tongue-in-cheek storyline that played off the real people who died while under the watch of their company.
I’ve long admired how effective the Bush administration has been when it comes to lying about something, getting caught in the lie, and then justifying the truth they initially sought to lie about. It seems to work on at least 30-something percent of the population, who are willing to vocally defend the lie, and then when the truth is revealed, say that the same reality they were moments ago arguing against is now totally okay with them.
Reading the letters to the editor in today’s Journal Star, it’s now completely okay with Jim Harnley of Seward if the Iraq war is actually about oil. He doesn’t go far enough to say that he actually believes that it is – he just lays the groundwork so that if the rest of the party moves to that point, he has demonstrated that he’s okay with it, therefore he won’t be a hypocrite.
Dear AT&T and Subway,
I write to you jointly because I am currently a regular customer of both of your companies and I also read that both of you have recently joined sponsorships with World Wrestling Entertainment.
I’ve been a wrestling fan since I was a kid – more than 15 years now – but these last few weeks have finally turned me off so much that I’m calling it quits with WWE’s programming.
FIrst off, Vince McMahon and others have been referring to Mark Henry – an African American man – as a gorilla. Maybe it’s different in the South where McMahon grew up, but where I come from, calling a black man an ape is pretty racist.
Then there was last week, when Vince McMahon was supposedly killed in an explosion. I don’t mind “death” storylines on their own, as they have the potential to be interesting. What I did mind was the follow-up – the way in which they portrayed Vince McMahon’s “fake” death in exactly the same way they portrayed the real deaths of Eddie Guerrero, Owen Hart and the 9/11 victims over the past 8 years – 10-bell mid-ring salutes, wrestlers acting “out of character,” tearful speeches, saying “The show must go on” (like they did the night Owen Hart died live on their program), etc.
Maybe to them, portraying this storyline death in the same way as the real deaths adds gravity to the drama…except in other places, they’re playing it totally tongue-in-cheek, including daughter Stephanie McMahon’s cheesy over-acting. Maybe to WWE, mocking the deaths of wrestlers who died under their watch or the deaths of 3000 Americans on September 11th is somehow funny or ripe for satire. I think it’s pretty disgusting.
WWE has been growing more and more tasteless the past few years, with their “terrorist” characters, wrestlers having sex with corpses, and so on, but combining this blatant racism with the exploitation of the real deaths of their employees and innocent civilians is the straw that broke the camel’s back for me.
If this is what they consider to be entertainment, I’m more than happy to finally turn the channel. And if this is the type of trash you want your company to be associated with, I’ve got plenty of other options.
So in a few months, when my plan expires, I’ll be happy to leave Cingular / AT&T for another service, knowing that this is the type of “entertainment” they want to use for their promotion. There’s no shortage of sandwich shops that I can turn to now that I’ll no longer be eating at Subway.
Best of luck to your companies. I hope you enjoy the business of all those folks who don’t mind making fun of minorities and dead people for a quick, easy buck.
Neal Obermeyer
Omaha, NE
