Cartoonist's car doused with used engine oil

Jason Chatfield says: "Australian editorial cartoonist Jason Chatfield awoke this morning to find someone didn't find one of his cartoons funny. Some people write letters to the paper, others coat the cartoonist's car in engine oil."

At 5am there was a frantic knock at the door. My eyes shot open, but I wasn’t sure if it was in a dream or if I had actually heard the knocking. Sure enough, the frenzied banging on my door started again, so I jumped out of bed and made a bee-line for the door. (It didn’t occur to me that it could have been a crazy person ready to knife me on the other side of the door, but at this stage curiosity just got the better of me.)
Turns out it was Peter, the guy who lives downstairs. Since he’s a builder he always leaves for work early, but from the agitated look on his face I suspected he wasn’t urgently inviting me down to his place for a croissant and a cup of tea.
He politely informed me that someone had decided to completely coat my (white) car in Valvoline Engine Oil.

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Mark Frauenfelder is the founder of Boing Boing and the editor-in-chief of MAKE and Cool Tools. Twitter: @frauenfelder. Come and hear Mark speak at the ALA conference in Chicago on July 1.

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DragonPhyre

@slawkenbergius: that’s the best thing about free speech. I don’t have to care WHAT you think is funny, I can say whatever I want.

And all this bullcrap about ‘hate speech’ needs to stop too. There is no such thing. You are allowed to say whatever you want about someone. If you actually do those things then you are supposed to go to jail. Saying something does not mean you are going to do something.

This country is going downhill FAST.
JamesProvost

I think this is a clever product plug by Valvoline.
Steve Zembek

I don’t get why he mentions a specific brand of oil.
Charlie

I know Jason.

The great thing is. Not only is this guy not funny, he really is as slawkenbergius put it “an arsehole”.

He deserves every drip of oil on that car and a whole lot more.
Teresa Nielsen Hayden / Moderator

Steve Zembek, possibly because he was quoting the neighbor.

Truthfriction, TrevorJ, Slawkenbergius: I assume you’d have the same reaction if it were your car? Or do you have some additional information not contained in the story the rest of us read?

Dragonphyre, “free speech” does not and never has meant that you can say whatever you want.

Congratulations on having the sheer dumb luck to not belong to any classes or categories that are the recipients of hate speech. Only people who’ve never been on the receiving end of it can afford to pretend it doesn’t exist. The ones that have know damned well that it exists.
TruthFriction4

I suppose this is one way to get free publicity, but I would have used chocolate instead of motor oil.

Seriously, is there any indication that this vandalism was because of this artist’s work, or are we all running on assumptions here?
trevorj

Second that – where’s the evidence this isn’t just random vandalism of some kind? This guy cartoons for the kind of free weekly paper you get unasked-for in your letterbox (or so Googling reveals), so how controversial could he be?
nygadfly

FTA: “He politely informed me that someone had decided to completely coat my (white) car in Valvoline Engine Oil.”

Judging from the photo, the word “completely” must have a different meaning in Australia than in the rest of the English-speaking world.
slawkenbergius

That joke about Stevie Wonder wasn’t funny in the slightest. The guy’s an arsehole. He probably deserved it.
The Astronot

What? Hopefully he used synthetic then he won’t have to grease anything for like 5000 miles.
trevorj

“Truthfriction, TrevorJ, Slawkenbergius: I assume you’d have the same reaction if it were your car? Or do you have some additional information not contained in the story the rest of us read?”

Well, of a sort: as it happens, Jason Chatfield’s hometown of Perth is my hometown too. But I really did need to Google his name to discover that fact – I’d never heard of him. People around here just don’t read free weeklies of the kind he cartoons for, and as such, they’re simply not capable (in my opinion) of attracting the kind of notoriety that would lead to revenge attacks, payback, etc. Hence my preferred “mindless vandalism” theory. (And yes, of course I’d be incredibly annoyed if someone poured motor oil all over my car. Who wouldn’t?)
Korpo

… This country being Australia?

Also, Australia does not have any guaranteed right to free speech in their constitution.