Capitalism has a foundational dependence on auditors -- outside entities who evaluate companies' claims about their financial state so that investors, suppliers and customers can understand whether to trust the companies with their money and business -- but those auditors are paid by the companies they're supposed to be keeping honest, and to make matters worse, 40 years of lax antitrust enforcement has allowed the auditing industry to contract to a four gigantic firms that openly practice fraud and abet corruption, with no real consequences.
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Like most other online services, Pokemon Go's terms of service are a reboot of the Book of Revelations, full of bizarre horrors, each more grotesque than the last. Read the rest
Walt Kelly's Fairy Tales is a 300-page anthology of Golden Age comic book stories by the great Walk Kelly. It's edited by comic book historian Craig Yoe.
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On May 1, 1953, a rifle-toting bobcat named Simple J. Malarkey ambled into Okefenokee Swamp, the setting for Walt Kelly’s Pogo comic strip, which ran in U.S. newspapers from 1948 until 1975. At the time, Malarkey’s inspiration, Senator Joseph McCarthy, was at the height of his political power, routinely destroying reputations in the name of rooting out Communism. Kelly should have been intimidated, but he mocked the bilious senator from Wisconsin for a year and a half, until one of the newspapers that published Pogo, the Providence Bulletin, threatened to drop the strip if Kelly didn’t drop the character. Seizing upon this fresh opportunity for parody, Kelly promptly drew a new Malarkey panel, hiding Malarkey’s face under a sack. “I’m afeared us will haf’ta keep these bags over our heads, otherwise that chicken from Providence might recognize us,” Malarkey confided to a cartoon cohort on October 8, 1954. In the context of the strip, the statement was a reference to a Rhode Island Red named Sis Boombah from the previous day’s comic, but it was also a clever slap at that Rhode Island newspaper that had tried to censor him.
Kelly’s Malarkey/McCarthy plot is just one of the many storylines in Evidence To The Contrary, which covers the syndicated Pogo comic strips from 1953 and 1954. The third volume in what Fantagraphics promises will be a dozen, Evidence To The Contrary gives us Kelly at his most self-assured, an artist whose facility with both caricature and dialect convinces us that an alligator named Albert really does enjoy nothing more than a good cigar; that an owl named Howland wears a gravity-defying wizard’s cap; and that the guilelessness of a likable possum named Pogo can be a surprisingly effective weapon against the fulminations of mere politicians. Read the rest
A talented group of pogo stick enthusiasts, displaying mad skills.
From Pogo, of Alice fame. [Video Link]
Update: Pogo has a howto explaining his methods, so you can learn to make your own mashups! [via Waxy] Read the rest
