The politician’s penis.

There is apparently a demand for guard dogs costing $230,000 apiece.

I’ve removed the Amazon Affiliate ad that used to run over on the right hand sidebar. Apparently the state in which I live, utter disarray Connecticut, has just passed a law requiring online merchants to collect sales tax, so Amazon has with no advance notice canceled all affiliate contracts with Nutmeggers. Thanks to those of you who tossed me a few bucks over the past year by ordering through that link.

Speaking of the beast: belated thanks to the kind reader who sent the pulp art book off the Wish List a few weeks back!

I’ll be at Netroots Nation next week — not speaking, just hanging around the Kos lounge, but there will be a booksigning on Friday. If you’re there, stop by and say hello!

This week’s toon.

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What a great image, on so many levels. Not sure where I ran across it originally, just found it the other day while cleaning off my desktop. Judging from the shadows, it’s either the start of the day or the end of it, as the men who built the Enterprise stand outside their workshop in some nonsdescript industrial neighborhood in Los Angeles, maybe waiting to crate their handiwork off to the studio. A couple of signifying details (which my fellow geeks will readily spot) identify this as the model built for the first pilot, which puts this at about 1964. They’re standing with one of the single most enduring icons of popular culture, but nobody knows it yet.

Update: on the internet, someone always knows the answer. It’s a workshop in Burbank, in December, 1964. Probably looking northeast, which would make it early evening.

A brief history of the Patriot Act.

Update: Credo link.

Housing prices continue to fall (NY Times link). One of my early cartoons on the housing bubble, from March of 2007 (six months before the economy crashed), here.

Crazy liberals!

… CREDO link.

… end of week update for archive:

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Who, besides Thomas Friedman, could come up with prose like this:

May I suggest a Tahrir Square alternative? Announce that every Friday from today forward will be “Peace Day,” and have thousands of West Bank Palestinians march nonviolently to Jerusalem, carrying two things — an olive branch in one hand and a sign in Hebrew and Arabic in the other. The sign should say: “Two states for two peoples. We, the Palestinian people, offer the Jewish people a two-state solution based on the 1967 borders — with mutually agreed adjustments — including Jerusalem, where the Arabs will control their neighborhoods and the Jews theirs.”

Those signs will be wordier than a Tom Tomorrow cartoon — and in two languages, no less.

Also, this:

I had some time to kill at the Cairo airport the other day so I rummaged through the “Egyptian Treasures” shop. I didn’t care much for the King Tut paper weights and ashtrays but was intrigued by a stuffed camel, which, if you squeezed its hump, emitted a camel honk. When I turned it over to see where it was manufactured, it read: “Made in China.” Now that they have decided to put former President Hosni Mubarak on trial, I hope Egyptians add to his indictment that he presided for 30 years over a country where nearly half the population lives on $2 day and 20 percent are unemployed while it is importing low-wage manufactured goods — a stuffed camel, no less — from China.

Lessons learned from an airport gift shop! At least he’s branching out from cab drivers and hotel desk clerks.