http://www.kommiekomiks.com/27.htm

That is a great comic I made many years ago. I should read it once every day.


P.S. I wonder who this blog's very insistent 'stalker', with the IP address 141.161.30.138 (Georgetown University, Washington, District of Columbia?), is. It's not like I write here so often, so whoever you are, you are welcome to enter an e-mail address (create a new, 'neutral' one at Hotmail or Yahoo or some other free service, if you'd prefer to remain incognito) in that box at the bottom of the sidebar, so you'll get an e-mail notification when/if there is an update here.

http://www.boomka.org/

Interesting idea, though I think there are notable differences between kicking from above, from the side or from below. The entries in this contest are kicking from the side, which as good as always is something perfectly acceptable. (Kicking from above, as in the case of a white Christian Danish majority at a swarthy Muslim Danish minority, is objectionable. Kicking from below is admirable.)

I have to comment that this cartoon would be anti-zionist instead of anti-semitic, if the settler wouldn't have a face straight out of the classic anti-semitic cartoons. On the other hand, one can argue that it is indeed anti-semitic, because, as an entry in this contest, it implies that zionism and its crimes are something all Jews would be taking part in.

This isn't really a Valentine's Day card. Maybe it's something better. Maybe not. Click to see it big.



This happened when I was cleaning my own dirt, but I think it's nicer to direct it to the ones who also have to clean up the dirt of others ...

Yesterday I went biking with Mihai to the countryside southwest of Lund. Below is a wing of Stora Råby church, with a sundial above the doorway. The church was built in the 13th century, and the clocktower was added in 1770.

Behind the church, there are high and dense bushes. As I walked around towards the backside, gigantic, pale birds of some sort flew off from the bushes. ("Mutant pigeons?", it flashed through my mind ...) I then spotted a couple of fairly large owls staring at me angrily from the bushes. I was too excited to manage my camera properly before the rest of them flew off to some large trees beyond the churchyard, so unfortunately there is no photographic evidence ...

Mihai got excited about this Fjord horse, because it resembles the Przewalski horses in Mongolia.



Mihai made many more nice pictures during this trip (some of them feature me with three arms), which you can see in his gallery.

In my recent interest in the cityscapes of Lund, I continued working on my photoproject about smoothsided houses.

Remember the old wooden house I took pictures of as it was being torn down last summer? Well, this is what's been erected in its place:



Of course, right now it looks horrible. But I guess that once someone has moved in and lived there for a few decades, it will start to look a little bit more personal and friendly ...
(But it doesn't change the fact that it for some strange reason was built in the exact middle of the yard, so that there is only a thin strip of yard on each side of the house, while they *could* have done the same as with all the neighbouring houses, and built this house on the edge of the yard, next to the street, so that it would have had a bigger, continuous yard behind it ... grmbl ...)



The remains of the gate will also be torn down soon.

But not all is sad: these pigeons were quite funny:



First, they were flying in circles above this house, and then they all sat down on the roof.



Judging by the amount of pigeon shit, it must be a regular hanging out place for this gang. It must be nice to live in this house and hear their cooing from the roof ...

The recent wave of outrage in the Muslim world about the caricatures of Muhammed, published in the Danish newspaper Jyllands-Posten, seems to have erupted in Gaza on the initiative of small secular groups affiliated with Fatah. (Though there had been protests about them elsewhere already in October last year.)

Some observers, among whom Lotta Schüllerqvist, have pointed out that it might well be an act of frustration at the surprising defeat of Fatah in the elections - trying to distract attention from the ruling party Hamas, posing as the 'true defenders of the muslim community', or something like that. Adnan Asfour, the highest political leader of Hamas in the West Bank, has now apparently made a statement saying that Denmark should punish the twelve cartoonists behind the caricatures. Perhaps he is trying to wrestle the issue into the hands of Hamas ("we're against the caricatures, too!").

Be it as it may, the Palestinian population faces a terribly frustrating situation, due to not only the Israeli occupation, but also their many opportunistic political leaders.

As for the caricatures, I think people should actually SEE them before they form an opinion about them. I've seen them, and some of the drawings were downright tasteless (such as the bomb turban, or the sketchy women (?) constructed of stars and crescents, with the rhyme "Prophet! Completely mad as a hatter - who keeps women under the yoke!"). A couple were rather neutral (well, except for the fact that they did depict Muhammed), while a few were quite witty, such as the drawing of "Muhammad in 7A at the Valby school", who has written (apparently in Persian) on the blackboard: "Jyllands-Posten's journalists are a bunch of reactionary provocateurs" - that one is more of a joke at the expense of people who can't read Arabic script.

See for yourselves a bit above the bottom of this page, which gives a short (and perhaps not very scientific, but nonetheless informative) history of depicting the Prophet Muhammed:
http://www.zombietime.com/mohammed_image_archive/
(The rest of that site is pretty 'interesting' ... see, for instance, how someone seems to think that anything in the shape of a crescent HAS to be an Islamic symbol!!! ... Er, no.)
If that site is down, here are alternative sources: 1, 2 (link 1 has stupid comments, though).

As for me, I'm for free speech in this issue. I think these caricatures have the right to be published, just as the writings of, say, holocaust deniers, anti-feminists and neoliberals have the right to be published. The point of free speech, in my opinion, is that it enables the general public to see and discuss what's going on, to form an opinion about issues, and to protest against issues.

What people should protest against in this case is the anti-islamic prejudice that is prevalent in some of the caricatures, and Danish and European society in general - not the fact that they were published.

I wrote an entry about this in my other blog, News From the Underground.

You are Milk. Daydream much? Completely dreamy and
creative, you make a great artist.

Which Garbage Song Are You?
brought to you by Quizilla

Well, it's not my favourite Garbage song (I like Vow, Shut Your Mouth and Push It more). But it's Mihai's favourite song, so that's okay ... :3

As mentioned in a previous entry, I like the smooth sides of old houses. In Lund, you can see quite a lot of them.

 

Click here to go to the gallery.