Google as a Mirror of World Opinion

Or simply as a reinforcer of classic stereotypes.

Funny, really. Not one of the search suggestions for my people is positive.

Bikes at the Bahnhof - Zurich, Switzerland

(Click for the full effect.)

Coffee with Jesus - Unmanned and Undeclared

(Click.)

Coffee with Jesus No. 48

(Click.)

Queenstown, South Africa

Saw this schoolgirl on Google Street Views. The umbrella, the school uniform and her posture, the dignity with which she carries herself to or from school (we'll never know) were in stark contrast to the bleak backdrop of her surroundings. Click it for the very large and also check in on the RFB main site for all the Saturated Street Scenes.

If this collection keeps growing, and it will, I would love to display these images in a gallery. Of course then Google would sue me if any of them sold. Maybe there's a way around that. Probably not.

The Saturated Street Scenes Collection Grows

Believe it or not, I have to do a lot of "traveling" before I find a shot I want to work with. Here are the latest. Click them for the massive size. The entire series is being housed over here.

 Victoria, BC

 Palermo, Sicily

Loch Brittle, Isle of Skye

Good Will

Father of Lies

(El Clicko)

Image is Everything

(Le Click)

Coffee with Jesus #44 - It's All Good, Jeez

(Clickity)

Cupcakes for Jesus

Bloody Marys, Bloody Battlefield

With no offense to your Confederate ancestors intended.

First class seats on a morning flight to Washington National Airport apparently require the consumption of Bloody Marys. We did as the natives did and consumed one, not making eye contact with the rabble boarding after us, slogging their sad way to cramped seats in the back like so many arrested political dissidents boarding a train for Siberia, hangdog, depressed, jealous of us. We tried to make eye contact with them, but they kept their eyes down on the carpet in the aisle, like good peasants, or affixed them to some imaginary thing in the back of the plane, anything but our eyes. I never do that when I fly in the back, which is to say, every other time I’ve flown. I look those first-class people in the eye and I think, “You suck. I hate you. You with your fancy Bloody Mary and your big leather seat and your legroom and your luggage coming off the carousel first. You think that’s worth the extra money you had to pay? Idiot! I’ll be back here saving money!” As it turns out, I think first-class travel might actually be worth the extra money, if you’ve got the extra money.

Washington National Airport has been slow to adopt the moniker bestowed on it in 1998 by Bill Clinton; Ronald Reagan Washington National Airport. The airlines still call it National. The exterior sign on the terminal when you taxi to your gate still says National. The flight attendants, those obedient servers of Bloody Marys, still announce that we have landed at Washington National. The only evidence I could find that this was Mr. Reagan’s airport were decals on the automatic glass doors as you leave the building. I suppose in the circles we traveled in that weekend, it is most certainly called Reagan and Reagan only.

Up in Gettysburg we tried to turn our blood into wine. We were joined by Kay's brother, an Army officer stationed in DC, and some other old friends at my sister’s second home, an antebellum masterpiece she bought for its proximity to the ski area. We drank late into the night, recalling Frankfurt and life as Army brats - far too late into the night. The morning was gloomy, with fog and light rain, and it matched the atmosphere of my brain. Kay’s brother, who possesses a hunger for history that will never be sated, gave us a tour of the Battle of Gettysburg that was more than my Cabernet flowing veins could properly appreciate. All I saw was the blood pooling in the rocks of Little Round Top, the bloated bodies roasting in the July sun on that hot day just four score and seven years from the Founding, where men wearing wool, good God, man! – WOOL – in JULY – were charging foolishly across fields to their slaughter – ordered by men who should’ve known better but let it proceed for Pride. The gloom of that March morning conjured well the ghosts of that battle, who told of bugs biting them, of streams running so foul with dead horses and blood that finding a sip of fresh water was all they could think of. They told of the heat, the stench, the miserable rations, the incompetent commanders and the flash of bayonets. It was utter misery. The glory, they said, was imagined in the aftermath. What was glorious in this? they asked? To have repelled an advance here only to let Bobby Lee slip through Fairfield to the South and escape back to the safety of Virginia? We had him! He was beaten! And we let him go for another two years. But it wasn’t just the Union ghosts complaining. The Confederate dead were later exhumed and relocated to the Carolinas. But to be buried even for that short time in Yankee soil meant they were cursed to haunt these serious grounds far from home forever, and they told of hearing the ludicrous orders to assault high ground occupied by the enemy across an open field under heavy artillery fire. Lee, they suggested, was a tiny-footed prima donna, and many of them lost respect for him that day. Oh, dashing, sure, they said. Cut a fine figure in his gray frock and white beard. Noble, maybe so. But so full of Pride that he got us all killed. Loved that damned Traveller more than he did us. You don’t know our names, but you know the name of his goddamned horse.

It would take Grant to whip slippery Lee, but today the men of the country clubs on the Potomac would have Grant removed from the fifty-dollar bill, to be replaced by an actor from California who spoke well and had a genial, grandfatherly way about him. They would do better to remove their nemesis, that dastardly Woodrow Wilson, from the one-hundred-thousand-dollar bill.

The Bloody Marys on the return flight to Orlando were welcome and we shed our jackets as we walked into the warm March air at our airport named for no one, not even Mickey.

Game of Thrones

(Click.)

Super-Saturated Street Scenes Moves To RFB

One of my favorite features from the old blog was Super Saturated Street Scenes, wherein I would just drop the little yellow guy from Google Maps down on a street and find something interesting.

Today while doing some research for a boring writing assignment about Cancún, I was wandering the streets of that seaside city on Google Maps and thought I’d take a hop across the water to nearby Isla Mujeres, where I found this gentleman staring down the Google Car crew.

So I decided to bring Super Saturated Street Views here to RFB. It’s a great big world out there, and Google lets us explore it from our computers, bumping up the saturation to imagine it better than it is, cropping to eliminate the periphery and creating our own versions.

In truth, no saturation bumping was necessary in this image. The Caribbean Sea is that blue. Click for the massive version.

Let the Shallow Analyzation Begin

Politics is Theater and the 2012 race kicked off with all the splashy graphics and empty soundbites you expect from the American political stage. Like every other news site, blog or opinionator out there, we at RFB will offer our take on how the Magnificent Seven performed last night. We'll just take them left to right.

Little Ricky Santorum

Erratic, nervous, but very convinced of his own mission, Rick is an earnest if delusional man who will stay in this race long enough to let his social issue concerns become part of the debate, bowing out early, announcing that he had fulfilled what God sent him to do.

Michelle Bachmann

This lady makes Sarah Palin look like, well - like the runner-up at a sparsely populated state's beauty pageant. Bachmann delivered and I know that inside the Romney camp they're already looking at her as a potential running mate. She delivers the Tea Party that Romney can't. The 23 foster kids line is a winner, but except the press to go out and dig up at least one of those kids who will say something mean about living at the Bachmann house.

Newt Gingrich

It is very hard to like Newt because he says whatever is expedient at the moment, but he brought himself up from dead last to at least the lower middle of the pack last night by realizing he had nothing to lose while speaking in that tough-talk populist way he has learned to fake.

Mitt Romney

If Mattel® manufactured Romney, he would be Senior Ken™. Americans like their politicians handsome, tall and well-spoken, and Mitt fits that mold as if he were plastic. He is the total package, minus the Mormonism, which American's don't like. But you almost forgot he was a Mormon last night.

Ol' Ron Paul 

If only Paul had a single ounce of charisma, you could hear the intelligent points he is making, but when he goes of on that senior citizen whiny old man way of his, it's hard to hear him. He's the smartest guy on the stage, but his awkwardness ruins him. Sadly, this is how we judge our leaders, and he'll have no chance when the field narrows.

Tim Pawlenty

If Rick Santorum had a boring twin brother, he would be Tim Pawlenty. Tim means well, you can tell, but he has trouble making his case. Cowering under the questioning about "Obamney" care didn't help him one bit. The establishment like him, but voters won't.

Herman Cain

It's nice to have a business leader who speaks plainly in the race, but the country is not a pizza shop and eventually Cain's folksiness is going to wear thin. He's good at a sound bite, but I think he's used most of his lines at least twice now. Could be a potential running mate for the front runner.

Can any of these people beat Obama in 2012? If the economy keeps tanking, any of them could.

Clever Title That Makes People Click

Katie and I sat down with a glass of wine and the headset mics on and started talking. I forgot how fun creating these things was. Seems I took a five-year break to blog over at Wheres My Jetpack? Would like to do this more often. Audio production is always fun for me. In this episode of Radio Free Babylon, we talk about things in the news like Anthony's weiner, joblessness, the hopeless 2012 Republican candidates and we also solve the Middle East crisis. Enjoy. Or don't.



I can't guarantee that it will load on your first try as the file is hosted on our kitchen computer, which tends to randomly restart once an hour or so. Katie thought it was dog hair clogging up something, but I already took it out to the garage and blew it out. There was a hell of a lot of dog hair in there, but it didn't fix it. So just try again in a minute if it doesn't work.

Render Unto Caesar

(Click it. Click it good.)

See the whole collection of "Coffee With Jesus" comics over here.

If a Tree Falls...

(Click.)

What Would Jesus Eat?

(Click.)

Make Hay While The Sun Shines

What is made in America? Basically, food, cigarettes and some of the lousier alcoholic drinks. As for our cigarettes, no one makes them better, and if you’re not a smoker, basically you hate America. It’s the one thing we excel at. The Brown Gold. This country was founded on tobacco trade and yet we wage war against it. The anti-smokers are not thinking clearly. When they aren’t trying to rid the world of smokers, they’re busy worrying that China hasn’t signed a pact with the world promising that they will stop polluting.

My shirt is from Indonesia; my desk from Vietnam, my shoes and just about everything else comes from China. We demand these things, the toys in our Happy Meals, the PCs, PDAs, HDTVs and everything down at the Dollar Store. And we demand them cheap. And we want to tell the Chinese how to clean their air? How can they possibly clean their air when they are busy building factories for our lawn and garden wagons, our ear-buds, our Guitar Heroes and our backpacks?

Maybe the only reason America’s air is cleaner than it was forty years ago is because we stopped producing anything. We shut down our factories and started buying everything from China. God help Wal-Mart when China’s workforce starts demanding better wages and benefits. And God help China if America ever stops buying all the cheap goods they produce.

There is a Wal-Mart Super Center a few miles from our home that we call the Super-Ghetto Wal-Mart. It is in a neighborhood that is, to put it nicely, impoverished. We will shop there, though, because Wal-Mart has everything an American household needs, and at better prices than anywhere else. It is only a few miles from us and yet worlds removed. And when the top blows off of this Beast and the gangs are roaming the nicer suburbs, murdering and raping, smashing windows and stealing food, I hope one of them recognizes me from my shopping sprees and says, “Hey, wait! Don’t kill that guy and his family. They’re cool. I’ve seen them down at Wal-Mart.” I’m sure at that time a gang will have commandeered the Wal-Mart and anyone approaching it to loot its shelves will be shot and burned, the store’s produce and kerosene stoves, propane grills and bottled water reserved for friends and acquaintances of the gang. I envision men on the roof with automatic weapons, guarding with their lives the acres and acres of lawn chairs and batteries, the blankets and canned goods, the coats and candy all under the roof on which they stand sentry. Women will approach them and trade sex in order to feed their children, or they will simply be raped and murdered, the children sold as laborers. And men who look like me, who have not shopped there before, will approach with gas can in hand, begging and pleading for a little kerosene or propane, maybe some crackers or a two-liter of Coke. And they will be shot and burned.

But that is not Today. Today is bright. Today holds promise. There are lawns to mow, Playboy Channels to subscribe to and timeshare to sell. Mickey’s gates are open and all is right on Maple Street.

Weiner Jokes

(Click.)

 

All The Old Comics Together at Last + Ayn Rand

Over the weekend I traded Katie a breakfast in bed for the installation of a tool that allowed me to put up many of the comics from the old blog in an attractive, easy to navigate place on our main site. So, all the old Cold Call Carl, Credenza Boys and Coffee with Jesus stuff is here. And here's a new CWJ, where our hero weighs in on the Ayn Rand resurgence.

(Click.)

Coffee With Jesus - New Character

So I was trying to find where I originally grabbed the image for this comic and came upon tineye.com, where you upload an image and it finds matches. Great tool. So now I can use the guy who Jesus replaced in the original as a new character. We'll call him Kevin. He will be as clueless as the other three in the series.

(Click.)

In Your Father's Footsteps

(Click.)

Warms My Heart

If you're enjoying these little comics, why not go Like us on Facebook? I'm not sure what good that will do either of us, but it seems to be what's expected of everyone these days.



(Click.)

I Think You Mean Walt Disney World® Resort.

(Click.)

Coffee With Jesus - Vol I, No. 32

(Click.)

Coffee With Jesus #31 - Painter of Light

(Click.)

Carl's Mid-Life Crisis

(Click.)

There's No Bread

Coffee With Jesus - Dot TV

(Click.)