Doonesbury turned 40 today. NPR reports:
Created in the throes of '60s and '70s counterculture, Garry Trudeau's Doonesbury comic strip blurred the lines between comics and the editorial pages, and produced some of the most memorable cartoon characters ever sketched.
Trudeau developed Doonesbury around three foundational characters — everyman Mike Doonesbury, football quarterback B.D. and campus radical Mark Slackmeyer. They represented the center, the right, and the left, Trudeau says.
Six weeks after Doonesbury was first published on campus, Trudeau was offered what he calls an "out of the blue" syndication deal. "It's a ridiculous story, and it nauseates my children," Trudeau says, "that I would find my life's work six weeks into it."
The NPR article has a bunch of the most memorable strips following the copy.
Via reader AS, this has to be my favorite jack-o-lantern ever:
This is one of my favorites, from a road trip through Wisconsin in October 2003:
Aaron Sorkin responded to his critics on comedy writer Ken Levine's blog:
[B]elieve me, I get it. It's not hard to understand how bright women could be appalled by what they saw in the movie but you have to understand that that was the very specific world I was writing about. Women are both prizes and equals.
More generally, I was writing about a very angry and deeply misogynistic group of people. These aren't the cuddly nerds we made movies about in the '80s. They're very angry that the cheerleader still wants to go out with the quarterback instead of the men (boys) who are running the universe right now. The women they surround themselves with aren't women who challenge them (and frankly, no woman who could challenge them would be interested in being anywhere near them).
The whole thing is worth a read, including Levine's introduction, from which I took the headline to this post.
Via Snopes, a clip from Jamie Oliver as he demonstrates to schoolchildren in Huntington, W.Va., where their chicken nuggets come from:
For the record, I eat tofu nuggets that are probably even more disgusting to some people, being made from all the leftover bits of soybeans.
A classmate sent me what turned out to be a hoax story claiming an activity that I will describe simply as a fun activity shared between a man and one other person can actually prevent breast cancer. Sadly, it can't, but apparently a component can do lots of other good things:
[Psychologists Gordon] Gallup and [Rebecca] Burch reasoned that certain chemicals in human semen, through vaginal absorption, affect female biology in such a way that women who have condomless sex literally start to smell different from those women who do not—or at least, their bodies emit the pheromones that “entrain” menstrual cycles among cohabitating women. (Their hunch was indeed borne out by reviewing the existing literature on menstrual synchrony.) But this happenstance discovery of asynchronous lesbians was just the tip of the semen iceberg for Gallup and Burch, who quickly discovered that, although much was known among biologists about basic semen chemistry, virtually nothing was known about precisely how these chemicals might influence female biology, behavior and psychology.
... In fact, semen has a very complicated chemical profile, containing over 50 different compounds (including hormones, neurotransmitters, endorphins and immunosupressants) each with a special function and occurring in different concentrations within the seminal plasma. Perhaps the most striking of these compounds is the bundle of mood-enhancing chemicals in semen. There is good in this goo. Such anxiolytic chemicals include, but are by no means limited to, cortisol (known to increase affection), estrone (which elevates mood), prolactin (a natural antidepressant), oxytocin (also elevates mood), thyrotropin-releasing hormone (another antidepressant), melatonin (a sleep-inducing agent) and even serotonin (perhaps the most well-known antidepressant neurotransmitter).
It's always fascinating to me the sorts of things that pop up in random reading.
This might not be the thing for everyone's kitchen:
Only $29.95 from ThinkGeek.
Did you know what goes on inside figs?
Figs are not actually fruits but a mass of inverted flowers and seeds that are pollinated by a species of tiny symbiotic wasps. The male fig flower is the only place where the female wasp can lay her eggs, at the bottom of a narrow opening in the fruit that she shimmies her way through. The baby wasps mature inside the fig into males that have sharp teeth but no wings and females ready to fly. They mate, the males chew through the special fig pollen holders and drop them down to the females, chew holes in the skin of the fig to let the females out, and then die. The females, armed with the pollen, fly off in search of new male figs to lay her eggs in. In the process some of the female wasps land on female figs that don't have the special egg receptacle but trick the female into shimmying inside. As the female wasp slides through the narrow passage in the fig her wings are ripped off (egg laying is a one-way mission) and while she is unsuccessful in laying her eggs, she successfully pollinates the female flower. The female flower then ripens into the fig that you can get at the supermarket, digesting the trapped wasp inside with specialized enzymes! For the females that managed to lay their eggs the life cycle continues with a new brood of tiny wasps ready to mate and pollinate.
So, in the past week I've worked 63 hours, commuted for 6, done schoolwork for 6, and walked the dog for 3. Only, the week isn't over, because I still have my Operations final due tomorrow night. And we've got a long week at work as we slog towards our production release Saturday.
The Daily Parker might be sparse.