A Reliable Source
An essay about Artificial Intelligence, Mother Nature and taking your shirt off at a football game...
Last week Donald Trump made news when he attended one of his many trials and kept making loud comments that the jury could hear, so the judge had to tell him to shut up and when all that happened I thought “When you need a cartoon idea, you can always count on Donald Trump” which then made me think of Old Faithful, the geyser in Yellowstone National Park that has an orgasm every 35 to 120 minutes.
A feat I haven’t been able to pull off since the late 1970s.
According to some news source I failed to write down, at some conference I neglected to remember, some women whose name I forgot (and I think you have to admit identifying news sources doesn’t get much more consistent than this) said that we need to develop and use Artificial Intelligence responsibly which is kinda like saying people shouldn’t overeat or you should wear a coat in winter or if you want a peaceful life you might want to avoid dating a Kardashian.
No shit.
Sometimes politicians and bureaucrats say dumb things we don’t believe and sometimes they say even dumber things they don’t believe and this forgotten woman’s statement made me ask when have we ever used anything responsibly?
That’s not what we do.
While the products I listed in the above cartoon aren’t exactly benign, you could give us the most benign and wholesome products imaginable and we’d still fuck that up and here’s a commercial from the 1970s that promoted American values like “Baseball, Hotdogs, Apple Pie and Chevrolet” so wander down Memory Lane and take a look:
Since that commercial aired we’ve dicked up baseball with analytics, filled ourselves with the chemical additives that come in hotdogs, eaten enough apple pie to become some of the fattest people on Earth and give us a Chevrolet and we’ll install a Self-Driving System and run it into the nearest light pole.
We tend to be an irresponsible species and every once in a while God gets sick of our shit and floods the Earth or sends a plague of toads or turns an insubordinate wife into a pillar of salt and He and/or She must be getting pissed off again because this time it looks like He and/or She plans to freeze us to death.
Normally (assuming I have any idea what that is) I read the news and decide what and/or who I want to draw about and what I want to say and then think of a cartoon that expresses my opinion.
But in this case…
It’s been freezing cold here in the Midwest which anyone who watched the Chiefs play the Dolphins is well aware of and we’ll now take one of my literary detours to talk about the Mensa candidates who get hammered on Jagermeister and decide to take off their shirts at a football game.
Mother Nature does not care how excited and pumped up you are about your football team and whenever I hear some adventure described as “Man Against Nature” I always think the only time Man prevails in that match-up is when Mother Nature doesn’t make an effort because as volcanoes, tsunamis, tornadoes, earthquakes, hurricanes and mudslides throughout history have demonstrated, when Mother Nature does make an effort she’ll kick the living shit out of Man.
And the latest example of Mother Nature kicking Man’s ass is the KC Fire Department getting 70 calls from Arrowhead Stadium during that Dolphins/Chiefs game and 15 people having to be hospitalized for frostbite and/or hypothermia and not one of them was named Albert Einstein.
But Jason Kelce still made me laugh
So Travis Kelce scores a touchdown in Sunday’s Chiefs/Bills game and anytime Travis does pretty much anything the TV cameras cut to whatever suite Taylor Swift is sitting in so they can see her reaction, but this time they caught a shirtless Jason Kelce screaming his ass off.
And just to prove it wasn’t temporary insanity, Jason appeared to spend the rest of the game shirtless and chugging what I assume was beer which might make Taylor wonder just how deep the Kelce Family gene pool is and whether she wants to dive in head first.
Which reminds me of the time my younger brother grew his hair out and it looked like crap and my older brother threaten to cut a chunk out while he slept so he’d have to cut the rest of his hair to make it match, but being a certified genius my younger brother took an old football helmet and attached a chin strap held in place with a combination lock and started sleeping in our family’s Rambler station wagon with all the doors locked.
Which my date saw when I brought her home one night and I had to explain why one of my brothers was sleeping in a station wagon in our driveway wearing the same head gear preferred by Slingin’ Sammy Baugh:
I don’t recall having another date with that woman after she got that enlightening look at our Family Gene Pool.
And now back to the cartoon.
OK, so I’m thinking it’s been so cold Hell must have frozen over by now which means some unlikely things must have happened which would explain how the Detroit Lions won a playoff game (for the first time in 32 years) but then I thought why would I make fun of the Detroit Lions?
I’ve got nothing against the team or the City of Detroit, but I had a good cartoon idea and now I was looking for a subject to draw that Hell Frozen Over cartoon about and as previously noted Donald Trump provided one.
Something to think about: we’ve reached the point in American History where a presidential candidate can run for the White House by getting indicted, charged with 91 crimes, attending one of the many trials he’s involved in and acting like an asshole.
And it’s working.
Which gets us to a presidential campaign that didn’t work.
If memory serves (and if it does, I’d like a margarita, no salt) I’ve never done a punctuation-based cartoon before and I probably thought of this one because we’re in the middle of the NFL playoffs and last week some teams had a first-round bye and then Vivek Ramalamadingdong got his ass handed to him in Iowa – the first round of primary voting – and suspended his presidential campaign which I described as a “first round, ‘bye” which may or may not make sense to anybody except English teachers.
The Department of Health and Human Services is asking the DEA to reclassify marijuana because it’s less harmful and less prone to abuse than we first thought and maybe that’s because we first thought marijuana would cause REEFER MADNESS and turn you into a sex-crazed werewolf, when it will actually turn you into a Late-Night Taco Bell patron and, if you’re extremely lucky, a Black jazz musician.
Food for thought (and now that I’ve mentioned it, I really wish it was Taco Bell food to go with that margarita I ordered earlier):
I just watched the first season of Boardwalk Empire – a series about Atlantic City during prohibition – and when Prohibition passed, all the gangsters and bootleggers celebrated because now people would pay 20 times what they previously paid for booze, which kinda makes you wonder about the motivations of the people who still think weed ought to be illegal.
Marijuana is not my drug of choice (I seem to produce plenty of lethargy on my own), but I have a hard time thinking it’s more destructive and dangerous than alcohol which we’ve decided is OK to consume and don’t you love how the liquor industry encourages us to drink and shows us just how much fun drinking is and the incredibly cool people we’ll meet in a bar and how we’ll all laugh and sing Sweet Caroline together and then at the end of those Isn’t Drinking Fun commercials adds:
“Please Drink Responsibly.”
Which is a Cover Your Ass move because when you lose your job and develop cirrhosis of the liver and can’t get any of the unemployed alcoholics who are now your only friends to harmonize on a Neil Diamond song, the liquor industry can say:
“Hey, we TOLD you to drink responsibly!”
In any case…
The news about marijuana made me think about some of the things we should have been warned about, but weren’t.
OK, that’s it for today and I now I need a cartoon idea so I’ll just sit here and wait for Donald Trump to do something outrageous which he does every 35 to 120 minutes because when it comes to cartoon material…
Donald Trump is a reliable source.
I was fortunate to be an only child, so the extremely shallow and brackish gene pool that I paddled around in was known only to me and the East Patrol Division of the Kansas City Police Department. They still talk about "that drunken kid in the Chevy."
Oh when I woke up this morning saw I had 114 new emails, I nearly deleted my entire email app. But then I finished my coffee and looked for yours, Lee. So I could read it first and get in a better mood. And forward it to my spouse, so he could read it and then made sure that my Facebook friends had it -- I like spreading laughter all over -- and now, whew! I can back to deleting email.
Thank you for making me laugh.