Fri Nov 26 -- December, almost...
It's Friday, it's cold, it's time for another cold Friday cartoon. This one's particularly cold; here it is before you:



X-Mas 2004 Drawing on Demand!
Christmas is fast approaching and what could be a better gift for yourself or the Bob the Angry Flower enthusiast of your acquaintance than a hand-drawn piece of original art? One in which you get to tell Stephen Notley what to draw? Nothing, that's what. I'm setting this up a tad early to make sure there's plenty of time to draw the thing and deliver it in time for Christmas, so bid bid bid now now now!

Books!
And while you're at it, have you bought your Bob the Angry Flower books yet? You haven't? Good grief, man (or woman) -- get on it! Each book contains special stuff not on the web, especially the Ultimate Book of Perfect Energy!!!, what with the LoveBot Conquers All story.

Tues Nov 23 -- Post-post
** mini-update later Tuesday **

Oh, right...
I forgot I wanted to throw up a pic of the cover I did for last week's Vue Weekly, illustrating an article about a new book that discusses the Simpsons' cultural impact. I kinda like it. If you're the editor of a magazine and you need cool illustrations, hire me!

(Image removed to speed up home page loading. Click here to check it out.)

Updates n' stuff
Quite late today on the update on account of a couple of things. We had a teensy provincial election here in Alberta yesterday, for starters. Of course, Alberta being what it is, our lunky conservative premier Raph Klein was resoundingly re-elected -- but on the plus side, my team, that is to say the New Democratic Party (or "Communists" to you Americans), won twice as many seats (4) as they had before (2), including my own home riding of Strathcona in which Raj Pannu frickin' FLATTENED the opposition. Since I'd just spent 12 hours helping to pull vote, that was pretty durn satisfying.

The second delay was GWAR, witnessed last night at the West Edmonton Mall. I'd missed them when they came through town in 1991 so I figured I couldn't fail again. They were... well, they were GWAR, much unchanged from the 20th century; it's me who's gotten older, perhaps lacking that childlike spirit, that ability to laugh with the wonder of Osama's head being torn off, his blood sprayed into the crowd. Ah well.

Anyway...

Leaden Angels
Ooh, boy, we're getting down to it now. The fifth and final section of my brother Paul's The Leaden Angels begins with The Vespers of Blood, in which the Compass of Death collapses, the semen on Veniot's glasses is explained, and Constantine has some dinner with Vanessa's brother Peter. Yow

Movie reviews?
Just one review, a wee commentary on the new Johnny Depp/Peter Pan movie, Finding Neverland.

Buy books?
Definitely!

Fri Nov 19 -- Gettin' cold...
Another week, another searingly powerful cartoon courtesy of angryflower.com!

Links?
Sure, why not, some folks have sent some interesting stuff in. Several folks have pointed me towards SorryEverybody.com, an amusing selection of Americans apologizing for the election, even if I don't quite think that's the right response. Then somebody sent in a link to Liegirls, Republican policies delivered in sexy phone-sex style. And then I got a link from a guy who's really into Agnosticism, to the point he's put together an Agnostic Church home page. Wacky! Oh, and just for my own purposes so I'll have a link to it, here's StealYourElection, a handy compendium of the growing pile of evidence that election 2004 was hacked.

I Have Books
You need them. Therefore, buy them from me. It's a simple equation, but powerful.
Tues Nov 16 -- I Can See the Sky!
Just a couple of quick things this time...

Sugary Evil: An Indymedia Cultural Extravaganza
I'll be doing a presentation tomorrow (Wednesday, 7pm) at Remedy Cafe as part of an Edmonton Small Press Association gig headlined by Jim Munroe of NoMediaKings and Emily Pohl-Weary with her book Girls Who Bite Back. Come on by, give it a check-out.

The Leaden Angels
More Leaden Angels action for y'all in the latest instalment, Snowballs of Acid, featuring more deaths, more mysteries, more revelations, and some snowballs made of a very curious acid indeed.

Fri Nov 12 --



Movie Reviews?
Not too much on the review side except for Seed of Chucky.

Christmas Approaches!
Buy some books!

Tues Nov 9 -- World Grinds On
Gotta take a bit of a break from the political carping so this is gonna be something of a slender update.

The Leaden Angels
Gots another Leaden Angels chapter up, A Gathering of Forces, in which Elizabeth confides in Vanessa and Constantine, Pr. Chelmnickon's cannonization grows near, and rifts appear in the Flannery O' Connor Brigade.

Technology, technology!
Check out the mind-blowing wackness of this demonstration video from IO2 Heliodisplay (the download's a bit slow, so I recommend right-clicking and "saving target as"). I guess it could be a hoax, but looks real enough to me. I want one!

Okay, a little politcal stuff
Just a couple of links to stories saying Kerry won, one from Greg Palast at Tompaine.com, and here's another by Thom Hartmann at Commondreams.org. And then there's the curious fact that a number of Ohio counties seem to have recorded thousands more votes than they had registered voters. Check out Bay Village (13,710 registered voters; 18,663 ballots cast) and Woodmere (558 registered voters; 8,854 ballots cast) on the lists. Now ain't that peculiar?
Fri Nov 5-- Chinning Up
** mini-update -- new reviews below **

Gonna switch it up here, go all Unpolitical on your asses (except to the extent that everything is political) with a little cartoon called




Okay, maybe I'll do just a *little* political yammering...

Some Reasons Not to Slit Your Wrists
It's been a pretty depressing couple of days, Wednesday particularly, a fog of defeat and despair that made it seem there could never be anything good again. But Thursday was better, we had a chilly but fresh-smelling afternoon, and the mind settles a bit. Here's a few thoughts that calmed me, at least.

It's all on Bush now
One of the galling things about a Kerry presidency is that it would have allowed Bush to repeat his lifetime pattern of swanning in, screwing things up and walking away without a scratch as somebody else cleans up his mess. Now it's all gonna come down to him and he's gonna have to be the one holding the ball when the shit *really* goes down. I gotta admit, I'm looking forward to seeing that.

It's still a pig
They say you can dress up a pig but it's still a pig. This government is a big fat ugly pig, and though this election will slap a ton of makeup and fresh shiny lipstick on it, at the end of the night when the makeup's worn off just like a Hallowe'en costume, it's still gonna be a pig.  I'm sure the media will capitulate completely and assume that every issue of the last four years is now dead, but these guys are so blind and incompetent they're gonna start generating new disasters almost immediately and things are gonna start looking bad again with no election campaign to distract everyone.

Nixon got re-elected in a landslide
He was in charge of an unpopular war, people hated him and protested him, and he won anyway. He praised the "silent majority". Not long after that he overreached and got booted out on his ear. Could happen again. Tougher, true, with the lopsided House and Senate, but anything can happen.

Must Sleep
I gotta go see a couple of movies to review tomorrow, After the Sunset, whatever that is, and The Incredibles, which I think will be fantastic. I frickin' hope so.

Wed Nov 3 -- Day After
Kerry has conceded. Bush wins. America made its choice and now we all have to live with it. Four more years indeed.

I say "America" in the plural, in the collective, even though I know America is filled with Americans who are as disgusted and disheartened as I am, people who went out and did their part and really hoped that they could steer their nation back to sanity.

But it wasn't to be. The most dispiriting thing about this result is the strong Bush vote that says even after everything that's happened there are many, many Americans who identify with this vision of America. One wishes it was an abberation, the cabal sneaking in under the wire in 2000 and then revealing their ghastly incompetent ideology for all to see and repudiate in 2004. But no. People bought into it. Not everyone, but many, many people. I expected Bush's vote to be weak because he is weak, but I was wrong.

These people worry me. I wonder about their judgment. We have some big changes coming, huge technological shifts that will feed social upheaval as they always do. We're already seeing the explosion of effect the Internet is having, not to mention cell phones, and within ten years or so we're going to have instant genetic sequencing and quantum computers that'll be able answer questions we don't even know how to ask yet. We're going to have to be nimble if we want to figure out how to deal with how these things affect our lives. I'm a little worried about how these people are going to handle it.

At least one good thing about being so wrong is that I can take comfort that I could be equally wrong about other things. Like, for example, my sick certainty that America is about to go off a cliff and take the rest of us with it. Maybe I'm wrong. It seems hard to imagine anything that could thwart these lunatics now they've been elected, but this game of the world is all about surprises, so we'll see.

Tues Nov 2 -- Election Day



Good luck, all. America, I don't believe in God but I do believe in you. You can do it. Make us proud.

* * * 6:18 Mountain Standard time, 8:18 Pacific * * *
Things look shaky but good for Kerry. At this point I can imagine a Kerry landslide and a lititgious nightmare. The one thing that will blow me away is a strong, clean turnout for Bush. We'll see...

*** 2.07 am MST ***
Before I Go to Bed
I don't yet concede defeat. The numbers didn't add up the way I wanted them to and I'm disappointed as hell in the popular vote, but there's still a chance. Right now we're looking at what I least imagined, a relatively clean victory for Bush, but we'll see what tomorrow brings.

GTA Madness
On an unrelated-to-the-election note, here's an illustration for an upcoming article in Vue Weekly...



-- more to come --

Fri Oct 29 -- Almost there...
*** late Friday-- mini-update, "Osama Flap", at the bottom of this entry... ***

Well, this is the last cartoon before the election, so up for y'all I've whipped this:



Movie Reviews?
Not so much, what with all the New Jersey and New York-goin', which reminds me...

NYC Comic Stores
I checked out a few comic stores in Manhattan while I was there. St. Mark'c Comics still has the four books I sold them last time and Midtown Comics still has the two UBOPEs I sold 'em last time, so if any of you Bob-liking folks want to get books AND happen to live in the New York City area, I implore you to go get a book or two so I don't feel like such a total shmutz. I also managed to get Jim Hanley's Universe to take a couple of EvBs and UBOPEs, so buy from there also.

The Leaden Angels
The Leaden Angels continues this week with another instalment, The Wilentz Family History, which features sarcastic pillow talk, the solution to the mystery of the unsigned letters and of course quite a bit of history of the Wilentz family.

Can You Feel It?
Can you? I can! I think this thing could really break the right way. We shall see. Good luck all. Tuesday awaits!

Osama Flap
Oh my God it's Osama! Yes! I love this story!

I'm watching CNN to see the bibble and what I'm getting so far is the "How will this affect the election?" burbling. As in, Osama releases a tape, so he's trying to influence our election, so we have to do the exact opposite of what he says, and since he's condemming Bush that means he wants Kerry to win, so we can't let him win so we gotta vote Bush. Meanwhile both Bush and Kerry muscled forward to say they're gonna kill bin Laden

Yeesh. Of course Osama is trying to influence the election, but not in the way people seem to think. He's not launching this thing into the end days of the election run in order to make sure one guy or the other wins. He's telling us something, communicating, with the hope that some of that information will affect action.

What's he actually saying? One seems to be that he's offering a truce. He says

Any state that does not mess with our security has naturally guaranteed its own security.

So he seems to be saying don't attack us, we won't attack you. Do we believe him? Is he trying to lull us? Maybe. But he's saying something, so it's better to take a listen to it for a second before expunging it as the word of the devil.

I love his slam on Bush though; it's the best:

It never occurred to us that the commander-in-chief of the American armed forces would leave 50,000 of his citizens in the two towers to face these horrors alone... It appeared to him that a little girl's talk about her goat and its butting was more important than the planes and their butting of the skyscrapers. That gave us three times the required time to carry out the operations, thank God,"

What's he saying? He's just pointing out how much easier Bush's reaction made it to carry out the attack. But since the devil said it, we have to believe the opposite -- Bush's reaction made it harder for them to carry out the attack! Yeah! Except... it kinda... er...

Let's not, in our zeal to insist the sun goes up at night if Bin Laden says it goes up in daytime, miss out on some basic stuff. Bin Laden told us that Bush's stupified unreaction we've all seen in the video gave him way more time that he thought he'd had. Draw your own conclusions.

(Quotes from this Yahoo article: Bin Laden: U.S. Can Avoid Another Attack)

Yikes! And even typing that in freaks me out! Bin Laden says we can avoid another attack? Well by God, we're gonna make damn sure we can't avoid another attack! Woo-yeah! Buy America!

Right. Anyway, while this is all a fun sideshow for the Hallowe'en weekend, I don't think it'll change anything. Big good American forces are on the move and I feel good about Tuesday.

The previous update is here, folks
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