With great pleasure, I note that my great friend and colleague finally has his blog, robertariail.com, up and running, with the new cartoons he’s done in the last couple of weeks.
This is a relief. Over the weekend, I tried to give him some remote technical aid — he was having a lot of trouble getting the cartoons up on the site — but it was beyond my poor, humble talents.
Great to see that someone has come to his rescue (or, he figured it out himself).
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The Castro cartoon is pretty provocative, do you think that would have printed at the State?
“would have been printed”
I think that they are both provocative. I don’t agree with their implicatios, which of course doesn’t make them a whit less interesting. But Brad, once again, why, why, why this ‘password’ stuff?
Karen, I agree that the log-in and password stuff is a huge pain. I’ve used WordPress blogs for about 5 years, and I still had trouble with it.
Brad, there are some measures you can take that help ward off spammers and that won’t chill conversation. One is installing Akismet a spam-blocking program that comes with WordPress (I think) and just needs to be enabled.
After my exams are over in April, I’m happy to give you some pointers on WordPress, including how to change the default theme to a fancier one. Overall it is a good platform with lots of potential for doing cool things.
Yes, we would have run it — after a conversation. Robert and I had a running thing going in which I would urge him to embrace the principles of the UnParty. Sometimes I moved him, otherwise not.
Basically, UnParty aside, I used to argue that a cartoon that is broader than a slap at one party or the other would have more appeal, and therefore greater impact, than one that could be dismissed as “oh, that’s just a typical way that people of X persuasion look at things.”
Robert’s a pretty conservative guy, and self-identifies as Republican, which is something I can’t get into. So frequently, I’d look at a sketch and say, “OK, you’ve got donkeys in here and they look pretty bad the way you’ve portrayed them. But can’t the same be said just as truthfully of Republicans? Couldn’t you have both donkeys and elephants doing this?” And sometimes that would be seen as helpful. It wouldn’t have been applicable in this case. Robert’s whole point in this one is slapping at Democratic Party ideology. I would probably just look at it and say, “Sure, if that’s what you want to say,” then try to sell him on a cartoon idea that slapped Republicans the next day.
Which Robert was fine with. He’s perfectly happy to do a good cartoon making Republicans look ridiculous. It’s just not always the first thought that comes to his mind.
Now I need to contact Robert and see why he hasn’t posted anything since this one. Maybe he’s having technical problems again. And there’s always the SLIGHT possibility that I’ll be able to help with that.
Speaking of which, thanks for the offer, Laurin. I am having a good bit of trouble with WordPress, although I suspect that once I get the hang of it, I will like it better than I did TypePad. Remains to be seen, so far…