Every time comics become a little more accepted in the overall zeitgeist, the more often I wonder if the medium’s traditional madness will be smoothed over. Most comic covers have already ditched exposition and teasers in favor of character poses and mid-fight snapshots.

Now this?

That’s a fucking cover. It’s a shame that the actual story is probably crazy racist, what with this being a wartime comic featuring an insane man who changed his name to Dynamite Joe.

Huh, so this is a thing that happened today.

President Obama Nominates Potential 2012 GOP Opponent to be Ambassador to China

In the White House’s Diplomatic Room, this morning, President Obama announced that he would nominate one of his potential 2012 Republican opponents, Utah Gov. Jon Huntsman to be Ambassador to China….

During the transition, then-President-elect Obama told his advisers to “think outside the box” when it came to pending appointments. A White House official says that Jeff Bader, senior director for Asian affairs on the National Security Council staff, told colleagues that he couldn’t think of a better candidate than Huntsman, who speaks fluent Mandarin Chinese from his time as a Mormon missionary, and has served in both the Commerce and State Departments.

Accusations of cynically sending potential opponents across the world aside, Huntsman is probably a good pick. Not a fan of him politically, but I do think that having a moderate-conservative as the Chinese ambassador will work out. There’s also the whole prog rock thing. Am I wrong in thinking that, if Huntsman can rock out with REO Speedwagon for a song or two, Wen Jiabao will be a pushover?

I have no clue where this image comes from, but I am goddamn sure that having a Rushmore golem patrolling the countryside cannot possibly go terribly wrong. This is the future of politics, people.

It turns out the fellow who draws Mother Goose and Grimm also draws editorial cartoons. The daily strip is an exercise in the banal, but the editorial cartoons are actually pretty good.

It’s strange watching the right-wing attempt to protest; their heart is in it, but they don’t know what they’re actually supposed to do. To be fair, the right isn’t any better than the left at staying on message.

This is the gastric-brooding frog, also known as the Platypus frog. There were two species of these things, and in both cases the female frog would swallow the fertilized eggs. The tadpole would then develop into a frog while in the female’s stomach.

These little weirdos went extinct sometime in the 1980s, although for once it wasn’t (entirely) humanity’s fault – we can lay the blame with chytrid, a nasty little fungus that has an affinity for messing frogs right the hell up.

I took a few moments to plug my current Twitter feed into the sidebar. The individual entries don’t look quite right, but I’ll need to poke at some of feed’s Javascript to fix it. If I get particularly bored I might even throw in an expanding pane to display shared items from Google Reader. (I’ll probably need to put together a better sidebar if I want it all to fit and not look terrible.)

This way it can look like I’m updating the domain more than I actually am! It’s all about managing perception.

People are pretty damn good at ignoring ads, since there’s no longer any (sane) way to avoid them. The cold-war response is to make the ads louder and more obnoxious, which only makes the occasional clever and well-executed ad all the more surprising –

It took me a moment for everything to come together, but when it did and I thought “I get it” the advertisers won. They were able to invoke an emotional response in me, tied to the product, which might influence future purchases; the payoff was clever enough that I’m not left resenting the company.

To be fair I don’t even have a fucking dog, but still.