Category Archives: comic

Now we know what a Nittany Lion is

So, if you’re like me, you’ve always sort of wondered what a Nittany Lion is. For a while, I thought it involved crochet somehow, but I guess maybe that would be a Knittany Lion. For years, it remained shrouded in mystery, at least, if you’re like me, and did not actually care enough to check Wikipedia.

But then this week we learned that for the past ten years, or possibly longer, numerous officials at Penn State have been involved in protecting and enabling a serial child rapist. And then, when Penn State’s football coach was fired for his involvement in protecting and enabling a serial child rapist, the school’s students rioted. I think we now have our answer:

Best URL for sharing: http://www.darwineatscake.com/?id=71
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Update: via Justin Stapleton on Google+, from now on the Honey Badger will be known as the Nittany Badger

Public radio, Occupy, and Darwin Eats Cake

So, look, I like public radio as much as the next guy. Which is to say, you know, Car Talk is sort of funny, I guess. But at this point, I think I’m pretty much done with them.

It seems that these guys are so desperate to avoid accusations of liberal bias (even if they come from unabashedly biased right-wing sources) that they will fire (or force someone else to fire) anyone who participates in the Occupy protests.

The first was opera reporter Lisa Simeone, who participated in an Occupy-related protest near Washington. She was the host of Soundprint, an independently produced show distributed by NPR, but was fired after pressure from NPR, which was prompted by criticism from Fox News and the Daily Caller. Her other show, World of Opera, refused to fire her, so NPR dropped distribution of the show, which will now be distributed by North Carolina’ WDAV.

Simeone noted that, if she is in violation of NPR’s ethics codes for speaking outside of work, then so are a lot of NPRs political reporters. Of course, the difference is that she was acting as an individual citizen, and not being paid, plus, she does not talk about politics at all in her radio show. Other people, who are political reporters, get paid to speak for businesses and on mainstream media outlets. So, there’s that.

Just to recap: Opera reporter exercises free speech, for free, on her own time? Ethics violation. Political reporter paid by corporations to talk politics on their own time? AOK!

More recently, Caitlin Curran was fired from her job at The Takeaway, which is produced by WNYC and Public Radio International, after becoming virally famous for this photo:

You can read Curran’s first-hand account on Gawker.

My guess is that public radio is running scared right now from the right-wing attack on their federal funding, which has been going on forever, but has been particularly vocal over the past six months or so. Here’s the thing, though, it does not matter how much you bend over to appease the right. They are going to keep coming after you. Even if all the federal funding is taken away, they are still going to keep coming after you.

The problem is that to the right, public radio is inherently symbolic of liberalism, if for no other reason than that it does not pander to anti-intellectualism.

Anyway, all of this brings us to the latest episode of Darwin Eats Cake. I posted the first two strips in the Occupy Darwin Eats Cake series here.  Here are the next three:

Best URL for sharing: http://www.darwineatscake.com/?id=64
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Best URL for sharing: http://www.darwineatscake.com/?id=65
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Best URL for sharing: http://www.darwineatscake.com/?id=66
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Occupy Darwin Eats Cake

So, for the next . . . um . . . span of time . . . lasting, I guess from now until I run out of ideas, my Darwin Eats Cake webcomic is changing formats. Normally, it updates approximately twice a week, on approximately Monday and approximately Thursday, and the strips are mostly self contained. For now, though, the strips will be coming more frequently, and will form a continuing storyline.

This change was necessitated when Eleonora convinced the rest of the cast to go into New York and join the Occupy Wall Street protests.

Here are the first two installations in the new series:

Best URL for sharing: http://www.darwineatscake.com/?id=62
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Best URL for sharing: http://www.darwineatscake.com/?id=63
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Like everything at Darwin Eats Cake, and all original material here at Lost in Transcription, these comics are licensed through Creative Commons, meaning that you’re free to share, copy, print, etc. them, preferably with attribution, and, ideally, a link back to the site.

Remember, sharing is caring 🙂

Allophones: Linguistics Humor from Darwin Eats Cake

So, here are the last two Darwin Eats Cakes. They go together to form a sort of continuing story. It’s like a soap opera, except instead of people killing each other and having weird supernatural experiences, they engage in clunky set-ups for jokes about linguistics. Woo!

Best URL for sharing: http://www.darwineatscake.com/?id=57
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Best URL for sharing: http://www.darwineatscake.com/?id=58
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