So, as of right now, it looks as if Dev and El were right the first time:
The claim from the NYPD that the books and other belongings had been safely stored turns out to be, well, not so much true. Some books were at the Sanitation Garage, but most were not, and many that were had been damaged or destroyed.
America’s Plutocrats: protecting you from the dangers of literacy!
So, last night Mayor Bloomberg sent the NYPD in to evict the Occupy Wall Street protesters under cover of darkness, excluding any press coverage (and physically assaulting and/or arresting any press who tried to actually cover the eviction).
Most of the characters from Darwin Eats Cake were able to evacuate from Liberty Plaza before things got out of hand, but Dev and El were among those who wound up getting arrested. They posted this report:
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| Best URL for sharing: http://www.darwineatscake.com/?id=73 Permanent image URL for hotlinking or embedding: http://www.darwineatscake.com/img/comic/73.jpg |
The thing about the library was based on this early report. The NYPD later stated that the books had not been thrown away, but were in storage, and could be reclaimed on Wednesday. They posted this, which looks to me suspiciously like a hostage photo:
Anyway, seeing as they were in jail, Dev and El did not have good real-time access to information today, so I hope you won’t hold their statements against them.
If you want to see what’s going on now, The Other 99 has been doing an awesome job of livestreaming events from Occupy Wall Street, and Global Revolution has a livestream that covers many of the different occupy sites.
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:
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| Best URL for sharing: http://www.darwineatscake.com/?id=71 Permanent image URL for hotlinking or embedding: http://www.darwineatscake.com/img/comic/71.jpg |
Update: via Justin Stapleton on Google+, from now on the Honey Badger will be known as the Nittany Badger
So, here’s the new Darwin Eats Cake, in which we find that the cast is still down Occupying Wall Street. Dev and El discuss the often-repeated, but untrue, criticism that the Occupiers are all unemployed.
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| Best URL for sharing: http://www.darwineatscake.com/?id=70 Permanent image URL for hotlinking or embedding: http://www.darwineatscake.com/img/comic/70.jpg |
So, here is yet more incredibly disturbing footage from Occupy Oakland. The video is footage someone was shooting late Wednesday night / early Thursday morning. It seems to be a line of riot police. Then, for no apparent reason, one of the police casually raises his gun and shoots the cameraman. Fortunately, it was just a rubber bullet.
This, along with reports (and more footage) of arrests of reporters and legal observers. Seriously, what the hell is wrong with the Oakland PD? Do they have an arrest quotient? Do they just have complete disdain for the people of Oakland? Do they have such an overwhelming sense of entitlement that they feel completely justified in arresting or shooting anyone who dares to observe them? Or are they secretly trying to drum up sympathy for the occupiers?
In related news, here’s the most recent Darwin Eats Cake:
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| Best URL for sharing: http://www.darwineatscake.com/?id=69 Permanent image URL for hotlinking or embedding: http://www.darwineatscake.com/img/comic/69.jpg |
So, we’re on a somewhat restricted publication schedule here at Lost in Transcription, as we are entering Day 4 of no power following Saturday’s “Snoctogeddon.” Still not clear how many more days until the lights (and heat) come back on, or how long every place with WiFi will be overrun with laptop refugees.
In the meantime, let me point you to a new group blog, which takes it’s name from Theodosius Dobzhansky’s famous quotation, “Nothing in biology makes sense except in the light of evolution.” I wrote about the origin of the quotation here, and featured this anagram-themed Darwin Eats Cake strip:
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| Best URL for sharing: http://www.darwineatscake.com/?id=19 Permanent image URL for hotlinking or embedding: http://www.darwineatscake.com/img/comic/19.jpg |
The new blog’s name is “Nothing in Biology Makes Sense,” and features the even something-er URL http://nothinginbiology.org/. It features writing from Simone Des Roches, Devin Drown, Sarah Hird, CJ Jenkins, Noah Reid, Chris Smith, Luke Swenson, Jeremy Yoder, and Jonathan Yoder (the fightin’ Yoders!).
The venture is only a few weeks old, but features veteran bloggers, and already has some really interesting posts.
Read it!
So, remember the third, terrible Pirates of the Caribbean movie? The big villain is Lord Cutler Beckett, a bigwig at the fictional East India Trading Company (any similarity to the East India Company purely coincidental).
His catch phrase, which he says whenever he is screwing someone over or doing something unethical, is “It’s just good business.” Which makes him sort of emblematic of what the whole Occupy movement is protesting against.
Near the end of the movie, all of his scheming and manipulation has backfired. We are treated to a prolonged sequence of him walking down a flight of stairs on his ship while the ship (the whole world, one could say) is collapsing (or, rather, exploding) around him. He repeats his catchphrase just before being engulfed in a huge fireball.
In honor of Lord Beckett, I whipped up this little thing. Feel free to share it before the cease-and-desist order comes.
And here is the thematically related next installation in the Occupy Darwin Eats Cake series:
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| Best URL for sharing: http://www.darwineatscake.com/?id=67 Permanent image URL for hotlinking or embedding: http://www.darwineatscake.com/img/comic/67.jpg |
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:
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| Best URL for sharing: http://www.darwineatscake.com/?id=64 Permanent image URL for hotlinking or embedding: http://www.darwineatscake.com/img/comic/64.jpg |
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| Best URL for sharing: http://www.darwineatscake.com/?id=65 Permanent image URL for hotlinking or embedding: http://www.darwineatscake.com/img/comic/65.jpg |
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| Best URL for sharing: http://www.darwineatscake.com/?id=66 Permanent image URL for hotlinking or embedding: http://www.darwineatscake.com/img/comic/66.jpg |
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:
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| Best URL for sharing: http://www.darwineatscake.com/?id=62 Permanent image URL for hotlinking or embedding: http://www.darwineatscake.com/img/comic/62.jpg |
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| Best URL for sharing: http://www.darwineatscake.com/?id=63 Permanent image URL for hotlinking or embedding: http://www.darwineatscake.com/img/comic/63.jpg |
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 🙂
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!
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| Best URL for sharing: http://www.darwineatscake.com/?id=57 Permanent image URL for hotlinking or embedding: http://www.darwineatscake.com/img/comic/57.jpg |
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| Best URL for sharing: http://www.darwineatscake.com/?id=58 Permanent image URL for hotlinking or embedding: http://www.darwineatscake.com/img/comic/58.jpg |