I'll just entertain myself

My memory has lots of holes. Fat Freddy should have been on my list. I would have snapped eventually.

They’re making a film of the Freak Brothers, I think John Goodman is voicing Fat Freddy. Some of it is available on YouTube.

I remember the BBC dramatisation The Trials Of Oz, it concerned the obscenity trial of underground newspaper Oz in the 1960s.

It is a verbatim recreation of the court records and is very good. At one point a Freak Brothers cartoon is brought up. It’s the one where Fat Freddy has to go to Rip Off Park to score some dope. He meets all sorts of nasty types who end up killing each other leaving him with a pile of drugs and weapons but no cannabis.

The prosecution did not get the joke and saw it a reward for going out looking for dope when the punchline was he only wanted cannabis.

It’s a very good dramatisation btw, I don’t know if it’s out there. I only saw it when it first came out, and I’ve never seen it repeated.

I had noticed some Freak Brothers activity online. I wondered if it involved modernizing (******* up) the original or continuing the good stuff. I'll search for the Trials of Oz, maybe start with youtube.

What I’ve seen looks quite promising, it looks fairly true to the original.

Most of our underground cartoonists work for Viz.

It’s a bit of an acquired taste, I love it. It’s very Geordie, some is written in the Geordie dialect and it’s very lavatorial.

It’s a cross between schoolboy lavatory humour and very highbrow intellectualism. They do a lot of comic strips about various philosophers needed the lavatory and their view of the universe getting in the way somehow.

It’s very different from Crumb and Shelton, but it’s the closest we’ve got.

Pablo Dylan

I'm one of the idiots buying daily lottery. In times past I spent a fortune on alcohol and tobacco. Now I waste some of that money differently, by buying Powerball and Megamillions. I get some of it back sometimes. The biggest payoffs were $1200 a couple of times for playing Cash 5. I don't play with the expectation that I can win. Just hoping that lightning might strike one day.

There's always hope, so go for it! I hope you win big.

I tell myself, "You know for certain you won't win anything if you don't play."

a2k can be pretty dead. I came back here because the site offers a wide variety of topics and still has some good members posting. I try to keep busy offline writing new stories. My current project is stymied because I haven't been able to draw the characters effectively. They can't function til well defined. Sometimes it works to set it aside until a few new projects have been completed. Today I'm debating that tactic.

Well done.

Sorry I missed that when I posted earlier.

A man I follow on facebook has his home repeatedly broken into by people from his own neighborhood. The other day they tore a hole in his wall big enough to pass a child through. Which is what they did. Always stealing from him.'
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Eric Jackson
In the USA, if a criminal intruder is in your house, it's justifiable homicide or legal self-defense to kill that person. US culture is so perverse that this is taken as an entitlement, but really it's an ancient recognition that human beings are territorial animals who can get violent about it when our spaces are invaded.
In English law, and from it IUS law, in part it gets reduced to the maxim that "a man's home is his castle." It's stripped from an obscure Old Testament quotation and embellished by racism in the USA. There are variations on the theme among the different Common Law jurisdictions.
Panama is not a Common Law jurisdiction. The US law goes back to William the Conqueror, but Panama is a Civil Code jurisdiction whose legal roots go back to the Roman Twelve Tables.
Here, you need to have reason to believe your life is in danger to legally kill someone in self-defense. The threshold of your door means much less in Panamanian law. And since we are not such a militaristic country, and don't have an arms manufacturing industry with a large and insane lobbying group, our law and our culture are much less gun-friendly.
It's generally a crime to kill someone over a property crime here. Although that conflicts with my emotions when I am repeatedly invaded and the police laugh, I can live with that. And if you are going to live in Panama, so should you.

Cutting my backyard is no work for the old. It's not even for the young. It's big for a suburban mobile home neighborhood, with a fence in the rear keeping we rif-raf from a nice subdivision. A cul de sac meets my property, which may or may not one day make my property more valuable. Our neighborhood has just one exit/entry on a supremely busy street, with no stopping mechanism for letting us move.

29 years ago I began fighting the poison ivy. I've pulled up roots like twenty foot cables and spent every spring digging up every sprouting new plant. One year I put roundup on it. It did no good. About two years ago I gave up trying to eradicate it. It gets too hot to spend your days out there digging up plants that have more persistence than you.

Yesterday I mowed half. Some might consider it the easy half. They are not the ones busting their 78-year-old ass out there. Today, in about ten minutes I will go after the far back piece. There are lots of dead branches in tall weeds. No wonder lawnmowers don't last around here.

A while back lighting struck a tree back there. It slowly died. Then we had the big freeze after a bit of drought. Two trees that had made up a trio with the dead tree also died. They were dying from the top down as is the way with most pines, so in no great danger of falling over. Naturally the neighbors didn't see it that way. I had to hire the limbs cut off and take them down fifteen feet from the top.

No more stalling. Time to get out there.

Turned out the far back is the tough half. I cut less overall than yesterday but burned more gas. Looks like it will take another session or two in the back. By then the front will be pretty tall.

Two nights in a row we saw no flies all day long. Until dinner time. All during the meal it dive-bombed us and we couldn't get it. After that I bought some Irish Spring soap and put half bars in plastic bags. Hung them in strategic places. Haven't seen a fly or mosquito since.

I don't know why, but THE PTERODACTYL is by far the most clicked-on piece on my blog.

The pterodactyl
Can be rather docile;
A quiet contemplater is he.
Wise pterodactyl;
He lives on his rock pile,
Shunning bustle and community;
Polishing his claws,
Humming without pause,
Often slipping into dormancy.
The pterodactyl
Is wholly without guile;
A solitary wisher is he.
Round pterodactyl,
Fat his chosen life style;
A monumental fisher is he.
Indifferently
Allows men to breathe ;
They taste most un-fishlike, you see.