MAD’s Greatest Artists Series

A series of hardcover volumes has just been launched of the legendary cartoonists and artists that have been working at MAD Magazine over the years. The first of them Don Martin. MAD’s Greatest Artists: The Completely MAD Don Martin features every single cartoon/art work/cover by Don Martin in the 30 years he was at MAD Magazine in chronological order.

I love MAD Magazine and I was raised with old issues from the 70s, 80s and early 90s lying around our house. My dad used to read them while he was in college in the 70s and he even brought back a huge collection of paperback special editions when he came back to Kuwait. They are now on my bookshelf and I take very good care of them. I had a subscription for a year in 2003-2004 and I thought they were OK. They humor has changed but the great quality of cartooning and drawing is still excellent, even though many of the original artists are not there anymore.

Anyway, Don Martin’s cartoons are HILARIOUS. A large part of that is due to weirdest ever sound effects and his extremely unique style of cartooning. I don’t think any other person in the world draws like that without the intention of trying to adopt his style.

I can’t wait to see which artist will be next in this series. I hope it’s Dave Berg. He drew the “Lighter Side Of..” comics. I loved them because they were a great way of actually understanding the American culture, society and lifestyle of the times.

The price tag on this is $150. A bit pricey but it’s definitely worth it, and you can find cheaper prices online at Amazon or Barnes & Noble. I’m also planning on buying the The Complete Calvin and Hobbes and then giving my old paperbacks to my little brother. I don’t think he’s ever read any but I’m sure he’ll love them.

Amores Perros

Cidade de Deus or City of God is one of my favorite movies of all time. I remember watching it in 2004 but I don’t remember how I came across it or if someone recommended it to me. All I know is that it sparked my interest in foreign movies.

This time, Netflix recommended the movie based on my ratings of a huge list of movies of all genres. Amores Perros or Love’s A Bitch is a movie set in Mexico City. Just like that Brazilian movie, it was heavy. I really don’t know how to explain it actually. I think most foreign films are like that because the filmmakers don’t have to follow the Hollywood formula of making a movie. Basically, it isn’t clean cut. The focus of the film was to tell a story and using all aspects (picture, sound, direction, filters, etc.) to tell the story, and not just using “good actors.”

The plot structure is very similar to Crash (made four years later) in which multiple stories and people are linked together. The height of each story line is a single car crash and a dog. You actually see the crash about three times in the movie at different angles.

The movie first introduces us to a young man who is in love with his brother’s wife. He uses the family’s Rottweiler to make money in dogfighting so he and his sister-in-law can leave town. But he faces trouble with a rivaling dogfighter. Then there’s a well-off family man who leaves his family to be with a top model, but the glamour doesn’t last very long when she faces every model’s worst nightmare. Finally, the movie ends with an aging ex-guerilla fighter who decides to end his pathetic way of life and literally clean up.

This movie is great because, again, it’s not what you usually see in movies produced by the major movie studios. Good people don’t always do good things. When someone falls there usually isn’t a triumphant rise back to the top. Second chances come more often than you know but having the guts to take them is rare. That is life and life’s a bitch.

If Americans Knew

If Americans Knew is a website I came across a couple of times by chance while reading other Middle Eastern blogs and just watching YouTube. The website is aimed at Americans obviously and hopes to present them with accurate information about the Palestine/Israel issue without any twisting and filtering of the media.

It’s a great website because it doesn’t complicate things. The information is there and is backed up. I think that their best section is the videos page. Apparently they produce and sell short documentaries. What they show on the videos page are the trailers to these documentaries and they are great.

The last video I saw was one called The Easiest Targets. It’s about the treatment women and children get while entering and leaving Israeli territories. The trailer doesn’t show gruesome images or sounds, but they might as well have. Just listening to the women telling their stories and then trying to just slightly pretend to imagine what it must have felt like. By the end of the video, I felt like I had been violated.

This isn’t your usually sobbing woman describing her ordeal, these are strong woman who have found their own way of dealing with that part of their past. I admire them. I’d watch it just for that. Check it out here and view it in whatever format you want.

Also, get a chance to just sit and browse through the website. It’s worth it.

This Account Has Exceeded Its CPU Quota

Unfortunately, the reason I have been getting that error message a lot lately could be due to a couple of things:

+ My theme.
+ One or more of my plugins.
+ One of my stat programs from my host.

Sadly, I’m still not fluent in code. HTML is easy but I have very few skills in php and others, so I won’t know where to start in fixing the theme and/or the pluigins’ codes.

So I’ve disabled all plugins that I’ve installed in the past four months and using this temporary theme.

BS, Not Only College Students Do It

Politicians are good at “BS” too. They are probably even better at it, because it’s not only a professor they are deceiving but huge numbers of people. When policy makers and leaders in the upper level provide BS from behind desks, these factors influence other factors. That is really serious!

In a series of internal musings and memos to his staff, then-Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld argued that Muslims avoid “physical labor” and wrote of the need to “keep elevating the threat,” “link Iraq to Iran” and develop “bumper sticker statements” to rally public support for an increasingly unpopular war.

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