PicoBlog

This is the official Substack newsletter of award winning editorial cartoonist Michael de Adder. Here you will see de Adder's political cartoon strip called THE deEP STATE, his editorial cartoons and other writings. Over 1,000 subscribers No thanksncG1vNJzZmiclZaxpbHRZ6qumqOprqS3jZympmc%3D

In the decorative images on ancient Greek pottery, in Aristophanes’s Lysistrata, John Donne’s Elegies, Ben Johnson’s “The Alchemist,” the Renaissance-era satirical writings of Pietro Aretino, and Shakespeare’s The Winter’s Tale, there are dildos. In the Elizabethan poet Thomas Nashe’s “The Choise of Valentines Or the Merie Ballad of Nash His Dildo,” whose dildo reference is supposedly the first in written English, the narrator’s unsatisfied lover reaches for her “little dildoe,” who “bendeth not, or foldeth any deal / But stands as stiff as he were made of steel.

1. TWITTER FILES Extra: The Defaming of Brandon Straka and #Walkaway Smeared as a Russian proxy after founding a movement to “#Walkaway” from the Democratic Party, Twitter documents suggest @BrandonStraka and his followers were set up 2. In Atlanta Monday, I testified before Georgia state Representative @MeshaMainor, in a free speech hearing centered around the censorship of members of the “#WalkAway” Facebook Group, whose 500,000-plus accounts were deleted by Facebook on January 8th, 2021.

The title of Tim Hetherington and Sebastian Junger’s 2010 documentary Restrepo refers to an outpost deep in Afghanistan’s Korangal Valley, considered one of the most dangerous postings in the U.S military when Hetherington and Junger shot the film in 2007. Nestled in the eastern mountains close to the Pakistan border, the area was a Taliban stronghold and soldiers stationed there could expect to take fire every day. Efforts to win the hearts and minds of local elders had never borne fruit, but the expectation that American troops—specifically, the Second Platoon, B Company, during a 15-month deployment—make some kind of progress remained.

Well, it’s time to finally, officially and definitively answer the question… Should You Release Your Film in Theaters or Straight-To-Streaming? Rephrased, does it make sense to release films “straight-to-streaming” à la Netflix? (And formerly Apple, Prime Video, Hulu, sometimes Disney+, HBO Max in 2021 and occasionally Peacock and Paramount+?) Should movies skip the theatrical and home entertainment windows? Apparently, at least a few companies no longer think this makes sense either.

The Spanish Dehesa is a 3,000-year-old agricultural system that is still in practice today which speaks to the heart of the southern European identity. What would be an otherwise open prairie is punctured by ancient trees with massive canopies, and the soil is protected by grasslands and the thick leaves of the oak trees. Dehesas are traditionally seen as a method to maintain pasture & grasslands in extremely dry climates where otherwise pasture would not survive.

Last week, a DP3 analysis of death-row data compiled by the Legal Defense Fund (LDF) reported that the number of people on death row or facing possible capital resentencing across the United States had reached a three-decade low, but that even as death row shrank in size it became more racially disproportionate. Today, in a numbers-heavy posting, we take a look at that decline, the status of the cases of those sentenced to death or facing capital resentencing, and the current demographics of U.

There’s no getting away from waste. I mean literal garbage, although there’s a deeper metaphysical resonance in the idea. For centuries, people used wagons to take away waste. By the 1920s open-top trucks were used for the same thing. This mechanical turn caused problems of an odorous sort, however, so covered vehicles were soon preferred. Then in 1937, a man with the darkly serendipitous name of George Dempster invented the Dempster-Dumpster system, which allowed wheeled waste containers to be mechanically tipped into a truck.

[Ed. Note: This article is going places… hope y’all enjoy the journey!] The 2010s were largely unkind to the Los Angeles Lakers. I mean sure they got a championship in 2010 and LeBron James decided to spend his basketball golden years there in 2018. But in between those moments? The Dallas Mavericks smoked the Lakers out the 2011 playoffs in truly enjoyable fashion for all non-Lakers fans. But the real gloom and doom began in the 2012-13 season.