Saturday, January 5, 2008

Refugees Unite!

Badly designed, impossible to navigate, ugly, loud, depressing, reeking of death. How did this beast that is eating the fabric of our civilization and puking it up on the shoes of our future achieve such popularity? I might be talking about the Bush War, but in this case I'm referring to MySpace.

I had a blog on MySpace for a while and it made my colon throb. And not in a good way. So, at the helpful advice of many of you, my readers, I abandoned it like the religion I was raised in and moved over to Blogger. I pray to the multitude of gods I no longer believe in (proud atheist) that it treats me – and you – well.

The groovy photo below is of me the night I met Dennis Kucinich and his wife, Elizabeth. I am a fan of his philosophies and politics and was thrilled to discover he has been a fan of my cartoons. (We're both ethical vegans) He's very charming and affable and I gave him one of my new books. I always pull a wagon full of books behind me in case I meet someone I admire.

More in a week or so. Hope you like the new blog and please tell your friends, family, and enemies all about it!
Smooches,
Dan

39 comments:

Jezzka said...

yes, i am the first to view your glorious blog!

Pashupa said...

nice photo of dennis... check out my dennis kucinich the vegan canidate dub mix, along with a similar photo of me and the candidate couple. Might have even been taken by you?

i agree with you about myspace and jesus. glad you moved your blog. praise allah!

siys said...

Smart move to ditch Myspace for Blogger! Happy blogging, Pirano, Pirato, uh er... Dan!!!

Best, Stevo

Mr. Brown said...

Agnostics, Atheists, Theists, None Of The Above ... Unite. As it says on the beer glass at a global eatery, "Love All, Serve All." Except those under the legal drinking age?

Micgar said...

Hi Dan! I like your new digs! Yes Blogger is probably better than Myspace. I have liked it a lot. Looks like I will have another great blog to check out on my list!
MG

Anonymous said...

As Jake Gittes/Jack Nicholson said in "Chinatown", "Who's the dwarf?"

PepperTree said...

Dan, new digs, more passwords to remember... stay in one place for awhile, OK?

OK, lets get to the the important stuff like Kucinich's beautiful wife Elizabeth- wow! And they're Vegans! That put's a feather in their caps.

Patrick in L.A.

Sarah Kramer said...

Welcome to blogger. :)

Justin said...

Wow, Piraro and Kucinich meet!
I thought I heard the brief strums of cosmic harmony the other day, and I wondered what it was.
Now I know.
That must have been a great meeting, congratulations.
Cheers!

Justin
Comics Coast to Coast

PHILIP FOUNTAIN said...

Dan! Welcome to the Righteous Blogosphere. MySpace is fine for Teenies and carnivores, but this is where you belong.
Count me among the legions united in faithful readership.
Gassho.

Ryan87 said...

congratulations, Dan. MySpace makes me feel 'old' and also perhaps is our world's most frightening manifestation of the chaotic minds that will someday run things. God help us all. -Adam P.

soyjoy said...

Dude, welcome to the bloggerosphere! It's 2008, time to start planning that trip back to Philly this spring!

Lookin' forward to more bloggery from you -here's an idea - is there a way to say "ethical vegan" that doesn't sound all high-horse? Who, after all, is an unethical vegan? Maybe just "an actual vegan"? I'm sure you can come up with something pithier. You're always so pithy.

Anna Banana said...

Welcome to my world. Here's a link to Vegan Dad http://vegandad.blogspot.com/
If you cook at all, I think you'll enjoy his short and sweet posts.

Unknown said...

Ah, this is much better than MySpace. Glad you moved it. I plan to be in NYC late spring and hope to take you and wife to dinner in Brooklyn. I know how to contact you (and Mike Peters).

Oh, Veganicat. Don’t be dissing Jesus or Moses or any True Prophet while praising a murderous cult.
g.

Michael Witmer said...

Lookin' good! Myspace is a bit of a cluster f***. Much better.

www.MadsMaurstad.no said...
This comment has been removed by the author.
www.MadsMaurstad.no said...

Hot diggity!
I am also a proud atheist!
Have no experience with MySpace other than I've noticed that all sorts of people get all kinds of ads in their profiles.
This blogspot-thingy
seem to have a very neat design.
I'll be on the lookout for the next update.
I am by the way planning to buy "Life is Strange and so are You" once I get my monthly scholarship.
Jolly good greetings from MAMAMA,
www.madsmaurstad.no

Garrett Williams said...

Oh, so glad you've moved to a usable blogging platform. MySpace is horribly-designed, hard to navigate, and gives me a "You must be logged in to do that!" message if I got my password wrong, which is why I left it for a year because I thought it just wasn't compatible with Firefox and Mac. Well, it also crashes my browser anytime I go there, too. Oh, and the rss feeds are hard to find. This is why I hadn't even thought of subscribing to your blog there. Now, I'm definitely subscribing to your blog. Blogger rocks.

JustMarci said...

Oh, thank you so much for moving to a real blog! I was oh so sad that I'd have to miss your bonnes mots since I can't stand MySpace!

OldsVistaCruiser said...

Dan:

This is a much better forum than MySpace - I hate that site!

Anyway, as far as today's strip is concerned (Saturday, January 5, 2008), your "Oxymoron County" has a destination that's a sort of a real thing.

"Meandering Turnpike" IS a real road, which is better known as the Pennsylvania Turnpike.
;-)

http://www.paturnpike.com/webmap/PTCIE800.htm - map of the PA Turnpike system

Bill
OldsVistaCruiser
Bucks County, PA

Unknown said...

Blogger is loads better than MyS -- the edges actually line up here and simple functions do no crash on a regular basis. I've loved following the Bizarro trail, and am glad to continue, regardless of the site you post on =)

DANIELBLOOM said...

Yeh, it's amazing, Myspace gets some much media ink, but it's a terribly designed site. Glad u switched over to blogger at our suggestions. Looking forward to more wonderful cartoons in my local paper, the Taipei Times, on Sunday, in Taiwan, free, democratic Taiwan, not commie China. Boycott the Summer Olympics. Don't give those commie SOBs your hardearned money. Stand up for freedom. China is a dictatorship with NO SENSE OF HUMOR, and Dan understands that so well.

PS: Looking forward to more global warming cartoons in the future....as the world ends.

SMILE

Danny Dan Daniel [BLOOM]

Dennis from Ennis said...

I am a virgin blogger. This is my actual first blog ever. Treat me gingerly.

1. I am not a vegan
2. I am not an atheist
3. I lived in Cleveland**

Please nobody hurt me! ;-)

Dan, nice place you have here. But you took a picture with the former mayor of Cleveland**? I've lived there so I can comment! I think the Cuyahoga river caught fire under his regime, too!

Did you know there is a reference to Bizarro in the latest "Pirates of the Carribean"? At one point Johnny Depp says, "Well, I've never actually met Bizarro but I do like his pies..." Is that some type of cryptic allusion to your strip?

Take care for now. If I'm not pummeled too hard for being a Christian meat-eater, I'll be back. ;-)

Hailey said...

Is Dennis Kucinich's wife really 2 feet taller than her husband?
Are you going to dig into the 2008 election? Heard a funny thing about Fred Thompson's wife...he was reminded that she needed to put something on, after all it is a republican/family crowd.

Glad you are on Blogger. :)

greg oakes said...

YAY FOR DAN!!! This place is definitely a lot smoother to operate than the MySpace blog. Please stop by to visit my Blogger Blogspot Blog when you have some time! HAPPY NEW (BLOG) YEAR!! All the best bro! ~go

HollyBerry said...

oh thank you for not being on myspace. i can't even access myspace from work, and i just so happen to be on blogger myself! i look forward to your angry vegan antecdotes and sharing the belief in our almighty.. uh.. selves. peace

Lisa Williamson said...

The Kuciniches should double-date with Dylan McDermott & Linda Hunt.

But seriously: what cosmic soulmates they seem to be. And she is more gorgeous in every photo I see.

Also: best wishes on the new blog.

Octus Orbus said...

What is Dennis standing on? I am a 56 year old, God fearing, Fred Thompson fan who belongs to the Red Meat Revival (which is a club that meets monthly to eat steak--each member has his own knife with his name engraved on the blade). I think you are a genius--best in the business and I appreciate your hard work.

Penny Mitchell said...

I'm over in the corner with Dennis from Ennis...even though I've refused to let him eat any rotting animal flesh in my presence. I'm not an atheist, either, but in fact am a born again Christian. Can I still join the party? ;-)

THANK YOU for ditching myspace...I loathe that website.

Love you with all my veggie, childfree, Independent, Please-God-let-them-actually-COUNT-THE-VOTES-this-year heart,

Penny

Tom Wayburn said...

Hello Dan,

If he is running, I will vote for Kucinich. He is the best of a sorry lot, but he is still part of the Capitalist Party – make no mistake. And, he does not understand Sustainability, Carrying Capacity, Overshoot, Peak Oil, Crash, or Dieoff. Do not forget that capitalism requires economic growth which is unsustainable in a finite world. Kucinich may know this, but his association with the Democratic-Republican Party disqualifies his politics.

Unknown said...

What is the meaning of your comic strip in the Washington Post Express January 22 edition. The white and black Washington monument? I am a schoolteacher and one of my kids had a difficult time understanding what was meant by Washington D.C. and Washington A.C. (under the blackened picture of the Monument.)

Tom Wayburn said...

Terence,

Certainly Dan will answer your question properly; however, for what it's worth, in my opinion the analogy between DC-AC and day-night and photopositive-photonegative is not exact even leaving out the sexual innuendo that associates AC with hetero- and DC with homosexual activities, which most people imagine go on principally under cover of darkness. The play on words is rather clever though, don't you think?

I hope I am not transgressing upon the bounds of propriety with the sexual reference, the bounds of sensibility in explaining humor, or the territorial bounds of Dan Piraro to whom the question was addressed. It has been my experience that humorists often cannot explain their own humor.

Tom

PepperTree said...

OK Dan, you did it again big time with the AC DC cartoon. Like everyone else, I was immersed in deep speculation as to the provocative or simple meaning here all the while knowing full well you're watching the messages of wonderment over this cartoon roll in and you're no doubt ROFLYAO at the attempts to make sense of this stuff.

I'll chalk another one up to artist's license and get a kick out of the attempts to explain the meaning.

By the way, if this cartoon is simply electrical in nature, the white and black could be attributed to AC alone while the DC would be constant on or white.

No, there must be some much deeper connotation going on here- a Hillary/Obama connection perhaps?

What I know for sure is that the newest comments should be at the top of the board instead of at the bottom.

Patrick

Unknown said...

I don't know hwo "clever" the play on words was. Although I respect his attempt to explain Dan's intentions, it still seems a bit flimsy. (See Dutch depiction of Muslims with bombs in their turbans). My point is that the students saw the image and immediately took it as a racist dig. At this point, I know that I have opened the door for all manner of idiotic comments. That, said, just bear in mind that The Post Express is a publication that young people read as well and their minds are shaped by the information they received. For Piraro, I imagine this does your artistic stock well. Congrats to you.Perhaps you can enlighten the youth with your cleverness.

PepperTree said...

Well, I find it sad that a simple black and white depiction should automatically cause one to label it as a "racist dig", but that illustrates where some people's sensitivities are these days.

As long as I have been following Dan's offerings, I have never detected a racist bone in his artful fingers and my suggestion of a possible Hillary/Obama connection was not meant to infer any racist feelings either.

In my observations, the true racist leaves no doubt as to where they're coming from and can be dismissed as the lunatics they are.

Karl said...

Thanks Dan for sharing the photo with us. Your wife is very brave and her heart is definitely in the right place, and so is everything else for that matter(comment in poor taste on my part, sorry).
I only clicked on the image to enlarge it so I could read what was written on the sign she was holding, honestly.

Artists for Animals said...

What a dynamic duo, you and your wife! Out there fighting injustice in your own unique ways.
Rock on!
We look forward to your future tales and pennings (both literary and artistic)!
I agree with SoyJoy, come visit Philly again! We want you back!
Best,
Z & J
www.publiceyephilly.org

Tom Wayburn said...

Peppertree wrote: "In my observations, the true racist leaves no doubt as to where they're coming from and can be dismissed as the lunatics they are."

This is a nice sentiment, but it ignores the genetic disposition all human beings have been endowed with by evolution. In one way or another, all of us are racists. All.

GAlcidesS said...

Ok, as I said in a previous post, I really enjoyed your site, I`ll be visiting often.

Greetings from Costa Rica.