Graphic Grandeur (To Thy Own Self Beguile Edition)

 

Caricaturist Al Hirschfeld was born on this day in 1903 (he died about five months short of 100 in 2003.) He caricatured a lot of famous people in his lifetime, including...

...himself.

He actually looks a bit more approachable in the photograph, but then he liked to exaggerate.

Are You Now or Have You Ever Been?

 

Roy Cohn and a friend, 1954.

Roy Cohn and a friend, 1978.

You never can tell with The Powers That Be, so please don't let them keep you from celebrating Pride Month.

 

Quips and Quotations (Everybody's Learning How Edition)

 

1942-2025

I wasn't aware those early songs defined California so well until much later in my career. I certainly didn't set out to do it. I wasn't into surfing at all. My brother Dennis gave me all the jargon I needed to write the songs. He was the surfer and I was the songwriter.

--Brian Wilson

(Looks like surf's down--Kirk)

Different Folks

 

Time out for some old school DEI:

Sly Stone 1943-2025

Imagineer That

 

Artist's conception. Copyright 2025 Brent Spiner Walt Disney Company

In the latest in non-apocalyptic news, Walt Disney's granddaughter Joanna Miller has complained about plans to present an animatronic version of her grandpa at the Disneyland theme park in Anaheim, California next month, stating that it's "dehumanizing". I don't have a Pluto in this fight, but I would like to say... 

...if it's good enough for Abe Lincoln...

Quips and Quotations (Mobile Army Edition)

 

I mean, certain things had to remain the same. She had to remain one of the antagonists because that was the structure of the show. In the second season, we saw for the first time that she was unhappy with Frank and wanted more from her life. Then around the third or fourth year, in an episode called "The Nurses" (1976), Hot Lips gave the nurses a speech telling them how lonely she was because she was in charge and that's the way it was, so she couldn't really have any friends. Her marriage and her divorce changed her. Her affair with Hawkeye in "Comrades in Arms: Part 1" (1977) changed both characters, so that they were never really rivals again.

--Loretta Swit, Major Margaret "Hot Lips" Houlihan on MASH

1937-2025

 

 

 

Hippocratic Oaf

 

Art by B. Smart (get it?)

The above is a May 1955 press release by the Los Angeles-based anticommunist (and anti-social justice) organization Keep America Commitee, which begs the question, keep America what? Sickly? How do these supposed threats to a kept Amercian stack up 70 years later? Let's start with the middle one. I've never met a single person born after 1960--the vast majority of the 2025 United States population--who's been stricken with polio, so I'd say Jonah Salk's legacy is secure. As for Mental Hygiene being a subtle and diabolical plan to transform a free and intelligent people into a cringing horde of zombies, well, I'm afraid that one is true if the 119th Congress is any indication. I'm just wondering why it took so long.

That leaves fluoridated water, which is apparently a threat again, at least according to the current Secretary of Health and Human Services. The Secretary has instructed the Center of Disease Control to recommend that cities and counties stop adding fluoride to their water supplies. Since the CDC just lost its 20-person Division of Oral Health in a recent round of budget cuts, there's been little pushback from the agency. Plenty of dentists from outside the CDC think the de-fluoridization of water is a terrible idea, but the Secretary, who has neither a D.D.S or an M.D. after his name, has shown he cares not a whit what the medical establishment thinks, and has gone so far to threaten government scientists from publishing their findings in medical journals. So what's his beef against medicine? He thinks it's corrupt. As someone who believes that any institution or establishment that's become too powerful potentially can go corrupt, I have a certain sympathy for that point of view. However, as the Secretary works for the Executive Branch of the federal government, itself an increasingly significant source of power...

  ...I'd just as soon take my chances with The New England Journal of Medicine. Corrupt away!