Watch it full screen, if you can.

Cartoonist Don Asmussen has perfectly captured the tone of our current political discourse:

(Click the image to see the full cartoon.)

In the meantime, I’ve seen a handful of colorized movies, and I think my artistic objections were justified.

But just a few days ago, I got this photo in email:

(Click for a larger image.)

Mygrapefruit is a photo retoucher who also colorizes old photos. This seems to bring Abraham Lincoln back to life on this, his 203^rd birthday.

He asked, “Are you being punished for something?”

Another person in the room overheard this. Entirely by coincidence, that person was reading the same book at the same time.

The two of us said, almost in unison, “Oh, you don’t know…”

The great Charles Dickens was born 200 years ago today.

I thank his hovering spirit for Nicholas Nickleby, for A Christmas Carol, for A Tale of Two Cities and Great Expectations, and especially for his greatest novel, David Copperfield.

There are other Dickens books I haven’t yet read. I should get busy and read them, before someone says to me, “Oh, you don’t know…”

I was a custodial worker. I spent a long time last night trying to remember dozens of people I worked with back then.

It was my intention to work there for a few years to pay my way through school, but things don’t always turn out as we imagine.

Thirty years and twenty-five days after I started, I retired from Ohio State. Happily, I had moved up the employment ladder in the meantime. I retired with a job title of “Senior Systems Programmer.”

As it happens, retirement is the career I was born for.

Here’s Vice President Joe Biden shaking hands with a Democratic fat cat at a fundraiser here in Columbus, Ohio, last Thursday:

I’m the fat cat.

(I wonder if a girdle would help…)

Jon Huntsman is the only candidate in that whole group that believes when an apple falls from a tree, it hits the ground.

Actually, I think Mitt Romney secretly believes that, too. But he would never dare to say it out loud.

Update: Three days after Reiner made this observation, Huntsman dropped out of the race. A man with his views has no place in the modern Republican Party.

He shared life lessons:

Update:

Dilbert cartoonist Scott Adams wrote:

I once thought his success was mostly a matter of luck. Anyone can be at the right place at the right time.

But then he did it again.

And again.

And again.

And again.

He was my only hero.

Links to many more tributes in the comments at TidBITS.

A good movie is about something, and also about something else.

And a great movie can be enjoyed even if you only get part of what it’s about.

Would have been, but Emmett Till was murdered when he was 14 years old.

A negro boy from Chicago visiting relatives in Mississippi, he may not have known that there were places in 20th-Century America still untouched by civilization. He carelessly violated one of the countless “unwritten rules” of the savage Mississippi culture, and for that he was kidnapped and brutally tortured to death.

His body was found three days later, horribly mutilated. His mother insisted on an open-casket funeral. She said, “There was just no way I could describe what was in that box. No way. And I just wanted the world to see.” Photos of the body were published in JET magazine (Warning: the photos are extremely disturbing) and other publications around the country.

In retrospect, it seems that the photos opened a lot of eyes to the nature of race relations in the American South. It was no longer possible to be blind. It was no longer possible to look away.

A little more than three months after Emmett Till was killed, the Montgomery Bus Boycott began, launching the civil rights movement of the 1950s and 1960s.

It seems to me that the Civil Rights Movement is bookended with the murders of children: Emmett Till in 1955, and four little girls in 1963.

It wasn’t all that long ago. Emmett Till would be just 70 now.

I was seated way back, at a table far from the podium. I was close enough that when a well-known statewide official or candidate rose to speak, I could say, “Ooh, that’s really him!” but distant enough that I felt like a spectator rather than a participant.

As I made my way out at the end of the event, I found myself walking right past John Glenn, one of the first American astronauts. I eagerly shook his hand. He said something like, “How are you?” but I couldn’t say anything in reply. I was in awe.

Today is John Glenn’s 90th birthday.

Since my first encounter with him, he became a U.S. Senator from Ohio. After he retired from the Senate, he flew on the Space Shuttle and became the oldest human being to go into space.

Happy Birthday, Senator Glenn. I’m still in awe.

Click the image or the link for the full cartoon.

It doesn’t matter if you believe in global warming.

Global warming believes in you.

Reality always seems to have a way of grabbing your attention, even if it’s not always in time to allow you to alter reality.