brainrow

When I was a little kid, I loved all animated cartoons. It didn’t much matter whether they were any good. When advertisers started pushing Popeye macaroni — green spinach-flavored macaroni in the shape of Popeye characters — I pestered my mom until we got some.

Oh, it was terrible!

Maybe that’s why I stopped loving Popeye cartoons. Or maybe it was the crude rubber-limbed early animation, Olive Oyl’s grating whine, Popeye and Bluto’s inarticulate mutters and grunts, or the dim-witted, predictable stories. As I grew older, I still loved cartoons, but Popeye fell by the wayside.

Then, many years later, I saw three long color cartoons: Popeye the Sailor Meets Sindbad the Sailor, Popeye the Sailor Meets Ali Baba’s Forty Thieves, and Aladdin and His Wonderful Lamp. They were good — good enough that I’m having trouble now deciding whether to buy this forthcoming DVD of the first sixty Popeye cartoons.

Could it be that Popeye just went over my head? Were Popeye cartoons making serious points about the human condition, and I was just too immature to get them? Roy Zimmerman found something:

Nixon looks rational, Reagan looks fiscally responsible. Dan Quayle looks like a genius.

If it turns out Woody Woodpecker is deep, I’m in serious trouble.

Via Boing Boing, computer scientists are developing software to spot fake photos:

Hany Farid, a computer scientist at Dartmouth College … has created mathematical tools to determine whether a digital photograph was altered after being taken. His methods work so well that the Associated Press now asks him to scrutinize any photo that seems fishy.

“We’ve developed a bag of tricks,” Farid says. “Every time somebody tampers with a photograph, we try to understand what they did and how to detect it.”

…

[One] way to doctor an image is to piece together two separate photographs. For example, during the 2004 presidential campaign, an image surfaced on the Web showing John Kerry speaking with Jane Fonda at an anti-war demonstration in the 1960s, complete with an Associated Press insignia. Some veterans of the Vietnam War reacted with rage at seeing the presidential candidate sharing a stage with the controversial actress and anti-war activist. But the picture, it turned out, was a fake.

With computer software exposing faked photos, how will dishonest politicians stand a chance in future elections?

“Even after it was determined that it was a fake, people were still talking about Kerry at a war rally,” says Farid. “The power of the images stays with us.”

Oh. Guess the important thing is to get the image out there, and it doesn’t matter whether it’s real or fake. You can hear the Swift Boat crowd breathing a sigh of relief.

You can never get enough of what you don’t really need. — Harold Ramis, quoting “a very wise person” in an interview on the newly-released DVD of the 1967 movie, Bedazzled, with Peter Cook and Dudley Moore.

Hillary doesn’t have a lock:

Sen. Barack Obama’s presidential campaign announced Wednesday that it raised at least $25 million in the first quarter of 2007.

The total comes close to the $26 million raised by Sen. Hillary Rodham Clinton’s campaign in the same time period and calls into question the New York Democrat’s status as her party’s front-runner in 2008.

Mystic prediction time: Hillary is out of the race before the first primaries.

There are plenty of Democrats who would prefer almost anybody but Hillary, for good reasons or bad.

Clinton was able to raise $26 million largely because she seemed like the inevitable candidate. But if Obama, who was just an Illinois state legislator a little over two years ago, can almost equal Clinton’s fundraising juggernaut, Hillary no longer looks inevitable. Those supporters who only want to be on-board with a winner — a substantial part of the Clinton constituency at this early stage of the game — are going to start looking at the other candidates. Watch for Clinton’s poll numbers to drop fairly significantly over the next few months.

Second mystic prediction: John Edwards will surge in the polls as supporters drift away from Hillary. This will be the first clear manifestation of the race issue in Obama’s candidacy — as Clinton’s fortunes fade, “pragmatists” will be looking for a credible alternative to Obama, fearing that the country isn’t ready for a black president.

I expect Edwards to be ahead of Clinton in the polls by the fourth of July. I make no prediction about Obama’s poll numbers.

If these predictions come true, remember you heard it here first.

If these predictions don’t come true, heh heh, it’s all a joke, see, about idiot pundits who make grand predictions based on the teeniest scraps of evidence. Boy, are those guys dumb, or what?

Cartoonist Don Asmussen may have explained why John McCain’s still running for president.

Tom Tomorrow shows who secretly runs America.

Ward Sutton considers past behavior to predict several right-wing reactions to Elizabeth Edwards’ cancer. (Warning: offensive language — but that’s the point.)

Mark Fiore on greenhouse gases: “Whatever you do, don’t do anything!“

Just when you think you’ve got a handle on the breadth and depth of stupidity in politicians, some politicians will step forward with a bold new idea and surprise you:

With little fanfare, the Canadian government recently introduced legislation that breaks with conventional trademark law and would grant the Vancouver [Olympic] organizing committee rights to “winter” and a long list of other common words, among them: “gold,” “silver,” “medals,” “sponsor,” “games,” “21st,” “2010,” as well as the name of the host city itself. The legislation would also give the committee special enforcement powers.

…

The law would also allow the organizing committee, a private group, to act like a government agency when it comes to enforcement. That means it would be able to obtain a court injunction without proving that an infringement of its trademark for, say, “winter games,” has caused it “undue harm.”

When some U.S. legislators demanded that french fries and french toast be called “freedom fries” and “freedom toast” after France wouldn’t support the invasion of Iraq, I believed they were setting a record for stupidity that would stand the test of time. But it’s very competitive out there in the world of political stupidity. I’d say this is an Olympic-class example, but I can’t afford the lawsuit.