January 2009

I don’t know if you’ve noticed, but YouTube’s tiff with Warner Music has resulted in a lot of viddies being removed from the one place where somebody might actually stand a chance of seeing them. I’m not about to weigh in on the proze and conz of the various copyright issues involved, except to say that when giant corporations battle, wee tiny widdle bloggers get stomped on, meaning that some of the Dardanellas I’ve posted here are now Officially Dead Links. No great loss in the scheme of things, and I’ll find replacements for them if I can, and for whatever else might be missing, eventually, when I get around to it, and so forth. The worst of it all is that we’ve lost Judy Garland. Somebody will have to break the news to Liza, but not me, as I’m a bit preoccupied at the moment, mainly with the arrangement of my sock drawer.

In the meantime, let’s have our monthly musical interlude, as follows:

And here we see that our venerable Dardanella survives even the vicious assault of a gang of harmonicaters. And who are we to complain, as long as these fellas look like they’re having fun?

The group is called Troupe de Gaita, and they have a website, composed in a language I can’t read, but which I take to be Portuguese, and which would perhaps make them Brazilian.

Gotta love how our favorite song translates to so many places around the globe, yes?

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Hey kids! Dig this:

I’ve been digging through my old comic book collection and found this ad on the back page of a Sugar and Spike comic, circa 1967. The same ad also appears on the back of one of my old Jimmy Olsen (Superman’s Pal!) issues, but this one was the cleaner copy.

This is a genuine artifact from my actual childhood. It’s shocking! You’d never see such a thing today, a toy M-16, manufactured by a mainstream toy company, advertised on the back of a DC comic - DC Comics, the same guys who brought you The Flash and Batman and Mr. Mxyzptlk. I was seven years old, and the kid in the ad looks about the same age. You’d have congressional hearings if they tried anything like this today. BRA-A-A-AP!

Read that ad copy: Keep cocking the fantastic M-16 Marauder and you can cut loose with a solid blast almost a whole minute long! Over 50 rounds! And all with the loud, realistic sound of the actual M-16 rifle! Hey, Mom! Can I bring this for Show and Tell?

The point being, I was raised on a strange planet. Fortunately, I turned out unimpeachably sane.

The rest of my generation, not so lucky.

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Doctors, scientists, theologians, and mystics agree — there are precisely 10,000 ways to day. Ten thousand! Exactly! How it came to be that the manifold means of human demise should come to equal this surprisingly exact number — one hundred times one hundred! — remains a mystery. Nevertheless, the number stands. Of the many ways to die, there are exactly ten thousand, and ten thousand is the number of ways of dying.

And so was born the need for my new website. DieToonDie.com is my ongoing project to document, in full cartoony splendor, each particular means of morbidity. Click on over, and you’ll see, to your horror and fascination, a man Choking On Eeyore… the depravity contained within a bowl of Radioactive Pudding… and even a secret, shocking image of a man being Killed By A Tapeworm!

I’ve been posting my little sketches there for the past three months, give or take. Five pics per week, excluding holidays. At that rate, it should take me about 40 years to run through the full ten thousand numbers. I expect it’ll be fun getting there, especially considering how much I hate toons. (Some people have assumed that these are “faked” drawings with “stunt” or “stand-in” toons, and that none is actually harmed in their production. To which I say Ha! Be it known that these are actual toons depicted in the final moments of their lives — or moments shortly thereafter. My pledge to you is: I will never shortchange my audience by presenting anything less than real, documented, bona fide, cartoon death.)

So please, click on in. Make DieToonDie part of your daily websurfing ritual. Subscribe to the RSS feed. And always remember: There are 10,000 ways to die. Collect ‘em all!

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