Doonesbury by Garry Trudeau for August 07, 2010

OK - too creepy to even think about…

It IS a bit creepy. Isn’t it good, though, that Doonesbury can show two unmarried people in bed. Remember the fuss about Rick & Joanie 35 years ago?

But all it shows them doing is laying there, chatting. Not much of an advance.

Thank you, Laughaday

re: palindrome > You’ve been gone? I have nothing to say ..since sarcasm does not translate well in print.

36 years ago Lucy ‘n Ricky had twin beds.

Well said.

are they in a trailer ?

you walked out on duke ? good for you !!!

Jeanne1212, the last “I Love Lucy” episode was filmed in 1960. That makes it about 50 years ago on my calendar. And if I remember correctly, that show broke ground by having a visibly pregnant Lucy on screen.

LAUGHDAY Good. It’s over. Yesterday’s news. Anyway you can say it was Bush’s fault that someone used their First Amendment rights and questioned something.? Ah, but they were not politically correct like posters who condemn Christianity here every day. How many posts today? How many condemned Islam? None?

Condemn Islam! Condemn Christianity! Condemn Judaism! Condemn Latvians!

How many more people have to die due to differing views of a figment of the imagination? This planet will never survive as long as this stupidity continues.

I Love Lucy finished as a regular series around ‘57 or ‘58. They produced a few specials in the years after that - one I recall was a crossover with “Make Room For Daddy”.

I don’t know if “I Love Lucy” was the first to show a visibly pregnant main character. Reflecting the times, however, in the episode where Lucy discovers she’s pregnant - nobody ever used the word “pregnant” and the episode title is actually “Lucy is enciente”

About Lucy and Ricky and the twin beds… It’s commonly believed that no couple was shown with a double/queen/king bed (other than the “handcuff” episode where the twin beds had mysteriously been pushed together) until sometime in the 60s or early 70s, perhaps Mr.&Mrs. Brady. Somebody, though, recently rediscovered some short-lived TV series from around ‘47 or ‘48 in which the principal characters (a married couple, natch) shared a bed.

Duke seems to be in a self-destruct mode far greater than any he has been in before.

It seems as if he has managed to come out relatively unscathed from all his other follies. In most other story arcs he has undeservedly come out “on top”. It looks as if this lovable scumbag is disintegrating beyond repair.

Laughaday, I agree with you, but please drop the subject of the mosque near Ground Zero. Palindrome tried for three days (I think) to pick a fight about it, and there is no fight about it. Your position is a reasonable one, similar to mine, although I would point out that it is way past time for mosques, churches, synagogues, and other religious buildings to pay property taxes to their communities. There is no reason for religious buildings to have tax-free property.

True, Hawg, but so were Rick & Joanie 35 years ago, and it scandalized many newspapers.

Plus4, you are comPLETEly incorrect. Millions of Muslims condemn terrorism.

Lew, no one here has “condemned Christianity”. What IS wrong with you?

All right, today is August 7th, the fiftieth birthday of Cote d’Ivoire. We should celebrate another country freed from colonization—after all, that is our celebration, too. I, however, must fetch some groceries & go teach. Good day, all.

”Mainstream Christians everywhere loudly condemn abortionist shootings.”

That one’s a lie too.

The condemnations are muted, only given when under pressure from the media, and they will not recommend taking any action against these domestic terrorists, since “it’s a free country”.

Complete double standard by the Christianists, and the politicians who pander to them for support.

Drives me crazy when they say the Brady Bunch was the first to show a married couple in a single bed. Lucy and Ricky were shown in one bed in an episode as they and the Mertz’ drove out to California.

@Mosque debate

Laughaday is responding to the lengthy NYT blog that I posted last Sunday and seems to think, as BrianCrook puts it, that I was trying “to pick a fight.” Both of their replies (“it’s not a question of tolerance vs. justice,” and “[our] position is a reasonable one”) fall squarely among the 33% of the blogs that called the building of the Cordoba Mosque an act of tolerance.

I think it’s fair to to assume that the bulk of these tolerant people are indifferent to religion, if not positively hostile to it. Consequently, in vaunting their tolerance they are in fact betraying their indifference towards the mosque issue. But two-thirds of the NYT bloggers could not afford to be indifferent, and I thought a modest proportion of Doonesbury readers might be interested in the reflections of this thoughtful majority.

I knew my “Sunday Diversion” post would draw a reflexive cry of “toleration” from some readers who dislike having their cartoon politics interrupted by the real thing. I’m a bit surprised, though, at their dismissing my proposal to discuss tolerance here as an attempt “to pick a fight.”

The truth is that the virtue of religious tolerance is something neither our society nor Locke’s has quite managed to achieve. What we’ve achieved, rather, is indifference. To denounce as intolerant or irrational those who don’t share your indifference is puerile.

For a serious argument that the Cordoba Mosque can be a symbol of tolerance, see today’s NYT piece on the Ahmadi Moslems. Note that they not only “refudiate” jihad, as SP demanded, but—-far more telling, IMO—-that the Ahmadi’s are in turn denounced as apostates by the Islamists.

If I thought that jihadists dreaded the Mosque as a heretical abomination, I’d happily make a (taxable) contribution.

http://www.nytimes.com/2010/08/07/us/07religion.html?scp=1&sq=Ahmadi&st=cse

laughaday, I agree that there’s a lot that Americans don’t know about Muslims in general (purposefully?), and about the individuals who are behind the mosque set in that location at this time in particular (opening day 9-11-11?), but I’m starting to feel that this is the best place for it. A little closer to the blast hole would have been even better.

Throughout the world and in the US, Muslims seem to have an informal preference to convert former places of worship of others (synagogues, churches, pagan temples, etc.) rather than build mosques at entirely new locations. Considering the numbers of those who come to pray at Ground Zero, this mosque may be following that tradition, so perhaps viewing it is all that Americans need to know about the people who are building it and the people who drove hijacked flying bombs into the buildings that used to stand there.

“Today is August 7th, the fiftieth birthday of Cote d’Ivoire. We should celebrate another country freed from colonization—after all, that is our celebration, too.”

Once again, Neolib blithely controls politics with nostalgia. Besides looking through the rosy politics of a personal calendar, s/he should check this actual chronicle:

http://travel.state.gov/travel/cis_pa_tw/tw/tw_915.html

Drome, your characterization of my thoughts and Laughaday’s thoughts on the mosque near Ground Zero: “the building of the Cordoba Mosque [is] an act of tolerance” demonstrates that you want to have a fight where none exists. Neither of us said that.

Then, you continue my asserting that most of the “tolerant” responses come from people who are “hostile to [religion]”. Why do you want to fight about this when no fight is needed? You cannot come up with a substantial legal reason that anyone could—or should—prevent the building of this mosque, yet you continue to yammer about the impotent words bandied about it.

Come up with something of substance either about this mosque or about “religious tolerance”—a vague phrase that you haven’t defined and that relates to this discussion hardly at all—or I shall ignore your obsession on this peanut and I advise other to do the same. I look forward to intelligent, rational, substantial remarks form you on subjects that matter.

michaelwme, today’s strip shows Toggle (Leo) reflecting upon his decision to walk out of his job during Duke’s “Billoxi BP” recording session. Toggle was the sound engineer.

I posed the question a few days ago about the moral culpability of Leni Riefenstahl’s sound engineer (and by implication, her other technical support staff) in a similar situation. Nobody chose to pick that up as a topic, but I seem to have anticipated GT’s destination in bringing this subject matter up.

As an editorial artist, GT himself has similar moral principles as Riefenstahl’s to consider about the ramifications of publishing of his work. Most of the time, that impact is negligible. At other times (as when depicting a formal VP candidate of plotting to choke children as they sleep), he brushes the work of classic political propaganda artists far more closely. Toggle found himself in a similar moral situation, and chose to walk out. Perhaps GT could learn a little from his own characters.

Fortunately for Toggle, this studio is not the Third Reich, but presumably (and hopefully) he got his boss’s permission to pack up and leave. He still has to pay Toggle’s salary, but it hardly seems likely that he himself will now be paid for a week’s worth of punishing work.

sounds familiar-My Mom is in the room by the living room with an auto-hear wall-Mom talking out was unexpected but I expected someone was eve’s dropping before it was revealed… years of Journalism/Mass Comm has ruined many surprises

Brian,

If you’re in fact tolerant of / indifferent to the religious issues raised by the Cordova Mosque, why are you anxious to dismiss any discussion of those issues as “impotent words bandied about”? Your impatience betrays something very like intolerance of alternative viewpoints to yours. Do you really think that the 200 NYT bloggers are just “yammering” about a topic that, from your parochial standpoint, should not even be news?

Jay_Dallas said, “Drives me crazy when they say the Brady Bunch was the first to show a married couple in a single bed. Lucy and Ricky were shown in one bed in an episode as they and the Mertz’ drove out to California.”

The censors allowed it because Lucy and Desi were married in real life.

I lived in a Muslim country for a couple of years. The temple call in the morning was reassurance that men of faith were coming to the Mosque to worship God. The Mosque at ground zero is a fact now. Why bring it up? It’s over.

BILLDOG challenged me to bring any specific example. Your very own comment immediately before shows your intolerance. Did religion have anything to do with the Oklahoma bombing? Why then did you mention the Church twice., three times if you count the time you wrote it with a lower case letter. I thought being respectful was PC.

Why didn’t you mention that not only was he Catholic, he probably had Irish blood in him. You know us Irishmen, always killing cops and blowing up things. And a Republican! Bunch of anarchists. The NRA, they eat babies. But the worst thing you could say was that his parents were devote Catholic. Is that a worse insult than being conservative? Hey, refresh my memory, did the Dems elect our only Catholic President? Odd? Irish?

Jay_Dallas, Smoothpate - Good reminder. I thought it was Fred and Ethel in the double bed and Lucy & Ricky in the bunks, so I googled it (episode “First Stop”). We’re all correct.

Lucy and Ricky start out in the double, but Ricky can’t take the sunken mattress. Ethel and Fred trade with them halfway through the scene because it’s like their mattress at home.

Lucy and Ricky do have their arms around each other (in fear) as the vibration of the passing freight trains rolls the bed back and forth across the room. Ethel and Fred aren’t shown touching each other in the double - she lashes his nightshirt to the side of the bedframe to keep him from sinking into the center. She gets in the other side and faces away, sleeping back to back with pillows and blankets between them, wedged to fill in the sinkhole.

Two more gems from Neolib today:

(1) “I’m through wasting time with your BS and will ignore your yammering from now on”

(2) “I shall ignore your obsession on this peanut and I advise other to do the same”

What kind of fool would post dire threats like this on a cartoon forum? Neolib takes herself altogether too seriously when she regresses to these schoolyard putdowns. Does she really think everyone is hanging on her next utterance?

Nemesys, you said “Throughout the world and in the US, Muslims seem to have an informal preference to convert former places of worship of others (synagogues, churches, pagan temples, etc.)”

This has been very common in ALL religions. It’s not an ‘informal preference’ of Muslims, it’s a persistent habit of all humanity.

Archeologists will tell you that we humans have a habit of using the same sacred sites over and over, layer on top of layer. Persistent worship consecrates a particular location.

rmbdot - Thanks for the reminder and recap.

Actually this toon reminded me of Archie overhearing Meathead and Gloria……

Nemesys, you confuse a doll with the person. Get a grip. By the way, no one ever considered Sarah Palin as formal. She is, after all, by her own description, a pit bull with lipstick.

Drome, on a planet of seven billion people, 200 remarks in a webpage forum over a week are pretty small potatoes. Pibgorn gets 200 remarks pretty much every day! In addition, again, you mischaracterize. I suggest that you use only the exact words of other opiners. I am in no wise anxious nor have you discussed any “issues”. Again, I await you to come up with something of substance. Good luck.

Billdog, I support you in your decision to ignore Lew’s comments. I look forward to more of your comments, however, as some of the best in this forum.

Stebon, I am sorry that you are frightened of Muslims. Muslims should frighten you no more than do Christians, Jews, Buddhists, Hindus, or atheists. I hope that you soon crawl out from under the bed.

Okay.. the flare-up of GT’s “bed scene” was 36 years ago….I’ve seen more re-runs of Lucy than re prints of D and have been too busy living to make make marks on the cave wall. My first real memory of a “shared” bed on TV was the old Bob Newhart show.

My Oooops! Sorry!

jeanne - that was the best use of a shared bed too

in 2 series, no less.

MichaelWME:

On Thursday GT shifted from Duke ranting in the studio to Toggle listening in the control booth.

On Friday Toggle walked out on Duke’s tirade.

On Saturday Toggle and Alex are discussing it. (in bed!)