We do not simply jump on the latest bandwagon to pass by. We pick up a lonely banner simply because no one else will.

We do not turn away from a fight, even one that we know we will lose.

We are not silent, because we know that we speak for those who have no voice.

We do not rest, because we carry the burden of those too tired to keep fighting.

We do not do what is easy. We do not do what is politically expedient. We do not do what is popular.

We do what is right.

There is a reason we are Democrats. Never forget that.

There’s a new meme going around that the fastest game of Monopoly would involve buying Park Place and Boardwalk and bankrupting your opponent in four turns. There is at least one major problem with their methodology.

Their game plot would involve not purchasing a number of properties. This is a big no-no under the actual rules. In a real game of Monopoly every property must be sold after it has been landed upon the first time. If the player landing on it refuses to buy it, it must go to auction and one player must buy it…even if for just $1.00.

(By the way: this is why people think Monopoly takes forever to play; they aren’t getting all the properties sold quickly and depleting people’s money fast enough.)

Knowing a thing or two about Monopoly and theoretical games (as anyone who has read Go To Hell will tell you), I decided to see if I could do better under tournament rules.

Any serious Monopoly player will tell you that Park Place and Boardwalk are not the key to victory; the orange group (St. James Place, Tennessee Avenue, and New York Avenue) are. These are the properties that are within the most common dice rolls upon getting out of Jail, including two of the six sets of doubles (two 3′s and two 4′s) that will get you out of Jail for free. This makes them some of the most often landed upon spaces. (The 7th, 5th, and 3rd most often, if you’re curious.) Boardwalk isn’t even in the top 10.

So here is the fastest theoretical game of Monopoly I can come up with, ending after only two turns, using tournament rules.

(Note: I use the classic version of the game, which was published from 1935-2008. The only difference with today’s bastardization of the game would be that Player 2 would pay $200.00 instead of $150.00 for Income Tax on turn 1. This doesn’t affect anything else in the gameplay.)

Both players start with the standard $1,500.00 in cash.

Player 1, Turn 1.

Player 1 rolls double 5′s, and lands on “Jail/Just Visiting.” Since he rolled doubles, he rolls again.

The second roll gives him 6 with no doubles. He lands on St. James Place and buys it for $180.00.

Player 1 now has $1,320.00, and Player 2 has $1,500.00

Player 2, Turn 1.

Player 2 rolls double 2′s and lands on “Income Tax.” Since he only has $1,500.00, he pays the 10%, or $150.00. Since he rolled doubles, he rolls again.

The second roll gives him 6 with no doubles. He lands on “Jail/Just Visiting.”

Player 1 now has $1,320.00, and Player 2 has $1,350.00

Player 1, Turn 2.

Player 1 rolls double 1′s and lands on Tennessee Avenue, buying it for $180.00. Since he rolled doubles, he rolls again.

The second roll is a 4. He lands on “Chance.”

The Chance card is “Go Back Three Spaces.” This lands him on New York Avenue, which he buys for $200.00. This leaves him with $940.00 in cash.

He then spends $900.00 to build 9 houses on his Orange Color Group, three on each. His turn then ends.

Player 1 now has $40.00, and Player 2 has $1,350.00

Player 2, Turn 2.

Player 2 rolls double 3′s, landing on St. James Place. Rent with three houses is $550.00, leaving him with $800.00.

Since the rules allow you to buy houses at any time between rolls, even during another player’s turn, Player 1 goes ahead and builds a fourth house on New York Avenue with some of the rent he just received.

Player 2 now rolls again. He rolls double 1′s, landing on New York Avenue. Rent with four houses is $800.00.

Player 2 is bankrupt, and eliminated from the game.

Player 1 wins.

Short, simple, and conforming to tournament rules. You are welcome.

There’s only one problem. He’s adjective, and she’s adjective.

Despite this obstacle, they carry on their romance until she stupid action, separating them. He refuses to let the romance die, however, and stupid quasi-romantic action. She finds out about this and is touched, but spurns him. As a result, he even stupider action.

Length of time later, she discovers that he has stupidest action of them all which blows her away. She wants to reciprocate his love, but can’t because new unforeseen obstacle. He makes one more play for her, they have a torrid affair lasting length of time until it is interrupted by new obstacle. She then must make a choice: the man she truly loves? Or something stupid.

In the end, their love proves enough/not enough to conquer all the obstacles in their way. They rest content in the knowledge that they are better people for knowing each other until stupid last second plot twist. The moral of the story is that adjective love is truly adjective.

According to Daniel Politi in Slate:

Officials in the small Kern County community, around 120 miles northwest of Los Angeles, are investigating reports that the boy had a hit list of students he felt had bullied him that he had compiled last year, reports the Bakersfield Californian. “He had intended targets. There’s no question,” Kern County Sheriff Donny Youngblood said.

Same old story. A bullied kid finally reaches the breaking point and, feeling he has no recourse, seeks to take revenge upon his attackers.

And how do we as a country respond? We villainize the victim of the original crime and lionize the aggressors.

It doesn’t start at the shooting phase, though. It starts a lot sooner. If a kid fights back against bullies with his fists then our “zero tolerance” policies guarantee that the victim will be the one who pays worse than the bullies who seek to destroy his life. Stand up for yourself with administrators and you’re just making yourself a bigger target for the bullies. You dig yourself deeper into the lower castes of the school, which makes you an even more attractive target for abuse.

Pretty soon, a kid feels he has no way out. I touched on this when I wrote A Funny Thing Happened on the Way to Columbine, as expressed by my narrator, Jake:

Let me get one thing clear: if you have never thought about shooting up your school, you have never been a teenager, and anyone who says they don’t know what would drive a kid to doing it is either incredibly dense or a horrible liar.

The teenage years are incredibly hard on kids, with pressure from within and pressure from outside, and when you add in the fact that the modern high school is the best science project anyone could have ever dreamed up to study social cannibalism, no one should really be surprised when kids’ minds burst like firecrackers tossed into a barbecue pit. Honestly, I consider the simple fact that more kids don’t take up arms against the seas of troubles that threaten to drown them a testament to self-restraint.

When you’re a kid, everything is the most important thing that has ever happened, and every insult is the straw that broke the camel’s back. Sure, you can get over it pretty quickly if you try, but in those minutes right after the incident, it can truly seem like your world is ending unless you do something drastic.
Now, imagine that these last straws are being dumped on your already loaded down with a book bag back, one each second, every second of every day. Social stratification pushing down upon your helpless body with tons of pressure. Pressure to conform, to belong, and to behave just like everybody else. Then factor in the incessant push to excel from the parental units, which they make sure is scratching away at you constantly like a rabid hamster stuffed under your baseball cap, and tell me you wouldn’t feel the need to go batshit from time to time.

It’s supposed to be the same for the jocks and the cheerleaders, and the other “popular” types, but unless you’re one of them, you’ll never understand how the hell it can be. When someone is dumping a truck full of manure on top of you, you don’t stop to contemplate whether he’s worried about how he’s going to make the mortgage payment next month, you concentrate on trying to get him to stop smothering you in shit.

And what compounds this problem is the way we as a culture react when a victim finally fights back. Again, from my narrator:

“For the record, guys, I’m with Mick part of the way on this. I have no problem seeing the assholes that got away with beating up Topher pay, and pay through the nose. I don’t think I’d mind seeing any and all of the other jocks get it, either. But there’s one important thing that we’re forgetting.” I paused for a second, cleared my throat, and fought the effort by my stomach to push some bile up into my mouth to shut me up. Like Mick and Topher, and probably Whitey, I was mad. Really mad, and I had to force the logical side of my brain to take control. “And that’s one simple fact: if there’s one problem with school shootings, other than the obvious carnage related difficulties, of course, it’s that people never seem to learn the lesson.”

I stopped again, and looked over the three of them. Topher was glaring even worse than he had been during Mick’s screed. Whitey looked intrigued, as if he guessed where I was going. Mick just crossed his arms and defiantly prodded me. “Go on.”

“By all rights, Columbine should have gotten the message across loud and clear to kids across the country: don’t fuck with the wrong people or you will end up dead. It didn’t, though, and neither did the killings that came later, because people love victims. Because a couple of kids who were sick of being kicked around killed their oppressors, they wound up making themselves into the bad guys, and made the bad guys into victims in everyone’s eyes. People were too overcome with grief over the senseless bloodshed to think about what had driven the two shooters to do what they did. And for those jocks, having their blood spilled wound up washing away their sins as far as everyone was concerned. Don’t think about what they were really like, turn them into perfect little angels in everyone’s eyes. And, personally, I am not really in favor of giving the world of jocks any new martyrs.”

If we started portraying these “victims” of shootings like the monsters they were, instead of pretending that they were harmless little lambs, then maybe some other bullies might start getting the message. Maybe administrators would start taking bullying seriously. Maybe we’d start attacking the problem with school violence at its root.

Zero tolerance for bullies, not for those that fight back. Expel the bullies. Protect the victims. Don’t tolerate the Social Darwinism that goes on in the hallways.

Until you treat the disease, the symptoms will keep recurring. And far too many people are blind to what the real disease is.

In 1995 a company called International Bakeries, which was essentially a vulture capital arm of a computer company called Data Processing Financial and General Corporation, went on a massive spending spree. They not only bought Hostess but the San Francisco French Bread Company, John J. Nissen Baking Company, Drake’s, My Bread Company, and tons of other companies.

They did this by borrowing like batshit crazy and eventually defaulted on their loans, leading to bankruptcy in 2004.

In 2009 they emerged from bankruptcy by BORROWING MORE FUCKING MONEY. They borrowed from Ripplewood Holdings, Silver Point, Monarch, and GE Capital. All these loans caused more payments and more interest accruing, leading to more and more debt. It was this debt that caused their collapse.

If it hadn’t been for easy credit, merger mania, leveraged buyouts, and greedy conglomerates whose philosophy was “if you can’t beat them buy them out,” then all the little brands (including Hostess) that this group of predators bought with borrowed money might still be small and innovative enough to survive financial hard times with little or no debt of their own.

So always remember: it wasn’t the unions that killed the Twinkie, it was the modern vulture capitalist culture.

Rae does not understand how I write. I cannot write a synopsis to save my life. Especially for a story that is still developing. You see, I know the beginning (actually, I’ve written the beginning), I know the end, and I know a few points inbetween. But my characters don’t like me telling them what to do beyond just steering them towards where they need to be. So I have no idea what is going to happen for about 75% of the book, and won’t know for sure until I write it.

That’s how I write. It’s the only way I know to write, too.

So what can I do to make the deadline for this impossible task? Simple. I have to make it a moot point.

I have to finish the complete first draft by October 17. 65,000 words in 28 days.

An impossible task? Not at all. I wrote the first draft of Sidekick (coming out in March, and the book Brothers in Arms is the sequel to) in 28 days as well, during November 2009. Sidekick’s first draft was 68,000 words, so there’s no reason I can’t do this.

Along the side of this blog you will now find a little bar detailing my progress. Taking out what I’ve already written, I need to write 2,107 words a day to make this deadline. I invite you to join me on this tour. I will try to find time to keep everyone up to date.

Batten down the hatches, here we go.

I will be at table A112 in Artists’ Alley, which is located near the Charles Street lobby of the Convention Center. Here is a handy map to track me down:

I will have a slew of TNAOQV books for sale and will once again be doing the World’s Crappiest Sketches for those who are so inclined.

I will be updating my movements (such as they may be) through my Twitter feed and through Foursquare, for those who wish to cyberstalk me.

I hope to see you at Baltimore Comic-Con!

As most of you may know we’ve had extreme financial difficulties lately, which has resulted in our being in arrears to our Homeowner’s Association, which levies a monthly fee to fund the sending of nastygrams to people whose landscaping they don’t like and… well, that’s about it. Of course, being a Homeowner’s Association (read: Nazis) they keep tacking fees on top of fees, and are now saying that we owe them nearly $4,000.00. Of course, since our monthly fee is $35.00, they’re trying to say that we owe nine years’ worth of fees on a house that has only existed for less than five years.

In late June the Homeowner’s Association lawyer, a woman named Judith Jennings did something very stupid. She levied against our bank account trying to take every penny we had towards their inflated fees. The problem was, all that we had in the bank was unemployment benefits (both of us are out of work), which she is not legally allowed to levy against. She eventually reversed the levy (and it took forever for our bank to give us back the money she tried to take, and never refunded overdraft fees caused by the illegal levy) but by then it was too late.

I’ve suffered for years from high blood pressure, and the incident with this lawyer illegally grabbing our bank account did not help. The stress of dealing with every penny we had (which wasn’t much) suddenly being ripped from us, then having to fight with this woman on the phone, then having to fight my credit union on the phone, shot it through the roof.

A couple of days later I had what I thought was a migraine headache. I then started to lose vision in my right eye. After wrangling with Wills Eye Hospital to try and finance treatment, I got my final diagnosis today.

The escapades with the Homeowner’s Association caused me to have a stroke.

Granted, it was a very small stroke, only really effecting the optic nerve in my right eye, but it was essentially a stroke brought on by the sudden spike in my blood pressure from the stress brought on from our HOA illegally trying to steal our money.

What effect this is going to have on the rest of my life and my career is not yet known (as a professional cartoonist I kind of need my eyes), but what is known is that my vision is permanently hobbled and my right eye now only has 20/400 vision in it.

I don’t know what the cash value of a human eye is, but I hope my Homeowner’s Association is happy because that’s what they took from me. I hope they credit it against the balance they allege we owe.

Unfortunately, from time to time they break a lot of shit, too.

I “upgraded” my blog to WordPress 3.4 a while back and started getting this handy little message whenever I tried to get to my dashboard:

Cannot redeclare class Custom_Image_Header in /wp-admin/custom-header.php on line 16

Nifty, huh? And because it broke my dashboard I couldn’t do anything about it.

Well, after much hacking, smacking, wailing and gnashing of teeth, etc., I got it working. Especially since one of the fixes in 3.4.1 was NOT a fix to unbreak what they broke.

And, as I tend to do in these circumstances, I like to share.

This file includes patched versions of the two .php files that break the “Back my Book” theme. Download it, and extract the two files as follows:

1. Extract “custom-header.php” to your /wp-admin/ directory.
2. Extract “theme.php” to your /wp-includes/ directory.

Then go to your blog and access your dashboard. Voila.

Hopefully the authors will eventually fix the theme themselves, but in the mean time kludge away.