It takes a lot to get me really worked up these days about something bad the Bush administration is doing. Don't get me wrong -- I'm constantly appalled -- but one gets sort of used to the steady stream of abominations burbling out of the White House after a while. The new strip-mine rule gave me pause, however.

According to this NY Times article, as of Friday the Bushies gave the green light to mountaintop removal mining, allowing mining companies to dump waste in streams, effectively obliterating them. This practice is destroying vast parts of Appalachia, all for a filthy source of energy we need less of if we hope to combat global warming. It is diabolically short-sighted.

I didn't even have room in the cartoon to talk about the sludge.

My "Puppy Principle" cartoon has been making its way around the internet a bit. Most people seem to get it, but -- as I initially anticipated -- I've heard from a couple angry readers who think I'm defending Michael Vick or downplaying the heinousness of his cruelty to animals. Let me state categorically that this is not the case. The purpose of the cartoon is to point out the cognitive dissonance between Americans' reactions to Vick's cruelty and other forms of cruelty perpetrated on humans on a much wider scale.

I posted this announcement on the front page of my site a little while ago, but those of you subscribing to the blog feed may not have heard that Slowpoke now runs in the Village Voice. So for you New Yorkers who've written over the years asking why the strip isn't in the Voice... now it is!

I must admit I've been lusting after the Voice ever since I used to visit my friend at NYU as a college student in the mid-'90s. I used to bring copies of the paper back to my dorm room at U.Va, keeping them around as a sort of antidote to the terminal preppiness of my surroundings. I even moved to the New York area briefly after college, with the ultimate goal of getting involved with the Voice somehow, but went broke before I could muster entrée to the NYC publishing scene (I wound up working at a yuppie dishware store in the Village where rich old ladies would ask me about the purpose of ceramic chicken-shaped containers, to which I replied "You could keep eggs in there," causing them to scoff. I got fired.)

But now, eleven years later, I have exacted my revenge on the ceramic chickens. Pick up a copy of the paper, and look for me somewhere in the vicinity of "Savage Love."

Thought I'd share this spot I did for this week's C-VILLE:

The Virginia government has set up a "Putative Father Registry" for guys to register their potential paternity after they bone someone. (Not quite how it's described on the site, but that's the gist of it.)

Remember, we are the state that brought you macaca.

Mat in France sends this amusing anecdote:

I laughed a lot reading your last cartoon about Americans touring Europe in ultra-comfortable equipment, first of all because, well, this is *exactly* how we caricature Americans over here (it is very European to describe the Americans this way, rightly or wrongly so), but as well because it is part of my job as a guide to do tours inside a medieval castle. I had once three American gentlemen, very friendly, very polite and considerate, but who were all three quite well stocked in terms of circumference. The beginning of the tour went all right, but there was a huge embarrassment when we got to the "narrow" part of the keep (narrow corridors and stairs). They quickly realized after having quickly tried that there was no way they would get through, even with a bit of help. They sort of chuckled a bit about it, looked very embarrassed, said something like "how slim they were in those days!" and returned to the tickets office... Poor gentlemen, they were very curious and eager to learn.

I should probably clarify here that my cartoon is intended to poke fun at Americans spoiled by convenience rather than as a cheap shot at those, er, "well stocked in terms of circumference." I read some statistic a while ago about the shockingly small distance the average American walks in a day. The convenience of driving everywhere perpetuates a need for more convenience. Like porta-couches!

In case you couldn't guess from the cartoon, I went to Europe on my vacation -- specifically, Ireland. A couple days into my trip I found myself lying in our hotel room, totally knackered, wishing someone would just cart me around Dublin. Thus came the idea for this cartoon.

I imagine touring Europe must present some difficulty for Americans not used to getting around via their own volition. Thankfully for them, there are alternatives that aren't a far stretch from my cartoon. One tour company in Dublin drives people around the city in buses shaped like Viking ships. Some of the people in the ships wear viking helmets.

You can always pick out the American tourists in a crowd because they have the biggest, most complicated-looking sneakers. Wearing running shoes for comfort, I was no exception (though I like to think mine are less SUV-like than most).

Ireland's natural beauty is phenomenal. There really is green stuff growing on green stuff, even more so now that they've had the rainiest summer anyone could remember. I'm always amazed at how easy it is to find pristine countryside not far outside major European cities. I guess it helps to plan your city 1,000 years before the advent of cars.

That's me sipping a Beamish in the Cock Tavern in Howth, a seaside area northeast of Dublin. We did a lot of hanging out in pubs watching soccer matches and other sports like hurling. Let me just say that hurling and rugby make NFL players look like wimps.

Now I am swamped with work, the price one pays for getting away from it all.

I meant to write a long post about the Ledbetter v. Goodyear case, complete with links to sources, but I'm about to leave for vacation. Alas, I will just say that according to articles I've read, there's a lot of gray area surrounding the law that the regressive bloc of the Supreme Court cited in denying Ledbetter her claim. Congress just clarified things with a vote to allow pay discrimination suits within 180 days of one's last affected paycheck. Bush promises to veto the bill. What else is new? Personally, I find this stuff a lot more relevant to people's lives than most of what constitutes political news these days. Here the Dems are actually attempting to do something good (!), but hardly anyone knows about it.

I won't be bloggin' for the rest of this week and next week. In fact, I will try to avoid computers as much as possible. See the front page of this site to find out where you can read next week's strip.