I oveslept and took a cab in this morning. The driver had a call-in show on and the subject was Gonzales. Most people - at least the coherent ones - wanted him to resign or be fired. One man, amid his mixed metaphors, referred to this whole scandal as a "dog eat pony show".

It was the high point of the longest cab ride to work I've had - I got the only driver in town who (a) stops for every red light and stop sign and (b) never exceeded 25 mph.

And Tommy, I used to read Omni most of the time - it had some good things in it, and good graphics.

"dog eat pony show"

Genius. A definite improvement on the original expression.

It's weird - I read Omni all the time, but I barely remember what was in it. I can recall a few sci-fi stories, plus the King excerpt. But very little else.

It had mostly science (fact) articles, right? Plus one or two scifi stories per issue? When Wired came out, I thought of it as sorta' like Omni, but with content limited to computer stuff....

Teeny tiny ponies and if you scroll down a movie with many bunnies! Too. Cute.

Here's something that always... "bothered" is too strong of a term, but... you know how many restaurants and food products have animal mascots? Animal mascots that are advocating the killing of their own kind for food? Animals that want to be eaten themselves?

Here's a blog devoted to them: suicidefood.com

The latest posting is great:

How refreshing to come across a souvenir from Suicidefood World that requires so little analysis.

There is a pig. The pig is squirting barbecue sauce ("great" sauce) on himself. The pig is in a fire. The pig is happy, almost defiantly so. There. The End.

This might be the clearest and cleanest example of Suicide Food we have seen yet. Well done, Danny's Bar-B-Que, of wherever-the-hell-Danny's-is, USA!

The pig is burning himself alive, but all he's aware of is his pride at being "lean," and how tangy is the sauce that will soon lock in his flavor. If you doubt the twisted obscenity of the Complicit Animal, look upon Danny's pig here and know that a vicious power is at work.

That kind of reminds me of this Pluggers cartoon, written up on the Comics Curmudgeon: [link]

Suicide Food is, of course, the theme of The Muppet Movie, too.

Because when I first saw this cartoon, I thought the caption was going to be “A plugger makes jewelry from the bones of her children.”

Heh. That was my first thought too.

Suicide Food is, of course, the theme of The Muppet Movie, too.

Yeah, I was thinking of that. I have always loved Kermit's response to the frog's leg restaurant maven - about how he didn't want to be responsible for putting "millions of frogs on tiny crutches."

Liese, Victorinox makes a convertable backpack carryon: [link]

I used to read Omni a lot, mostly for the stories, which seemed racier than other scifi magazines. And the science fact was more dubious, or more out on the fringe, than Discover or Scientific AMerican or what have you. At least, in my head, which I like to think of as reality-based, but it's just a basis.