I watched Beauty and the Beast (the Disney version) last night. It wasn’t as good as I remembered (the animation - especially Belle’s face - at times looks clunky and overdrawn), and the “new” song, “Human Again,” didn’t add very much. Still, it was entertaining enough.

One thing that struck me: virtually every object in the Beast’s castle is animated and sentient - the furniture, the suits of armor, the silverware and dishes, everything. This is because the witch whom the selfish prince insulted placed her enchantment not just on the prince/beast but on the entire castle staff (frankly, turning an entire castle staff into objects just because their master has insulted you strikes me as at least as selfish as anything the prince/beast did). And this castle has a lot of stuff - judging from the “Be Our Guest” number, there are thousands of plates, forks, spoons and knives.

So I have to wonder - before the witch’s spell, just how many servants did this guy have? And, more importantly, why didn’t this castle have any furnishings that weren’t enchanted servants? And what did the prince eat off of before the witch entered their life?

I found myself wishing that the screenplay writer had the same take on Gaston’s sidekick as the lyricist. (Gaston - sp? - is the villain). During the songs, Gaston’s sidekick is constantly insulting Gaston in ways that mostly fly over Gaston’s head (”No one plots like Gaston…/No one persecutes harmless crackpots like Gaston”). The implication is that the sidekick stays with Gaston for the status, but nonetheless sees Gaston for the petty tyrant he is and holds him in some contempt. But apart from the songs, the sidekick is just a standard Disney oaf (”look at the funny short man fall into the snowbank, mommy!”) - not nearly as interesting.

Otherwise, the basic problem is that no matter how you try - you can make the villain a sexist pig, you can have Beauty stand up to the Beast, you can make Beauty a book-loving intellectual, you can have Beauty be released by the Beast and then voluntarily return, you can have Beauty save the Beast’s life (albeit only in girly ways) a few times - the basic story of Beauty and the Beast is irredeemably sexist. (Is it intentional irony that the villain’s plan to force Belle to stay with him - hold Belle’s father hostage until Belle agrees - is identical to the Beast’s plan?) If I ever have a daughter, I’m renting her Mulan instead.

I’ve always liked seeing other cartoonists’ “work process” - it’s neat to see how the drawings are constructed from scratch.

So to the right is a panel from my “Dicebox” story (see the post below this one for the info on that) from initial doodle to finished color.

(If you don’t like cartooning-related posts, don’t worry! Just skip down a couple of posts, there’s oodles of political stuff posted today!)

Y’all may have noticed that there were no posts on Alas yesterday. A major reason for that is that my pal Jenn Manley Lee, creator of the excellent online comic book Dicebox, is taking a well-deserved break. While she’s doing that, I’m filling in with a short story, written and drawn by me, using Jenn’s Dicebox characters.

The first page of my story, “The Argument,” has now been posted on Girlamatic (Dicebox’s publisher). One or two new pages will be posted every Wednesday for the next couple of weeks (the complete story is five pages long). Doing this project is loads of fun for me; it’s been too many years since I did an actual comic book, with characters and dialog, rather than a political cartoon.

It should be fun for my blog’s readers as well; the story of “The Argument” was inspired by the discussion over one of my more infamous posts.

You can read “The Argument” page-by-page for free; the most recent update is always available to the general public. If you’re willing, however - or if you’d like to help out the owner of this blog - you can buy a one-month subscription to Girlamatic for under three bucks, which will enable you to read all of “The Argument” once it’s online.

For less than three bucks, you’ll help me and a lot of other independant cartoonists, and you’ll have access to hundreds of pages of original comics. Aside from fifty or so pages of Dicebox - which is simply an amazing comic - Girlamatic contains a whole lot of other comics, including Kris Dresden’s beautiful new comic, encounter her. (For my money, there is no one in comics today who draws better than Kris Dresden.)

If you do get a one-month (or heck, a one-year) subscription because of what I’ve written here, please click on “Dicebox” in the “What convinced you?” question - that’ll not only help Jenn out, it’ll help me out.

End of sales pitch.

But, not the end of the post. I wanted to point out that Kip - hubby of Jenn Lee and long-time friend of mine (full disclosure) - has a post up on Long Story Short Pier discussing (among, as is always the case with Kip, other subjects) my Dicebox story.

And, even more, I wanted to put up a link to this post by the talented Dylan Meconis (another Girlamatic cartoonist!), so that I’ll be able to find and reread it whenever I’m feeling the need for a kick-ass, economy-sized box of inspiration.

Every time I think the Bush administration has found the single worse, most right-wing, most biased person in America to nominate for high judicial office, they dig deeper into a pit under a rock and find someone even worse.

So please, visit Ruminate This’s post about Prior. She’s got good links. She’s got background info about Prior that will piss you off. She’s got the info on where to call to encourage the Democrats to resist.

And then visit Jack Balkin’s site, to read his post. And, most of all, visit Ignatz, who has done post after post explaining why Prior is a bad choice.

And then go back to Ruminate This, and give your Senator a call.

Hey, do you drink coffee?

If so, are you so incredibly stupid that you’re going to get confused between the brand names “Starbucks” and “Haida Bucks”?

Well, Starbucks thinks you are that stupid. Crowgirl at Magpie has the story.

Somehow, this story reminds me of Groucho Marx’s famous letter to Warner Brothers. The issue at hand was that the Marx Brothers were planning a new movie, “A Night in Casablanca,” and Warner Brothers claimed that this title was too close to their well-known film “Casablanca.” Groucho wrote:

Given the news of the week, it occurs to me that Hamas is a major area of agreement between left and right: I don’t know anyone, left or right, who wouldn’t dance with delight if a mouth to hell opened up and permanently sucked every member of Hamas off the face of the Earth. (The big disagreement is that the left feels the same way about the folks running the Israeli government).

The Watch and The Mad Prophet Blog posts some disturbing news: Israeli children are being raised to hate Arabs, and in particular Palestinians. The article (which obviously has an anti-Israel bias, by the way) quotes from Israeli schoolchildren’s letters to Palestinians:

I don’t entirely trust the article’s source, but unfortunately I think the above quotes are actually pretty plausible. (And I don’t doubt that similar quotes could be found going in the other direction, of course.)

On the other hand, there is reason to hope. Check out Unmedia, where it’s “hug a Jew” day.

Via Unmedia - Dean isn’t perfect, but he could be worse. The news from Vermont:

Compare that to the news from Texas:

When he promised to “leave no child behind,” he was being ironic.

Maziltov to Trish Wilson, who just had an article accepted by the feminist magazine Off Our Backs. Way cool!

And while you’re visiting Trish’s blog, be sure to read her entry on archeology news, including news about the looting in Iraq.

Update: Making Light also has an indispensible post regarding the Iraqi National Museum. Via Long Story Short Pier.

The vast majority of films are never seen, never watched. If they still exist at all, they sit in private repositories and rot. Why? Because there’s no profit in preserving these films.

But what happens if film buffs and historians try to preserve those films, restore the prints, and make them available to the public? Well, then, the film buffs and historians risk getting sued - there’s plenty of profit in suing people, after all.

It’s yet another perverse incentive created by the American copyright system. From a letter to Congress written by supporters of the Eric Eldred Act:

The Eric Eldred Act is a way of allowing “abandoned works” to be released to the public domain. It would require copyright holders to pay a low registration fee (say, one dollar) after fifty years to maintain their ownership of the copyright. Otherwise, the work becomes public domain, and the scholars, archivists and preservationists can have at it. It’s a simple, straightforward, and cheap way of addressing a real problem.

(Frankly, I’d go a lot further to reform copyright than just the Eric Eldred Act - but the EEA is a good, moderate start.)

Found via Nathan Newman.

Via Long Story Short Pier, I learned that Paul Muller of Heretical Ideas wants lefty bloggers to post something nice about the GOP, and righty bloggers to post something nice about the Democrats. (I wonder what Greens are supposed to post about?)

Paul’s post suffers from a bit of hypocrisy: by including a lot of criticism of lefty bloggers’ alleged “snide, childish posts and huge amounts of spin,” but not a single negative word about right-wing bloggers, Paul shows that he’s at least as guilty of (in his phrase) “only telling half of the story” as the folks he’s criticizing. Still, it’s a worthwhile challenge, and it’s nice that Paul extended it to right-wing bloggers as well.

Kip answers the question by praising the GOP Governor of Alabama for a new tax plan, which will (if it works as planned) improve things for poor workers in Alabama. What particularly thrilled me, reading this story, is that the Republicans (some of them, anyhow) have been reaching to the Christian tradition of care for the least well-off to justify the new tax plan for the voters. I’ve always thought there was a neighborly relationship between “I tell you the truth, whatever you did not do for one of the least of these, you did not do for me” and the kind of liberalism John Rawls inspires; the failure of Democrats to reach out to this religious tradition has always disappointed me.

Anyhow, I’m not a Democrat; I’m a Green. So instead of focusing on the right-wing mainstream party, it would make sense for me to focus on the right-wing alternative party. What can I praise about libertarians?

(And by the way, I really, really hate libertarians. I mean, not personally - goodness knows, many libertarians are terribly nice folks a pleasure to socialize with - but politically. Check out this cartoon I did, for instance.)

I have to say, I like the libertarian opposition to victimless crimes. Unlike the Democrats, the libertarians seem aware that there is something wrong with “crimes of self-victimization,” like drug use or prostitution. How does throwing a prostitute, or a LSD user, into jail help society? And even if throwing them in jail does benefit society, what right do the rest of us have to benefit by taking away their liberty?

As for the GOP, and in particular the Bush administration… I didn’t agree with the decision to invade Iraq. But having made that decision, they also decided to attempt to minimize Iraqi civilian casualties, and I do admire that.

In the aftershock of 9/11, Bush was careful not to demonize Arabs or Muslims, and spoke out against hate crimes. Again, gotta admire that. (Orcinus discusses this in more detail.)

Finally, saying something nice about the Democrats would be too easy - there are too many progressive Democrats who I basically agree with politically (Oregon’s congressman Peter DeFazio, for example). So I’ll make it harder on myself by finding something to praise Bill Clinton for. And the answer is easy: He put Ruth Ginsburg on the Supreme Court.

One nice thing about the Alas comments is that it lets me discover my readers’ blogs. Which brings us to Half the Sins of Mankind, a terrific, thoughtful blog. Being the single-minded sort that I am, I particularly liked the posts relating to feminist issues (and there’s quite a few of them), but the entire blog is smart and funny. Here’s a sample, from a discussion of Justice Scalia and abortion:

Check it out.

Ulli’s Roy Orbison In Clingfilm Website

(Clingfilm, by the way, is known as siran wrap in the states).

Exploring Uli’s website also turned up a terrific piece of Bush/Chirac slash fiction. And a wonderful Freud/Jung piece, as well. No, really. (Thanks to Sarah for the tip.)

I have no idea how valid or not this study is (the results sound plausible enough to me), but I can’t resist reporting it anyhow. From a press release:

Thanks to Kip for pointing this out to me.

Hopefully, most of my readers are familiar with the sad history of how the US government has cheated - and continues to cheat - American Indians out of billions of dollars of their property. Essentially, the US government has held land “in trust” for American Indians (generally, without the consent of the original owners); the profits from this land (and the oil and other resources the land contains), hundreds of millions every year, is lost in a maze of bad paperwork and bizarre accounting practices, but somehow never results in the Indians getting the money that they’re owed. This has been going on for over a century now.

Over and over - and under both democratic and republican administrations - the Bureau of Indian Affairs, a subsidiary of the Department of the Interior - has dodged every attempt the Indians have made to get their money back. I’ve blogged about this before, here, here (another cartoon), and here.

One strategy the BIA is fond of is “it’s hard to hit a moving target” - they try to confound lawsuits and congressional demands by morphing into a new form every year or so. This week’s cartoon was inspired by a quote from a document the Indian Trust folks (the Indian group suing the BIA) submitted to the court (which I read in LiP magazine):

Well, if that quote isn’t a cartoon begging to be drawn, I don’t know what is.

Well, it cracked me up, anyhow. View it here.

Sara at Diotima, a pro-life conservative who is of two minds about the partial birth abortion (PBA) ban, writes:

1) I think it’s perfectly reasonable of Sara to say that, since federalism is a non-starter in real-life politics, it’s unreasonable to expect pro-lifers to refrain from lobbying for laws they want at a federal level. However, it seems to me that she should then be willing to apply this rational not just to pro-lifers, but to all groups and causes seeking to make laws at the federal level.

In other words, if conservatives want to say “it’s unreasonable to expect people seeking to make important real-world changes to abide by the idea of Federalism,” then I can see their point. But to be intellectually consistent, they must this rule of thumb across the board - including admitting that liberals are justified in ignoring Federalism by the same logic - and I wonder if conservatives are willing to do that.

2) Do “pro-lifer activists actually want to stop abortions?” If so, why support the PBA ban, which (according to the way pro-life activists describe it) won’t actually stop even one abortion; it’ll just change which procedure is used. (Indeed, some pro-lifers actually oppose the PBA ban for this reason).

Either the pro-lifers believe what they say - in which case, they think the PBA ban won’t actually stop abortions, and they must have some goal other than stopping abortions. Or the pro-lifers favor the PBA ban because it will stop abortions - in which case, they must believe what pro-choicers have been saying for years, that the PBA ban is “stealth” legislation written to sneak a fairly broad abortion ban into law, and the pretense of banning only one procedure is a deception.

Okay, to be fair, there are other possibilities besides those two extremes; no doubt reasonable conservatives will seek out the middle ground. Still, there is a contradiction inherant in pro-life support of a ban that will, according to the pro-lifers, not reduce abortions at all.

I wish I had more time for blogging today, because there’s a lot of good stuff out there… check out these links.

Body and Soul on Burma.
And then just keep on reading because, you know, it’s a great blog.

The Head Heeb on Rwanda’s new constitution
This is absolutely fascinating stuff. Here’s a sample paragraph:

Cut on the Bias on the Klu Klux Klan
Suzanna (back on my blogroll because she went a month without using the insulting term “idiotarian”) explains why nice people shouldn’t join the KKK, and more importantly, why the presence of (seemingly) nice KKK members doesn’t make joining the KKK okay.

Stephen Sondheim summed it up pretty well in Into the Woods: “Nice is different than good.”

Making Light on what her kitchen lacks
I especially liked the idea of a single, centralized motor with various plug-ins, rather than separate motors for each motorized appliance.

Trish Wilson on Fetacide Laws
Good, thoughtful post, bouncing partly off of the Findlaw article I linked to last week. Trish’s blog in general has also been a super source of WMD information - this post in particular is great.

Jack Balkin on “Is the Partial Birth Abortion Statute Constitutional?”
Frankly, he says pretty much the same things I spent all last week saying, but he says it better and with more authority because, well, he’s Jack Balkin.

I wish he had discussed the likely impact of O’Connor’s retirement - I’m still planning on posting on that, perhaps later this week.

…Go read this one, over at Pedantry. In the post, Scott criticizes the “Israel cannot negotiate while violence continues” position:

That’s not even the most interesting part of Scott’s post (although it is the easiest to quote out of context). Scott goes on to argue that people who see a moral equivalence between Israel and the Palestinians are committing a category error by conflating “collections” with “collectives.” A collection is any group of people: the Palestinians, the Jews, the comic book collectors, all people whose first name is “Albert,” and so on.

It’s a point well taken. In the past, I’ve tended to refer to “Israel and Palestine.” My thought has been that just as it’s possible to create “facts on the ground,” it’s also possible to create “facts in the semantics”; by speaking as if “Palestine” already exists, I was implicitly denying that Israel has any right to Palestinian territory. However, Scott’s post reminds me that that semantic strategy may just muddy the discussion, by making semantic equivalences where they don’t exist in real life.

Anyhow, go read Scott’s post.

Roy at Man on the Street sent me a link to a nifty email protection javascript - “email protector.” It allows me to put clickable links to my and Bean’s email addresses that y’all can use to send us email, but which the email-harvesting programs spammers use can’t read.

Anyhow, it’s very easy to use, and doesn’t require having any understanding of javascript. And having a clickable link is far more convenient for readers than my previous solution, which was to write out “barry - at - attbi - dot - com” and require folks sending me email to translate. So thanks, Roy.

Thanks as well to the public-spirited Jim, who created the program and made it available for free. Check out Jim’s blog Rubidum, which Jim promises contains “absolutely no scientifically valid information on the element rubidium.”

Just a post to send good wishes to MB at the newly-departed but already-missed Wampum. MB is one of Blogtopia’s most talented; she writes with clarity about what matters, and that’s the best thing I could say about any blog.

* * *

I’d like that to be all I write in this post, but alas, that’s not the case.

I’ve always hesitated to comment on inter-blog disputes; generally, the more blogs slag each other, the worse off everyone is for it. I think I do more good by keeping my nose out of other people’s business.

In general.

However, as Wampum points out, that attitude taken too far becomes burying one’s head in the sand.

Natasha Watch, created by Mac Diva, is a terrible idea for a blog; its creation cannot help but spread malice and mud.

When Mac Diva writes “Let’s just say that M.B.’s credibility is just as tarnished as Natasha’s,” I can only agree - which is to say, both M.B. and Natasha are highly credible in my book. Their blogs are valuable reading, and I haven’t seen any reason to doubt their integrity. For what it’s worth, insofar as people I’ve never met can, they’ve got my trust.

I’m really not comfortable blogging about this in the open. I mention this in public because Natasha and MB both deserve to be defended in public; they’ve earned that with the quality of their work.