10 for 10 (5th Entry): Love Those Yorkies!

Greetings to our blog readers in Belgium, Canada, and Japan......

Tonight, we are desperately trying to catch up on our 10 for 10 series, and we now know you perhaps cartoonist Bill Griffith must feel if he has gotten behind on drawing his comic strip "Zippy the Pinhead." But, we imagine he is not a notorious procrastinator.

We are featuring an image of Yorkshire terrier, also known as yorkies.

You may not find a yorkie at your community animal shelter here in America, but you may just find a friend for life, so here are two animal local shelters we will provide links for:

https://www.coastalhumanesociety.org/ (Animal shelter in Brunswick, Maine)

http://www.hshponline.org/ (Animal shelter in Hays, Kansas)

Comic Strip Survey: For the First Time, We Check Out the Baltimore Sun

Greetings to our blog readers in Hong Kong, Turkey, and Germany........

This week for the first time in the eight-year history of this blog, we look at Sunday comic strips from "The Baltimore Sun." We were hoping to see "Zippy the Pinhead," and as it turns out, yesterday Bill Griffith's comic strip was truly a piece of art. Today, he made vintage fun of Donald Trump; even Bao Bao, the panda at the National Zoo in Washington, D.C., isn't such an easy target.

Omigosh, we just made a major faux paux as it is considered rude to mention Washington, D.C., when one is talking about Baltimore. Fortunately, when I briefly met John Waters, a cult film director from Charm City, in 2002, I did not make this mistake. But, I only talked to him for about eight seconds, which is how long I spent talking to Willie Nelson backstage at a Farm Aid concert  around that same time.

"The Baltimore Sun" features several comic strips which we don't see in the other newspapers we survey, like "The Washington Post" (whoops again!), including "Mother Goose and Grimm," "The Middletons," and "One Big Happy." All three of those strips made our big list.

First place goes to "Foxtrot," which features the family going out for a Sunday picnic at a state park in a place like The Humpback Bridge State Park in Covington, Va., and they encounters all sorts of natural elements likes ticks (top image), poison ivy, and snakes. Of course, in Florida, they would also have to worry about alligators.

Third place goes to "Speed Bump," in which a judge (center image) tweets his verdict, somehow we can't imagine Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas doing such a thing (ahhh, that's the third D.C. reference).

And, in sixth place, we have "Mother Goose and Grimm," which ironically has a nursery rhyme themed strip (given its title) as Humpty Dumpty falls off his great wall. We actually didn't get the Obamacare gag (and, that makes four), but we liked the strip enough as it is.

Now, let's give this list which you can perhaps read on the Metro after you've come back from seeing that new Woody Allen movie at the Landmark E-Street Cinema...........now, we are up to five!:

1) Foxtrot

2) Pearls Before Swine

3) Speed Bump

4) Dilbert

5) Get Fuzzy

6) Mother Goose and Grimm

7) The Middletons

8) One Big Happy

9) Garfield

10) Zits

http://www.baltimoresun.com/

http://baltimore.org/

http://www.visitmaryland.org/

http://www.gocomics.com/foxtrot

Top Ten Comic Strips from Comics Kingdom: We Like Bizarro

 

 

 

Greetings to our blog readers in Panama, Denmark, and Singapore.

 

Happy 72nd birthday to Mick Jagger of The Rolling Stones.

 

This week, we take a look at our ten favorite Sunday comic strips from the Kings Comics Distributor, which features strips as diverse as "Barney Google and Snuffy Smith" by John Rose of Harrisonburg, Va., and "Zippy the Pinhead" by Bill Griffith, from Hartford, Conn., actually we are not really sure where the cult cartoonist lives, but last we heard it was somewhere in the Nutmeg State.

 

The images are of 1) The original "King Kong" (1933) with the late Fay Wray is an image we are using for "Bizarro," which showed King Kong's fist and Fay Wray (the barefoot woman in his hand has also been played by Jessica Lange and Naomi Watts) going through the Empire State Building; 2) Tony Hawk, the skateboarding legend now in his mid-40s, is used for "Bleeker the Rechargeable Dog" which showed the boy in the strip getting carried with skateboarding tricks; and 3) a chemistry lab is used for "The Brilliant Mind of Edison Lee."

 

Those three comic strips are three of our top favorites from Kings Comics, but we also  liked "Rhymes with Orange," which featured a man on a couch.

 

Today, we will also mark which comic strips are in "The Washington Post" (Sunday edition) with a WP, and "The Denver Post" (also Sunday edition) with a DP as well as the "Mrytle Beach Sun" in Myrtle Beach, SC, with a MBS.

 

1. Bizarro

 

2. Dustin WP; MBS

 

3. Bleeker the Rechargeable Dog

 

4. The Brilliant Mind of Edison Lee

 

5. Rhymes with Orange WP; DP

 

6. Take It from the Tinkersons

 

7. Pardon My Planet

 

8. Retail

 

9. Zippy the Pinhead

 

10. Hagar the Horrible WP, MBS

 

 

http://www.washingtonpost.com/entertainment/comics/

 

http://www.denverpost.com/comics

 

 

Top Ten Comics from the Sunday Roanoke Times: Jump Start Gets the Bronze

Greetings to our blog readers in France, Russia, and Bulgaria......

Today, we bring you the last installment in our favorite Sunday comic strips of the week series.

This was a week when Bill Griffith used his comic strip "Zippy the Pinhead" (not in "The Roanoke Times") to make fun of another comic strip "Funky Winkerbean" (which is in "The Roanoke Times"). Both strips share the same distributor Kings Features.

Our favorite comic strip from "The Roanoke Times" was "Speed Bump" http://www.gocomics/speedbump which featured several ducklings taking selfies of each other. Second place goes to "Get Fuzzy" in which a cat and a dog fight over a baby rattler, which one can presumably find at a Toys R Us http://www.gocomics.com/getfuzzy ............. Lastly, we went with "Jump Start" for third place which revolved around an African-American and a white mother with children almost colliding in the produce aisle of a grocery store http://www.gocomics.com/jumpstart

Here is the top ten:

1. Speed Bump

2. Get Fuzzy

3. Jump Start

4. Non Sequitur

5. Garfield

6. Agnes

7. Pearls Before Swine

8. Dilbert

9. Doonesbury

10. Zits

http://www.roanoke.com

http://www.washingtonpost.com/comics

For a look at our favorite comic strips in the "Martinsville Bulletin" go to our sister blog at http://www.politicscultureandotherwastesoft.blogspot.com

Last Ten Movies We'Ve Seen: Catching Up with 2014

Greetings to our faithful blog readers in Afghanistan (well, maybe), The Bahamas and Poland.

Here are the last ten films we've seen (well, actually as of last week). We are still trying to catch up on the best films of 2014, some of which are listed in the IMDB as 2013 films.....yes, we are confused as well!

1) Night Moves (top image, film is about eco-terrorism.) 2013. Dir: Kelly Reichhardt

2) Palo Alto (center image, Palo Alto is where Stanford U is located). 2013. Gia Coppola.

3) Inherent Vice. 2014. Paul Thomas Anderson.

4) Post Mortem. Chile. 2010. Pablo Lorrain

5) Tabu. Portugal. 2012. Miguel Gomes

6) Drug War. Hong Kong. Johnnie To.

7) And, Now a Word from Our Sponsor. (bottom image, Ipana, originally an American toothpaste now only found in Turkey!)* 2013. Zack Bernbaum. (w/Parker Posey)

8) Museum Hours. 2012. Austria. Jem Cohen.

9) Lfe of Pi. 2012. Ang Lee.

10) Under the Skin. 2013. Jonathan Glazer (w/ Scarlett Johansson)

#- We learned that from Bill Griffith's comic strip "Zippy the Pinhead"


http://www.imdb.com

http://www.netflix.com

Sunday Funnies- A Quote from Zippy the Pinhead

Since we 'got into trouble' for hotlinking an image of the Bill Griffith comic strip "Zippy the Pinhead," we thought we'd go with this image of The Coneheads, characters that first appeared on "Saturday Night Live" in the 1970s. Some believe The Coneheads was influenced by the cult comic strip, which was also mentioned in an episode of "Seinfeld."

We are taking this quip from the relatively-new collection "Lost and Found," which not only features Zippy the Pinhead, but many tales involving Griffith's other signature character Mister Toad. Parents should perhaps be warned that some pieces in the book from Griffith's early years of cartooning originally appeared in comic strip characters. Gosh, I just sounded like Nancy Reagan there...and, I'm not a Republican!

Here is the quote:

"Mr. Ed is the illegitimate offspring of Captain Kangaroo and Donna Reed." 

http://www.zippythepinhead.com

Special Quote of the Day- Keith Knight

Normally, we post the Quote of the Week segment on Mondays (or if I'm busy as hell, on Tuesdays). But my Facebook friend Keith Knight, 43, an extraordinary talent who is the cartoonist behind the new, hip comic strip "The Knight Life," and the cutting edge political cartoon series "The K-Chronicles" as well as a musician in a hip-hop band called The Marginal Prophets, volunteered this quip for Black History Month which I simply loved too much. So hence I am posting it now today!:

"Talk to any black person 60 or older for 10 minutes and you'll learn more about Black History than you ever learned in school."

SIDEBAR: I recently decided to follow the comic strip character Zippy the Pinhead, created by Bill Griffith, on Twitter. He sent me a message which said: "I see we are both mutual friends of Paris Hilton." While I don't know the rich media starlet personally, I also follow her on Twitter as well! I'm not sure Zippy (who I really think is Griffith) is aware of this!

SIDEBAR TWO: The Brady Network, one of the leading gun control lobbies in the country, has raised an issue with the Starbucks coffee chain, a favorite hangout for Ms. Hilton, over the fact that they apparently allow folks who want a lattee to walk into their establishments with loaded guns! Perhaps, some of these people are police officers, which I could understand, but I certainly see the Brady Network's concerns though I have not read a newspaper story detailing both sides of the issue. The Brady Networks contends that this has an intimidating effect on customers, and I can imagine that would certainly be true in rural Georgia (persuming they have Starbucks stores in rural Georgia).
My favorite Starbucks happens to be in Front Royal, Va., with the Starbucks in High Point, NC, (well there are more than one of them) being a close second. I'm not exactly sure why though........?!