Top Ten Sunday Comic Strips from the "Roanoke Times:" Yeah, No Room for Hi and Lois

Greetings to our blog readers in Tunisia, Germany and Slovakia...........

Today, we are blogging while listening to "The Best of Bread," a compilation of hits from the '70s soft rock band Bread fronted by David Gates, who is alas like the last or next to last guy from the band who is still alive. And, we are also one hour away from the series finale of "Mad Men," which might possibly end with a song from Bread.

Here are our top ten comic strips, which include an independent business owner who wants to protest the government ("Pearls Before Swine") which reminded us of the comic book guy from "The Simpsons," a dragon preparing to snack on a knight ("Speed Bump") and Garfield coming in second to Odie at a talent show ("Garfield"), perhaps next time the 37-year-old cat should take up juggling or tap dancing:

1. Speed Bump

2. Pearls Before Swine

3. Garfield

4. Doonesbury

5. Get Fuzzy

6. Non-Sequitur

7. Agnes

8. Dilbert

9. Mutts

10. Jump Start

http://www.roanoke.com

http://www.gocomics.com/speedbump

http://www.gocomics.com/getfuzzy

http://www.gocomics.com/Agnes

Yes, Prime Minister_ Turkey's PM Says Twitter to Blame

The great Mel Brooks, who is thankfully alive and well, said the best way to make fun of your enemies is to make fun of them. As residents of Istanbul continued massive protests against Turkish Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan's plans to build a shopping mall on the grounds of Gezi Park, we are going to that here as Erdogan hides away in Tunisia, his next stop on his North African foreign affairs trip.

It seems from speaking with my fellow Turkish-Americans that we might actually dislike this guy as much as Cuban-Americans despise Fidel Castro, but we are not all right-wing fanatics.

In fact, my fellow liberal Turkish-American Cenk Uygur skewered Erdogan quite well last night on his Current-TV talk show, by saying that the man thinks he can always get his way because he has been power now for just over a full decade, but the Marmara Sea's colors seem to be changing.

Here is Erdogan's actual statement about the 'causes' of the protests: "There is a problem called Twitter right now and you can find every kind of lie there," he said. "The thing that is called social media is the biggest trouble for society right now."

http://www.current.com

http://www.twitter.com

Tweets from Saturday Night_ Middle East Madness

The finger-pointing from Republican presidential team Mitt Romney and Paul Ryan, or DynoMutt and Blue Falcon as we call him here in the office towards the Barack Obama administration for catastrophic riots which started in Egypt on Tues., the 11th anniversary of Sept. 11th, and then fostered into a even more horrifying frenzy in Libya, where American Ambassador Chris Stevens was killed along with three other American diplomats and ten Libyans who were providing security to the embassy in Benghazi, which is not actually Libya's capital.

Today, we also learned that a mosque in Harrisonburg, Va., a city that is home to James Madison University, which is a two-hour drive from both Washington, DC, (to the north) and my hometown of Roanoke, Va. (to the south), was vandalized with the words: "This is America." Harrisonburg is also the city where a FBI agent arbitrarily raided the home of a man of Arab heritage during this country's Sept. 11th period.

All of these events are very disturbing to those of us who are Americans of Middle Eastern heritage, as it reminds us of the quote from the late great Japanese film director Akira Kurosawa: "In an insane world, only the mad are sane."

Some of the other tweets of the night dealt with the presidential election here in America.

Here are some tweets from the 20:00 or 8:00 p.m. hour, New York time, this evening:

1) @Wolf Blitzer (CNN host Wolf Blitzer): "So sad to hear US evacuates families and non-emergency personnel from Tunis. I was there last year when things were encouraging."

2) @BillMaher (Outspoken liberal comedian Bill Maher): "These middle east protestors r different these days- taking pics of themselves throwing rocks and yelling: 'hashtag down with America."

3) @NPRInskeep (Steve Inskeep): "Top religious authority lists reasons why murder of US ambassador was against Islam."

4) @TheMuslimGuy (Arsalan Iftikhar): "TV ALERT: I will be on 'CNN Sunday Morning' tomorrow @ 8:30 a.m. EST on anti-Islam movie and protests around the world...Fun Stuff, I know...Sigh."

5) @Terry-McAuliffe (former Democratic strategist Terry McAuliffe): "Met some llamas for Obama at the Albermale Dems BBQ."

6) @Coffeepartyusa (Coffee Party): "The man who made the anti-Muslim video has a foreign-sounding name. Let's hire Trump and Kobach to declare he's not American."

7) @WSOC-TV (WSOC is Charlotte, NC's ABC affiliate): "Mitt Romney's son goes door to door for his dad in Charlotte."