Month: January 2005

click for comic
This cartoon is supposed to be a parody of those wignut pharmacists who pop up in the news every couple of months by refusing to fill prescriptions for birth control. I got kind of caught up with trying to make logical arguments both for and against nihilism, so this week’s strip comes off as more pedantic than usual, which many scientists believed to be impossible. Hopefully my first use of the word “bullshit” in a comic takes some of the salty pang of pretentiousness out of this cartoon.

I already talked about why those who believe birth control is wrong are morons. Here’s a brief synopsis of that long-winded post:

A fertilized egg is not a person. At some point in the future, and if several favorable variables and conditions are met, it becomes a viable fetus. Something that may become something else in the future is not the same as what it might become, since there are many different possible outcomes for a fertilized egg. And if you’re willing to believe all fertilized eggs are people, which doesn’t make sense, your brain has to do all sorts of crazy shit to justify that nonsense, like believe in angels.

Thankfully, I live in that increasingly marginalized part of the country where pharmacists are required to have a certain level of common sense. However, there is an inverse correlation between Bible nuts and pretentious philosophy majors, and the northeast is clogged with them.

I am a cynical atheist who believes that man is more capable of evil than good, and even I realize Nihilism is bullshit. It’s a juvenile reaction to the notion that the universe is meaningless. Of course it’s meaningless, it’s 99.9999% empty space interspersed with a couple of rocks, one of which we know to be inhabited by a bunch of douchebags.

Just because the universe is meaningless, doesn’t mean existence is. Not to get all Tony Robbins on you, but existence is what you make of it. It’s all in your head, and has as much meaning as you apply to it. While people are certainly free to be Nihilists, that doesn’t prevent the rest of us from perceiving them as gigantic assholes.

click for comic
Just letting those of you who only read the blog know there’s a new cartoon this week. I don’t have the time to write much about it.

All I’ll say is that I don’t think homosexuals emit sinful particles. If anything, they emit a contagious exuberance for life. I’m merely pointing out that ideology factories like Bob Jones University aren’t real institutes of higher learning.

Next week I take off my nerd cap and put on a pretentious asshole beret.

There’s no cartoon today, but I have posted something for you to look at on the current strip page. I’ll spoil the surprise and tell you that it’s random cartoons I drew when I was 12 or 13 years old. Oddly enough, the quality of the drawing is actually better than what I was doing in the early days of BFW.

Next week’s cartoon is most likely the nerdiest thing I’ve done in 2005. Make sure you familiarize yourself with string theory before next Friday.

click for comic
I mentioned this comic last week and how I would’ve bumped it up in the queue if I made the Free Times deadline. It’s been less than two weeks since the tsunamis and this cartoon seems awfully dated.

It’s a reaction to the horrible coverage the local Boston news gave to the disaster in the first 48 hours. New England was having a minor snow storm the day of the tsunami (six inches of snow tops) and all the local news broadcasts had that snow storm as the lede. They had all the usual broadcast sensationalism, featuring several segments with reporters standing outside to prove that it was snowing, and man-on-the-street interviews with people who were suffering the unbearable tragedy of being delayed at Logan airport. The tsunami was only mentioned in passing in the “world news” segments.

Of course, this was due in large part to the magnitude of the disaster not being known at the time. But the local TV news is always shitty, not just during a disaster. Even as the reports started coming in, the local news coverage was embarrassingly lame, focusing on families from New England who just missed the storm or the plight of that fucking supermodel, as if she was somehow more important than 150,000+ ugly people. As an ugly person myself, I’d like to believe that’s not true.

In retrospect, I wouldn’t have done this cartoon. Instead, I would’ve ragged on the local news in a more light-hearted manner, without using the casual mention of the tsunami victims to illustrate their callousness.

Matt of Idiot Box did a cartoon (go to this page after Jan 10) dealing with the same issue this week. And he was much more effective at making his point.