Category Archives: Uncategorized

Maus

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Maus is number 1 seller on Amazon right now

I discovered the book ”Maus” just a couple of years ago when I started getting re-interested in comics and drawing. The kerfuffle over banning it in the Tennessee school has turned it into the number one best-seller on Amazon.
 
According to Art Spiegelman, the author, one of the book‘s parts deemed objectionable was the frame showing his mother’s death by suicide after she survived Auschwitz. I’ve seen it. I couldn’t even remember it until i saw it again. I’d forgotten all about it. It is a black and white cartoon line drawing, one frame of several on that page. It is about as non-graphic as you could depict a subject like that without depicting it at all.
 
All I can say to the parents worked up over this book is, if you’ve banned it but you haven’t looked at your kid’s TikTok feed lately, you are just being foolish. Auschwitz IS offensive and that’s the point. It still stands for a reason – so we never forget. The book Maus was written for the same reason and it comes from someone who experienced it. How rare is it to hear a voice like that today? It’s getting exceedingly rare.
 
World War II is ancient history to most people now. How many people have even met someone who witnessed the death camps? I have. I’ll never forget the day my grandfather talked about the human bodies piled high like stacks of firewood. ‘“I saw that with my own eyes,” he said. And he never talked about it again.
 
I’m happy that Maus is receiving new and widespread interest. Maybe it’s banning wasn’t such a bad thing after all.

Don’t Let Powerpoint Take Over Your Screen

online teaching, teaching, Uncategorized

When you are making a Powerpoint presentation over a Zoom session, you are working with two applications that think they are the center of your computing universe. That makes it very difficult to know what is going on in your Zoom room if you are showing a Powerpoint that has taken over your screen.

Don’t do that! You don’t have to operate Powerpoint in “Full Screen” mode, make it into a window so you can see other things too!

To display PowerPoint presentations in a window and not full screen just do the following:

  • Select “Set up Slide Show” on the “Slide Show” tab
  • Select the radio button for “Browsed by an individual (window)”
  • Start your PowerPoint show

That’s it! Now you can see what’s going on in Zoom while you are presenting a PowerPoint.

How Pope JPII ended communism in Poland

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It was going on while I was in high school and after that, I was in the Navy. After a crackdown by the communist regime in Poland, the people had had enough. At the time, I wasn’t paying too much attention to world events. Sure, I had a good social studies teacher     who taught a required course called International Relations, but our main emphasis was on Russia and China. We learned enough in that class to know that people behind the iron curtain were not doing well. And that America was something to be proud of.

I had heard about the Solidarity movement in Poland some on the news, but I did not realize the significance of Pope John Paul in helping with toppling communism in Poland and setting in motion world events that ultimately would see the end of the Soviet Union.

Here is a really interesting read about it: https://reason.com/2021/11/20/the-pope-who-helped-bring-down-communism/

Humility – A Hidden Source of Strength

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Humility is the virtue which is perhaps more easily misunderstood and underappreciated than any other. Our culture values personal confidence, self-belief and resolution, and rightly so. And we are acutely aware of the psychological dangers of low-self-esteem, with which so many people struggle today, especially the young. Yet true humility is not in opposition to a positive attitude and healthy self-confidence. For Christian humility consists of nothing other than honest self-knowledge, a recognition of who and what one is in relation to God, to the world, and to one’s fellow human beings.

Read more…

Bob Moran Cartoon Reblog

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From Bob Moran ❤️:
“Disturbingly, out of all my artworks, this is the one most suppressed by Twitter. They really hate it. Likes and retweets are regularly removed. It can’t seem to get over 10,000 likes – even though it’s had more than 1.5 million impressions. The fact that they clearly view it as dangerous disturbs me every day. But it also gives me hope. It reminds us that we have something they not only lack, but which they fear. Genuine, meaningful love. Something worth fighting for. Right to the very end.”
“This black and white ink drawing was done some time in 2017 I think. I just doodled it on a postcard to raise money for an epilepsy charity. Someone, somewhere owns the original. I just liked the idea of this elderly couple. Perhaps this is where they first met. Perhaps it’s where he asked her to marry him. That might be their house down in the valley, where they’ve raised a family. At the time, I was living in a town in Hampshire but I was about to move back to the Somerset countryside where I grew up. I was probably thinking about returning home and staying there. I nearly put their intials carved into the tree trunk but decided it would be a bit much. You can imagine them on the other side.
When all of this nonsense reached a certain point: When stories were coming out of married couples being kept apart, parents being forced to die without their children by their side, grandparents kept from their grandchildren for months on end as the children were told they might kill them if they saw them – I just couldn’t believe that people were agreeing to it. This image came back to me and I decided to recreate it in colour. I thought it conveyed the power and significance of life-long love quite well. But also, had a sense of freedom and embracing life with all it could throw at us.
Finally, I thought perhaps the tree could remind people of the fleeting nature of our lives. It’s probably been there since before these two were born. And it will be there after they’ve gone. Our lives are short and we have to live them. Not just survive and exist. This, of course, was when I was still very much in ‘optimistic cuddly Bob’ mode. I still felt that it could all be stopped if enough people remembered some vital truths about the human experience.
Once it was finished I tweeted it and wrote, ‘Never surrender your right to be with the people you love.’ I hesitated because I felt that it was a statement of the obvious. But that was the whole point. People had forgotten the obvious. I realised that this had, in the space of a few months, gone from being a universal moral truth to a highly controversial statement. It certainly struck a chord with people. It’s the most popular image I have ever produced.
As I expected, it angered a lot of idiots on the other side. “Unless being with the people you love might kill them.” They replied, clearly feeling like they had absolutely destroyed me. This total abandoning of logic and ethics really astonished me. I realised that these people could not see the difference between deciding, as a family, not to see each other because you are genuinely scared of a novel cold virus, and being ordered to stay apart by the government. What’s more, they clearly believed that this was the first time in human history when seeing your loved ones put them at some risk of a potentially fatal viral infection. What world did they think they had been living in?
My message was deliberately absolutist and unconditional because that is how I have felt about all of this from the beginning. No circumstances, no level of threat, no risk of death can ever justify somebody in authority banning families from being with each other. Once we cross that line, all sorts of unethical misery ensues. As it has. The Christian sacrament of marriage states, “Those whom God hath joined together, let no man put asunder!” – there is no small print that reads, “Unless there’s a nasty bug going round, in which case forget it.”
Once I could see the impact of my words combined with the image, I added the words to the original artwork (now sold). I received many lovely messages from people all over the world, who told me this piece had given them hope. Or brought them back from the brink of despair. Some people even said it had convinced them to see their loved ones again. Or to never stop seeing them again. I still find it comforting, even now. I think it has a power bestowed on it from somewhere outside of myself. Either by the circumstances in which it was created or by something beyond comprehension.”