Los Angeles Times, I salute you for your forward thinking.

‘L.A. Times’ Drops Daily ‘Garfield’ as the Comic Is Blasted and Praised
By Dave Astor | Published: January 05, 2005 12:50 PM ET

NEW YORK The Los Angeles Times dropped the daily version of “Garfield,” the most widely distributed comic in syndication.

“Garfield” has received mixed reviews in recent years, but the Times is one of the few papers to ever dare pull it. Reader reaction? “We are getting complaints,” said Jennifer James, a Times editorial aide, but she declined to reveal how many.

The Times dropped the daily “Garfield” effective two days ago — while keeping the Sunday “Garfield” — to make room for “Brevity,” a new comic by Guy Endore-Kaiser and Rodd Perry of United Media (E&P Online, Dec. 9).

“We’re always trying to get some new talent in the comics pages,” said James, who did not make the “Garfield” decision.

Gene Weingarten, a humor columnist for The Washington Post and Washington Post Writers Group, praised the Times decision during his weekly washingtonpost.com chat yesterday. He said the paper displayed “the kind of cojones missing in too many places” and described “Garfield” as “a strip produced by a committee, devoid of originality, devoid of guts, a strip cynically DESIGNED to be inoffensive and bad, on the theory that public tastes are insipid. [emphasis mine] Now we need others to follow suit. Like the Post.”

When asked for a response to Weingarten’s comments and the Times action, Universal Press Syndicate Director of Communications Kathie Kerr said today: “Our understanding is that ‘Garfield’ ran in a children’s section of the Los Angeles Times. When a feature is dropped on pages which are predominantly read by children, those young readers are less likely to complain or demand its return.”

She added that Jim Davis is “hands on” with his comic, and concluded: “‘Garfield’ is the most widely syndicated comic strip in the world, and that speaks volumes to its popularity. More than 2,700 newspapers worldwide publish it, and, in the last year, more than 50 newspaper clients were added. It’s an easy-to-get laugh a day and that endears it to millions of children and adults worldwide.”

I can remember when Garfield was actually funny. That was for a couple of weeks, back during the fucking Reagan administration. I can understand wanting to milk a ca$h cow dry, but I mean, jesus christ already. How many times can you do a variation on the ‘fat lazy Monday-hatin’ lasagna-lovin’ cat oversleeps’ four-panel strip? Apparently, several thousand times.

If I had limitless sums of monies at my disposal, I would bestow a grant to some programmers, so that they could create a programme that would take every single Garfield strip and variant thereof (i.e, calendar installments, greeting cards, etc) made, and see exactly how many times Jim Davis has done the same three or four ‘jokes’ over & over. Then, I would give another grant to a group of scientists, so they can run a battery of tests to see how much more raw Banality has entered the Universe since Garfield’s inception. Finally, upon receiving and analysing the results from both groups, I would write another sizeable cheque, and give it to some bloodthirsty contract killers, and immediately dispatch them to Jim Davis Estates.

Good christ. For that matter, why is Bil ‘The Family Circus’ Keane still alive? Does no-one else see that as being a problem??

My brakes are going tits up! Also, today I was fired!

I’m going to bed, before anything else fucked-up happens. Wake me up when my classes start next Wednesday

A couple of days ago, I was wasting time on das InfoBahn doing vanity searches for both my name & Sidore’s name, and one of the Sidore-related links was a site called mangoat.net, that had a mini-review of ‘Kitten with a Whip!’, under the title ‘real doll creepyness (sic)’. Here’s the article in its entirety:

01/28/2004 Entry: “real doll creepyness”

Great mother of Snuh?, I think I finally found the worst site on the internet.

I.. I just don’t know what to say. Be careful clicking that at work.

/shudder

Sure, sometimes bad press is better than no press at all — one of the two comments for his post read ‘Woah…she’s hot!’ — but I had to say something. Hence, fueled by a mix of ire & curiosity, I wrote goatman back..

To: Mike Kremkau (mangoat@gmail.com)
Subj: RE.your 28 Jan entry “real doll creepyness”

Hi there, Mangoat!

Davecat here, maintainer of the website ‘Kitten with a Whip!’, and boyfriend to Sidore Kuroneko, the Goth RealDoll. I was doing an MSN Search on ‘KWAW!’ and stumbled across your witty posting. Suffice to say, being called the ‘worst site on the internet’ is a bold statement. What about it did you find bad? Was it the layout? Or was it the content? You don’t really go into specifics, so I’m at a loss, here. Care to explain? We’d enjoy hearing from you..

Cheers,
Davecat

About two days later, the erudite philosopher goatfucker sent his riposte:

To: lamia_doll [at] hotmail [dot] com
Subj: Re: RE.your 28 Jan entry “real doll creepyness”

Dude, you have a site dedicated to the life and personality of a fuckable latex sculpture of a woman. Plus, you really need to drop the tables, or at least make the borders invisible. Also, choose a better font and text color because my wife can’t read the site at all.

So I fired back with this missive that same evening:

To: mangoat@gmail.com
Subj: I guess we can’t all be as clever as Mangoat

Okay, so let me guess:
1) You don’t like fiction, or the development of fictional characters.
2) You can’t appreciate beauty, whether it’s artificial or not.
3) Sex without emotional baggage doesn’t really appeal to you.
4) The simple concept of a person spending their time to create a website around a subject that they enjoy, one which does no harm to anyone, makes you cringe.

As for your table complaints; no, I won’t be dropping those, unless you can come up with a better solution for me. And I happen to like dark colours such as black, dark blue & purple, so the colours are pretty much staying. If they’re too dark for you, I would suggest turning the brightness up on your monitor. Or just do what I do on sites that I think are too dark – highlight the text.
As far as the font for ‘KWAW!’, it should be Arial; if you’re not seeing it in that, check your browser settings. I would’ve used Futura T Light, but not everyone has that installed, and I refuse to use serif-based fonts. In short, if you don’t like ‘Kitten with a Whip!’, don’t visit it. I’m sure you can find other sites to mock.

Shi-chan & I say thanx for your input! We will give your comments the attention that they deserve.

Cheers,
D. & S.

And so far, I’ve not heard anything else from Goatfucker Towers. A tragedy. 😐

Ultimately, I could not physically care less if a person thinks Dolls are creepy, or if they think I’m a freak for owning one. It’s not as if I’m going to leap out of my seat and sell Shi-chan right there and then, just cos I don’t fit into some fuckwit’s concept of ‘normalcy’. Personally, I tend to think a lot of anti-Doll comments (made by males, anyway) are done so out of jealousy. And normally, I’m not a vengeful person — I may make the odd threat occasionally, but very rarely do I follow thru with them. Once in a while though, it’s extraordinarily satisfying to hit back, especially if you know you’re in the right

Four more years of a hillbilly despot. That’s fucking fantastic.

I have to say that at this point, I’ve completely lost faith in the general American populace. Obviously I’m not the only one disappointed, but I was hoping against hope that enough voters, even republicans, would recognise what a mindless rolling twat Dubya is. Heh, I really should’ve lowered my expectations.

O well. I suppose there’s nothing left to do now but hope Dubya doesn’t suddenly instate a retroactive draft, or alienate any more allied countries, or sodomise the economy even further, or get us all nuked into oblivion, or etc etc

[10.31.PM] aneamo: LOL, funny. Oh you see this? http://www.animenewsnetwork.com/
[10.32.PM] aneamo: Oh, 3rd story down, Zeta delayed again.
[10.33.PM] Davecat: THOSE MOTHERFUCKERS HAVE DELAYED ZETA AGAIN??!! i SWEAR TO ALMIGHTY CHRIST, IF THEY DON’T SHIP THAT SHIT TO MY FUCKING HOUSE BEFORE THE END OV 2004, I WILL SKULLFUCK EVERYONE AT BANDAI AMERICA.
[10.33.PM] aneamo: O_O LOL
[10.33.PM] Davecat: GODDAMN IT ALREADY.
[10.33.PM] aneamo: Yeah, it’s crazy, more delays.
[10.34.PM] Davecat: I mean, wtf?? They’d better be adding more extras, to justify this new new new new delay. The damn thing’s done! It’s ready to go! FUCK ALREADY!
[10.35.PM] Davecat: It’s bad enough that we’re probably not getting the Zeta PS2 game this year (if ever), and now this??
[10.35.PM] aneamo: There was some kind of flood at the warehouse. http://www.animenewsnetwork.com/bbs/phpBB2/viewtopic.php?t=10484
[10.36.PM] Davecat: A FLOOD at the fucking WAREHOUSE.
*seething furiously*
[10.36.PM] aneamo: Nuts.
[10.36.PM] Davecat: FUCK.

Well, I’m off to watch Mezzo! Cheer!

Just had an idea for an article; in the style ov the editorials on The Onion, it would be called, ‘I Should Stop Wasting So Much Time Pursuing Older Women Who Have No Interest In Me, And Start Pursuing Younger Women Who Have No Interest In Me’. Heh.

Just so you know, I will be working on the rest ov ‘I am not making this up‘, but as I have to do a bit ov cross-checking — I have to scan thru Emails & ICQ logs and whatnot, cos believe me, my time with that hateful individual was one big messy fucking blur — that’s kinda on hold, cos at this moment, I’m literally racing against the clock to get into courses for this Fall, and describing what I have to do for that is far too involved for me to get into right now. I’m remaining hopeful, but I’m sure I know what the outcome will be. :-\ But I’ll be getting onto the rest ov that saga soon, as I’m sure that’s the only thing that’s drawn a lot ov people to this blog in the first place..

In the meantime, let me throw some links at you, in lieu ov actually writing something. Here’s the Gynoid cutie known as Actroid, from Kokoro co., Ltd ov Japan: Link one, her movie at Link two, more at Link three, which features additional movies, and a direct link to another movie at Link four