Cover of National Velvet with Liz Taylor

Why did she die at a fairly young age, 79? I looked it up in several sources, and it was congestive heart failure. That can slow you down. As I understand it, your heart becomes this squishy thing, not like a strong muscle, so your blood kind of swishes around, instead of squirting properly all over. Your legs are what the medical profession calls a “second heart.” That is, when you walk, they push the blood back up to your heart that gravity has let fall down to your feet. So, it’s healthy to walk. And not so healthy that she was in a wheelchair the last few years.

Turns out I’ve hardly seen any of her movies. Mostly, I admire her for being outspoken, and for appearing in public without much (any?) plastic surgery. You have no idea how hard it is for older women in Hollywood. Hell, even a good number of the girls on The Bachelor have had things done, even at 25! (although it’s mostly boob jobs.)

My Elizabeth Taylor filmography:

Jane Eyre – I think I saw it. I read the book, great girls book.

National Velvet - Yes, read the book (all the horse books I could find) and saw the movie. There may have been some tears.

Little Women – probably. I saw one version, and liked it a lot. Who was she, Jo? And I read the book several times.

Image via Wikipedia - Elizabeth Taylor taking off her shoe

Ivanhoe – I think I had to see it in high school. But I might be getting it mixed up with the Ivanhoe Reservoir I see every day.

Cleopatra – Yes. I remember thinking she didn’t look that beautiful to me. She and Richard B. had some chemistry, though.

Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf? – I hate this play. It was originally a play, then a movie. A married couple battle it out, and they’re not as clever as they think they are, but they sure are mean. It makes you squirm. If you saw the Emmy- nominated episode of The Office where Michael and Jan give a dinner party (the only dinner party) — like that.

A Little Night Music – I love this movie! Saw it as a play, too. It’s kind of like Glee for theater-goers, romantics, and sophisticates.

Cartoon after the jump. 

national velvet horse mourns elizabeth taylor's passing

Not what you expected for Ms Taylor’s eulogy?

Rob Tornoe, a talented cartoonist out of NJ,  posted on Facebook:
Who’s going to draw the first political cartoon of Elizabeth Taylor as Cleopatra being carried to the pearly gates?

Which was funny because so many cartoonists will do/have done that. It looks weird to me to have editorial cartoonists draw heaven, just like gag cartoonists do, but I think death is hard to do well.

Daryl Cagle has several blogs, which is very confusing, but I managed to find his collection of Elizabeth Taylor cartoons. I’m not going to name the cartoonists, because there are 3 or 4 of the most hideous portraits I’ve ever seen there, and 4 have the SAME drawing of just her eyes! Poor Liz. You can make up your own mind whether Gocomics (which has most of the same people) is any better.

Interpretation of Elizabeth Taylor cartoon

Cartoon caption: National Velvet, the horse speaks to us about how he misses Liz Taylor. (title) IF NATIONAL VELVET WAS LIKE MR. ED I m-i-i-s-s L-i-i-z! Elizabeth Taylor, 1932-2011.

National Velvet was one of her first movies, when she was just a teen, so I just went with it. I titled it 2 ways: the one above, and also, IF NATIONAL VELVET COULD TALK. I wasn’t sure if most readers would know about Mr. Ed, an old TV show which is still on TV in syndication, and also spawned some fun comic books.  In any case, Mr. Ed, the name of the horse, only talked with his owner Wilbur, so no one else knew he could talk. From the theme song:

A horse is a horse, of course, of course, And no one can talk to a horse of course. That is, of course, unless the horse, is the famous Mister Ed.

Funny set up, but I can’t remember what else happened! Mr. Ed talked with a loud whinny, of course, so I tried to write his words like that.

And that’s my Liz Taylor take.

My latest cartoon for Psychology Today: How to Write a Personals Ad for Love.

More cartoons:

1. Who set the Angeles Station Forest Fire?
2. Political cartoons for teh LA Times for February 2011.

bank of japan throwing money into the country to stabilize the stock market

Of course, I may have the entire scenario wrong, but I got a nice colorful cartoon out of it, with a red Japanese sun on top. (Some of the editorial cartoons I saw on Japan had only the sun!  Oh, well, I took the path less trodden.:))

More cartoons:

1. Nuclear radiation from Japan!!!!!!
2. Banks timed failures to hide behind the election. Right?

cartoon on building mosque near 9/11 Twin Towers

Interesting story of man who burned the Koran on 9-11 and then was FIRED from his job at the NJ Transit Authority. From NY Daily News:

Derek Fenton, 39, of Bloomingdale, N.J., burned the book during a protest on the ninth anniversary of Sept. 11 outside Park51, the controversial mosque slated to be built near Ground Zero.

“Mr. Fenton’s public actions violated New Jersey Transit’s code of ethics,” an agency statement said.

“NJ Transit concluded that Mr. Fenton violated his trust as a state employee and therefore [he] was dismissed.”

“He said, ‘This is America,’ and he wanted to stand up for it, in a Tea Party kind of way,” a police source said.

Another police source said Fenton described himself as a “loyal American” exercising his “right to protest.”
If Fenton was fired for burning the Koran while off-duty, his First Amendment rights probably were violated, Chris Dunn of the New York Civil Liberties Union said.

I would think so! The guy is doing this on his own time, and certainly not representing NJTransit! I don’t believe any book should be burned, let alone religious books. But a book isn’t as bad as a flag, and he did have a right to his beliefs.

Myself, I did some research on the poor souls who were forced to jump from the Twin Towers on Saturday September 11, 2010. Very interesting, and I may post it here. It was the most horrifying part of the event to me, and perhaps to others.

And I think even Obama realizes now that he may have put a big schism in the Democratic party for voters, for him to act like this is no big deal. Freedom of religion, yes. But it’s not like everyone can just build wherever they want to anyway. Zoning, neighborhoods, height, number of similar businesses, traffic congestion – these all regulate where building is allowed.

And so should a major event in our history.

And I was really pissed off when someone on Facebook wrote this on someone’s page:

Yes, while I honor those who died, I never cease to flinch at the hyperbole about freedom surrounding 9/11 when it seems to me that since 2001 we have played into the terrorists’ hands by ultimately forgetting some of our core-values—-like freedome of religion. And don’t get me started on the “marketing” of 9/11.

This started a long discussion of me disagreeing with all the other libs there who seem to think 9-11 was just a dream or a movie or a fantasy. It’s almost as if…and feel free to correct me here…they’re jealous that conservatives can point to an actual event that happened. As if this is a PARTISAN issue, instead of history! Amazing.

There are probably many more comments on this cartoon on Gocomics, (Sorry, no link now. Uclick threw away 2 years of my cartoons on Slate, Gocomics and Yahoo News when they kicked me out of Gocomics.) and I made a few minor changes in the drawing there.

For search engines: GROUND ZERO and GROUND HALF A BRAIN. Ground Zero is the Twin Towers and Ground Half a Brain is the White House. (meaning Obama.)

More cartoons:

1. 9/11 Cartoon in 2009.

9-11 Photographer Unknown.

Famous Falling Man photo from 9/11. Apparently the photographer made several photos of this man, one of which shows him aiming straight down, like an arrow.

I’m not sure if this is the same photograph sequence that Esquire talks about, although it’s obviously a tall man.  Esquire gets a little dramatic talking about what the AP photographer, Richard Drew, had in mind with his photos, but this still gives me chills:

They jumped to escape the smoke and the fire; they jumped when the ceilings fell and the floors collapsed; they jumped just to breathe once more before they died.

More cartoons:

1. Who set the Angeles Station Forest Fire?

Maybe I was wrong. And maybe cartoonists can help. I’ve never read editorial cartoons until about a year ago, so I had no experience to draw upon. But cartoonists leaped right into the fray, even as corpses sailed across the tv. In one sense, I guess it was brave of them(the cartoonists.) Here are some cartoons that worked, and some that didn’t. (Cartoons are after the jump.)

I originally read this story in AP, but it’s disappeared now. From Fox News:

All told, some 132 people have been pulled alive from beneath collapsed buildings by international search and rescue teams, she said.

Experts say the chance of saving trapped people begins diminishing after 72 hours. One mother still missing her children said it’s too soon to give up.

“Maybe there’s a chance they’re still alive,” said Nicole Abraham, 33, wiping away tears as she spoke of hearing the cries of her children — ages 4, 6 and 15 — for the first two days after the quake.

Oh, no worry! The entire report was copied from the AP and pasted on Puff Post as if the reporters were working for them.

Only a small number of funerals have been held since the 7.0-magnitude quake struck, with most people buried anonymously and without ceremony in mass graves on the outskirts of the city. An estimated 200,000 people died, according to Haitian government figures cited by the European Commission. The United Nations said Saturday the government had preliminarily confirmed 111,481 bodies, but that figure does not account for corpses buried by relatives.

The LA Times has word from yet another survivor found 11 days after the quake:

He told of passing out in the rubble, dreaming at times that he could hear his mother crying. The furniture in his room had collapsed around him in such a way that it created a small space for him amid the ruins of the house. He had no food. When he got desperately thirsty, he drank his urine.

Also Friday, an 84-year-old woman was said by relatives to have been pulled from the wreckage of her home, though doctors said her condition was critical.

People, don’t give up looking for survivors!!! Especially now that we have Chile with the same problem. I don’t think it’s the rescuers that give up, however, it’s the government. But miracles happen, they happen every day – (thanks to Denny on Gray’s Anatomy – I miss him so much).

I saw a lot of cartoons use this idea of the name of the country with a lot of cracks in it – get it? – the earthquake. I thought the first one was very clever – I never would have thought of it. After a few of them..But remember, most readers see just the one, in their own paper, and think their cartoonist is very clever, and don’t know that a dozen other cartoonists are doing the same concept. You can learn from the Internet, not just imitate, so let’s hope the identical ideas are just coincidence.

I thought this one by Gary Markstein from gocomics.com was better than the other similar ones I saw.

Jeff Parker from cagle.com has an easy, clear style, which I always like, but I picked this one because I was impressed with how quiet and yet effective the idea was, and it’s how most of us get through the day – thinking about something horrific, and then finally acting on it. (I picked this out yesterday, but to my great surprise, Jeff and Steve Kelley (both editorial cartoonists, and Steve is one of my favorite op-ed cartoonists – I have one of his books!) just started a new comic strip today, which isn’t political at all! More on that later.)

I am not into scratchy black and white drawing styles from the 19th century, sorry – and they look their worst online. But I thought John Deering from gocomics.com did this difficult idea well – that both the buried Haitians and the UN were having problems with no seeming help.

Mike Luckovich from cagle.com did a nice visual here. Maybe this is a cliche, or a classic concept, the hourglass, but it’s new to me, and I thought the imagery of the bodies falling to their death was powerful. Sad.

Signe Wilkinson at gocomics. com is one of my top 3 political cartoonists! Great style, color, ideas, and she hardly ever misses, which may be the most amazing part of all!

Small World by Tom Briscoe from gocomics.com is 2nd only to Ted Rall in popularity in Gocomics. I just noticed that recently, after a year in there myself. I’ve only seen Small World once or twice, but why the subscribers…? This just seems weak to me.

I’m a sucker for a good graphic! The hands outstretched is a popular motif, as you can see even from my little collection here, but the bold colors and stylistic font and careful placement of elements make this my favorite. Thanks, Deng Coy Miel from cagle.com !

Thanks to all the cartoonists, and especially to Gocomics.com and politicalcartoons.com that offer some of the best cartoonists in the world, 24-7.

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