There was a competition going on for short films about Seattle. Some of the entrants (at least they seem like they could be) are showing up online. F’rinstance, here’s a poetic ode to the city by Riz Rollins; and here’s Peter Edlund’s Love, Seattle (based on the opening to Woody Allen’s Manhattan and dedicated to team-and-dream stealer Clay Bennett).

• Health scare topic of the day: “Rabit bat bites.”
• Online scare topic of the day: “We’re all Internet addicts, and we’re screwed, says Newsweek.”
• Those hipster fashionistas at Vice magazine have devised a “Wheel of Punk,” a wheel chart proclaiming what is the most and least punk. The punkiest, in their summation: “Pre-Rollins Black Flag.” The un-punkiest: the Eagles.
• Unpaid Plug O’ the Day: My fellow Stranger refugee Inga Muscio has a “Stop Thinking, Start Writing” class starting here in Seattle later this week.
• Another year, another round of public college fee hikes.
• Another year, another plea to finally get ourselves a progressive state income tax.
• PETA ranks Safeco Field as baseball’s second most “vegetarian friendly” ballpark. #1: would you believe Philly?
• Yep, Senate Republicans don’t want you to find out who’s funding their campaigns.
• “The average Canadian is now richer than the average American.” And not just in Canadian Tire Money.
• There’s a commercial for tourism to Colombia with the slogan “The only risk is wanting to stay.” Forget about those pesky drug wars. Just enjoy the quaint cities and unspoiled beaches. They’re saying this openly and forthrightly.
• It’s one thing to see Photoshopped® fakes of movie stars’ heads on nude models’ bodies. But when a guy sticks Frida Kahlo’s head on nude models’ bodies (bodies that obviously don’t have the real Kahlo’s injury scars), some Kahlo fans get righteously pissed off.

youchosewrong.tumblr.com

• Ever feel like life’s one big choose-your-adventure book and you’re hopeless stuck on the wrong path? Then enjoy these unhappy endings at “You Chose Wrong.”
• It turns out that with NBC taking full control of MSNBC.com (it already wholly owns MSNBC TV), some or all of the website’s 80 Redmond-based editorial positions will move to the New York region. Just what I need: more laid off journalists in the Seattle area competing for the same scarce jobs.
• The teases of an Almost Live! reunion have been partly revealed. The new venture, The (206), will be an online, not broadcast, series. (This probably means short self-contained skits, not half-hour package episodes.) The only announced performers so far are John Keister, Pat Cashman, and Cashman’s son Chris.
• Got construction or construction-management knowhow but not a job? Do as Gordon Lightfoot said and be Alberta bound.
• When sunscreen is outlawed in Tacoma schools, only outlaws won’t have face blisters.
• KPLU remembers the Seattle (specifically, Cornish College) roots of avant-music giant John Cage.
• Kitty Wells, 1920-2012: The original “queen of country music” had a rawer, less subdued sound and image than Patsy Cline (the only female country singer urban hipsters have heard of, still). Wells’ biggest hit, “(It Wasn’t God Who Made) Honky Tonk Angels,” was an answer song to Hank Thompson’s “The Wild Side of Life.” Today, only country historians remember the latter.
• The Daily, Rupert Murdoch’s iPad-only “online newspaper,” might disappear by the end of the year. The real Daily, thankfully, is here to stay.
• Huffington Post blogger Spencer Critchley (which would be a great character name for a romance-novel hero!) says Romney’s guys are foolishly running a TV-style campaign in the Internet age. By this, Critchley isn’t talking about ad expenditures so much as the operating mentality, imagining that a candidate’s superficial “brand image” is all that matters.

the bon marche at northgate circa 1956, via mallsofamerica.blogspot.com

• Emily Badger at the Atlantic pontificates that “The Shopping Mall Turns 60 (and Prepares to Retire).” Malls are actually 62 years old, counting from Seattle’s own Northgate. Badger’s timeline dates from urban planner Victor Gruen, who published a prototype concept in an architectural magazine two years after Northgate opened. (The one thing Gruen’s design had but Northgate hadn’t (yet) was a roof on the central plaza.) Badger is right, though, that malls have passed their peak as American institutions. The last new one opened in ’06; big-box stores and strip malls have stolen a lot of their business and clout.
• After years of speculation, MSNBC.com is now wholly owned by Comcast/NBC Universal. It’s immediately been renamed NBCNews.com. Microsoft sold NBC its half of the online joint venture, having divested its interest in the same-named cable channel back in ’05. NBC claims the site’s Redmond-based staff will stay in the Seattle area. [Update: 100 techies will stay here, but around 80 editorial jobs could move to New York.] Microsoft claims it will start its own news site later this year.
• Meanwhile, a recently-unearthed NBC documentary about the deep south during the civil rights struggles reminds us that, at the time, many white southerners actually believed that black people liked being segregated.
• Trend-analyst Richard Florida never said the rise of the “creative class” would be a panacea for the professional caste, or for the cities that hope to attract this caste.
• A hockey fan site ponders what the heck Seattle’s anti-arena factions are thinking:

There aren’t many cities that would seriously consider turning their backs on an investment of nearly $300 million in private capital within their boundaries, particularly during trying economic times.

• Celeste Holm, 1917-2012: The Oscar-winning film star and venerable stage actress had been in financial straits in her latter years. She was estranged from her family after she married a 41-year-old opera singer when she was 87. One of those family members was son Theodor Holm Nelson, the computing visionary who coined the term “hypertext” and inspired much of the conceptual underpinning of this whole WWW thang.

• A note to marketers everywhere (not that they’ll ever listen): As soon as you bill something as being “For Women” (not any specific women, just “Women” as a single mushed-together whole), a woman who doesn’t identify with your targeted “psychographic” will cry foul. Latest example: Pix, an iPad-based “photography lifestyle magazine for women.” It’s full of fluffy fashion, make-up, and shopping tips, and light on the notion of photography as a serious endeavor or of its readers as serious people. Bringing in the deserved snark is Stella Kramer, Pulitzer-winning photo editor (and Seattle punk-zine pioneer).
• When basketball vet Charles Barkley hosted Saturday Night Live, the cut-off-at-the-end 12:50 a.m. skit had him shilling for his own homespun “Barkley’s Bank” as an alternative to the world renowned Barclays Bank. These days, that’s where I’d rather trust my money.
• Hooray to local gallery-scene and edgy-installation-art vet Scott Lawrimore, who just got an important curatorial job at the Frye Art Museum.
• A “Christian” anti-sex website wants to scare teens into abstinence by making up scare stories about condoms.
• Courtney Love just keeps getting into messes, legal and otherwise. Sad, really.
• Howard Schultz wants U.S. businesses to start making more jobs and stop whining all the time. Or something like that.
• Art Thiel would like you to get the facts n’ figures about the Sonics Arena proposal (which aren’t all in yet) before you get emotional about it in either direction.
• A UK High Court judge declared Samsung’s new tablet computer isn’t an iPad ripoff, because it doesn’t “have the same understated and extreme simplicity which is possessed by the Apple design.” Or as a BBC commentator interprets the ruling, the judge decided it’s not as cool.

comicsbronzeage.com

Just Sayin’ Dept: Here’s something that hasn’t been publicized much in the World’s Fair 50th anniversary celebrations.

• Could the Almost Live! cast (or a key portion of it) be reuniting in a new project? A site called The206.tv is being coy n’ teasing about it, at least for now.
• Cafe Racer will reopen. And it’ll look better than ever.
• Seattle’s own Ezell’s has the nation’s greatest fried chicken, according to a highly manipulable Esquire online poll.
• Danny Westneat sees the Sonics Arena plan as a much better deal than the one that was used to rebuild Husky Stadium.
• No, there won’t be a zip line in West Seattle’s Lincoln Park.
• No, there won’t be an Airbus factory in Wash. state. But Gov. Gregoire would really like Airbus to buy parts and services from some of the same local subcontractors and suppliers that service Boeing.
• Just as Rush Limbaugh has his paid phony callers, Mitt Romney buses and flies in loyalist rooters to his campaign speeches. Even to the NAACP!
• It’s the 20th anniversary of the first photo ever posted to a Web site. It was a plug for a retro-cabaret combo comprising “administrative assistants and significant others of scientists” at CERN, the Swiss lab where both the WWW was invented and the Higgs-Boson Particle was discovered. The hereby-linked article includes some of their science-nerd-chic novelty repertoire.
• No, online-meme followers, Bill Gates did not speak at some random unidentified high school and tell the kids, “Life is not fair. Get used to it.” That whole text comes from a newspaper op-ed column dating back to 1996.

from the early pc game series 'leisure suit larry,' via classicgames.about.com

A Mother Jones writer attended a tech panel at South By Southwest. A marketing rep (not a programmer) from a social-media startup company boasted of its fratboy-esque corporate culture, making borderline-rude “jokes” along the way.

The Mother Jones writer walked out of the session, then filed an essay claiming a rising subculture of sexist “brogrammers” had infiltrated the tech biz.

The term was quickly picked up by Businessweek, CNN, and others.

Then Gizmodo.com, using an equally small slice-O-reality as its own basis, claimed “There’s No Such Thing as a ‘Brogrammer.'”

My take: What there are, and have been for more than a decade, are dot-com douchebags.

Those are the loud, brusque, macho jerks running a lot of these companies—both startups and now-established sites.

You saw them in the early 2000s. You saw them in the film The Social Network.

You can see them in startup offices from Seattle to Brooklyn, preening and yelling deals into phones and being rude to people (female and otherwise).

I suspect you won’t see them as much among the coding rank-n’-file, in positions where precise thinking counts and the hard-sell doesn’t.

But all it takes is one or more a-holes at the top to make a shop feel like an uninviting place for women employees—or for women customers.

(You do know that social media, mobile gaming, and all these other fast-rising online realms have female-majority audiences, don’t you? Some dot-com douchebags apparently don’t.)

Happy 7/11 everyone! And we’ve got a new place to get our free regular Slurpee® on this only-comes-but-once-a-year day. This brand new 7-Eleven franchise is on Virginia Street between 8th and 9th, in the cusp between Belltown, the retail core, South Lake Union, and the Cascade district. It’s got all your favorites—burritos, Big Bite® hot dogs, $1 pizza slices, bizarre potato-chip varieties, coffee lids with sliding plastic openings. It closes nightly at midnight, though (sorry, hungry Re-bar barflies at closing time).

• I can tell you that hate-filled, hyper-aggressive online “comment trolls” existed back in the 1980s days of bulletin board systems (BBSs) and 300-baud acoustic modems. Neil Steinberg at the Chicago Sun-Times sees their antecedents back even further. A lot further.
• There’s only one million-selling music album so far this year. It actually came out last year.
• Jon Talton explains how tax cuts are “the god that failed.”
• ACT Theatre will have the U.S. premiere of a play by Brit mega-playwright Alan Ayckbourn next year. And he’s personally coming over to direct it. This is just about the most establishment-prestige you can get in the play world.

makela steward via rainiervalley.komo.com

Welcome to all our kind readers who still have Internet connections after “Malware Monday.” In today’s randomosity:

• Let’s congratulate the Seattle woman who just became Ms. Plus Size America.
• The Tacoma Art Museum is getting a big collection of “western American art,” and a big new building addition to put it in.
• Wash. state’s wine biz has become big enough for the Gallo empire to move in on it, buying up Covey Run and Columbia Winery. I remember, of course, the late ’70s days when Gallo was radical America’s favorite brand-to-hate, a status later taken by Nike and later still by Wal-Mart.
• Another sometimes-radical-hated company, Apple, said it will stop submitting its products for “green electronics certification.”
• Ex-Posie Ken Stringfellow has done a lot since his last solo CD in 2004, including abandoning the States to become a free man in Paris. Now he’s finally getting another set of music out, incluidng a duet with comedian Margaret Cho. Title: Danzig in the Moonlight.
• One fifth of all “adult fiction” physical books sold in the U.S. this past spring were Fifty Shades of Grey (the submission-porn story set in Seattle by a British author) or one of its sequels.
• Underwater oil-exploration teams have found the lost city of Atlantis in the North Sea, if you believe the U.K. tabloid Daily Mail (which you really shouldn’t).
• As banking-behemoth blunders spread to the Brits, one analyst notes that, within the industry, “it had become acceptable or perhaps even encouraged to provide false information.”
• David Carr summarizes recent developments in the newspaper biz, and, as you might expect, sees a biz whose troubles just keep getting worse.
• Romney (hearts) the Koch Bros., those campaign-funny-money far-right oil/chemical/paper-towel barons who occasionally claim to be “libertarian” (as in, you know, protecting the “freedom” of mega-corps to control everything and ruin the planet).
• Extreme heat, like they’ve had everywhere in the contiguous states except here, is lousy for the fish.
• And finally, local-politics site extraordinaire PubliCola is back! Yaaaayy!

via david haggard at flickr.com

• One of my pop-culture obsessions is the history of cartoons. That’s how I stumbled across this tragic tale of the songwriter who gave us “Whistle While You Work” and “Who’s Afraid of the Big Bad Wolf?”. He was a depressive and an alcoholic who shot himself in 1942, with his music for Bambi yet to be released. He was estranged from his 20-year-old daughter from a first marriage; his last wife remarried weeks after his death, to a family employee (who then took her for everything she had and dumped her).
• One of the Seattle music scene’s longest running teamings (over 30 years!) has come to a sudden end. Hard-rock mainstays Queensryche have fired frontman Geoff Tate. Tate tells Rolling Stone the next step will be lawsuits, “and it’s probably gonna get ugly.”
• The lawyer guy who sued local web cartoonist The Oatmeal isn’t suing him anymore.
• Kurt Eichenwald at Vanity Fair says he knows exactly why Microsoft has had what he calls “a lost decade.”
• Here for your comment-thread wins is a handy list of “logical fallacies” used by people who can’t really back up their arguments.
• For a movement that allegedly seeks to persuade us all to the righteous logic of its ways, today’s right wingers can be so inhumanely rude. Today’s example: a onetime 13-year-old “teen conservative idol” who’s now resurfaced as a 17-year-old progressive. The insults by wingnut web-pundits and comment trolls against him, and against his mother, are as predictable as they are pathetic.
• The 24/7 Wall St. site has another list of brands predicted to disappear within the year. Among them: American Airlines, Suzuki cars (in the U.S.), Talbots stores, and two media enterprises that Wall Street Republicans would like to see go away (Current TV and Salon.com).
• David Auerbach at the webzine “n + 1” would like to remind you of the continuing “stupidity of computers.” Still.
• Why does broadcast radio just get blander and less listenable every year? Seattle Weekly found a new villain: the Portable People Meter, which tracks listenership more intensely than the previous diary-based ratings system. I’d place the blame elsewhere, on the huge corporate “station groups” and their anti-creative chains-O-command.
• And finally, please say hello to Gus the Diapered Duck. He appeared this past First Thursday at the Core Gallery in Pioneer Square’s T/K Building. The adjacent feet belong to his mistress, artist Kellie Talbot, who depicted Gus in a series of paintings about a New Orleans character called “Ruthie the Duck Lady.” (And yes, the T/K Building is just up the road from the old Pioneer Square Theatre building, where a certain insurance company used to have its regional sales office.)

themediaonline.co.za

I’ve recently become obsessed with deliberately awful online writing.

By this I specifically mean copy that’s not really meant to be read by humans, only by Google’s search-engine algorithms. (The term in the trade is “SEO,” for “search engine optimization.”)

Texts are stuffed with “keywords” and boldfaced (or “strong”) phrases. The pages may have their own domain names, chosen to be close to whatever a search user is really looking for. Header tags and other “metadata,” unseen by the reader but seen by the search engine, are endlessly tweaked for optimum pickup.

These pages can be some of the least useful, least informative, and least readable stuff in the whole WWW.

This is particularly annoying when the pages deal with self-help and how-to topics (which is most of the time).

Partly that’s because a lot of it comes out of low-paying “content mill” operations, who outsource a lot of their work to Third World contractors of questionable English-language skills.

And partly it’s because the mills generally don’t give a darn about communicating any knowledge, only about gaming the system for a few bucks.

The business model is that you get your page ranked high in searches. Then you convert those page views into income, by pasting in either Google’s own “AdWords” slots or “affiliate ads” for Amazon and others that pay the site a sliver of any sales (or both).

The propagators and champions of SEO can be as annoyingly hype-laden as any other “web gurus.” They’re not only unapologetic for the formulaic blandness of their product, they’re proud of it. One guy known as “Webwordslinger” (real name: Paul Lalley) even boasts that…

Bill Shakespeare–you know, The Bard–would have made a terrible web writer. He never gave a thought to keyword density and didn’t even know what strong text was or how to use it in web writing.

•

If this kind of bad Web writing exists solely to make money, then it’s even more stunning to see examples that don’t even have the monetization part figured out.

A kind reader recently referred me to an extremely unofficial site promoting the Seattle Great Wheel, the Seattle waterfront’s new star attraction.

Only the site, “Pier57ferriswheel.com,” seems to have no affiliate links and definitely has no AdWords links.

What it does have is warmed-over text rewritten from other sites about the Great Wheel, and a little link at the bottom for the Wheel’s official page (or rather, for its official Facebook page).

•

Some critics would look at all the bad commercial copy online and claim proof that Americans (or at least Americans younger than themselves) have become a nation of illiterate boobs.

I have a different take.

I say that, instead, the written word has become more important than ever.

The written word is the lifeblood of commerce in the Internet Age. Far more than it was in the days when magazines and TV ruled marketing.

But too few of the bureaucrats and hotshot entrepreneurs in charge realize this.

They think they can throw up the cheapest trash they can get and just manipulate it into profits, by using ever-trickier shticks (including “article spinning” software!).

But it doesn’t work that way. Not in the long term.

Google-ranking is a fad. Heck, Google itself might turn out to be a fad.

To establish a “brand,” to sell stuff, or to simply stand out from the crowd, you’ve gotta take your text seriously.

It’s an art (or at least a craft), not a formula.

And it takes a professional to do it up right.

Someone, say, like me.

lindsay lowe, kplu

• It’s like Animal Planet’s Whale Wars, only without the whales. It’s Greenpeace submarines trailing Shell oil-exploration rigs in the Arctic.
• There’s a “celebration of life” service for my mother today in Marysville.
• Huge swaths of Wash. state exist in a “rural information ghetto,” with little local news media, little or no broadband access, and even spotty or no cellphone reception.
• Local bands in Spin‘s all-time greatest-band-names countdown include Mudhoney and Bikini Kill. But Motorhead as the #1 greatest band name of all time? Sorry. Do over.
• Speaking of which, Duff McKagan will be this year’s Seafair Grand Marshall. Still waiting for Mark Arm’s equally deserved official recognition.
• Online Media Shrinkage Watch: Salon.com, one of the pioneers of web-based punditry, is bringing in exactly half the revenue it needs to survive.
• Who owns the rights to the classic series Route 66 and Naked City? Hard to tell. What’s more certain is that the two shows’ exec producer had some very rough final days.
• If the producers of The Looney Tunes Show had wanted to effectively depict Bugs and co. in a domestic setting, they should have perused old issues of the Looney Tunes and Merrie Melodies comic books.
• Tired of stick figure construction workers? Then look at these animated .GIFs in which the moving objects tend to be graceful women’s skirts and hair.

beautifullife.info

komo-tv

• More tsunami debris is showing up on Northwest beaches. Darn, I remember when all you’d find there were dead seals.
• Publicola, having just broken up with Crosscut, has announced its nuptials with Seattle Met. The lifestyle mag will own and host the local inside-politics blog, starting some time next month.
• The Downtown Seattle Association’s raising money to install a semi-permanent family playground at Westlake Park (which would just coincidentally make it a less hospitable locale for, say, Occupiers).
• Pearl Jam’s biggest nemesis isn’t Ticketmaster but its own ex-business manager.
• Seattle’s arts world is a nearly half-billion dollar business. And that’s just the nonprofit side.
• But the arts alone (or the gays or the hipsters) isn’t enough to drive a city’s economy, let alone turn one around. That’s the lesson from Minneapolis writer Frank Bures, who’s out to debunk pundit Richard Florida’s whole “Creative Class” shtick.
• KIRO-TV’s exposé of an elementary school janitor was a big hunk of lies n’ half-truths, according to some local “media watchdog” types.
• The president of the U. of Virginia was fired, allegedly for nothing more than insufficiently sucking up to corporate interests.

Band name suggestion of the month: “Premier Instruments of Pleasure.” (From the “Sexual Wellness” section of the Amazon subsidiary Soap.com.)

• The new Microsoft tablet device will be called the “Surface.” How, er, superficial does that sound?
• Plastic shopping bags disappear in Seattle on 7/1. You have 12 days to stock up on those magnificently reusable Bartell Drug bags while you still can.
• Local hiphop artist Prometheus Brown would like you to care about the victims of gun violence, and not only when those victims are white people from “nice” areas.
• Nick Eaton joins city and county officials in jeering at the Seattle Times‘ fact-stretchin’ anti-Sonics arena editorials. In other news, somebody still reads the Seattle Times editorials.
• The waterfront streetcars Seattle can’t seem to find a place for anymore, even though the folks loved ’em? St. Louis transit officials would like ’em.
• There’s a 20-year-old intern/blogger at NPR’s All Songs Considered named Emily White. (This is NOT the Emily White who used to work for The Stranger.) She recently wrote a confession that she’s almost never paid for the music she’s downloaded. In response, Camper Van Beethoven and Cracker frontman David Lowery penned a screed denouncing her and people like her for shelling out bucks for computers and Internet connections but not for the content they thereby attain:

Why do we value the network and hardware that delivers music but not the music itself?

Why are we willing to pay for computers, iPods, smartphones, data plans, and high speed internet access but not the music itself?

Why do we gladly give our money to some of the largest richest corporations in the world but not the companies and individuals who create and sell music?

• Elsewhere in piracyland, when last we mentioned The Oatmeal online cartoonist Matthew Inman, he’d complained about a “social media” humor site that had posted his art without credit or payment. Then an attorney for that site sued him for defaming his client’s character. Inman replied back by starting an online fundraising campaign for the amount of the lawsuit—only with the proceeds going to charities instead. Now, the attorney has re-sued Inman, and has sued the site hosting the fund drive and even the charities it benefits. To quote one of America’s greatest contributions to comic satire, “Whadda maroon.”

ford 'seattle-ite xxi' car display at the world's fair; uw special collections via edmonds beacon

• In the revived Baffler, self described “anthropologist and anarchist” David Graeber has a long “salvo” of an essay that starts out by asking some of the questions a lot of folks have asked during the World’s Fair semicentennial: Where the heck are the flying cars, missions to Mars, or other techno-wonders we were promised back then? Graeber smoothly segues from that into a more general modern malaise, in which nothing seems to be getting better except info-tech—and that’s turned us all into serfs to bureaucracy, even in our private lives. His answer: a more egalitarian economy. (I know, easier to say than to make.)
• Online Media Shrinkage Watch: The combo of Crosscut and Publicola turned out to be more of a springtime fling than a marriage. Crosscut’s cutting back. Not just on its new hires (Publicola founders and city hall insider reporters Josh Feit and Erica Barnett), but the site’s existing staff and freelance budgets. Three big funding sources are expiring around the same time. Crosscut founder David Brewster says a new funding scheme (and a reorganization, with Brewster stepping back from full hands-on management of the site) is on the way. And Feit’s talking about restarting Publicola with his own new reorg. Weezell see….
• As Wash. state’s privatized booze biz rolls on, could people actually start drinking less?
• Attendance at Occupy Seattle’s “general assembly” meetings has plummeted. Is the organization fading away? If it does, its range of causes has not and will not go away. Tactics change. Goals remain. Eyes on the Prize and all that.
• While the alpha-male hustlers running most all of America’s tech companies (and the equally estrogen-lacking tech journalists and bloggers) weren’t noticing, Internet usage has become majority female. So are the usages of GPS, e-book readers, Skype, text messaging, mobile-phone voice usage, and more.
• The Waterfront Streetcar might or might not run again. If it does, it won’t be for at least seven years.

theoatmeal.com

Matthew Inman, known to all as The Oatmeal, is Seattle’s (the world’s?) greatest online satirical cartoonist.

He’s also, like so many of us, trying to make a living from his craft in an Internet world in which anything anybody posts is treated as fodder for reposting, revising, or just plain stealing.

Lately, commercial ad-supported dotcoms are using “social media” as their current excuse for taking, and making money from, other people’s creative work without paying those people for such work. “Hey, don’t blame us. We didn’t repost your work. It was one of our users (whom we merely encourage to repost stuff here).”

Inman publicly complained about one such “social aggregation” site, where dozens of his drawings had appeared. Some of his drawings had stayed up at that site, even after others were removed.

The site responded by suing him!

They wanted $20,000 in damages to the reputation of the site’s “brand,” or something like that. At the same time they sent a “cease and desist” letter, demanding Inman stop dissing them.

Inman’s posted response was hilarious; pure Oatmeal snark at its finest.

Inman vowed to start an online fund drive. (Yes, even though he’d already made a cartoon comparing such drives to street begging.)

Then, he vowed to take a photo of himself with the $20,000. The aggregation site’s lawyer would get the photo, plus an original cartoon of the lawyer’s mother (imagined as an unattractive slag) and a Kodiak bear.

The money, however, would be split between the National Wildlife Federation (hence the bear image) and the American Cancer Society.

The (real) fund drive’s title: “BearLove Good. Cancer Bad.”

The result: With 11 days to go, the drive has raised over $165,000!

The aggregation site and its lawyer picked the wrong funnyman to aggravate. (Though the lawyer says he’s thinking of responding with more suits.)

The Power of Oatmeal indeed.