Ello!!! It IS me you are looking for. That is if you are looking for me on Ello. As if I have time to utilize yet another social media platform when I don’t have the time to visit all of my friends blogs. But I always like shiny new things.
And who better to promote my starting on Ello, than Lionel Richie. Caricature included!!
So if you are looking for me, my profile over there is ello.co/bearman-cartoons.
Yes friends urine luck, as I tell you the history of Urine Mouthwash. Well back before the days of Listerine and Scope, people needed something powerful enough to cure the breath of a dragon. Already used as a way to clean laundry someone must have said, “If it cleans my sheets, it has to do wonders on my teeth and breath”.
But Ancient Romans being Romans didn’t just want their own fluids. No they wanted to import the stuff from as far away as Portugal. In fact it became such a profitable and popular item that Nero did what all governments like to do….he taxed it.
I am sure you can find practitioners of the practice today still but I wasn’t adding that to my research. You can find out for yourself. haha
The last in my lastest series of WWE Caricature Signs features former WWE Wrestler and now COO Triple H aka HHH aka Hunter Hearst Helmsley aka Paul Levesque. Earlier this year, the WWE launched the WWE Network. After first approaching several cable companies to create a premium network like Showtime and HBO, the WWE decided that the distribution wasn’t there and therefore created the network as an over the top streaming network.
The big value to customers is that at a $9.99 price point (with a 6 month commitment) you would get all the PPV events that historically were only available on cable/satellite. The company stated in early earnings calls that they anticipated needing 1 million subscribers to break even. Considering on cable any single PPV event could cost $45, the heavy PPV buyers flocked to the network early. For one cable/satellite PPV, you could watch four monthly PPV events. Great deal right? Well unfortunately the WWE seemed to stall at about 700,000 subscribers as recent reports.
So how do you get the needle moving again? Have one of your biggest talents use his on-air time to, with a wink, shamelessly promote the WWE Network at “only $9.99” at every chance he can. If this doesn’t work, there is talk they may scrap the entire streaming network and try once again to sell it via cable.
Apologies for the odd posting schedule as I have been working on several commissions including some new WWE Signs that I will be posting over the next few days. Those of you who don’t care about wrestling or WWE should probably just skip visiting this week and return next week 🙂
Today’s entry is a John Cena sign. Cena is the former champion and under WWE rules would be next in line for a rematch with the current champ Brock Lesnar. For years, John Cena’s shirts have proudly displayed his mantra of “Hustle, Loyalty, Respect.” When WWE COO Triple H threatened to pull him from the match, Cena threatened lawsuit. In return Triple H mocked him saying “But when John Cena said the words to me ‘lawsuit’ — hustle, loyalty, respect, lawsuit — it doesn’t even fit, right? So out of character for John Cena.”
Personally my way of changing it to “Hustle, Lawsuit, Respect” works better. What do you think?
For the uninformed today’s cartoon is about the game Cards Against Humanity. Essentially each player is given several answer cards and one person reads a question card. The players need to respond with the answer that they think the reader will like best. Given the adult nature of most of the cards, typically the winner ends up being the one who has the most outlandish response. Buzzfeed offers some examples.
Therefore, it is essential to know your friends well that you decide to play this game with to ensure that there won’t be hurt feelings or too overt embarrassment when done playing.
When we get together for a family lunch/dinner at someone’s house, many time it includes playing safe games like UNO. So much to my suprise after lunch at our house, my wife suggested the entire family play Cards Against Humanity. Not only did this include my mother-in-law but also several teenage nieces and nephews.
Of course I said if I played I would NOT explain any of the cards. Thankfully my MIL was sitting next to my wife so any confusing words could be explained in whispers. Of course, my wife had to loudly blurt out every word that she had to define.
Note: All of the answers used in the cartoon are real cards except one. You have the ability to make up your own cards so one of the answers was offered up by a female friend that she heard in college. I’ll let you figure it out.
Did you ever find a Kale Smoothie Recipe that actually tastes good? Did you ever even try? Do you know about the benefits of Kale? I certainly didn’t until recently but kept hearing things like “Kale is a Superfood” So I went online to find out why. According to WebMD Kale offers these benefits:
So I decided it was time to try it. YUCCCCCCCCCKKKKKK!! Too bitter for my taste buds. So how was I to get the benefits of Kale without having to hold my nose to ingest it? SMOOTHIE!!! But just throwing in Kale with your other smoothie ingredients won’t work well because it tends to leave chunks in the mix. And who wants that? So I give you my own recipe and with the exception of ice, all the ingredients are shown in the picture below.
Trust me that all you taste is the banana and the strawberry. No bitterness. You are all welcome for making sure you live long healthy lives so you can keep coming back so my site stats stay up. 🙂
The buzz on the internet today is that Lebron James is returning home to play basketball with the Cleveland Cavaliers. Today’s cartoon pokes fun at the Cleveland fans who in 2010 burned Lebron’s jersey when he went to play for Miami. In fact then (and now) Cavaliers owner Dan Gilbert stated in a now famous letter when Lebron left,
This shocking act of disloyalty from our home grown “chosen one” sends the exact opposite lesson of what we would want our children to learn. And “who” we would want them to grow-up to become.
But the good news is that this heartless and callous action can only serve as the antidote to the so-called “curse” on Cleveland, Ohio.
Well Cleveland continues to be “cursed” while the Miami Heat went on to win two championships under James. That is all seemingly water under the bridge as James and Gilbert seemingly have made up.
James stated his reasons for returning on Sports Illustrated:
To make the move I needed the support of my wife and my mom, who can be very tough. The letter from Dan Gilbert, the booing of the Cleveland fans, the jerseys being burned — seeing all that was hard for them. My emotions were more mixed. It was easy to say, “OK, I don’t want to deal with these people ever again.” But then you think about the other side. What if I were a kid who looked up to an athlete, and that athlete made me want to do better in my own life, and then he left? How would I react? I’ve met with Dan, face-to-face, man-to-man. We’ve talked it out. Everybody makes mistakes. I’ve made mistakes as well. Who am I to hold a grudge?
In Southeast Ohio, college basketball means more than the NBA. However, I always liked Lebron James public persona (minus the mistaken way he decided to announce going to the Miami Heat). I think his actions in continuing to support the Northeast Ohio community with his Foundations and Donations should have kept more Cleveland fans on his side. Now they have the chance to love him once more.
Lara Croft – Time Raider is to blame. Yes if you have been wondering where I have been it is all her fault. Work has been crazy busy the past several weeks but in my down time I have been playing games on my new Xbox. To my wife’s gratitude I finally cleaned up the basement entertainment cabinet by donating my old PS2, Gamecube and Wii. As well as the old DVD player. In it’s place came the Xbox so I have my video game system and DVD player in one.
And unfortunately that means Lara Croft has been sucking all my free time as I veg out on the couch instead of drawing or spending time on the internet. But I am not a total waste as I spent two days volunteering this past weekend. Don’t you think better of me now?
Any guilty pleasures you have that are pretty much a waste of time but you still do them anyway?
This Game of Thrones Poster that parodies the HBO series. came about last week based on a five minute quick caricature of The Hound from the series.
I liked it so much that I thought I should color it. So 5 minutes turned into a five hour project to give you “The Fox and The Hound” Imagine if Disney bought HBO. This is what you might see in the promotional poster.
Obviously the Fox is Daenerys Targaryen portrayed by Emilia Clarke and the Hound is Sandor Clegane who is better known as the Hound (duh!). He is masterfully played by Rory McCann. I have mentioned before that typically I am not into fantasy realm movies/shows like the Hobbit or Lord of the Rings but this one has me hooked. Now if they could get other good shows to make it worth paying the rest of the year like Showtime.
I have a different view of Net Neutrality than most based on what I have read. That being said I am always open to additional info to sway me back to the masses belief that what the FCC has been proposing of late and the deal between Netflix and Comcast is completely bad for the internet as a whole. But first of course I find that with all the discussion around the topic, the person you don’t hear from is President Obama who in 2008 stated:
“I will take a backseat to no one in my commitment to net neutrality.”
That prompted today’s editorial cartoon as it seems everyone is driving the conversation around Net Neutrality with the exception of the President.
I could write a huge diatribe about my feelings about the Netflix/Comcast deal but I found an article by Maggie Reardon of CNET that helped explain some things better for me so it may help others as well. Check out her article here. This portion was particularly helpful:
“The other thing to realize about the Internet is that the network itself is a shared medium. Information is chopped into packets that traverse the Internet separately and are reassembled at their destinations. Packets from your email or a video you selected from Netflix travel alongside packets for everyone else’s data. Just like a highway where all cars are subject to the same speed limit, but still travel at different speeds due to the congested road, some packets arrive at their destination sooner than others.
For some forms of communication it doesn’t matter much if the packets arrive in order or if some arrive a little later than others. This is true of most text-based communications, such as text-based websites or email. But for other forms of communication, such as audio or video, it’s crucial that all packets arrive in order and in close succession. If some packets are delayed or dropped, the experience of the video or audio once the packets are reassembled is not pleasant. There’s often buffering, pixelation, and/or jitter.”
Here is how I explained it to my wife and figure it worked for her that others might find it beneficial. Think of the internet like Amazon. You order from many manufacturers but the processing and delivery are all handled by an Amazon warehouse (let’s ignore the vendors that drop ship directly for this example). Let’s say Amazon has 100 bays to process items into the warehouse and 100 more to process items out of it. Everything flows well until too many manufacturers are trying to unload their items at the same time. It causes slow downs much like on the net.
With a company like Google (YouTube) or Netflix they are sending an abundance of trucks to the warehouse at any given time. This causes delays in them getting their items into the warehouse and therefore delays it getting out. This is what causes dithering or delays in video at times. So Amazon either has to build more bays or enlarge the ones they have to accommodate Netflix traffic. The question becomes who should pay for that? Should all Amazon customers pay for it or just the ones getting items from Netflix? Well one way to do that is to have Netflix pay for the upgrades and then Netflix can choose to eat the cost or pass it on only to their own customers.
One of the arguments I consistently read about the issue are from those that take the information highway analogy and liken it to ISPs creating a toll road. Right now they have the incentive to continue to expand and speed up all the roads. But what happens if they create a toll road for companies to gain faster access. Then ISP’s like Comcast will begin spending money only on infrastructure to make the toll roads faster and therefore leaving the “free roads” to maintain same speeds and service levels as today, never to increase again.
This is where I think the FCC and the President should be taking a stand. I don’t think it should be an open access to allow payments for every large company to take advantage of to the detriment of smaller companies. Rather I look at there being a download percentage limit. Right now YouTube and Netflix each account for over 10% of the total internet traffic. So let’s say the FCC rules state that any company with over 10% of the download traffic on the web can at their discretion enter into a mutually benefiting agreement with ISP’s to deliver the same uninterrupted service that others who don’t carry as large of data can enjoy. Notice I didn’t say faster.
To me the biggest hassle in traveling is dealing with the WIDE LOAD trucks that slow traffic for miles and impede my own travel. If the government created wide load lanes that the trucking companies had to pay to use but I didn’t get access to, I would be happy with the arrangement. They get a special lane and I my speed is not degraded to get to my destination at all.
So what do you think? Am I missing anything?
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Week 2 let me know if I missed anyone.
I have made a decision that if we hit the limit of $1500 that I will still pay cartoonists for adding Bearman to their webcomic through the end of the month as well as match to the $500 limit. So I am adding the three toons from this week and I am going to keep matching even though I hit the 500 limit. So with the 1500 hit plus the $30 in webcomics from this week and the total of $620 in matching donations
So no more payouts for blogging or adding me on G+ but if you are interested in getting involved with your webcomic or matching donation? See this post. And
Best way I can ask you to support those who support me is to visit their websites and check out the amazing work they are doing.