The Adventures of Accordion Guy in the 21st Century

Welcome to Day Five of the Accordion Guy Advent Calendar. Today’s goodie: comics!

First, let’s take a look at a recent comic by Ted Rall. If you’re not familiar with Martin Niemoller’s poem, you’re going to miss the not-so-subtle reference…

Now while I think that some of the actions of the current U.S.

administration are intended to have chilling effects and are

curtailments on the freedoms for which they’ve been a role model, it

hasn’t and probably will not come to this. It exists only as a paranoid

fantasy in the minds of those the extreme left and as a wet dream in

the extreme right-wing blogsphere (Adam Yoshida, I’m lookin’ at you).

Even less probable are the events depicted in the comic book Liberality for All, in which the gentlemen pictured below are action heroes:

Almost as implausible as making Michael Moore and Al Franken into comic book action heroes.

Uh…yeah.

The comic (literally) takes place in a different reality: one where

Al

Gore was acclaimed the winner of the 2000 election deadlock. Like a

gazillion “what if” speculative fiction stories in which one historical

detail is changed, the future was altered drastically. Let’s look at Sean Hannity, a year after 9/11:

What would have Gore done? Feel free to speculate in the comments.

That was all flashback. The comic actually takes place in the year

2021, 20 years after 9/11. The UN effectively runs the US (currently

ruled by President Chelsea Clinton and Vice President Michael Moore).

We jump to the UN in New York, where the “Honourable UN Representative

from Afghanistan” is being warmly greeted:

Don’t laugh. In the comic, I’m sure the NDP is running Canada.

The next panel, which I haven’t included, shows the UN ambassadors from

Canada, Germany, France and Spain — guilty parties in right-wing eyes

— applauding. Suckers! Osama’s goodwill gesture is a front: he’s actually planning to bring a nuke to New York City!

In the meantime, let’s get back to Hannity. In the year 2021, with conservatism outlawed, he’s part of the

underground, broadcasting his show via pirate radio and a key player in

the resistance. For reasons that I suspect are being saved for later,

he lost his right arm (presumably in a skirmish with left-wing pinko

fellow-travellers) and now has a bionic prosthesis. He also sports an

eyepatch in the style of Colonel Nick Fury from S.H.I.E.L.D.:

By “those who can’t”, he means “the pampered

upper-middle and upper class, tongue-tied folks that they are”. His

chamber is lit with red lightbulbs in memory of the red states.

Luckily for Hannity, he’s got help: G. Gordon Liddy, looking as spry as

he did when I last saw him during a visit to Crazy Go Nuts University

in the late eighties (for reasons unknown, he was often a guest

lecturer during Homecoming). Back then, he was so damned proud of his

involvement in the Nixon scandal that his car sported the licence plate

H20GATE. In the comic, he’s traded the car for a motorbike which he

drives with action-hero adeptness.

Even with at least three laser sights locked on his dome, Liddy can observe a moment of silence for his dead homies.

Hey, what’s a right-wing action hero comic without a little dig at gun control? Or, for that matter, France?

The real G. Gordon Liddy would never touch a French gun!

No matter where you live in the political spectrum (see this map of where I live in Politopia, according to their quiz), I’m sure you’ll find this comic, Liberality for All, entertaining reading.

If you didn’t like the comic — or at least not in the way its creators

probably intended — hey, good for you. You are probably free of head

injury.

Here’s an article which ran in last Thursday’s Financial Post: Tucows Milking the Internet, which is subtitled “Now it just needs to get investors interested”.

I’m not so crazy about the photo that accompanies the article. It’s

of my boss’ boss and occasional giver-of-special-assignments-to-me,

Elliot Noss:

It’s an odd photo. Elliot seems to be saying “As a matter of fact,

there just happens to be a small part in my movie that’s just perfect

for you. Why don’t you sit over here, where we can talk about it in

further detail…”

Silly stuff aside, the article will provide a quick overview of what it is Tucows does:

Tucows’ domain name business accounts for about 85% of annual sales,

which were US$44.7-million in 2004 compared with US$37.1-million in

2003. The company has operating income of US$2.14-million in 2004,

US$931,735 in 2003 and an operating loss of US$979,747 in 2003. So far

this year, the company has posted nine-month revenue of US$35.9-million

and operating income of US$1.3-million.

David Shore, an analyst at Desjardins, has this to say about our blogging tool, Blogware:

“Blogging has taken the world by storm but the big challenge from a

business perspective is how you make money off it,” Mr. Shore said.

“We

think Tucows might have come up with a way to make money from the

growth of blogs by providing blog capabilities to service provider

partners who bundle it or sell it to customers. To participate in one

of the top three hot trends in the Internet and make money off it is a

good thing.”

Another goodie of ours that the article mentions in passing is Email Defense,

our anti-spam solution. I’ve got it hooked to up my work email account,

and despite the fact that my email is published on this blog (currently

ranking within the top 1000 at Technorati), my spam is down to a

trickle.