THIS MODERN WORLD

I made an enigmatic reference to this on Twitter, but it’s not really something that fits into 140 characters. I used to have a little Amazon Affiliate button on the site, which gave me a small referral fee every time a reader used it to make a purchase there. It wasn’t a huge amount of money but it was more lucrative than ad revenue, which never seems to pay much of anything somehow. If nothing else, it covered the cost of keeping the site online.

At some point Amazon had a dispute with the state of Connecticut about sales tax, and in the process jettisoned all Connecticut residents in the affiliate program (so Connecticut could not make the argument that Amazon had a physical presence in the state).

Now that it looks like Amazon and Connecticut have kissed and made up, I hope the company remembers to reinstate the affiliates they dumped overboard.

Ways to save the GOP.

The Brooks panel refers to this column from last week, in case you missed it. The salad bar would not be crowded because (1) contrary to Brooks’ famous assertion, there is no salad bar at Applebees, and (2) because I suspect that once you strip away the crazies, there’s not much GOP left.

Your cartoon in the Pacific Sun (Feb 1-7, 2013) about “assault rifles” reminds me of the simplistic propaganda cartoons used by Mao’s China, Stalinist Russia, and Hitler’s Germany.

‘Cause you know who ELSE liked to mock the NRA…

Two of my friends with Yahoo email have been hacked in the last 24 hours, so I assume there’s something going around.

…Ah, here it is.

Somebody pointed out that it hasn’t been updated in about four years, so I added some stuff, though it feels kind of old school at this point. Just to make it less of a one way street, anybody who sends one of the books will get a sketch of Sparky in return. (And in the exceedingly unlikely event anybody orders the Cintiq, they’ll get a whole grab bag of goodies to be determined.)