Curiosity has landed

Wheels down on Mars.”

Photo from the start of the journey last November, by my friend Michael Wilkinson (@mwilkinson3 on Twitter).

…also, this. “The accuracy … is equivalent to me being in Los Angeles and hitting a golf ball to land in a hole on St Andrew’s golf course in Scotland.”

…one more:

Sigh

I wrote this cartoon after the Gabby Giffords shooting in January of 2011. It remains tragically relevant.

New toon

Republican ju-jitsu.

A note about the first panel: this of course refers to the famous moment in the Reagan/Mondale debates, when Reagan sought to dispel doubts about his age and alertness (after a poor showing in the first debate) with, well, a clever one-liner some speechwriter had come up with. And it worked! Everyone agreed the clever one-liner certainly put those doubts to rest. It’s particularly terrifying, given what we now know — the man was a few short years away from being diagnosed with Alzheimer’s, and more to the point, his own son has speculated that he might have been in the early stages of the disease at that moment, and into his second term as President of the United States. I thought a long time about that panel, and thanks to Sparky’s List had the opportunity to discuss it with a reader whose parent has Alzheimer’s. At any rate, it’s a comment on a specific and disturbing moment in American politics; it’s not meant as a joke at the expense of anyone suffering from that disease, and should not be taken as such.