Being Jim Davis

The failing New York Times is so dishonest; they haven't mentioned our podcast once even though every American loves it. Sad!Anyway, we talkin' about stuff in this podcast. Mainly Dolly Parton.Today's strip

If you're listening to this podcast and you should happen to be the sort of person who, let's say, is Dilbert creator Scott Adams, I highly recommend skipping ahead to about the 5:30 mark. What's in those first few minutes you ask? Look, it doesn't matter really, nothing too terribly interesting or insightful. Point is, those first five minutes just aren't for you, Scott Adams. They're for someone else.Today on the program we discuss Frank Sinatra, perambulatory ice cream, obscenity laws in the 1970s, and Garfield's role as a vehicle for identity politics.Today's strip

We must take sides. Neutrality helps the oppressor, never the victim. Silence encourages the tormentor, never the tormented. Sometimes we must interfere. When human lives are endangered, when human dignity is in jeopardy, national borders and sensitivities become irrelevant. Wherever men and women are persecuted because of their race, religion, or political views, that place must - at that moment - become the center of the universe.--- Elie Wiesel, Nobel Acceptance SpeechMy audio is pretty awful this episode. But that didn't stop us from talking about Garfield at OBSCENE length!Today's strip:

This struggle may be a moral one, or it may be a physical one, and it may be both moral and physical, but it must be a struggle. Power concedes nothing without a demand. It never did and it never will. Find out just what any people will quietly submit to and you have found out the exact measure of injustice and wrong which will be imposed upon them, and these will continue till they are resisted with either words or blows, or with both. The limits of tyrants are prescribed by the endurance of those whom they oppress.--Frederick Douglass, "If There Is No Struggle, There Is No Progress"The end of today's episode is all fucked up because I had some audio trouble, but, honestly, it had probably gone on long enough already. Also, #where'sgarfield?Today's strip:

In an ever-changing, incomprehensible world the masses had reached the point where they would, at the same time, believe everything and nothing, think that everything was possible and that nothing was true. ... Mass propaganda discovered that its audience was ready at all times to believe the worst, no matter how absurd, and did not particularly object to being deceived because it held every statement to be a lie anyhow. The totalitarian mass leaders based their propaganda on the correct psychological assumption that, under such conditions, one could make people believe the most fantastic statements one day, and trust that if the next day they were given irrefutable proof of their falsehood, they would take refuge in cynicism; instead of deserting the leaders who had lied to them, they would protest that they had known all along that the statement was a lie and would admire the leaders for their superior tactical cleverness.--- Hannah Arendt, The Origins of TotalitarianismToday's strip:

So, y'all following @sarahkendzior on Twitter? You should do that.Anyway, today's episode features further discussion of Garfield's butthole. People really seem to love it when we talk about Garfield's butthole. Plus, an Alfred Hitchcock reference! That might help you briefly forget that America has descended into a white supremacist fever dream.Today's strip:

Look, I know Michael Moore totally called it this year, even predicted the critical upper Midwest flip, and most of the rest of us got it wrong, but I still haven't forgiven that slovenly bastard for convincing me to vote for Nader in 2000. I was young and impressionable and he should not have done that!Today's strip:

So have you guys read Masha Gessen's "Autocracy: Rules for Survival"? Definitely worth checking out. Possibly more important than listening to this podcast.Today's strip:

Hey there. In case you've been wondering why we (Jon and Chris) don't seem at all fazed to have civilization collapsing around us as we happily bullshit about Garfield, it's because Being Jim Davis has a pretty considerable lag time between recording and publication. Today's episode, for example, was recorded on Friday, November 4, back before a quarter of the electorate decided that 228 years is old enough for a republic. And I'm writing these show notes on Sunday, November 13, shortly after Donald Trump announced that noted white supremacist and douchebag Steve Bannon would be his administration's Chief Strategist. Which is obscene, right? This shit isn't normal!Anyway, we'll be super-depressed during next weeks episodes, so you've got that to look forward to.Today's strip:

Today's surprisingly long episode of Being Jim Davis zooms in with laser focus on a number of pressing issues, including the unexpectedly voluminous capacity of Jon's icebox, the old-hollywood inspirations for panel seven's mistaken identity trope, and the cocktail of cynicism and sheer laziness that clearly inspired Jim Davis to run a 'summer heatwave'-themed strip in September.Today's strip

In today's Garfield, Jim Davis teters on the verge of introducing formal teleological elements to the strip, perhaps in the consideration of turning it into some kind of narrative, then backs off from that. We argue about whether or not the depicted events take place in the bathroom.Today's strip

In this Very Exciting Episode, our Skype call drops in the middle of the podcast! But when we come back, are we the same podcasters? Or, like Captain Kirk going through the transporter, does the disruption of continuity actually portend a far more sinister reality beneath the congenial veneer? Is the very act of podcasting in truth akin to committing suicide and being replaced by soulless doppelgängers each day? Can I successfully mine the persistence of identity problem for the podcast writeup twice in one week, or is that like stepping in the same river twice? Anyway, something about wax fruit.Today's strip

Heraclitus’s “table fragments” raise puzzles about identity and persistence: under what conditions does a side table persist through time as one and the same object? If the world contains things which endure, and retain their identity in spite of undergoing alteration, then somehow those things must persist through changes. Heraclitus wonders whether one can view the same side table twice precisely because it continually undergoes changes. In particular, it changes compositionally. At any given time, it is made up of different component parts from the ones it was previously made up of. So, according to one interpretation, Heraclitus concludes that we do not have (numerically) the same side table persisting from one moment to the next.In this episode of Being Jim Davis, we examine Garfield's incomplete understanding of biology, the strange life of Jon Arbuckle's orphan side table, and the surprising versatility of the onomatopoeia 'poomp.'Today's strip

Garfield asks a hypophoric question and we talk about Jay Ward. It's the late 1970s, and this is Being Jim Davis.Today's strip

Listener, please conjure in your mind your own personal conception of the platonic ideal of a Garfield strip. Really think about the nature of that strip: How many panels does it have? Does it contain references to dieting? What is the ontological quality of the discourse between its various players? Is there a perplexing denouement in which one or more characters breaks the fourth wall for no particular reason? Perhaps most significantly, is it bloated with cumbersome dialogue containing allusions to bizarrely juxtaposed real-world entities?Is Garfield a product, or is it more accurately described as a process? For that matter, is the comic even written by Jim Davis, or is there some fundamental fact of the universe that simply requires its existence? Do newspaper comics necessarily imply some connection with the material world or conscious minds to conceive of them, or is it possible that, like the laws of logic itself, Garfield is perhaps neither physical nor conceptual?Now compare the image

Today's topics include the dull drudgery of life and the minimum defining characteristics of eye contact. Then we get into a wholly unnecessary argument over whether this strip constitutes a logical progression from the previous one, which was more or less the same exact joke. For those among you who are not excited by the bleak prospect of an entire week's worth of strips organized around the plot device of Garfield dieting, may we suggest alcohol?A slight correction: Upon further research, it turns out that carrots were NOT discovered in the 1970s. Jim Davis regrets the error.Today's strip

In today's strip, Jon Arbuckle puts Garfield on a diet, a funny enough one-off gag that will never probably never be referenced again. We also discuss floor-sitting, #where'slyman?, Bhagwan Shree Rajneesh, #panel2, cat jowls, and Jon Arbuckle's lost years as a member of the Weather Underground.Today's strip 

In today's episode, Jon brags that he's "seen cats use the litter box before." Okay, Mr. Big-City-Sophistication, we get it: you're worldly and cosmopolitan. You don't have to rub it in our goddamned faces by "casually" dropping the fact that you own at least one trivet. Oh, and today's strip was actually pretty good -- a welcome relief after yesterday's, which was a real dog's breakfast.Today's strip 

In today's episode, a week that had opened so promisingly, and then soured with Thursday's disappointing installment, finally becomes what -- let's face it -- we all knew that it would: yet another unbearable slog through -- what shall we call it? -- the, imagination(?) of Jim Davis. No, "imagination" is definitely not the right word for this one.Today's strip 

Not much to say about this one, but hey, you've already listened to 66 of these things. Why stop now?Today's strip: