Political cartoon: Fandom and SixApart

[buggery]

Last night brown_betty, in between writing brilliant posts and comments about the "clarification" (I do not think that word means what they think it means) of LJ's permissible content policy, she came up with a brilliant idea for a political cartoon about the whole mess

Comments

[ratcreature]

woobie!sheep indeed!

[buggery]

Sheep are kind of terrifyingly woobie in the real world, at least when they're young. I had the good fortune to visit the Hebrides just after lambing season about 12 years ago, and so there were lambs everywhere. They bounce instead of running or walking, they want to investigate everything so their mothers are always chasing after them baa-ing out warnings, and they all have huge soulful blue eyes. It wasn't enough to get me to stop eating lamb, but I can certainly understand why so many people have that reaction.

It was a great experience to have inform my choices in illustrating the sheep in this cartoon, obviously.

[ratcreature]

Oh yes, they are very cute. In my family we used to go look at the newborn lambs in season sometimes, before Easter when they are traditionally eaten here. I mean, we had to make a trip a bit outside the city limits to go see them, but spring is quite nice there because the farming is mostly fruit trees with pretty blooms. And it is one of the nearest vaguely nature thing you can easily get to.

There are sheep in some of the real inner city too, mostly around the harbor and in the neighborhoods near the river in general where they maintain the dykes, but it's just not very bucolic, what with being just a mix of residential and industrial areas, and not that many sheep either, mostly just what you need for the dykes.

[buggery]

In English variant spelling is usually employed to distinguish "dike" (meaning an earthwork embankment to confine or control water; when built along a riverbank a dike will more often be called a 'levee' in US English) from "dyke" (a lesbian; a homosexual or bisexual woman, especially a butch or mannish one; this term is often perceived as pejorative, particularly when used by non-lesbians).

I lived in Holland for two years, and saw plenty of dikes (in Nederlands "dijk") but none which made use of sheep... just either wind power or another standard electrical power source. So, um, what do sheep do for a dyke exactly?

[ratcreature]

Well, I learned the spelling "dyke" in school, though I'm of course aware that it is also a term for lesbians.

And sheep keep the grass short and the earth firm or something. I guess it's easier or cheaper than some machine maintenance. All over Northern Germany sheep graze on dikes, and I'd be astonished if they would't across the border in the Netherlands. Typical photos of dikes always have sheep on them, like this photo of a dike from the German wikipedia page:
http://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bild:Wesselburenerkoog_aufm_deich.jpg

The entry mentions the maintenance sheep as well.