Life Imitates (Lame) Art
This image has been stuck in my head since I saw it sometime last week. It's a photograph of plumes of bomb smoke rising over Baghdad. It sticks with me because I can't help seeing two anthropomorphic figures duking it out in the dark clouds. You see it too, right? Of the three dark smoke columns, the leftmost and center ones seem man-shaped, and the middle one seems to be punching the guy on the left. It struck me that all you'd need to do is put blocks of supposedly trenchant text on the two figures-make one of them SHI'ITES, and the other SUNNIS, or perhaps label the two smoky contenders as ROSY PROJECTIONS and BITTER REALITIES-and you'd have a photorealistic editorial cartoon, of the extremely hacky variety that always chagrins John (muskrat_john) Kovalic.
