Sorry for the lack of updates. This past week I was lucky enough to tag along with my father on a trip to Israel where he was on a State Department-sponsored speaking tour. I’m slowly posting the photos on my Flickr, and will be putting up the juicy action-packed diary comics I drew there as soon as I slap on some watercolor. Plus! New weekly This is What Concerns Me’s are sitting on my drawing table waiting to be scanned. Soon this blog will look like a normal one, so please don’t unsubscribe just yet. At least wait until I offend your political notions.

And I’m starting the year-end awards early, because really, there’s no way anything could top this.

Doree Shafrir wrote an interesting take on discrepancies between male and female wages over at Jezebel. She takes into consideration a lot of the outside factors often ignored in the 77-cents-on-the-dollar figure that’s normally thrown around in this debate, normalizing for different career choices and the like — though it turns out “there’s still a five percent wage gap for male and female college graduates, even after controlling for things like age, race and ethnicity, region, marital status, children, occupation, industry, and hours worked, according to testimony given in April to the United States Joint Economic Committee.”

Doree concludes that this is because women are less likely than men to negotiate their salaries, and I think she’s right to a certain degree. I know I was really freaked out by the prospect at first, and I’ve always been more willing and perhaps able to negotiate in jobs that I didn’t want as much as the ones I did.

But the thing is, I think Doree is ignoring the sociology behind negotiations. This argument presumes that women would be able to win those arguments were they even to bring it up; given she led with Peggy Olsen from Mad Men being snubbed when asking for a raise, this seems pretty funny to me. Women are not rewarded for being aggressive or going after what they want, and I’ve certainly gotten a toned-down Don Drapering myself sometimes when asking to be paid a fair wage for my work. I think it’s important  to encourage women to negotiate, but it’s unfair to put all the blame on them for not asking when there’s still the matter of someone — usually a man — with the real power.

Then again, more men have hired me than women, so fuck if I know what’s going on here, but it probably has something to do with my breasts.

Yes, this is the real forecast for the day after tomorrow in Oakland, California. So let’s just give it up, guys. Use all the plastic you want, gorge yourself on factory farmed burgers and have tons of Catholic babies. We’re clearly fucked as it is.

Which reminds me that I owe mine from Zine Fest… Gotta keep those coffers full for the fat cats!

(This is only one of the sweet morsels on Tiny House Design.)

Elizabeth Kolbert profiled Colin Beavan, a.k.a “No Impact Man,” in terms of the absurdity of his project to live with a carbon footprint of zero — in Manhattan. She also writes about other Thoreau-wannabes who’ve undertaken similar pseudo-eco-friendly stunts in order to propel their writing careers (including one woman who gave up toothpicks but bought a three-story house and went on several cross-country plane trips).

The nouveau Thoreauvians have picked up from “Walden” its dramaturgy of austerity. Their schemes require them to renounce (if only temporarily) various material comforts—cars, elevators, Starbucks—that their neighbors take for granted. Renunciation sets them apart and organizes their lives in the name of some higher purpose. The trouble—or, at least, a trouble—is that it’s hard to say exactly what that purpose is.

At twenty-eight, [Vanessa] Farquharson is almost exactly the age that Thoreau was when he set off for Walden Pond. And she’s a lot like him, too, if he’d been the type who, as she writes of herself, enjoys blowing a “month’s savings on a bottle of pink Veuve Clicquot and pairing it with back-to-back reruns of ‘America’s Next Top Model.’ ”

(Yeah, she’s the one who bought the house and started going to “eco-friendly spas.”)

These projects are about guilt, gimmicks and cold hard cash. But of course Kolbert, writing for a print publication, looks over the most absurd bit of all: that the goddamn “No Impact” book is printed on a whole lot of environmentally unfriendly paper (really, is it even New Leaf? and how many copies will be sent back coverless to the publisher when the next gimmick rules). Still, at least someone is calling these people out while they sit in the scented soy-candlelight eating their organic grass-feed kobe beef and counting their money.

Also, look forward to a neat series of interviews with cartoonists whose talent to press ratio is far higher than a lot of the cartoonists you read about.