Sadly, No!

And They Cook, Too, the new blogger cookbook to benefit Doctors Without Borders, featuring Majikthise, Elayne Riggs, Julia of Sisyphus Shrugged, Sadly, No! and many others, is now on sale. There are also Blogads graphics available for posting on one’s own site. And, well, as everyone knows, we love to help, so we took it upon ourselves to, as the great chefs say, ‘kick it up a notch.’

Figure 1:

Ad with picture of pie on computer screen.

This has a lot of compositional ‘pull.’ See how the design draws the eye slowly but strongly toward the upper-right corner? This seems to come from a reliance on bold shapes (the rectangle, the acute triangle) whose negative space perhaps leaves questions unanswered. Here’s how we approached this design problem.

Figure 2:

Ad with picture of pie hitting
William Kristol, on computer screen.

As you can see, with the freer lines of movement expressed against a dark background…

Two years ago we helped fellow Canadian Adam Yoshida:

Adam has an idea that’s so crazy, it might just work:

What I propose is this, in the near future, representatives of the United States, the United Kingdom, Canada, Australia, and New Zealand should be invited to Washington […] to develop and sign a treaty which provides for a formal Alliance between these countries and creates a common market for all. All tariffs and virtually all labour mobility restrictions between citizens of these nations would cease to exist.

Adam’s venture needs a name however, as he himself recognizes:

I’m not sure what to call this alliance. The “League of Good Nations” was one that quickly came to mind before being discarded.

Ryan Thomson once had a similar idea. Then Kaye Grogan. And now? We give you, English Prime Minister Tony Blair:

British Prime Minister Tony Blair has called for a global alliance to defend universal values of justice, fairness and freedom from fear.

Bonus points:

Blair to ‘tough it out’ on Iraq […]

“If the going gets tough, we tough it out,” he said, as he stressed the need for a global alliance to fight terror.

Are there a lot of suicide bombings taking place in the vicinity of 10 Downing Street these days?

Now that Ben Domenech has resigned his position as the Washington Post’s resident conservative red-blooded all-Amur’can blogger, we should probably start thinking about his replacement.

For your consideration, Gavin and I have compiled a list of right-wingers whom we think can capably fill Ben’s sadly vacant shoes. Each candidate will be graded in several important categories that we feel are essential for anyone looking to take Ben’s place, including “Cultish Loyalty to President Bush” and “Spittle-Drenched Insanity.” In the end, though, it will be YOU, you Sadly, No! readers, you, who will decide on the winner. Once the winning candidate is chosen, we will e-mail our suggestion to Washingtonpost.com editor Jim Brady and WaPo media critic Howard “Colonel” Kurtz.

[Gavin adds: We have a new mail-bombing device, you know. Hat tip to Talk Left for leaving it out where we could find it.]

And now, without further ado… let’s meet the candidates!
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Woof. This is a beat down. Can somebody please make sure that Mr. Daou is invited back to future debates? Instead of, say, Sean Penn? Thank you.

Predictably, the answer is going to be: Sadly, No! 2004:

Shorter Michelle Malkin:
Disposable kids

Day care is killing America’s children.

From Steve M. of No More Mister Nice Blog, 2006:

LIBERALISM KILLS KIDS

A few members of Congress think you and I are mass murderers — or at least don’t consider that assertion objectionable.

Bonus points: this is getting old but from the press release quoted by Steve:

“Liberalism Kills Kids” is a groundbreaking work which documents the devastating failure of America’s 40-year experiment with liberal statism. From the deaths of 44 million unborn children, to skyrocketing rates of out-of-wedlock births, to the divorce epidemic, to the destructive demands of the movement to normalize homosexuality[.]

Abortion rate? Down.
Out of wedlock births? Little change in the last 10 years, though there has been a slight increase in the last 5 years.
Divorce rate? Peaked in the 1970s.

Destructive demands of the movement to normalize homosexuality? Let us know what they are. (Please show your work.)

This is the best piece of spam I’ve ever received. First it tells me that I need to make my schlong bigger, and then it goes off on these weird tangents about the destruction of topsoil and the meaning of life:

Is your size bringing you sad.

It’s time to terminate the misery of the proportion of ur unit. visit here

www.lototpeopldiffmake.com/8a/.
the carrying capacity of dams; they also destroy many areas of fertile land by removing the fertile topsoil.Man is not the only animal to blame. Elephants are also world too, it remains in one piece only being tarnished through not conquering truth. Hence, it. human thought.”Einstein was born in Ulm, Germany on March 14, 1874. Before his first birthday, his family had .

hope this was helpful
Mathew.

It sure was, Matt. Now I know Einstein’s birthday AND I’ve got TEN INCHES OF UNCUT MANHOOD.

I didn’t know you could do this.

Click here and something very nice happens.

Blogger Ben Domenech Strikes Back; Calls Washington Post Editors ‘Fools’
By: Robert B. Bluey
Posted 03/24/06

“The idea that the attack machine has gotten to the level where they dig back to your freshman year of college, when you’re 17,* and say, ‘Hey, this guy should have been thinking about the authority of what he was writing the same way that people do at the New York Times,’ then, I mean, it’s idiotic,� he said. “I certainly was sloppier than I should have been, but the sense that I ever felt this was significant or this was dangerous or that there was ever anything to come out of it is just ridiculous.�

“…And that bridge,” said the young man. “Do you see that stone bridge? I built that with my bare hands, piling stones and spreading mortar. And do you think they call me Ben the bridge-builder? No, they do not. That is not my name.”

The man threw back his whiskey, hiccuped, and roared, “But you fuck ONE BOX TURTLE…”

* Ben Domenech worked at Human Events, the weekly in which this article appears, at age 15, and began writing for NRO at 17.

We’re still putting together our list of potential Ben Domenech replacements, but in the meantime let me endorse Max’s nomination of Tom Maguire. You’ll notice that we never go after Maguire on this blog, and that’s because refuting him actually requires doing work, and we just like the low-hanging fruit ’round these parts.

Honestly, I can’t think of a better candidate: he’s intelligent, relentlessly partisan, and just wingnutty enough to keep things interesting. If WaPo wants someone who can make effective conservative arguments, Tom’s their guy. If, on the other hand, they just want a non-plagiarist version of Ben Domenech… well, we’ve got a few suggestions of our own for them…

Also: GO BC!!!! Eat it, Villanova cobagz!!!

[The Red State comment threads for the We Must Defend and We Must Attack posts (see below) are archived against future accidental catastrophe or totally not-on-purpose misplacement, after the jump.]
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