Hey, Did the Guelph Mercury Steal My Robocall Cartoon?

So today I see in the Guelph Mercury this cartoon about the Pierre Poutine Election Robocall Scandal.

Kind of really similar to the fumetti photo cartoon I posted to facebook and twitter on Wednesday. I realize that everyone is doing gags about robots, phones, and poutine these days, but a robot that looks like that, with an old rotary dial phone and clunky computer lettering? The gag wasn't even that funny...

Wiki Weirdness

Writing about the possible infiltration of Wikipedia by state-sponsored "disinfo" agents for Montreal's Centre for Research on Globalization, Dr. Ludwig De Braeckeleer rehearses the history of secret agents messing with the media:

Conducting false flag operations and planting disinformation in the mainstream media have long belonged to the craft of the spies. In the months preceding the 1953 overthrow of Iranian Prime Minister Mohammed Mossadegh, U.S. and U.K. intelligence agencies used both techniques abundantly.

A copy of the CIA's secret history of the coup surfaced in 2000. Written in 1954 by the Princeton professor who oversaw the operation, the story reveals that agents from the CIA and SIS (the American and British intelligence services) "directed a campaign of bombings by Iranians posing as members of the Communist Party, and planted articles and editorial cartoons in newspapers."

Interesting stuff. I wonder if any historians of editorial cartooning have tried to get to the bottom of that one? Anyway, the article goes on to trace the efforts of Wikipedia watchers to track down the identity of a Wiki-editor who was voted "the most abusive administrator of Wikipedia" and who now apparently lives in Alberta and who may or may not have been a secret agent.

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other wiki stuff:

wikicomics

interview about the wikipedia war on comics

there is a MAD wiki

Supermanica, dedicated to Superman's world, pre-1986, is a wonderful place to visit

(the cartoon up top is by Bill Avidor)