From Clay Jones on his political cartoon “Angry Birds”
Are Angry Birds still a thing? Is the game still popular? Are you still receiving annoying invites to play on Facebook?
During a speech in Portland Friday, a bird flew into the auditorium and landed on Bernie Sanders’ podium. No pun intended, but Twitter went crazy, and #BirdieSanders is still trending.
Talk about an opposite dialogue. People are charmed and amused by a bird landing on Sanders’ podium. Many think it’s analogous of the man and his campaign, which is the point my cartoon is taking.
Meanwhile, on the Republican side of things … ugh. Do you have a barf bag? We have Ted Cruz stealing lines from the movie “An American President” to script his anger at Donald Trump. I think Cruz confused Michael Douglas movies and intended to quote “Wall Street.” We have a debate on Ted Cruz’s sex life. Seriously … Donald Trump is back to insulting women. Ted is upset at particular women being insulted but not all. Hey, where are these guys and their outrage when someone makes a really bad vulgar joke about Hillary Clinton’s or Michelle Obama’s physical appearance? Hypocrites.
Back to nicer stuff for a day: The bird thing was really cute. Even I can appreciate something nice and sweet occasionally … and then I’ll destroy it with vultures and flying monkeys. The audience in Portland loved it too and roared with approval. I also learned today that it really ties in with the TV show “Portlandia,” which I have never seen.
I love birds. I worked in a zoo once (in another lifetime) and working in the birdhouse was part of my duties. I started every morning feeding the birds at 5 a.m. and I usually finished by noon. There were a lot of birds and they all had a different diet. You’d be surprised by how many birds are meat eaters. I’m talking about worms to raw red meat (usually horse meat). The flamingos were some of my favorites as I would make them follow me and go where I needed them by clapping my hands. We also had a few primates in the bird house (we weren’t a well coordinated zoo), and I had to feed and clean after them too. Basically, it was like feeding a bunch of raccoons.
My first idea for this cartoon was going to involve two panels (like it still does). In the first panel it would state “birds love Sanders.” and in the next panel it would read “Trump loves the bird” and Donald would be flipping his middle finger. Then I saw some people make comments similar to my idea on social media. What really killed it for me was seeing an amateur cartoonist draw the same idea … and pretty well too. So that obvious idea went into my garbage pail along with the Sharpie and correction fluid pen I killed last night.
