#BugMartini | #blameAdam
Something about mope and faith, or Mopey the Morbid Angel, at which point we find ourselves obliged to reckon with Cookie Monster, and then the Universe collapses into the gravity of this nexus of cascading invocation and eternity; a bug in the system stacks to overflow, accretes to singularity. Blame Adam when it all comes whimpering to a pathetic end.
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Image note: Triptych detail of Bug Martini by Adam Huber, 27 June 2018.
#blameAdam | #thehashtag
If trying to explain everything amiss, askew, or awry about this panel seems an agonizing prospect, we can most certainly blame Adam.
Any other day I might have gone with panel two, but something about this makes me wonder at the four-panel comic strip version of The Aristocrats.
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Image note: Detail of Bug Martini, by Adam Huber, 23 May 2018.
[#bugnuts]
Should occasion arise to suggest Eight Dollar Testicle is not #MyNextBandName, well, of course we can blame Adam. Kind of like Venkman and Jell-O, that way; there is always room to blame Adam. The eternal question, of course, is do bugs have nuts.
No, it isn’t.
Rule of thumb: When blaming Adam, the eternal question is whether you really, really want to know.
Of course you do.
And, Bugnuts. Now there’s a band name.
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Image note: Detail of Bug Martini, by Adam Huber, 29 April 2018.
[#xkcd]
No . . . no, we’re not going to actually do it. It’s okay, though, to to thank Randall for the earworm.
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Image note: Detail of xkcd #1981, by Randall Munroe, 16 April 2018.
If we say it could be worse, that speaks nothing of the actual comic strip itself, in this case, Saturday Morning Breakfast Cereal, by the one and only Zach Weiner.
If we go with something about Aquaman and the fish fertilizer farm, is that too arcane?
It isn’t an epitaph.
Look, any number of jokes go here, like the second panel and how the one bug with the axe needs to be named Ed because something goes here about thirty years.
Still, though, the fourth panel is a killer. No, really, file under, “Holy shit!” and blame Adam.
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Image note: Detail of Bug Martini by Adam Huber, 21 February 2018.
It would be easy enough to overplay the drama in an early look toward the 2020 election by Alexander Burns and Jonathan Martin of the New York Times:
In a largely leaderless party, two distinct groups are emerging, defined mostly by age and national stature. On one side are three potential candidates approaching celebrity status who would all be over 70 years old on Election Day: Mr. Biden, and Senators Elizabeth Warren of Massachusetts and Bernie Sanders of Vermont.
‡
Competing against the Democrats’ senior cohort is a large and relatively shapeless set of younger candidates who span the ideological spectrum: governors, senators, mayors, wealthy executives and even members of the House. They are animated by the president’s turbulent debut and the recent history, from Barack Obama’s victory in 2008 to Mr. Trump’s last year, of upstart candidates’ catching fire.
‡
In the Senate alone, as much as a quarter of the Democrats’ 48-member caucus are thought to be giving at least a measure of consideration to the 2020 race, among them Cory Booker of New Jersey, Kirsten E. Gillibrand of New York, Amy Klobuchar of Minnesota and Kamala Harris of California. All are closer to 40 than 80.
‡
For now, however, it is the party’s septuagenarian trio that is casting the longest shadow over 2020, and all three have taken steps to extend or expand their leadership status in the party.
In between, for good measure, is discussion of an amorphous non-faction we might consider as the collected other, including Rep. Seth Moulton (MA-06), Los Angeles Mayor Eric Garcetti, and New Orleans Mayor Mitch Landrieu. Before booking the orchestra for a dramatic score, we should remember this is merely April, 2017; Democrats need to to read the midterm map, first. That is to say, it seems a bit early to see who lands where in relation to what. And, admittedly, it is hard to account for the proverbial known unknowns in the time of Trump; the unknown unknowns seem extraordinary at this time, too.α
And then there is this. Never mind. Blame Adam.
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Image note: Detail of Bug Martini by Adam Huber, 19 April 2017.
When history looks back on this period of American thought and communication, we might from our present vantage in that past to be wonder how prominently will stand out the question not of re-definition, but, rather, de-definition. Once upon a time it was enough to simply mutter and growl that transition is a noun. 
Meanwhile, pretty much any noun in the language can now be converted to a verb; simply apply the gerund form to mean, approximately, “using the [noun] as the [noun] is to be used”.
This makes sense in some cases; ’tis true enough that some words simply were as such when they arrived in our knowledge. There is a Fulghum joke in that, but it’s a regional thing, or it would be except nobody really cares. But it is, in fact true. We saw with a saw, for instance, and that is simply how the word arrived in our lifetimes.
Robert Newton Peck once explained it is always a lasso and never a lariat; you lasso with a lasso, but do not lariat with a lariat. And maybe he was wrong, but the lesson stuck. American pedantry is a thoroughly internalized empiricism.
So it goes. For the moment it suffices to blame Adam.
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Image note: Detail of Bug Martini by Adam Huber, 8 March 2017.
This Is 