Recently, Rosemary Mosco — science communicator extraordinaire and all forms of nature but especially birds afficianado — ran a comic (seen above) about birds whose common names suffer from Tony Danza syndrome¹. The Mo[u]rning Dove has a mug expressing its opinion on the topic of mornings, and because Mosco is a professional, you should know immediately that cloacal kisses are totally a thing.

Meanwhile, the mad geniuses over at TopatoCo know a good thing when they see it. The world needs a Mornings Can Kiss My Cloaca mug (complete with handy arrow) and now there is one. There’s also some misprints that lack the arrow for five bucks less, but honestly? It’s the arrow that makes it. Well, that and the irritated eyebrow the bird sports. Get one for the morning-averse person in your life.

Yeah, we’re a bit short on words today, but you got nearly 15,000 of them in the past ten days and I need time to catch up on everything that happened since SDCC started. Enjoy the weekend, we’re out.

Spam of the day:

How did your recent visit to 7-11 go?

I haven’t been to 7-11 in more than five years when on weekend EMT duty on the hottest day of the summer, we stopped by 7-11 on the way back from the hospital for Slushies. I hadn’t had a Slushie for, I’ma say 35 years, and had a moment of panic the next day. Blue is never a color that should come out of you.

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¹ As in, what’s the refrain to that one Elton John song? Hold me closer, Tony Danza, right?

There’s only one thing to say today: For the first time since they revived under the auspices of First Look Media, The Nib didn’t update on a weekday. This is twice now that a media company sponsor (the first time was Medium) decided to pivot to something that we all know won’t work, and took The Nib into a state of uncertainty.

Today, it’s a one-person shop, with Matt Bors doing everything himself. His editorial staff — Eleri Harris, Matt Lubchansky, Andy Warner, and Sarah Mirk — are laid off until he figures out what happens going forward. The stable of cartoonists that brought us politically-informed chuckles, nonfiction stories, and reports from countries that barely get mentioned in news channels, much less get to provide editorial cartoons from their own POV are on hold, until Bors figures out what happens going forward.

I said it before, I’ll say it again: subscribe. Subscribe because The Nib 2.0 published more than 4000 cartoons and paid cartoonists more than US$1.5 million. Subscribe because in just under two weeks, they will be publishing again. Subscribe because the fourth issue of the print edition of The Nib has made its way to the world, and it’s their best yet. Subscribe because people deserve to be paid for their work, and as of today, we’re it for funding. Subscribe, because if you follow cartoonists, you’ll find that they are overwhelmingly urging you to subscribe and doing so themselves.

And when you subscribe, consider this: the cover price for the print edition of The Nib is US$14.95; that comes to US$60/year, or five bucks a month. Bors is letting you subscribe to the print edition for four bucks a month; if you value the work being done, don’t take the discount. Go to US$8/month or more; even though it doesn’t get you any additional physical rewards, you’ll be giving Bors the financial resources to get his staff back to pay his contributors, to have those multiple cartoons each weekday continue.

Me? I’m hitting up the US$16/month level, because that’s just about what I pay to back up this site, and that benefits only me. I can support the best cartoonists in the world at least as much as I support this quasi-vanity project. And hey, if that means the site stays more afloat and some of you who aren’t in a position to subscribe today can pay it forward later? Bonus.

Updates (for now) can be found via The Nib Daily newsletter, or their twitterfeed. The twelfth will be here soon and we’ll all figure it out together going forward.

Spam of the day:

The miracle that scares Big Pharma

I told you to stop emailing me, Marianne Williamson.