Have Gas?

There’s an old joke that goes “if God loves America then why did he put all the oil underneath people who hate us?”.  In actuality, the majority of the oil we use does not come from the Middle East.  We get most of it from Canada, South America and domestically.  Come to think of it, we still get most of it from people who hate us.  Though we get very little from the Middle East, it still affects the prices we pay.  That’s not fair.  It seems everything and anything affects oil prices.  If demand is low then the price goes up.  If everybody wants it then the price goes up.  If there’s a coup in the U.A.E. then the price goes up.  We hardly get any from Iran and Libya, yet we have to pay higher prices when they have a domestic squabble or threaten Israel.

Did you notice the way I spell “Gadhafi” for this toon and the others I’ve done?  If you look elsewhere you’ll see it spelled differently.  That’s because there’s 112 variations on the English spelling of the dictator’s name.  Even if we went by his preferred spelling we’d still be confused because he has more than one way of spelling it also.  I’m thinking if you can’t decide to spell your name then you’re not qualified to be the leader of your government…even if it’s Utah.

The reason I spell it “Gadhafi” is because that’s the Associated Press style book’s way of spelling it and most United States newspapers goes by AP style.  CNN and MSNBC also spell it with the AP style.  The New York Times ignores AP style in this case and goes with el-Qaddafi.  The Los Angeles Times spells it “Kadafi”.  Reuters and the BBC goes with “Gaddafi” as well as ABC.  Foxnews doesn’t spell it at all because no one employed at Fox is literate.

Yesterday one of our local news editors, Bill Tolbert, helped me find the AP style for the name.  Today I picked on  copy editor, Laura Moyer to help me find the correct English and AP style for each dictator’s name in today’s cartoon.  Laura probably likes me less than she did yesterday.  Anyway, shout outs and major thanks to Bill and Laura for the assists.

Have Gas?

Here’s the rough.  You can see some of the changes Laura made to “Khalifa”.  At first I was going with “Sheickh” which is how they spell it in Bahrain.  But Laura pointed out he’s not “Sheik” or “Shiek” anymore and it was just simpler to refer to him as “King”…like you would with your dog.  Of course in my case he’d be “King Chubby”.  Khalifa probably wouldn’t like that very much.

Have Gas? rough