"Pwease Don't Twead on Me."

Hazy Dave tweaks his Gadsden flag design. (For all the Gadsden redesigns, click here.)

Another "civility flag."

That one is from Hazy Dave, who says he "fooled around with putting a baby rattle on the tail a bit, but didn't think the complication was necessary."

"It's okay to tread on me now. I have health insurance."

You remember my challenge to redesign the Gadsden flag to reflect the new civility. That one is from Chip Cannon.

I've got more to come, and I'm still accepting entries. The idea is that the old threatening snake is inappropriate and must be toned down, lest unstable individuals take it the wrong way. You can go off the civility message, however. Just use the Gadsden flag and be interesting or amusing or something.

Another reimagining of the Gadsden flag snake.

Another entry in the "For civility's sake, let's change 'Don't Tread on Me'" challenge. This one, from Mateo, reworks the snake into the 2 snakes of the caduceus and changes the phrase into the physician's precept.

Here's a discussion point for the comments: Is "First, do no harm" a good conservative principle, making this flag something other than mockery of the liberal's call to civility? Or does the presentation of government as medicine work as a critique of liberalism?

Now, let's dance!

Chip Ahoy gives us another entry in the "For civility's sake, let's change 'Don't Tread on Me'" challenge.

All we are saying...

is...



Another entry in the "For civility's sake, let's change 'Don't Tread on Me'" challenge. This one is from WestVirginiaRebel.

For civility's sake, let's change "Don't Tread on Me"... Part 3.

Awesome Printer takes up my challenge to make the snake friendlier and adopts my rewrite of "Don't Tread on Me":



And Henry (the commenter) comes up with these variations:

For civility's sake, let's change "Don't Tread on Me"... Part 2.

Chip Ahoy responds to my request for a redesigned Gadsden flag:

For civility's sake, let's change "Don't Tread on Me" to "Please, Don't Tread on Me."

Or, "Please, when you tread on me, walk gently, but don't worry I won't bite. I'm quite a gentle fellow really. I just have some modest reforms I would like to propose."

Oh, but the snake still looks so awfully angry, with his mouth open, his tongue out, and his tail curved slightly up. Please, help redraw the flag with a friendlier snake — a good citizen snake — and a kindlier message.

"Tread on me, I'll be your friend, we all need somebody to tread on."

Isn't it time, after all these years, to get over...

... Jim Morrison's ...

... snake is long, seven miles... he's old, and his skin is cold....

"Who do you think made the first stone spear? That wasn't the yakkity yaks sitting around the campfire."

"It was some Aspberger sitting in the back of a cave figuring out how to chip rocks into spearheads. Without some autistic traits you wouldn't even have a recording device to record this conversation on."

Said Temple Grandin to the Wall Street Journal, which is, presumably, responsible for misspelling Asperger.

I mean, really, Aspberger? What is it? Cleopatra's last meal?

Ah! I am distracted by a worm! We all have our mental quirks and orientations, and the point is: The world benefits from the diversity of human minds. I'm inclined to tap out endless assorted bloggings to the web, and Temple Grandin's precursor chips away at stone and invents the spear.

Grandin opposes the "handicapped mentality" some people take toward kids with Aspergers:

"When I see these kids with 150 IQ and their parents want to put them on Social Security [disability], it drives me nuts." These kids "will come up to the book table and start talking about 'my Aspergers.' Why don't you talk about becoming a chemist, or a computer programmer, or a botanist?"

She continues: "It's important to get these autistic kids out and exposed to stuff. You've got to fill up the database." Silicon Valley and the tech companies are like "heaven on earth for the geeks and the nerds. And I want to see more and more of these smart kids going into the tech industry and inventing things—that's what makes America great."

Ms. Grandin lives in a simple apartment in Fort Collins, Colo., and has used the profits from her books to put students through school. "Four PhDs I've already done, I'm working on my fifth right now. I have graduate students at Colorado State—some of them I let in the back door, like me: older, nontraditional students. And I've gotten them good jobs."

"You know what working at the slaughterhouses does to you? It makes you look at your own mortality."

"When I was younger I was looking for this magic meaning of life. It's very simple now," she says. Making the lives of others better, doing "something of lasting value, that's the meaning of life, it's that simple."

So Aspergers is not just an aptitude for designing technical things. It also opened a different path into morality.

In the Garden.

Iridescent things seen on the road today.

"I was like, 'I’m going to glue rhinestones on my eyelids, bitch!'"

At long last, Adam Lambert tells his "I'm gay" story.

Here's the cover:



A cute butterfly and a green snake approach Adam's exposed zipper.

"Group keeps weeds, snakes away from 9th U.S. president."

What we read when we scavenge reading material.