Big giant circular tables hollowed out in the middle and filled with potted plants of exotic flowers are the stuff of high level international talks. Whether it's the United Nations, or NATO, or the G8, or continental talks, or Communist Party talks, or the Organization of the Petroleum Exporting Countries, you can always tell how high brow things are by the size of the round table. And thus, drawing on the theme of another gathering of important people, this time of Foreign Ministers meeting in Rome, I came up with this:

Following down the same path I took in a recent cartoon, and just so that I don't have to draw another roundtable for a while, as I had to here, here, and here, I archived the table so I can throw it into a future cartoon the next time I poke fun at the very important people. (The teeth were archived seperately)...

Boy, what a waste of time that meeting turned out to be. Shadowed over by news of the deaths of 4 peacekeepers after Israeli missiles destroyed a U.N. post in Beirut, it was hardly the right occasion to cavass any country to drop more peacekeepers in the region. Well, at least those foreign ministers, including our own Peter MacKay got to spend an afternoon in Rome. How nice.

* * * * * UPDATE * * * * *

January 2, 2007: I received word today that this cartoon won a Ranan Lurie Citation for Excellence Award from the United Nation's Correspondence Association. Quite a mouthful, but a great honour to be lumped among some of the world's best editorial cartoonists.