Edgy

Someone recommended that I make QlownTown an edgier comic strip. Comics on the web tend to be ironic, satirical, gritty, or bitter, and mine is pretty traditional. But I've written out ideas for every strip for the next three months, so it seems a shame to toss all those ideas. Besides, I don't think in edgy terms. So I thought, what if I just add profanity to existing ideas? If someone swears freely, they're automatically less conventional and, arguably, hipper. So here are several previous strips with profanity added, chosen from the week of April 12th through the 18th. You can start here, then click backwards, to see the originals.

June 22nd: "My f****** dog ate my homework."

June 21st: "Come on Shtanley. Share you clamsh. Don't be sho g****mn shellfish."

June 18th: "You couldn't stoop to my level if you wanted to, you f****** g****mn s***head."

June 17th: "Yeah, he's my new partner. He's a copper spaniel, for C*****'s sake."

June 16th: "Oh, sh**! You're looking for a wise man. He's on the next mountain over. I'm a frickin' wise guy."

Note that the last one has a milder form of obscenity which is heard frequently on TV and in polite company, but it still adds a certain punch that the original version didn't have.

So part of the New Humor of QlownTown could be that clowns, normally considered silly and sweet, would have gutter mouths.  For a certain segment of the population, this could add a lot. I confess, as I wrote these, I started to laugh at the notion of adding dirty words for no reason. It's incongruous.

But this wouldn't change the essential type of humor in the strip. It still wouldn't be current, topical or satirical. And it would probably cost me a lot of existing subscribers. So I'll keep the naughty language out...although there are times when I want a character to express profound disgust and frustration, but %$@#! just doesn't quite do it. Maybe I should make it interactive, so readers could type in their own words. One reader might type in "Consarn it!" or "Dab-dang-naggle!", while someone else might type in---well, you can imagine.

So that's where it stands, at least for the _____________ time being, ___________!

Store

I just changed the name and description of my CafePress store. If you go to www.cafepress.com and enter QlownTown or some of the keywords that lead to my products, it'll show you the products but never direct you to the actual QlownTown store at www.cafepress.com/qlowntown. Anything you buy in their Marketplace is their pricing, and I pay them more and receive a smaller profit than if you purchased the same thing through the QlownTown store.

I had hoped that the name and description change would show up when someone was shopping in the Marketplace, so they'd get the message that merchandise costs less if you buy in my store, not theirs...but they've cleverly set it up so you never see the store owner's description. So if someone visits the Cafepress website but doesn't know about QlownTown, they'll never get directed to the QT store. They have to enter the address manually.

What they're doing is competing directly with their own clients, who already pay a monthly fee for a store. They're taking my money for the store, then trying to offer a lower price than I do on my own products! So today I went through and lowered the price on almost every item. A few key items (that are likely to sell a lot, of course) cost me more to put in my own store than CafePress sells them for in theirs, so those items may be a little pricier, but my in-store prices now beat them on almost all items. Hah!

I keep the shop open with them because I do get some sales through their Marketplace, but I hate paying a monthly fee and then having them compete with me. So, if you're shopping for QlownTown paraphernalia, shop direct!

Changes

I had a revelation today. Not life-changing, no flash of light or spiritual awakening, but a revelation nonetheless. Saturdays and Sundays draw the fewest visitors to the site. The Sunday strip usually takes a loooong time to draw and color. So I decided to cut the Saturday and Sunday strips. You'll still get to see a free comic Monday through Friday, but now my cast has the weekend off, just as I--and probably you, too--do. This frees up a lot of time to explore other ideas. I'm considering a number of things: altering the drawing style a bit to get closer to the freedom of my original sketches, which are almost always transformed into a less fluid look when I pencil them and then trace the penciled drawing with ink.

 I'd like to get closer to the off-the-wall nature of some of the cartoons I've done, and away from the comfortable, often pun-based strips which are clever but may not appeal to a wide range of internet-surfing cartoon fans. And I have a very different approach that I'm thinking about, but that will need more development before I'm ready to talk about it.

So what do you think? I love getting letters, emails and posts telling me what you like, but I'd like to hear ideas of what would make you tell more friends about the site; what would make you more likely to check it out daily; what you would like to see on a T shirt, mug--or any other object--that you'd be likely to order. Would you like to be able to order T shirts for the cast of your show or the workers on your project with a custom cartoon on it? (Clowns doing Hair? Clowns building a Habitat for Humanity house?) Have you always wanted a ten-foot-tall clown statue on your front lawn? Send your feedback to dsmith-weiss@qlowntown.com.

Today is Work at Home Fathers' Day. I guess I'd better take the rest of the day off, now that I don't need to get Sunday's strip ready.

(Would that I could take the day off--but now I can spend it on exploring!)

Cars

After hearing the president's address last night, I thought, "Gee, this sounds like a speech Jimmy Carter gave back when he was president". I think we're closer as a nation than we were then to making some sound environmental decisions with our purchases, but I'm not sure. When I see a full-sized SUV with an unused trailer hitch (or no trailer hitch), I wonder if the owner really needed that size vehicle for anything other than comfort. I ran a successful construction business years ago using a four-cylinder diesel VW truck. They don't make those any more: not enough buyers. Ronald Reagan took Carter's solar panels off the roof of the White House. Maybe they were ugly. But it's a shame that we just seem to be catching on to the situation thirty-odd years later.

Anyway, it's not my place to be judging all the aspects that might go into someone else's car-buying decision, but I have a few that I'm thinking about when the time comes to replace my current car:

• The upcoming Nissan Leaf intrigues me: electric only, and fine for local trips, which of course are what most people make. But it'll cost about $24,000 after tax breaks, plus about $2K to install a home charging system. Why will it be more expensive than a gas/electric hybrid? There's no gas engine to drive up the price.

• Rumor has it Toyota will come out with a plug-in Prius that will run on electricity only for the first whatever number of local miles. If it's not a lot more then the Leaf, this would seem to make more sense. No word on when it'll come out. Despite the temporary woes of Toyota, it should be a winner. We have one Prius now, and a couple we know has two Prii; that'd be kind of cool.

• The new Ford Fiesta boasts a 40 MPG highway rating. Since MPG ratings are now more accurate estimates of what one can expect in real life, this could be a realistic figure. That's great for a regular gas engine, and it's an American company--a plus in the times of recession--and it's the one major American carmaker who didn't screw up so badly that it had to borrow all sorts of bail-out money from us.

• The VW Jetta diesel. AS I said, I had a diesel VW back in the 80s. They run well, they're simple to service, and they tend to be durable. Now that "clean" diesel is the norm for US engines, it's a relatively non-polluting option. And, if you're really fanatic, you can build or buy a used vegetable oil processing unit for your home, and run the car with little or no purchased diesel.

• A natural gas powered Accord. Honda has offered these for several years, although it's a little-known fact. The mileage and net cost is about the same as gas, but natural gas is mostly from the US, while gasoline comes primarily from foreign sources. The engine also pollutes less. You need to purchase an in-home refueling station, and need to have natural, not LP, gas, but you never have to fill up at a service station. Just come home, "gas" up, and instead of paying then, it just shows up on your monthly bill.

• A regular car converted to natural gas. This can be done on most cars, I believe. It's a way to make a car you like which might not get great gas mileage into a more environmentally-friendly one.

My wife says that, because I chose the Prius, it's her turn to pick our next car. But she's pretty ecologically minded, though not as fanatical as I tend to be. We like the idea of buying a used car--it's generally a better investment, because the huge drop in value when it was first driven off the lot has been absorbed by the previous owner. Of course it's all moot at this point: we have no immediate plans to buy anything. But it's fun to plan ahead.

Please note: I am not a shill for any car company. They may not even want a cartoonist who draws clowns all day talking about them. These are just cars that I am personally thinking about. If there are other environmentally friendly cars out there I haven't mentioned, let me know. And when you buy your next vehicle, just keep in mind: how big do I really need it to be? Is there any way, directly or indirectly, that I can give BP a little less of my business?

Hot chocolate

I did today's cartoon about a Swiss chocolate army knife. Thinking about it as I brushed my teeth last night--an odd time to think about sugary foods, I admit--I thought, "I should've shown the marshmallows being toasted, too," then remembered that marshmallows aren't usually toasted before putting them in the mug. My next thought was, "Well, why not??"

 Of course, now it's summer, and who wants hot chocolate in hot weather? But there is a week's vacation in Maine coming up this summer, at which we'll be around a campfire one night, and I intend to introduce this drink to the family there. Is this as game-changing as blackening food or sushi were? No. But it's a cool concept.

I have, in my bulging file of recipes-to-try-that-I-may-never-get-to-because there-are-so-many, a recipe for Mayan hot chocolate, which includes red pepper. This is another variation I'll have to try, but it'll probably have to wait till winter. And another for cinnamon and ginger hot chocolate. And then there's one...well, the point is, I'm currently intrigued by the idea of toasted marshmallows in the drink. Now if I could only turn it into a recipe that would win the one million dollar grand prize in the Pillsbury Bake-off...

Garage door

Saturday, my wife's garage door opener wouldn't work. After confirming that the remote was working fine, I noticed a cable had snapped on one of the two large springs that support the weight of the door. I went to Home Depot, bought a new 12 ft. cable, came home, raised the door by pulling up on it--so much for pampering my bad shoulder and elbow!--while my wife operated the opener, and began to install it. Then I realized I needed a nine-footer. Back to HD, bought the shorter cable, came home to find one side of the sixteen-foot-wide door had ripped out of the ceiling! It was hanging at about a 15-degree angle, held in place mostly by the now-bent arm of the garage door opener. After cutting open the ceiling to reinstall the ripped-out support and getting a shower of cellulose insulation all over me in the process, I realized that I needed a piece of angle iron to replace the old one which had cracked from the collapse. I almost went back for a third time to the Depot, then decided, 'No. This is what insurance is for."

I called Steve, the guy who'd installed the door twenty-two years ago, and he said he'd come over Sunday and take a look. I screwed some vertical 2x4s to the sides, top and bottom of the raised door to make sure it didn't collapse completely in the meantime. At this point, all my plans for Saturday were shot; the door had eaten up too much time and worn me out. I had a beer instead.

I stayed up till midnight Saturday night browsing garage doors on the internet: I figured it was time to replace the door with a fancier one, since insurance would cover the work of replacing the old one (if it was indeed shot), so we'd only need to pay for the difference in value of the upgraded door. I was also hoping that Steve would say it was fine propped up for now and we'd order the new door, and he and his crew would replace it when the new one came in. However, he took one look and said it couldn't stay like this. Should I replace it? Probably, he said. Can we leave it for now? No, we'd better take it down, or reinstall it temporarily.

Well, now I was seeing more uninsured expense. If the door still worked, we'd have to pay the full cost of taking down the old one after it was reinstalled, plus the full cost of purchasing and having them install the new one. We decided to reinstall the old one and see how it looked. That meant I would be helping Steve right then--no finishing my own projects while he and his crew did all the heavy lifting.

It took almost three hours of lifting the heavy door manually, propping it up on a long log laid across two ladders (luckily, we'd been doing some logging in the back yard the week before), clamping off various rails, re-bending stressed metal, replacing various hinges, bars and pivots and sweeping up lots of insulation. The good news: the old door works fine now, runs more quietly (why didn't I think of oiling the moving parts all these years?) and has new safety cables installed so the springs can never snap and put someone's eye or windshield out. The large springs, which used to hang down low enough when the door was opened that I would periodically bang my head on one, now stay close to the ceiling thanks to an alternative layout Steve came up with.  He charged me about half his normal Sunday rate because my attorney wife helped him out with some legal issue years ago. (See? Do a good thing and it comes back to you----karma may take a long time to come back around,  but it comes.) It came out to less than our deductible, so there was no need to involve the insurance company. And I figured out, after discussing the ins and outs of altering the door, how I will remake the door so it looks like old-fashioned out-swinging carriage doors instead of one wide fake-wood grained slab! I had decided the door needed to look better and was resigned to spending big money on a new one.

What I've left out is that I got up at 6:45 Sunday because I had to be at a "breakfast" at 8:30 AM, which turned out to be just muffins, coffee and juice. I really need seven and a half hours' sleep and a decent breakfast including protein to feel alert, so I wound up taking two naps during the day. That, plus the garage door project, did in all my planned Sunday projects.

The garage door spring could have hit one of us when the cable snapped, or taken out a windshield or other window. The door could have collapsed completely---on the car or one of us. It could have fallen sideways and ruined all sorts of things stored in the garage. As it turned out, a lot of dirty, exhausting work was required. So what is the result of this almost-disastrous weekend?

I, ever the cockeyed optimist, am just excited about getting to work making the old slab door look like expensive carriage doors!

Of course, before I start that project, I have a Saturday and Sunday's worth of other projects to complete...

The Dump

I went to the transfer station yesterday. (I'm trying to wean myself off of the term "the dump", so my grandchildren someday don't say, "Oh, Grandpa, you're so old fashioned. There haven't been dumps for years!") They have a recycling building, a place to dump your non-recyclable trash, and a "yard waste" area. This is where people may dump their leaves, tree clippings and other biodegradable landscaping detritus. The large piles are periodically turned with a backhoe or grader, and when a pile is pretty fully decomposed, it's moved to another area. Townspeople are welcome to come and shovel it into their car, truck or trailer and take it home. This is the nice "black gold" gardeners refer to: fully composted material that add nutrients and goodness to garden or lawn soil. The problem is that some people seem to think that "yard waste" refers to plastic bags, bits of tires, cutoff pieces of lumber, synthetic rope cutoffs from nursery plants, etc. There are also good-sized sticks which actually qualify as yard waste, but they're too big to decompose quickly, so they have to be picked out when using the compost for most projects.

In the past, I'd shovel the stuff into my vehicle, pick out a few of the bigger sticks and non biodegradable stuff as I was loading, and sift everything else when I got home. There'd be a big pile of sticks, rocks and things to throw into the woods after I pulled out and threw away the bottle caps, plastic tags, spare metal parts and pressure treated wood pieces I'd found. But a few years ago, I'd seen a guy with a big wooden frame mounted at about a 45 degree angle on the back of his trailer, with chicken wire across the opening. He'd throw the compost against the chicken wire, the good stuff would go through into the back of the trailer, and most of the bad stuff would roll down the screen onto the ground.

So, on my trip yesterday, I brought along a large tarp and some green plastic fencing. I spread the tarp into the back of my Prius (it's times like this that I miss my old truck) so it looked like a big open bag in the rear of the car, tucking the upper corners of the tarp into the rear door openings. I then stretched the fencing across the back, tucked the corners of that into the doorways, and closed the doors. This held up the top of the "bag" and created a semi-rigid sieve for the compost. The fencing and tarp were plastic, so there was no worry about scratching the paint on the car.

I then began to throw shovelfuls of compost at the fencing, and, sure enough, the good stuff went through, and the bad stuff stayed on the surface. Some fell to the ground, but after a few shovelfuls, the fencing would collapse onto the sifted pile and I'd have to lift it and shake off the debris, but that was no problem. In about five minutes, I'd filled the back of the car with sifted, trash-free compost! It worked so well, I think I'll build a frame for the fencing, so the bad stuff rolls off like that trailer setup I saw years ago.

As I walked around the passenger side, preparing to leave, I saw that I had put a long set of scratches on that side of the car when I backed in! There was a wooden "table" sitting there. I had noticed it when I looked in my rearview mirror on that side, but once it looked like I'd avoid it, I had backed in the rest of the way and did the damage. The crunching of the compost as I backed over it had masked the sound of the scraping.

I drove home, alternately pleased with how well my sifting had gone and despondent at the thought that I might need to have the car repainted. So much for free compost! As soon as I got home and had dumped the compost, I drove into the garage, found a bottle of rubbing compound, which is made for removing scratches from car finishes, and began rubbing. It took about five minutes of easy work, and the scratches disappeared completely! Happiness returned!

Now I can look out back at the pile waiting to be mixed into my gardens and smile. Next time, I'll back up more carefully, and be even happier. I may even get a trailer and hitch, because now I'm really fired up about getting more compost.

Does it say something bad about me that I get excited about decomposed plant matter?