Don Smith-Weiss's blog

Inanity

2011-06-20T09:20:00.000-04:00

I attended my niece's high school graduation last night (congratulations again, Dylan!) and encountered a stranger whose motives mystified me.

During the ceremony, there was a loud air horn that sounded repeatedly. It was amusing the first couple of times, but became increasingly obnoxious as it was blown too frequently. After all the diplomas had been handed out, for example, it was appropriate and fun, but after a beautiful, gentle song sung by a group that included several graduating seniors, it just seemed out of place.

As we were leaving and I waited outside the rest rooms for my wife, my attention was caught by a man in a tank top--evidently, he didn't see the graduation as an occasion to dress up at all--walking along a nearby path spouting obscenities as if he were in a private place. Now, I have been known to swear with the best of them, but not in public and not within earshot of strangers who may be offended. I counted at least five uses of the word "f**k" or "f**kin'" in the short time I heard him speaking, and I was far enough away not to hear every word of the few sentences I overheard. Then I noticed the air horn in his hand--this was the same guy.

As luck would have it, we wound up driving out of the parking lot behind a large pickup with dual rear wheels, a string of LED lights along the rear bumper, and a polished sheen that said this was no work truck, but rather an advertisement for how macho the driver was. And yes---I recognized the driver as the same person who'd been shooting off his air gun and his mouth. Then we noticed the license plate: I POLUTE. At the same time, the truck accelerated around a corner, and huge clouds of black exhaust spurted from the long chrome pipes that grew up the rear corners of the cab.

I'd like to think that POLUTE was spelled incorrectly because this guy couldn't spell, which would be consistent with the stereotype I'd already formed in my mind, but I realized that the second L would have been more letters than would fit on the plate. Still, why would you purposely put that on your license plate? Is he proud that he pollutes? Does he not care? I assume he's annoyed by people preaching about the environment and conservation, so perhaps it's just meant as a joke. Still, with everything else I saw this person do in my short experience with him, I tend to believe that he thinks everyone else should shut up and let him do whatever he wants, and/or that he wants to provoke people.

I also noticed some lettering on his rear window. It was hard to read because the letters were white and the sun was reflecting on the glass, but I made out the words "your hybrid", so I'm guessing there was another use of some variation of "f***" and a disparaging comment on vehicles like the Prius we were driving. For a fleeting moment, I wondered if he'd seen us in his rear-view mirror and blasted the black exhaust for our benefit, but my wife correctly said that I was probably being paranoid. Still, I have to wonder why someone would drive a truck that periodically spews big clouds of pollution and then try to draw people's attention to it. What can I compare that to? A person who eats a lot wearing a T-shirt that says I TRY TO EAT SO MUCH FOOD THAT THERE WON'T BE ENOUGH FOR STARVING CHILDREN? A smoker with one that reads I SMOKE IN THE HOPES THAT YOU'LL GET CANCER FROM SECONDHAND SMOKE? A person (admittedly, like myself) who eats food shipped in from far away advertising that I DON'T EAT LOCAL BECAUSE THAT WOULD ONLY SAVE GAS AND SUPPORT THE LOCAL ECONOMY? (Yes, that last T-shirt would have to be an extra large.)

We are all guilty of doing something that isn't in the best interest of others or ourselves, but how many of us try to draw attention to it, or brag about it? We don't do these things to hurt others, or damage the environment, or waste resources--we do it because it's something we enjoy or covet, and we make the choice, consciously or unconsciously, to indulge ourselves. But to think about it and point it out to others? He even paid extra to have that license plate.

I tired to imagine a situation in which I could carry on a friendly conversation with this guy. Maybe, if I hadn't heard his air horn or breathed his exhaust or seen his license plate, we'd get along fine. But I'm guessing that it's more likely that he would soon say something so offensive that I'd feel compelled to walk away, muttering under my breath that he should go f**k himself.

Sanded in

2011-05-10T10:28:00.000-04:00

Our downstairs floors are being sanded as I write this. I am holed up in my upstairs office as the gentle roar of sanders, hammers setting nails that have popped up too high and a powerful vacuum seeps through the floor. The floors will be stained tonight and the fumes will be pretty strong, so we'll retreat to our bedroom and hope it's warm enough to have the windows open through the night. The kitchen cabinets are covered and taped off with sheets of plastic, so there's no access to food or drink. I can reheat the leftovers from last night's takeout dinner on the grill out back--I just hope the clouds outside don't open up at lunchtime.

I enjoying sitting in the parking lot of McDonald's eating my breakfast this morning. I haven't been out to breakfast in about a year. I was disappointed that the sausage patty was so much fattier than I remembered, but I like their pancakes (a "top secret" version of their recipe uses 7-Up, and I suspect that's the secret; I've made them at home and they taste pretty much the same). I usually eat a healthy breakfast, so today I ate the hash browns, biscuit with jelly and the pancakes. I figure it balances out all my healthy breakfasts so far this year.

The guys who'll replace the insulation in the basement and re-sheetrock the garage ceiling will arrive this afternoon, at which time there'll be one crew sanding and staining the first floor (the Clean floor) as another crew sends dust and fiberglass fibers floating through the basement level (the Dirty floor). It's odd to be shut out of my own living space by a Dirty crew and a Clean crew at the same time. Unfortunately, we'll need to pass through the Clean zone to go out to eat and run errands, but that's what door mats and stocking feet are for.

Everything we had on the first floor is in a big storage locker out in the driveway. It blocks the garage, so our cars sit in the driveway, and I have to be sure to move mine up to the street in the mornings before the trucks arrive so I won't be trapped.

All of this disruption will only last a week. By the weekend, I expect we'll be moving everything back in. The floors will be clean and new; the furniture will probably be rearranged a bit, so there'll definitely be a feeling of renewal. We'll have the rental company take the container away; we'll park our cars in a garage with a new ceiling; and we'll forget in a week or so how intrusive it all was.

Then, in what I hope will only be a couple of weeks, we'll put the house up for sale. If it sells quickly (as the McDonald's ads used to say: hey, it could happen!) we'll go through the whole process of moving out again in a month or so! [When that happens, though, we'll hire movers. My wife, son and I (mostly I) moved everything out this time.] If it takes a long time to sell, at least it'll be clean and finished for our own enjoyment.

I'll probably take some photos before we move everything back in; then people can see what it looks like when it's empty. I guess that counts as an unexpected bonus.

The problem with working at home at a time like this is that I can't really get away from the reality that our home is torn apart. If I want coffee, I have to drive to get it. If I'm working quietly at my desk or drawing table, listening to music, the sound of destruction and repair is still in the background.

Of course, I don't live in Japan, or in the wake of a tornado, so maybe I shouldn't complain. In a week or two, things will be back to normal for us. I guess it's not that bad when I look at it that way.

Musings

2011-04-22T17:00:00.000-04:00

I've been thinking about a bunch of sh*t today. I don't mean metaphorically; I've actually been thinking about sewage. It seems appropriate on Earth Day to ponder environmental issues.

Here in the Advanced Countries, we generate human waste in our houses and workplaces,as everyone does--but then we add lots of water and pour it into septic tanks which go to leach fields, or into public sewers which carry it many miles away to be put through a long process which destroys pathogens, cleanses the water we added, and releases it all as harmless stuff.
In the old days, they used outhouses. Not so good either. But there is a better alternative.

Composting toilets really make the most sense. They're not exciting and will probably never catch on for more than a few people, and I'm not suggesting we all install them. But think about it. Sewage is essentially biodegradable matter that really doesn't need to go anywhere. A composting toilet doesn't add extra water. It lets the natural microbes and bacteria break down the toxic components. What ultimately emerges is a moist, odor-free mulch which can be used on lawns, shrubs and other non-food crops. With a little further composting, it can be used to grow food. Even dumping it in the back yard or woods or paying someone to pick it up periodically would make more sense than shipping it far away.

We are supposed to get our furnaces and cars serviced regularly, so it would make sense to have periodic service calls set up, much as dental checkups are, so the work of maintaining the proper moisture content, temperature, etc. wouldn't fall on the homeowner. Right now, if you buy a system, you're responsible for watching over it for the rest of your life. A bit of a burden.

I imagine that, as adequate water resources are harder to come by, our grandchildren may see these systems become more prevalent. In a world where cars run on fuel cells and homes are heated and powered by solar, it doesn't seem far-fetched.

When the Rural Electrification Act of the '30s went into effect, millions of rural Americans were connected to the electrical grid. Prior to that, many farms had on-site generators to provide electricity. The total cost of the electrification of the rural U.S. was higher than setting up generators and/or windmills, with batteries, for all those country-dwellers would have been.

Of course, now the damage is done. We expect someone miles, maybe even thousands of miles away, to take care of us. The big electric, water and sewer companies or municipalities provide their products and services to us, when local service technicians could probably maintain smaller rural systems for a comparable price. Is the possibility of a site-based system failing for a day or two any worse than the four or five times a year I currently lose power because of a downed power line somewhere far away, while my own neighborhood, with its buried cables, is not the problem?

For urban and city dwellers, the larger, centralized grid makes sense, but not for Joe and Betty Corn-Farmer out in East Cow Flop, Tennessee. Ten years ago, I wouldn't have imagined 5% of cars on the road being hybrids, as they are now. So I can imagine a day when many of us stop dispatching our doodoo to a distant destination, and importing our electricity from an offsite entity.

So Happy Earth Day to you future composters!

Minor changes

2011-04-07T10:17:00.000-04:00

Funny how a little change can make a big difference. I'd noticed that some of my cartoons were more difficult to draw, in part because my hand simply isn't as steady as it was for many years. It occurred to me that I could start drawing in a larger format, so I increased the size of the original panel(s) from 13" x 4-1/4" to 15" x 4-5/8". This means that details are easier to draw smoothly. There's still a certain roughness to my line work that I accept as part of my style, but now a circle doesn't have to come out like an oval or a cursive "c".

I also bought a set of new pens, thinking that I'd expand from the .7 mil size I've been using to a 1 mil thickness, to account for the larger scale. But I realized as I began the first drawing that I'd bought roller ball pens, not the gel pens I prefer. Rollerballs, like ballpoints, tend to skip upon first touch---not an issue for regular handwriting or note-taking, but critical when one may be drawing a line that's only 1/4" long and the lines are supposed to connect. So I'm sticking with the .7 ones, at least for now. Maybe I'll go with thicker lines later.

I also ordered PhotoShop CS5, an upgrade from the Elements version of PhotoShop I've using. It will enable me to do color separations for the calendar and newspapers. (In the past, I had to send the files to my son, Dan, and have him use his computer program to convert the files to four-color for the calendar.) CS5 will also allow me to resume exploration of an unusual approach I was toying with for the strip, and which I had abandoned as too difficult with Elements.

None of this affects how you see or receive the cartoons--that'll come later--but it makes me feel that, like spring, there's a reawakening in this process of creating QlownTown. All hail Spring, bigger paper and CS5!

Statistics and questionnaires

2011-04-01T14:29:00.000-04:00

I just received an email full of fun facts, such as "A comet's tail always faces away from the sun". I was reading them in hopes of finding inspiration for cartoons. One item really caught my eye: "The Swine Flu vaccine in 1976 caused more death and illness than the disease it was intended to prevent." As I tried to grasp the meaning of this so I could turn it into a cartoon, I realized that it was a prime example of how statistics can be used to mislead us and twist our perceptions. My first reaction was, that must have been a misguided vaccination campaign...until I realized that it was still to the good. Fewer people died from the flu itself because fewer people came down with it, having been protected by the vaccine. Let's say 100,000 people avoid coming down with the flu because they were vaccinated; another 100 die from the vaccine and another 100 get sick from it. Ten die from contracting the flu. So the vaccine killed or sickened 200 people, while the flu only killed 10. But what if those 100,000 hadn't been vaccinated, and 20,000 of them got the flu, and 5,000 of them died from it? Then there would have been 5,000 flu-caused deaths and only 200 deaths due to the vaccine. I don't know the exact numbers, but I'm pretty sure this was a case of statistics implying a result that is the opposite of the truth.

I had a guy working for me years ago, and he bragged that he and his wife had never had their child vaccinated, and she'd never come down with any of the diseases the vaccines were intended to prevent. Well duh, I thought to myself---there's no polio to catch because everyone else got it taken care of. If everyone stopped getting their children vaccinated, these diseases would come back.

Now, I'm not campaigning for universal vaccination; everyone must weigh the risks and proceed accordingly. But to say that vaccines haven't helped or should never be administered is a bit unrealistic, don'tcha think?

It brings to mind the questionnaires I get in the mail occasionally, or phone polls I sometimes get sucked into because I forgot to check Caller ID first. The questions are generally phrased to make the "logical" answer the one which favors the inquiring party's position. Democrats, Republicans, Tea Partiers, Right-to-Lifers...they all do it. Instead of asking "Do you think people should use crosswalks?", for example, the wording might be, "Would you rather be forced by the government to use crosswalks or have the freedom to make your own choices about safety as a thinking adult?" What gets me is when the organization doing the asking then touts the inevitable results as supporting their own position.

Maybe misleading statistics and leading questionnaires aren't really the same, but that's how my mind goes about its business sometimes. Hey, I was just looking for a joke, and I managed to come up with a topic for a new blog, which I know I should do more often. It's Friday. It's cloudy. So is my head. Did you know that most people who write a blog on an overcast day tend to be less coherent in their writing? No? Well, I'm putting together a questionnaire that will prove it...

Comic Con

2011-03-21T13:05:00.000-04:00

I sent in my bio and photo today for the New England Comic Con, to be held at the Hynes auditorium in Boston on September 17th & 18th, 2011.

For those who may not know, a comic con is a convention at which artists, cartoonists, Star Trek cast members and other celebrities appear. I'll have a table, at which will be T shirts, prints of cartoons, original artwork from the strips, and whatever else I can come in with to make a buck and amuse passersby. This is new to me--I've been to one convention for a couple of hours, but hosting a table and coming up with a display is uncharted territory for me. Still, I'm looking forward to it. It'll get me out of my office, and I'll get to meet a lot of other artists.

My inner geek is looking forward to maybe meeting Walter Koenig (Star Trek),
and my inner pig is looking forward to meeting Gena Lee Nolin (Baywatch). I must admit, however, that I've seen all the Star Trek episodes, but only one or two Baywatches. I may do a cartoon about each of them so I can have them sign the artwork. I've done a couple based on Star Trek already; clowns and Baywatch could make an unlikely but amusing combo. My first thought is to do something with slow motion, but what that will involve is still up in the air--so to speak.

I wound up committing to this because I'm in the cast of a production of Guys and Dolls, and another cast member, Don Higgins, set it up. [He draws a web comic called Dark Magic and Donuts. I have great respect for his work because it's a creative, entertaining series and because he, like myself, is not above stooping to the occasional flatulence joke.] So this particular production features two cast members named Don who both do online comic strips and who both drive VWs. I was hoping he would be wealthy, because then I, by extension, would also probably be wealthy---but alas, neither of us is.

In other news: I just checked the stats on the QlownTown website and was happy to see that visitorship (my own new word) is up. That's good to see. I'm hoping that the exposure on the ComicCon site will help bring even more people to the site. QlownTown recently passed the two-year mark, meaning I've done...well, I don't know how many. If I were still doing seven days a week, I'd know it was 730--365 a year--but since I cut back to just weekdays last June, the number is lower. Let's see: two days off per week; say, fifty Saturdays and Sundays in 2010, another twenty or so this year. So: 730 - 70 = 660. That's still a lot of clowns.

I've planned every strip through May and partway into June, and every week I schedule a Saturday and a Sunday cartoon, but then decide towards the end of the week to save them for later. I make no promises, but at some point in the future, we'll return to seven days a week. I hope that by the time I do the convention in Boston, there'll be a new QlownTown every day and they'll be appearing in at least a few newspapers.

By that time, I also expect to be living in a new house and looking out at a verdant landscape. However, looking out the window at the snow falling heavily today, I feel more confident that the new house will happen; I'm not so sure about the verdant part.
But, clear roads or snowy, I'll be trekking down to Boston in September to ply my wares. Should be fun.
(I just realized the "trek" pun I made after I'd typed it. Sorry. But I'm leaving it in.)

A few words in defense of meteorologists

2011-02-08T11:22:00.000-05:00

If you live, oh, say, anywhere, you've probably experienced some crappy weather lately. Here in New England, we've had tons of snow through the last month. We had an "open" Christmas (no snow), but a day or two later it was truly a winter wonderland.

Through all this, I haven't heard anyone say how well the weather forecasters have done. They've predicted almost everything very accurately. They make projections a whole week ahead, and it seems that if it changes, they catch it when there are still a few days to go. For example, they were predicting last Thursday that we'd get a snowstorm this Thursday. Yesterday--still three days ahead of the expected storm--they corrected their prediction. That's pretty good forecasting, all things considered.

I read a few years ago that they're generally right about 85% of the time. For something as changeable as the weather (especially around here), I think that's a damn good average. They don't control the weather, you know...at least I hope you do. (If you didn't know that, then here's some more news: if you send me $1,000, you'll have good luck for a year. Really.) People make their plans, their schedules; build their lives around what the weather folks say will happen; then blame them when something different occurs. I guess it's natural to want to fault someone else when your plans get messed up, but remember that 85% average the next time you're mad about shoveling your driveway or getting wet in the rain.

So there's my defense of meteor-ologists. Next time, I'll defend doctors, lawyers, insurance agents and car salespeople. Of course, when they--or most of us--screw up, it's our own fault.

Muh

2011-02-04T11:19:00.000-05:00

I just found a great new site. It's a store, actually. It's called muh stuff, and features clothing and merchandise with the "muh" label on it. It's a parody of designer clothing, and a joke in itself. If someone asks "What's that?" when they see the logo, you're supposed to say "It's muh shirt" or "It's muh mug" or whatever you're wearing/holding/displaying with the logo on it. There are even stickers so you can label other stuff as your own: "muh house", "muh motorcycle", maybe "muh dish" if you bring a casserole to a party or potluck. There are even "muh" underpants and "muh" boxers.

You can also buy stuff through the main Marketplace at CafePress, but you'll pay higher prices there.

I think this is a great opportunity to start a craze and lampoon overpriced logo merchandise. The word is Muh. Spread the word!

Random thoughts

2011-01-27T11:27:00.000-05:00

...I mean even more random than usual.

I deleted the items in my "Trash" folder in my e-mail program. There were about twenty--not a lot--and I know they take up very little space on the hard drive. It's just nice to be rid of them completely, to not even see them if I decide to check the folder. It's sort of like taking out the trash, only it doesn't contribute to pollution or climate change and I don't need to put on snow pants and boots to do it.

Speaking of climate change, why do people take all the snow we're having as proof that there's no global warming, when in fact the correct term is climate change? Global warming occurs some of the time and is only part of the overall change; sometimes it's heavier snow or wind than in the past. Or more hurricanes. Or mosquitoes.

Speaking of snow, we just had the third or fourth or fifth major snowstorm this month, and I still marvel at how beautiful it is. Maybe it's because I work from home, and after I've cleared the driveway for my wife with my easy-to-use snow blower, I can go inside and avoid dealing with slippery roads, traffic and the cold.

Dilbert did a joke today with the punchline "sewer side mission", but then defused the potential groan about the pun by adding another punchline. This is an effective device to dilute a pun (even though I believe a good pun is a clever thing and should be respected; embraced, even). I probably should have done this one my Abominable Snowman cartoon, although I already had a lot of words in there.

Why is it that when I look through the bunches of coupons that come in the paper, I hardly ever see anything that is of any use to me? I read about these coupon clippers who save hundreds of dollars a week, but I have to believe most of them are saving, say, a buck on a major name brand when the store brand is just as good and already costs two bucks less. Or they're buying ultra-processed Pillsbury Corn Syrup and Guar Gum biscuits when I can make better ones at home for a lot less. I suppose if you already cook with a lot of processed food, there are real savings, but when I can save a quarter or so each on a big box of some product, but only if I buy three, and it will take me a year to use them up, it doesn't seem worth it. My idea of a coupon is 50% off flour or sugar or milk. Unfortunately, we use coupons so seldom that when I do send a coupon along to the grocery store with my wife (she usually does the shopping; she claims I'm an impulse buyer) it tends to get forgotten. Now that's like throwing a dollar away. Too bad the manufacturers don't just lower the price for everyone...but of course they couldn't afford to: it's the extra effort that earns some people the discount.

Rebates are even worse. I bought a new cell phone, and to get the $50 back, I had to send the original receipt, the side panel from the box, a filled-out form, and ten of my favorite shirts to get the rebate. God forbid it gets lost in the mail. Then four months later I get a generic-looking check and wonder what it's for. If I buy a phone at a Verizon store and it's a rebate from Verizon, why can't they just give it to me at the Verizon checkout counter when I pay Verizon? Once, the store clerk explained it to me incorrectly, and by the time I realized what I had to do to get the rebate, they told me it was too late and they were sorry. And Verizon is the top-rated wireless provider!

Why is it more fun to come up with cartoon ideas than it is to draw them? Actually, I enjoy the drawing, too, but coming up with the initial concept is the best part. Maybe it's because I can see it in my mind, and making the image available to everyone else is just work. The penciling is a lot of fun; the inking, scanning and cleaning up are less so. Then the coloring is fun again. I guess it's the same as when I was a kid: it's fun to make up stuff and color in pictures.

Now it's time to go work out in the gym. We'll see how I like the weather after that.

Furniture

2011-01-26T11:13:00.000-05:00

I've been stripping an old commode the last couple of days. No, not a toilet--a cabinet with a lift-up lid that used to be used to store a water pitcher, a chamber pot, etc.) I found a non-caustic stripper, Smart Strip, that works well. I covered it with plastic wrap, even though it says you don't need to. This kept it wet for almost a day, at which point I peeled it off and scraped off the loosened paint. I'm letting the goop dry up, after which I'll bag it and dispose of it as trash in a sealed bag. I don't think there's any toxic material in it--if any of the paint was lead, the bagging up will take care of environmental concerns.

After the first coat had softened the top layers of paint, a layer of graining was revealed: the pine had been given an oak-look faux woodgrain, with some decorative swirls applied over that. I considered carefully stripping the remainder of the top layers--which, by the way, included bright turquoise and an even brighter orange under the most recent off-white layer!--and preserving the graining. If it were a more valuable, historically-significant piece, I probably would have, but these are pretty common, and I prefer the charm of the pine to the more formal oak look. So I reapplied the stripper, waited overnight, and scraped off the faux finish. But it reminded me of some Shaker chairs we have.

My great-aunt and -uncle lived in Alfred, Maine, right down the street from an old Shaker community, and had purchased three chairs from there when the community was sold off due to declining membership. The chairs had the original woven cotton tape, but had been painted white at some point. My father had removed the paint for them using a scraper rather than a liquid stripper...a wise decision, since they're much more valuable now with their original finish. I've known for years he'd used the scraper, but never asked why. He could have removed the cotton tape, used a liquid stripper, and re-woven the seats using the original material, if they wanted to preserve the weaving. Of course, that would've removed the original stain as well. Did they know the original finish made them more valuable? Did they just want to preserve it for the sake of historical accuracy? Was the scraping easier than removing and reweaving the tape to chemically strip the wood? Did they just like the look of it?

Suddenly, I wanted to ask my dad about this. I've always felt pretty settled regarding my father's passing. We had no unresolved issues when he died, and in the ensuing years, I've had only fond memories with no lingering questions. But suddenly, twenty-odd years later, I just wanted to talk to him. It wasn't a big thing, and I didn't suffer pangs of regret or longing. I just wanted to ask Dad about something he did that was similar to what I was doing. He had made a decision, as I had, on how to refinish something. We never did any projects like this together, and now I wanted to trade thoughts. All this time had passed, and yet for a moment I forgot that he isn't here anymore.

Once we lose people, we lose the opportunity to learn from them directly. We can no longer ask questions when we wonder what it was like to live through a World War or the depression, or how our parents fell in love. Or why they refinished furniture the way they did.

We once gave my mother a book in which a series of questions were asked about her youth, what it was like growing up, the circumstances of her marriage, her children's births, and on and on. She was supposed to write in her answers, and we'd ultimately have a book that chronicled experiences in her life we might not otherwise know. It was a gift for her--we figured she'd enjoy hours recalling the highlights and day-to-day goings-on in her life--but it was to be just as much a gift for us. When she died last year, never having filled in anything, we thought of giving it to my father-in-law. We mentioned it, but he didn't seem interested. Now I'm thinking I should keep it and start writing in answers about my life. If someone gives me a book like this when I'm old, I may not be interested then, either--and eventually my kids and their descendants may have questions that the book could have answered. Not on how or why to refinish furniture, of course, but a little more insight into who preceded them on the family tree.

A journal would accomplish the same thing, but at least this "memories" book provides a structured start. I think I'll try to dig out that book this weekend. Maybe it'll ask me to describe workshop projects.

Hiding stains

2011-01-19T11:52:00.001-05:00

I saw a cartoon today ("Tiger") in which a boy tells his brother that their mother can get the stain out of his tie, which he concedes is better than his idea of dipping his whole tie in sauce to make the stain less noticeable. This was funny, but I've joked about this for years, and finally decided one day last summer that it wasn't all that bad an idea. If you wanted your most comfortable red shirt with a black stain on it to look good, mightn't it make sense to consider dyeing it black?

We had a lamp with a pink shade that had gotten stained by splashes of oil at some point. I wanted to sell it and knew that the shade would be a problem, but it wasn't worth enough to buy a new shade. So I sprayed the shade lightly with some WD40 oil. After an hour or so, it had soaked in evenly and the shade was once again all one color. It may have been a little darker than it was originally, but that didn't matter. It looked fine.

I had a tie that have been stained over time, and tried staining it with a little oil, but the silk didn't take as kindly to the oil as the shade did, and I just threw it out. This method doesn't always work. But if the item is worth saving, keep it in mind.

This gives me an idea for another item repair; well, upgrade, actually. I have a Santa tie that I received many Christmases ago that used to play carols if you squeezed the bottom end. (Unfortunately, it played them for a minute or two, long enough for the novelty to wear off...but for the first few seconds, it was a source of great amusement for everyone for whom I played it.) The battery wore out several years ago, and I still wear it, but I'm always reminded that it used to play music, and I've wanted to restore it.

Well, I have a set of tiny LED lights that flash when you squeeze an attached button. They came in a card I received several years ago, and I saved them, figuring they'd be good for something some day. We went to a contest last month in which a bunch of couples each decorated a gingerbread house. We were invited to bring whatever we wanted to add to dress up our houses, and I thought of those lights. I stuck them behind the gingerbread tree that sat in the "yard" of the little house, and it looked pretty cool.

Now, I think I'm going to stick these lights into the lining of the Santa tie. They're pretty bright, and I think they'll shine through the silk. Actually, I have a tie with a Christmas tree on it, and maybe I'll set them in behind the tree on that tie instead. That'd look really flashy (forgive the pun).

Of course, the batteries may die on the flashing lights by next Christmas, so I guess I'll just tape them to the back of that tie, and if they're still functioning next November, I'll install them then. Or, if I think of it, maybe I can get a fireworks tie for the Fourth of July and put them in that one.

I love when I come up with an idea like this, because my wife thinks I hang onto much too much stuff "just in case I need it someday", and this is one case of that habit actually paying off. Now if I could just find a use for all the random sized pieces of plywood, pine, maple, MDF and other building leftovers that are in my workshop. I saw a lamp made of 3/4" x 3/4" strips of miscellaneous materials glued into panels that looked really interesting, but that's a lot of cutting and gluing. Maybe I'll use the pieces to build a set of shelves to hold all the other "just in case" stuff.

Pastor

2011-01-14T11:31:00.000-05:00

Someone sent me a link to the youTube video of the pastor of the infamous Westboro Baptist Church ranting that the Arizona shootings were God's way of punishing us for our "sins". I won't put the link here; you can find it easily enough yourself. My point is that I decided to watch it, much the way one looks at a horrible accident even though one wants to look away.

I used a technique I learned years ago, at mime school, of all places. I don't recall why we got around to discussing watching TV commercials, but Tony Montaro, the brilliant teacher and mime, told us that when he watched commercials, he would just let himself "zone out", and struck a blank--and very funny--facial expression. The idea, he said, was that you could let all the frantic and/or subversive messages of the ad wash over you and just ignore them. (This, I should point out, was in the days before remotes and DVR's, when one could only avoid a commercial by getting up, going over to the TV, and turning the sound or TV off--or by leaving the room.)

So I turned on the reverend's video and watched blankly. As I felt the anger begin to rise, I told myself that he was beneath contempt and not worth the effort...and, lo and behold, I felt myself relax. I watched the whole thing, heard all the words, marveled at the utter lack of compassion, awareness and Biblical understanding of this man, but I was able to avoid the overwhelming outrage that I might normally feel.

People on all sides of the issues generally seem to feel that political dialogue in America has become largely impolite and impolitic. Perhaps if many of our elected officials employed what I'm calling the Montaro Zone-Out Technique when they see or hear opposing views, they might tender their responses more rationally. I can picture a representative or senator listening to a fellow member of Congress whose views are directly opposite his or her own, and letting a blank expression wash over his or her face. It could make for great TV, although the Technique might occasionally be mistaken for dozing off or daydreaming. Then, as the life returned to the eyes, the measured response would be based on a sifting of the essence of the opponent's statements, not having allowed oneself to get sucked into the emotional reaction that might normally muddy the debate.

Interesting how tragedies beget waves of civility. In the aftermath of 9/11, football commentators consciously stopped using terms like "slaughter," "killing" and "decimation." Crime dropped sharply in NYC, and other places as well, at least for a while. Regardless of what did or didn't cause the shooter to do this, we can use it as a reminder to back off. Someone can disagree with you without being a liar; someone can interpret information differently without being a villain.

Part Two

2011-01-11T11:34:00.002-05:00

...So I get back home from the emergency room and finish tying down the load on the trailer. The same bungee actually slipped again--but this time I was being careful to keep my face out of the way! I realized that with three plastic hooks placed under the fender, one of them was slipping over the other two and coming loose, so I hooked it elsewhere. The rest of the tying down proceeded without incident.

I pulled the trailer out of the garage (I had decided to do the loading in the relative warmth inside) and hooked it onto the car. I made sure the chains and wiring were connected: the day was not going to get worse, I swore.

The whole fifteen-minute trip to the transfer station, I kept checking the rear-view mirror to make sure nothing shifted. At the station, I unloaded the recyclables, then drove around to the dumping area and threw in the trash. So far, so good. I checked all the bungees, and everything seemed firmly attached. I headed off to the storage area, still planning to cartoon when I got home. (As it would turn out, there would be no cartooning till Monday.)

Ten minutes later, I was two thirds of the way there, when I looked in the rear-view and saw that some of the tire were missing! I immediately pulled over, and a man in a van pulled up behind me. "You lost two of your tires," he said. They're both over there," he said, pointing to some apartment buildings nearby. They almost hit me, but we were both lucky!" I apologized and thanked him, and went over to get the tire I could see. The other one was nowhere in sight, so I turned around to go back and try to find the two tires that were still missing--and the two crates of Christmas stuff that I thought had also fallen off. I pulled over to get the big aluminum tray we put under our Christmas tree stand in case of leaks, which was sitting in the middle of the four lane road, only slightly banged up from the fall. By now it was about 3:30 PM, so it was dark enough that some people had their lights on and others didn't. I grabbed the tray and was about to run back across the road to my car because the car that was approaching in the lane I'd have to cross was signaling that he was going to turn before he got to me. Nope! He had one light out and was using his parking lights instead of headlights, but proceeded full speed ahead in my direction. Luckily, I realized this in time and stopped to let him drive by. As I got in the car, I thought, This is another reason you should never use your parking lights as headlights! If it's dark enough to have your lights on, use your damn headlights! You're not parking when you're driving forty miles an hour, so don't use your parking lights when driving. This has been taught in driving school for at least forty years, so everyone should know it by now! But I digress.

Before I pulled out, another guy stopped and said, "I saw your other tire fall off back by CVS." I thanked him and thought, Okay, if no one stops and steals that tire, I'll just be down one tire. Which would mean in the spring, I'd still have to pay for one wheel (probably at least $150 used, if I could find one used) and two tires--you know they're going to say I should buy two matching tires, not just replace one and have the other be a year older than the new one; they wouldn't wear or ride evenly!

I found the tire where he'd said it was. I climbed the fence between the road and the parking lot where I pulled in and retrieved it, tying it and everything else down VERY securely, then drove all the way back to the transfer station, checking the sides of the road as I drove.

The gate was closed. I asked the two men there, about to close up for the night, if they'd seen a tire or plastic crate in the lot. No, they said, and no one had turned anything in. So I headed back to where I'd found the first tire, checking both sides of the road again for tires and crates--or, worse, a splash of beloved Christmas heirlooms scattered across the landscape.

I tried to remember what might have been in the missing crates. The Hallmark house ornaments that my mother had given me each Christmas, one a year, for twenty-five years? The "NOEL" ceramic candle holders that belonged to my wife's grandmother? The little clay versions of our dogs and cat (all now deceased) that I made when the kids were little for them to hang on the tree?

It then occurred to me that maybe the load had shifted forward on the trailer. It had all been on the rear half of the bed, but in my panic, I hadn't counted how many plastic crates were still on the trailer; I just saw the missing tires and assumed the two crates that had been at the back of the trailer under them were gone, too. But maybe there were still six.

This was a small consolation, although by this point I assumed that, the way things had been going, they were probably all gone. And by now it was getting late, and darker, and I needed to get to the storage area. No time to pull over and check. Depressed over the loss of whatever was lost, I pulled into the apartment complex to take one last look...and there it was on the side of one of the streets: the fourth tire! I pulled over and counted the crates: six! No Christmas items had been harmed in the making of this disaster. I scooped up the tire and rim (I would've hugged it, but someone might've seen me), tied it down with lots of extra, caaarrrefully placed bungees, and drove to the storage unit. Everything was quickly unloaded without incident. I looked for the long brush/scrapers we keep in our cars to dust off snow--they'd been missing and I thought I probably put them in storage--but by then it was too dark to see into the recesses of the stuff, so I resolved to look for the scrapers again at home.

I'd been on a diet all week, with the plan that I was allowed to go off the diet, if I so chose, on the weekend. Having lost several pounds already and feeling more like my pre-holidays self, weight-wise, I had decided earlier in the day that maybe I'd ease up a bit but not pig out over the weekend. But as I headed home with an empty trailer, a sore cheek and dusty clothes, I decided that The Diet Was Off.

We went out to dinner that night, and I had a martini; hot bread dipped in herbed olive oil; fried rice balls stuffed with sausage, cheese and other good stuff and served with a thick tomato sauce; veal with butternut squash ravioli in a cream sauce*; and a dessert of gelato with baklava crumbled into it.

And I didn't regret it at all.**

*I would usually have eaten half of the entree and taken the other half home for later...but not this time. This time I ate the whole thing.
**Except the guilt about eating veal.

Cockeyed optimism

2011-01-10T11:58:00.000-05:00

What a Friday I had last week! I had finished my cartoons for the week, and they were forecasting that a Nor'easter would blow in later in the day, so I decided to do a few errands before coming back home and getting ahead on next week's QlownTown. I loaded the rear half of my trailer with six plastic crates full of Christmas paraphernalia and four wheel-mounted summer tires for one of our cars, to be dropped off at the off-site storage area we're renting. The front half held the accumulated trash and recyclables from around Christmas and New Year's.

I tied down the Christmas crates and tires with a big bungee "net" and was securing the load on the front half when it happened. A bungee hook which I thought was firmly locked under the fender of the trailer popped loose, whapping me in the cheek. I immediately tasted blood, realized what had happened, and imagined the hook may have caught my cheek and ripped it open. I touched my cheek and saw blood all over my hand, which only added to my concern. Holding my cheek to stay the flow of blood, I ran upstairs to check things out in the mirror.

I confess here that I hit myself in the eye with a bungee years ago, which resulted in my having to stay indoors in the dark for two weeks with my pupils dilated. Fortunately, there was no lasting damage, and I had since assumed that I was therefore safe from bungee injuries, because what are the chances of anyone who's careful and seldom uses bungees being hit by one twice in a lifetime? Now we know: in my case, 100 percent.

Trying not to panic, I looked in the bathroom mirror and saw a small split under the end of my mustache. The first sign of my cockeyed optimism appeared then: at least the scar wouldn't show very much, I thought. I felt around as much as I could without really hurting myself, and decided that the cut on the outside was separate from the one inside my mouth. Again, good news, I reasoned. Two shallow cuts seemed less disgusting than a puncture through the side of my face.

I called the doctor's office, and was told that for facial stitches, they preferred I go to the emergency room. Great, I thought. A higher co-pay than an office visit.

I waited at the emergency room for about a half hour to 45 minutes, I'd guess. I'd brought an ice pack, so there was no real swelling, and if I held it gingerly, the coolness provided more relief than the slight pressure of the pack caused pain. I was finally ushered in and informed by the doctor that indeed I would need three stitches on the outside--but none inside. She warned me that the Novocaine would burn, and I thought of telling her that my dentist told me years ago that the pain of a Novocaine shot is from the pressure of injecting it too quickly, and that in fact shots never hurt at my dentist's; but I figured, here's a woman who's about to sew up my face: do not do anything that might annoy her. So the shot burned, and it tasted terrible, but then my face went numb and everything was better.

She covered my face with towels, which short-circuited my plan to count dots in the ceiling tiles or read the posters on the walls to distract me from what was happening. There was still a lot to do that day, and I knew it would include dealing with bungee cords when I got home; but I decided to try to relax and try to use this as time to rest. She probed the site a little more and informed me that the hook had gone through the cheek, so I would need a stitch on the inside as well, but I had already been repulsed at that thought when it first happened, so the news that there was indeed a Hole in My Cheek wasn't a big deal. The inside stitch would dissolve on its own, so I didn't need to look forward to someone dragging a thread out of the sensitive inside of my cheek later. Again, a little more cockeyed optimism.

As it turned out, she didn't even trim my mustache. She used blue thread, so she can see what are whiskers and what are stitches when she removes them later this week, but they are pretty much hidden in my 'stache, so I don't need to recap the whole story for anyone unless I choose to. You can see from the length of this blog why I would be happy that I don't have to repeat the tale over and over.

As I left the hospital, I remembered that my sister-in-law Gaila had told me just a couple of weeks ago that if you pay directly, you may pay less than if you wait to be billed the standard co-pay by your insurance company. I turned around, went back in and asked about this, and was told that if I paid now, my co-pay would be $200, versus $250 as the standard co-pay. I charged it, which also gave me points on my credit card: a twenty-cent bonus, and another chance for optimism in the face (hee hee) of a lousy situation.

Walking out to my car, I thought how great it was that I saved $50 by asking. Then I thought, that's what a true cockeyed optimist would think. And then I laughed at what an optimist I am to be amused at how optimistic I was being.

Fortunately, there's been no swelling, and, as long as I remember to take a pain reliever regularly, no real pain. I haven't flossed for a few days--don't tell my dental hygienist!--but the only real inconvenience has been trying to remember not to get too close to the cut when I'm shaving.

And--ever the optimist--I did get an interesting story out of the whole fiasco.

Tomorrow, I'll tell you about the trip to the transfer station and storage building. Oh yeah--the day's woes weren't over yet.

Recipe

2011-01-06T14:38:00.000-05:00

I've had several requests to print the Spiced Pork Tenderloin recipe I mentioned on my Facebook page, so I'm running it here. I've been more or less following Phase 1 of the South Beach diet this week, which allows lean meats but does not allow many carbs. (I hate that word; it's such a cliche, but it's less unwieldy than "carbohydrates".) There's no prohibition on seasoning, however, so I dug out this very flavorful recipe. I usually marinate pork loin, because it can be pretty bland if the seasoning just sits on the surface, but this seemed to infuse the whole cut, despite being rubbed on just before cooking.

This, by the way, is a great way to diet, in my opinion: use plenty of seasoning if the food you're limited to will be bland. Herbs and spices add few if any calories, and, unless you prefer mild or unadorned food, a lot of character and flavor. We had a low-cal arugula salad last night that I'll do again, even when I'm back to eating in my usual, somewhat undisciplined way. It was seasoned with capers and vinegar. It called for anchovies, but we were out, so I figured some capers would provide a similar savory punch. I notice that as I've been dieting, I put more effort into making the food interesting and exciting. It's sort of a reward for the sacrifice.

Anyway, here is the recipe for Spiced Pork Tenderloin with Balsamic Pearl Onions:

1 T. minced fresh rosemary (or about 2 tsp. dried)
2 tsp. ground fennel seed
2 tsp. brown sugar (I used half the amounts of Splenda and it tasted fine.)
1-1/2 tsp. dried thyme
1-1/2 tsp. ground cumin
1-1/2 tsp. salt
1/2 tsp. pepper
pinch of ground cloves
2 pork tenderloins, 1-1/4 to 1-1/2 lbs. each

Combine dry above ingredients in a small bowl. Rub each tenderloin all over with 1 T. oil and half of the rosemary spice mixture.

Heat oven to 450F with rack in center. Heat 2 tsp. oil on medium-high heat till shimmering (or, in my kitchen, before it burns!). Add the loins, reduce heat to medium, and cook about 6 minutes till well-browned, turning 3 or 4 times. Transfer to roasting pan and roast till thickest part measures 135 to 138F, 12 to 17 minutes. Take out, cover with foil, and let sit till temp is 145-150F.

2 tsp. oil
1-2 large red onions, sliced
1 T. fresh rosemary
2 T. brown sugar
1/3 C. low sodium chicken broth
3 T. balsamic vinegar
1 T. unsalted butter (optional)

While pork roasts, return skillet to medium heat, add 2 tsp. oil, and add onions. Cook till dry (frozen) or soft (fresh) and browned, about 8 minutes, stirring to break up slices. Add 1 T. rosemary, 2 T. brown sugar, chicken broth and vinegar, stir, increase heat to high. Cook, stirring occasionally until onions are tender and liquid has reduced to a glaze, about 5 minutes. Add butter (if using--I didn't) and stir to coat onions; season to taste with salt and pepper (again, optional; I didn't add salt). Slice pork thinly; serve with the onions.

I must give credit for this recipe to the Boston Globe magazine. I made a couple of small changes, but this is basically their recipe. Enjoy.

Clean water

2010-12-15T10:13:00.002-05:00

I once wrote a song called "Water", which included the line "you are the water in my life," water being the one essential need of all people and, therefore, a fitting metaphor for how important the "you" to whom the song was supposedly being sung was. I thought of it this morning as I was cleaning my office and came across a flyer I was given.

When I spoke at my local Rotary a couple of months ago, they made a donation in my name to Pure Water for the World, a non-profit organization dedicated to providing, well, just what its name says. They supply filtration systems in needy areas. 1.8 billion people lack clean drinking water, and 2.2 million die each year from waterborne illnesses. In Honduras alone, fifty thousand children under 12 die each year from diseases that result from drinking contaminated water. We all know we're not supposed to drink the local water in certain areas because our bodies may not be immune to the pollutants in it; imagine living where the locals shouldn't drink the local water!

Rotary and other groups donate to this organization, which installs filtration systems in homes and villages. Polluted water is poured into the system, flows through layers of gravel and sand, and comes out clean! They currently use concrete holding tanks, which are of course very heavy and difficult to get into some remote regions, but they're researching the use of plastic components instead. This is important work.

I hadn't expected to be paid for speaking, but I was thrilled that Rotary chose to make that donation. It was a nice way of paying it forward: I spoke for free, and the club gave money to a worthy cause. I didn't really look at the brochure till just this morning, but now I'm even prouder.

All of which leads me to suggest that, especially at this time of celebration and good cheer, you make a donation of time and/or money to a worthy cause. Huge amounts of money go to wars, political campaigns and to frivolous purchases. Take a moment to give to something that no one can complain about. (Okay, no one can justifiably complain about. There'll always be someone criticizing.)

Be the water in someone's life.

Imagine

2010-12-08T13:01:00.001-05:00

It's the thirtieth anniversary of John Lennon's death. (Some call it an assassination, but that is defined as an attack for political or religious reasons. This was just to impress a woman.) At the time, Jane Fonda said, "They're killing the poets now." It was a time full of hyperbole along those lines. A horrible but random act against someone that many people respected and/or loved--nothing more--but people wanted it to have some meaning. Well, it did--because it reminded people of the positives in his life, and maybe made people a little kinder as a result. Even today, people will recall the date and think about peace and kindness.

I read an article recently that pointed out that Lennon wasn't the gung-ho pacifist we often recall. When Brian Epstein managed the Beatles, he encouraged them to avoid political statements, and Lennon obeyed for the most part. He was actually quite the hooligan (now there's an old word) when he was young, was occasionally violent to his first wife, ignored his first son, Julian, for many years, and became an outspoken pacifist when it was trendy to do so. "Imagine" was written by a multimillionaire who lived a cushy existence ("Imagine no possessions"). The album before, he had called his fans "peasants". And after a couple of years as an outspoken peacenik, he retreated from the public eye for years.

This is not to say that his activism wasn't heartfelt...just that it wasn't the sum total of his life. Yet we celebrate that part...and that's okay. He was flawed, like the rest of us, but if he serves as a symbol, so be it. My feelings that day thirty years ago didn't harp on any hypocrisy in his life. I was telling myself that all you need is love...and trying to believe it.

I was remembering the songs---when they played "In My Life" on the radio that day, I cried. I discovered the Beatles because the first girl I ever had a crush on, in fifth grade, loved the Beatles, and I drew a cartoon of them to impress her, and became a "fan" because she was. But "She Loves You" blew me away, and I was a True Fan ever thereafter. "Strawberry Fields Forever" still moves me. "I Am the Walrus" has so many layers, it's like a little five-minute concerto. And I love that he used a slamming door as percussion on "Give Peace A Chance".

All the radio stations were playing his solo and Beatles music all day on December 8, 1980. It was what I frequently played on my stereo anyway, but it meant a lot more because millions of people were listening with me. And in that process, a sense of togetherness and a wish for a non-violent world coalesced, if only for a few days. It happens on a smaller scale every year at this time.

And isn't it nice that, the day after we mourn the bombing of Pearl Harbor, we recall the life of a man who, at least for a few years, sang about the idea that there might someday be a world without war? Sure, it's simplistic. And unlikely.

But at least once a year, it's nice that we stop to imagine.

Elizabeth Shaw

2010-12-01T16:13:00.000-05:00

One of the teachers from my sixth and seventh grade years--and I think the fifth, too--passed away last month. I hadn't heard from or spoken to her since I moved on to junior high---she wasn't the type I would have tried to contact. She was pretty serious, never affectionate, and could even be mean sometimes: she once made fun of a student's big feet, and another time, when we were filling out personal information forms in class and I didn't know the city of my birth, she abruptly sent me outside in the snow to go around the building to the principal's office (I went to a very small, old school) to call home and find out from my mother. She could be short with her students, and never radiated the warmth that one recalls in one's most fondly remembered teachers. But she could teach. And she taught me love and respect for the English language.

She would drill the rules of English grammar into our heads until we understood them. She once procured booklets with all the basic rules of English for us all to take home---a book that I saved and referred to for years, and which I wish I still had today. (I doubt I'd use words like "procured" if not for her positive influence.) She instilled in me a clear understanding of the difference between their, they're, and there; of when to use it's rather than its; that when you create a possessive form of a plural word ending in s, such as members, you don't add a second s---"the members' votes were counted" would be the proper form. There are still words and rules I have trouble with: I generally have to rely on Spell Check to confirm or correct the spelling of occasion or broccoli, and I always have to set aside time when confronted with whether I should write "if it were to have..." or "if it was to have...". But those are my own personal mental blocks---not a failure on her part.

As a matter of fact, just starting that last sentence with "But", I was aware that, technically, it should have been part of the previous sentence, because Mrs. Shaw taught me that.

I understand that language evolves, but it took me years to accept "impact" as a verb because I'd learned it was only proper to use it as a noun. One can reasonably play with grammar only if one understands the basic rules. Certainly, "woe is I" is awkward, albeit correct---but a lot of people never learned, or were never taught well enough to remember, that "Woe is me" is perfectly acceptable as a colloquialism, but it isn't proper grammar. I wrote a song with the line "You told me you'd take me and never forsake me for anyone cuter than I," and I like that I used the proper form when "me" would be the more common choice. Mrs. Shaw's influence.

Unfortunately, it wasn't until I reached high school that I realized just how much I valued what she'd taught me...and I should have written her then to say thank you, but I didn't. I went to college as an English major my first year, and she deserves a large part of the credit for that. I should have written to her in college---I certainly knew by then that she had molded at least the writing and speaking portion of my brain well---but I didn't. And when I began writing a comic strip and a blog, it would have been a good time to track her down and tell her how I was using the tools she'd given me as a child. Why didn't I think of it then?

A classmate from those elementary school years recently commented on a grammatical reference I made on Facebook with the words "Mrs. Shaw would remember"; shortly thereafter, another former schoolmate informed me that she had passed away. So I went to Google and typed in her name--I thought it was Elizabeth, but I'd only thought of her as "Mrs. Shaw" all my life, so I wasn't sure I'd find her--but her name came up, and I read the obituary online. There was a link to send condolences to the family, so I clicked it and left a few comments on what she had meant to me.

She evidently had a happy retirement. She was in a quilting club in Maine---an activity that I wouldn't have imagined the stern woman I knew participating in. (Yes, I know I shouldn't end a sentence with a proposition.) She had a husband and children who loved her. I'm glad. She scared me sometimes, but she had a very positive and lasting impact on my life. And she loved teaching, which says to me that maybe she loved her students, too.

So if you're listening, Mrs. Shaw: thank you.

Sticky Situation

2010-11-29T13:16:00.000-05:00

I bought some red fiberglass rods at Home Depot yesterday to place at the edges of our lawn, so the snow plow will know how far over to plow. I then spent five or six minutes scraping the price tags off the rods. Why?

Because some dolt stuck them near the top. These are poles that are made to be buried at the base, and are meant to be a little more attractive than a stick stuck in the ground---therefore, it's reasonable to assume that people won't want a price sticker showing. So if the bottom end is made to be buried, shouldn't the label go there? Then no one would have to scrape it off.

This happened to me years ago with some drip edges I bought for the roof of a house I was building. The edges would show, and I planned to paint them to match the house. Of course, a price tag that was painted over would ultimately peel off, so I had to scrape the tags which, again, had been stuck on the exposed edges--not the part that would be covered by shingles.

I've also seen trim moldings that have the sticker on the finished face, light bulbs that have one on the bulb itself, and many other products where the clerk or associate applying the labels has stuck them in the worst possible place.

Now, you might say that the people doing this are just sort of slogging along, in a job they'd rather not have for a wage that doesn't seem worth any effort. But, as the tired old saying goes, if you're going to do something, do it right.

I worked as a busboy years ago, and teamed up with a guy named Guy (true!). Guy didn't like to work and I didn't like to sit around, so we decided he'd be the manager of the dining room we worked in (there were multiple rooms in this restaurant) and I'd be the "worker". He'd keep track of which tables were about to leave, and I'd get ready with a new set of dishes, glasses and silverware. If there was time, I'd do the clearing, then let him bring the dirty dishes into the kitchen while I cleaned and set the table. We'd stack up multiple paper placemats with the silverware between, cutting precious seconds off the time spent re-setting a table. We even stashed saucers inside an empty paper napkin box one time when saucers were in short supply from the dish washers, and told "competing" busboys from other dining room that we didn't have any. (Okay, not very admirable, but it entertained us.)

When things got really busy, Guy would pitch in more, but he mostly stood around and planned while I did the grunt work. I didn't mind---I liked keeping busy. He didn't. And Guy, despite being lazy, was a more efficient busboy than the other guys because he and I had a system worked out.

The owner, who believed everyone should always be busy, came in one time and found us eating cornbread and standing around. He went into a rage, but every time he said, "why don't you do [fill in chore here]," we'd point out that we'd already done that. He couldn't find anything we hadn't already done, and finally stormed away in a huff. (Why he didn't have the wisdom to have us train the other bussers is beyond me. We were 15-year-old efficiency experts.)

The point is, we had a menial job with low pay, but we found a way to make it fun and do it better. Is it too much to ask someone who is preparing products for someone who will be purchasing a do-it-yourself item (which almost everything in Home Depot is) to think about how they can make less work for that customer?

Years ago, I would receive magazines in the mail with the mailing label stuck right in the middle of the front cover, and the label would take off the surface of the cover if you tried to peel it off. Now they use removable labels, so at least the problem has been solved for mailed magazines. Stores can't do that, because people might switch labels between products to get a steal (literally), but couldn't someone write a memo and tell people to think?

Maybe, when the memo is ready, they could stick one on the forehead of each person with a tag gun.

In the meantime, I offer this link, in case you encounter something similar.

Long time

2010-11-18T16:35:00.000-05:00

Well, it's been almost two months since I wrote my last blog. I've been concentrating on getting our house all finished---all the little and big things that need doing after twenty-four years. I want everything completed before I go back to concentrating on QlownTown. As a former contractor, I have some projects that were never finished, and I intend to do them all now. The plan to sell our house this summer, then this fall, has now been bumped to spring, but I'd like to actually live in a finished house for awhile anyway.

It's frustrating to have to repair things that have broken or aged after so many years, but of course they'd have to be addressed even if we were going to stay forever. And I am not allowing myself to do any half-assed repairs so I can sell the house: I don't want to have on my conscience that something might go wrong for the eventual buyers a few months after we're gone. (Nor do I want them coming to me and saying "Hey!...There's [fill in problem here] that you didn't tell us about.")

One nice thing that I did was to enlarge our shower. It used to be about 31" x 32". Yes, tiny, and closed in on three sides. Now it's three feet by three feet, with clear glass on two sides. The extra inches make a huge difference, as does the extra light pouring in and the view out through the glass. And instead of molded white fiberglass, the walls are tiny yellow-green tiles with pristine white grout. I wish we'd done this years ago. Some people say, "Aren't you sorry you did this if you'll be gone in a few months?", but I figure it'll be a big selling point, and we're really enjoying it now.

And I see any improvements made in this period as research for the next house.

For example, our garage door was always this big, flat, fake-wood-grained slab. I added a post in the middle, creating the look of two doors, and added trim and windows to make it look like two sets of carriage doors. (Finished photos to follow once it's painted.) Now I know that I can put in an inexpensive door and, with some moldings and a little time, create a much more expensive-looking "set" of doors. I probably wouldn't have attempted it on a new house.

I was just looking for the photos I took during the process, and evidently deleted them. I had thought I might write an article for Fine Homebuilding, but now, I guess I'll need to do this again to get pictures.

So, until I get back to making the big QlownTown push: upgrading the site and store, submitting to newspapers, and working on a one-of-a-kind approach to the online presentation of the strip, I'll probably just blog about construction---which is my other big love anyway.

Reversal

2010-09-29T11:04:00.000-04:00

As I drew today's cartoon, I knew it needed a guy driving a car, a speech balloon and a comment box--the voice-over, if you will. Lately, I've been sketching out the cartoon as quickly as possible in pencil, then changing it as little as I can when tracing with pen, while still trying to keep some fluidity in the lines.

After the whole thing was sketched, I realized that I had laid it out backwards. I wanted the comment to be the last thing you read, and the speech to be the first. Wanting to keep the looseness of the original sketch, I decided to just reverse it after I scanned it into the computer. So I inked, scanned, lettered and flipped it. After it was all cleaned up--there are generally little dots or lines where some of the light penciling gets picked up by the scanner, or little overshot lines that I decide to erase, and the process can take half an hour--I was ready to color it.

And as I began to color, I saw the problem: now the clown was driving on the left side of the car! This would be fine if part of the joke was that he was driving in the UK, but this wasn't the case. So I switched it back to the way I'd originally drawn it.

The result is a cartoon in which the punchline comes at the beginning instead of the end. I could have redrawn the whole thing, but that would take the spontaneity out of the drawing. I don't do well on second drawings. Especially if I'm really happy with the first one. The second is a burden, and it never satisfies me. Besides, I'm busy working on my house when I'm not cartooning, and a do-over just seems like time stolen from house projects. So it goes to the website as a frontwards illustration of a backwards joke.

I hope people still find it funny. Maybe I'll fix it someday. There are cartoons I've drawn over the last year and a half that I plan to revisit eventually. Maybe when they go onto a calendar, hopefully when I'm preparing them for a book. (No plans for that yet.) But for now, they stay as they were originally. Not all do-overs have to be done right away.

(By the way, after I had this whole post put together, I realized that the dashboard and the outside of the car were the same. I went back and fixed this on the original, and that's the version you'll see if you check it out at www.qlowntown.com...but I'm leaving these two versions here. This just shows you how long it can take to finish a cartoon that takes about two minutes to sketch---and still not get it right!)

WWII story

2010-09-28T16:17:00.000-04:00

Starting in 1941, an increasing number of British Airmen found themselves as the involuntary guests of the Third Reich, and the Crown was casting about for ways and means to facilitate their escape. Obviously, one of the most helpful aids to that end is a useful and accurate map, one showing not only where stuff was, but also showing the locations of 'safe houses' where a POW on-the-lam could go for   food and shelter. Paper maps had some real drawbacks -- they make a lot of noise when you open and fold them, they wear out rapidly, and if they get wet, they turn into mush.
Someone in MI-5 (similar to America's OSS) got the idea of printing escape maps on silk. It's durable, can be scrunched-up into tiny wads and unfolded as many times as needed, and makes no noise whatsoever.

At that time, there was only one manufacturer in Great Britain that had perfected the technology of printing on silk, and that was John Waddington, Ltd. When approached by the government, the firm was only too happy to do its bit for the war effort.

By pure coincidence, Waddington was also the U.K. Licensee for the popular American board game, Monopoly. As it happened, 'games and pastimes' was a category of item qualified for insertion into 'CARE packages', dispatched by the International Red Cross to prisoners of war.

Under the strictest of secrecy, in a securely guarded and inaccessible old workshop on the grounds of Waddington's, a group of sworn-to-secrecy employees began mass-producing escape maps, keyed to     each region of Germany or Italy where Allied POW camps were known to exist). When processed, these maps could be folded into such tiny dots that they would actually fit inside a Monopoly playing piece.

As long as they were at it, the clever workmen at Waddington's also managed to add:
        1. A playing token, containing a small magnetic compass
        2. A two-part metal file that could easily be screwed together
        3. Useful amounts of genuine high-denomination German, Italian, and French currency, hidden within the piles of Monopoly money!

British and American air crews were advised, before taking off on their first mission, how to identify a 'rigged' Monopoly set -- by means of a tiny red dot, one cleverly rigged to look like an ordinary printing glitch, located in the corner of the Free Parking square.

Of the estimated 35,000 Allied POWS who successfully escaped, an estimated one-third were aided in their flight by the rigged Monopoly sets. Everyone who did so was sworn to secrecy indefinitely, since the British Government might want to use this highly successful ruse in still another, future war. The story wasn't declassified until 2007, when the surviving craftsmen from Waddington's, as well as the firm itself, were finally honored in a public ceremony.

It's always nice when you can play that 'Get Out of Jail' Free' card!

The above is, as I recall (it's been sitting in my "Drafts" file for months) someone else's account of this historical factoid. I make no claim to authorship. But it's a very cool story, don't you think?

Dates

2010-08-23T08:47:00.000-04:00

I was at the hairdresser's Friday.

I think men now call their hairstylist a hairdresser, don't they? She's not a barber. For a long time, it was kind of unmanly to say one goes to a hairdresser instead of saying a barber. I cling to very few macho stereotypes, but I'm still unsure about hair cutting.

But I digress. I was waiting to get my hair cut, and my hairdresser said, "I forgot to check what today is". I was going to say "Friday," but then remembered that she has the QlownTown Holiday Calendar hanging in her salon and was wondering what special occasion appeared there. Turns out it was Men's Grooming Day, and we all had a laugh about the appropriateness of my getting my hair cut on that day.

I went to an informal fortieth high school reunion lunch that afternoon--so informal that, out of a class of 177, only eight showed up--and I was glad that my hair was neatly trimmed. After all, try as one might, one doesn't want to disappoint the people one hasn't seen for forty years, does one? I was actually a little nervous beforehand, or so I thought. I realized after the fact that I was just excited to see people I'd seen almost every day of my life for many years. Funny how you can change so much over the decades, yet talk so easily with old friends. Even if we don't see each again for another long span of years, it was nice to check in and see that these people are all right. I continue to care about these people with whom I grew, even though the years have separated us.

There's talk of a more organized gathering in October, and I expect we'll see more alumni then. But eight of us will have special memories to share: "Oh, remember back in August, when we ate at the Yard restaurant and caught up and reminisced? Good times."

Evolution

2010-08-06T11:17:00.001-04:00

It's been interesting, these last few weeks drawing QlownTown. I've made a conscious effort to give the characters larger hands and feet, and tweak their proportions. I like when a character like Mr. Katz is shaped unlike anyone in real life. It becomes more fun to draw when the clowns look really silly, and it's closer to the "stretch and squish" rule at Disney. The idea is that cartoon characters should stretch longer and squish flatter as they move, exaggerating natural shapes and movement. It's almost like imagining them made of Jell-O...and as we know, there's always room for characters made of Jell-O.

I've also tried lately to steer away from puns again. I like it better if they don't become the norm, although there are many strips---Shoe, Mother Goose and Grimm and Frank and Ernest spring to mind---in which puns are common and clever. I wish my mind worked more like Tony Carrillo's. He does F Minus: almost every strip has a twisted sensibility. I used to do stuff like that when I was in college. I think you're more open to irony as a student. As you age, life beats you down and you become tired of thinking creatively. Actually, it's just the way I think now. One-liners. But if the drawing style can evolve, maybe the humor can as well.

Of course, having said that, I have a pun coming up concerning Toll House cookies next week...

Putterer

2010-07-28T18:31:00.000-04:00

I had a great weekend this past Saturday and Sunday. I spent most of the time in my basement, cleaning the garage, getting stuff ready to move into storage in preparation for selling our house, and puttering in my workshop. I had one bookshelf that was stacked with projects-to-be-done. It had been accumulating stuff for years. Well, a few things got thrown out, and a few little projects got finished. We now have a miniature copy of a spinning wheel that my grandfather made, and which was in pieces under layers of dust, sitting proudly in our front hall. An heirloom doll's bed that my mother and then my daughter played with is now fixed and ready to store under cover till we have a granddaughter someday.

Saturday night, I sat down to dinner with a grin, and realized I'd loved getting the chance to just putter all day. Fixing stuff, organizing, cleaning, replacing lights...this is stuff I love to do. I guess I knew I was a putterer, but I get to do it so seldom I forgot I was. Now I'll try to make time for it. I gave myself permission to go from project to project, so if I was planning to box up an object and then do something else, but noticed that object needed the paint touched up, I'd jump to painting the object, then box it up and go on to what I'd planned. Did everything I'd scheduled get done? No, but I didn't care. I got a lot of things accomplished. It feels good when we accomplish something.

In the next week, I'll be getting a trailer hitch on the VW Bug, buying a trailer, and moving stuff into storage...and we'll attend a family reunion on Saturday. A week from now, we'll have new happy memories and a lot of stuff out of our house. Ah, accomplishments. Puttering. Satisfaction.

Lucky day

2010-07-22T14:19:00.000-04:00

Ever have a day where you run errands and it works out better than you expected? That happened this morning.

My first stop was Home Depot, where I returned a can of paint and some molding. I got a store credit for what I'd paid--but it still felt like a profit because I was suddenly $40 richer. On the way back to the car, I found a five dollar bill in the parking lot. No one around, so I pocketed it and drove to Staples, my next stop.

As I shopped for some paper, I found 100% recycled for less than the price I usually pay for 30% recycled. It's a lower-grade finish, but works fine for my purposes, and I can now add "Printed on 100% recycled paper" to my correspondence. I had a coupon, but it turned out I needed to spend $25 to save $5. I found a couple of folders I needed, a drawing template I'd forgotten I needed, and some hanging folders that will help me improve my filing system. I also answered an in-store survey about a new shredder they're thinking of carrying (which, by the way, was very nice: it'll take 100 sheets at a time, and will even shred paper clips and staples) and received a $10 coupon. So I left the store with $28 worth of stuff that I needed anyway, and only paid thirteen and change for it! With the fiver I found, I was almost twenty bucks ahead.

Sometimes small, unexpected victories are the sweetest.

Vacation

2010-07-19T11:45:00.000-04:00

Just back from a week's vacation in Maine. Did all the usual stuff--read a couple of books, swam, visited with family, went shopping, watched the sun set--but with a stomach ache most of the week. Some days were awful---an actual ache that I always noticed, and nausea a few times; and one time I became very sad as I tried to nap up in my room and heard the extended family laughing and splashing down on the lake---but most days, it was just a low-grade ache that kept me subdued but not stopped. I like to have a drink or two on vacation, maybe more than usual, but there were only two glasses of wine for this guy the whole week because of the 'ache. And the whoopie pies that are famous in our family, which we buy daily from the bakery down the street...only a couple the whole week. Very little coffee, even though I love a good cup out on the deck overlooking a pristine scene. I would've liked to at least come home having lost a few pounds---I didn't eat much---but I only lost one.

Yet I still had a great time. Yes, I didn't swim much, and was a lot quieter than I usually am, but just being with all the brothers- and sisters-in-laws, and nieces and nephews, and folks-in-law, as well as my wife and kids and their significant others, is always a treat. You see, there were twenty-seven of us in one big house last week. We do this every year. And we enjoy each other's company the whole time---or close to it. If I was too weak to dive off the dock, there were kids who weren't, and I was glad to just be there with them. If I couldn't have a drink, I could visit with my sister-in-law who was a little loopy and a lot of fun. And if I was quietly reading a book, I could do that on the shore, in the shade, with an in-law or two doing the same in a chair beside me.

The one day I felt fine, I got a little more active, but was a little "iffy" by evening. But what if I'd been home working during my illness? Would it have been bearable? QlownTown might've missed a few days, because I wouldn't have been up to sitting up at the drawing table or computer for hours. So, while I wouldn't recommend being sick on vacation, there are worse things.

We started doing this big family-week-at-the-beach-or-lake about twenty years ago, but I was sick the first couple of years. Bronchitics one year; pneumonia the next. I began to think I'd never go on vacation with the family without being sick, but then I went all those years till now feeling fine. My plan is to never be sick again. The law of averages is in my favor.

I did accomplish some stuff: my nephew Jake showed me a book of cartoons from the Perry Bible Fellowship, a very offbeat strip. (Warning: a number of the cartoons are R-rated.) What I loved about the strips is that they almost always have an unexpected twist on what you expect. I choose not to go in an R-rated direction with QlownTown, but I hope I can back to more of the offbeat, Far Side type stuff I enjoy so much. I wrote down a few ideas, and will try to move some of the puns to a later date and incorporate these new ideas over the next few weeks. It re-energized me.

***

An order came in while I was away for a print of one of last week's cartoons. I went to get it ready to send to the printer, and realized that I hadn't thought about what size the new square panel would be when people bought prints. I decided to center it on an 11" x 14" page. I still haven't decided if I'll stick with the square format, or if I'll go back to the strip, or if I'll just do whatever I want each day. Consistency is a good thing, I guess, but why not just use the format that serves your purpose best each time?

I'm still working on a new project that would be very cool, but that's still a few months off. For now, though, QlownTown is exciting me again. I'm feeling upbeat. I'm even going to try a piece of the blueberry pie that I brought home from the bakery. It may rile my stomach, but I'm getting used to that now, anyway. Maybe it'll give the comic a slightly darker edge, although I'd prefer that if that's going to happen, it happens because I decide to---not because I'm in pain.

By the way: yes, I called the doctor's office. She said it's probably just a bug that's going around. It's been nine days, but I'll give it a few more and see if it goes away. (High co-pays are a good incentive not to overburden the doctor.)

Rope swing

2010-07-02T11:11:00.002-04:00

I drew a cartoon earlier this week and was very pleased with myself when it was done. I liked the colors, the composition, the way I drew the characters. I liked that I'd changed my original concept of having the chicken say, "Of course I'm chicken" to a caption explaining the picture. I think that's a drier, more amusing way to do it. That way, the "narrator" is stating this as a logical reason, which I think is funnier than just having the character make a silly pun. (I was going to say "bad" pun, but puns aren't really bad--they're clever wordplay. Shakespeare and I don't have a lot in common, but we both have beards and love a good pun.)

I even traced a Shaker-style wooden box to get the even curve of the rope...I use a compass sometimes, but it's quicker and easier to trace an object when I want a smooth ink line. And I decided that Perry seemed like a good, unlikely name for a chicken. Finally, I liked that I put the chicken in a bathing suit and set things up as if he was just another one of the boys.

Sooo--it's all done, it gets uploaded, it's there in the queue--and then it arrives in my email several days later as the Daily Cartoon. And I see that the rope on the swing is so long, one would smash into the ground before reaching the water.

My first thought was to fix that--redraw that part of the cartoon so the rope is tauter. That would mean replacing some black lines and a few areas of color, all of which I'd do in the computer. But I liked every other element so much, I decided not to tamper with (near) perfection. Maybe I'll do a followup, where the taunting kid who's holding the tire tries to swing and hits the ground. He deserves it.

Edgy

2010-06-22T15:21:00.000-04:00

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

2010-06-21T14:57:00.000-04:00

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

2010-06-18T13:20:00.000-04:00

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

2010-06-16T10:42:00.001-04:00

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

2010-06-09T10:09:00.000-04:00

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

2010-06-07T09:11:00.000-04:00

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

2010-06-02T14:11:00.001-04:00

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?

Changes

2010-05-26T12:56:00.000-04:00

One advantage of doing a strictly web-based comic strip is that I can change it after it runs online. In a newspaper, the strip runs once and that's the only version ever printed (unless it later shows up in a book or on a calendar). But with an online strip, I can make changes, corrections, improvements or upgrades as I see fit. This happened earlier this week.

The strip was about a T shirt on which the color ran after washing it. The first version, which appeared Tuesday, had one clown talking and that was it. This is a technique used more often in anthology strips like the Far Side or Close to Home, where the characters are different every day, and therefore the traits of each aren't established enough to necessarily make their response funny. In a recurring-character strip, however, the personality of an established character can add to the humor. For example, Garfield may make a snide comment after Jon says something that is itself funny. Our familiarity with Garfield's sarcasm makes the cat's comment the punchline.

When I re-read the T shirt cartoon Tuesday night, however, I decided it might be funnier if the second clown points out that, even though the first guy now has a shirt that ridicules the wearer instead of whomever he's with, he is still wearing it...proving him to be stupid. So I redrew the necessary parts, uploaded it to the site in place of the former version, and told my email subscribers what I'd done, asking for their reactions. Several people responded, all preferring the new version. I do too. Of course, those of you who don't subscribe may have never gotten to see the original version---except that I ran it here. Another reason to sign up! This could happen to a strip again, but I probably won't tell you about it here next time.

I'm curious to see if there'll be any sales of the QlownTown logo shirt in the next few days, since it appears in this same cartoon...I figure product placement is okay in my own strip. I actually decided to offer this comic strip (the second version) printed on merchandise in the online store. (I no longer put every new strip on merchandise, unless I receive a request.) Now you can buy a copy of the strip on T shirts, mugs, etc., and even order a copy of the "runny" shirt itself so you can make a fool of yourself. Hey, people have actually ordered the "You wanna go where everybody knows you're inane" shirt--a sign that some people have no shame.

I live for these people.

Lost

2010-05-24T11:59:00.000-04:00

Well, I guess I'll weigh in on the Lost finale, along with every other blogger on the internet. I had to watch it in low def, which looked really bad on a 50" screen, but we're having issues with our Tivo, cable, and/or set--we haven't pinned down which yet. (SPOILER ALERT: READ NO FURTHER IF YOU HAVEN'T SEEN THE LAST EPISODE!!!) With my luck, they're probably all dying--which ties in nicely with today's blog.

Anyway, I thoroughly enjoyed the last episode. The fact that you could interpret it as a Christian metaphor (right down to the wound in Jack's side and the ending in a church); or as it all having been a dream in Jack's mind as he died--or maybe just the sideways reality of season six was a dream, or maybe his being on the island was a dream; or as an unknowable version of what Life and Death are really resonated with me. After six seasons in which mystery was piled upon mystery, and countless fans and reviewers pondered online What It All Means, an ending which was open to interpretation was the best conclusion. That we can feel relieved that most questions were answered--through one explanation or another--is a testament to the writers' skill. Maybe the sideways reality was Purgatory--a popular theory for a long time--but by not spelling out that it was, we can still look for other answers...or tell ourselves that that's indeed what it was. I was able to go to bed thoroughly satisfied--and yet I was anxious to see what others said this morning. Closure, yet still open to discussion.

I'm pleased that I can still ponder what happened in those six seasons, yet not be frustrated that there are big, unresolved questions left hanging that will never be answered. I would have thought that this series, with all its twists and turns, would have been a closed book when it ended. But I would now like to watch the whole thing again (at some point, and not all in one sitting!), knowing the ending, and see what answers I come up with as I follow the stories again. It's impressive when a linear drama is able to compel one to watch it again, even after one "knows" how it all turns out.

By the way, I'll give away the eventual ending of the QlownTown comic strip now: they all turn out to really be clowns. Big surprise.

Hidden stuff

2010-05-18T16:49:00.004-04:00

I like to stick little details in the strips that people may or may not notice. In video-game speak, they're Easter eggs.

Today's strip features a clown using an iPad. It's right out there in the open, but only one person wrote to tell me she'd noticed it. I thought it was pretty cool to put it in there; I haven't seen any iPads in cartoons yet, although I'm sure I'm not the first cartoonist to draw one.

'Way back in March '09, I did a strip which included a duck whistling. That one wasn't hidden, but it was a little detail that a lot of people noticed. As a matter of fact, I may be the only one who thought that cartoon was funny, but I redeemed myself with a lot of people who liked the whistler.

In the octopus cartoon, the applicant's name was Callie Mari. It was probably illegible on small computer screens, but you'll be able to read when the book comes out someday. (Don't hold your breath.)

The little dinosaur whose dad was reading him a bedtime story had a Jurassic Park poster on his wall.

And it was a lot of fun to draw different kinds of brooms outside Voldemart.

When I began, I had planned to do lots of "half tone" colors using words, but that sort of fell by the wayside. I'll try to start doing it again, though. Again, it doesn't translate well to the low resolution of some computer screens. When the strips start appearing larger--a change we're planning for the site at some point--it'll be easier to spot. (If you can't read it, the grass at the bottom says GRASSGRASSGRASSGRASS.)

Entertainment for the simple mind, I guess.

Writing gags

2010-05-12T11:00:00.000-04:00

I have to say, I love creating ideas for QlownTown. Someone dropped me an email this week to say how much she and her husband enjoyed the Russian Ukulele strip, and asked me how I come up with them. I've expounded on this in the past, so I won't repeat myself here. But this one had an interesting progression. It began as a scribble of a guy who walks into the strip with a guitar, or what appears to be a guitar, then opens it, revealing it to be a case with a guitar inside. When I sat down to do the finished version, that seemed a little incomplete. So I thought, how about if he has a big guitar case, inside of which is a smaller one, inside of which is a still smaller one. Then, I figured, why not make it an upright bass case, inside of which is a guitar case, then a mandolin, then a ukulele? I liked the even sillier logic of bothering to haul around an upright bass case just to to protect a ukulele.

I had wanted to show the original sketch, but can't seem to find it. This prompted an office cleaning this morning, during which I organized the strips I've drawn so far into semi-logical piles. I began drawing the daily strips about 11" x 3", and the earliest strips were drawn so they could also be a square panel. The idea was to offer a square or strip formats to newspapers, but I found it to be too time-consuming. (One artist I know of does it that way: Wiley Miller, whose Non Sequitur appears as both a strip and a panel, depending on the paper or site.) After a few months I switched to a larger format, 12-1/8" x 4-1/4", and I've occasionally done square panels along the way--after all, it only appears on the website (for now), so QlownTown can be any shape I want. So there are the early dual format drawings, the smaller strip size, the larger strip size, and originals that are the square-panel-only format, as well as the Sunday strips--which also vary in size if the artwork outgrows the intended size: I'm a big believer in trying to retain the freedom of the original pencil drawings, and if I think I got it right on the first sketch but some element goes "outside the lines," I'll just change the size of the drawing, resizing it in the computer as necessary.

Anyway, I did find this early sketch of another strip which evolved into the final product later. I was working as a kitchen designer at the time, but I wanted to remember the color concept more clearly, so you'll notice it's colored with highlighter pens--the only color source I had in the office.

When the strip appeared in its final form, it looked like this:

In this case, the original drawing and concept were pretty close to the final outcome. But the process from that first sketch was the less-fun part of the job. Coming up with the idea was the exciting thing. There's an artist, Keith Knight, who draws his strip, The Knight Life, in a cafe. That's not the setting: that's his "studio". They're kind of scribbly, but I like them, and he gets to basically sketch his initial idea and that becomes the finished cartoon! Lucky guy.

In the future, I'll try to post more before and after strips.

Wine

2010-05-10T11:09:00.000-04:00

A few weeks ago, we visited our friends Kris and Lynda in Washington, DC. Among the many fun things we did over a long weekend was to have dinner at the home of a couple of our hosts' friends one night. As a thank you, we brought a couple of bottles of wine. Because the hosts already had the evening's wines planned out, the bottles we'd brought weren't opened that evening. (For those you wondering, it is not required that the hosts open a gift bottle--they may open them later if they choose; it is, after all, a gift.) We had brunch with the same people the next day, and I explained to them that the Pinot Noir we brought was a special wine to us.

I'd had it in a restaurant one night a couple of years earlier, and liked it so much that I decided later to purchase a couple of bottles at a wine store. It was more expensive than what I usually spend on a bottle, but I felt it was worth it for special occasions. It so happened that a few weeks later, we were going to Game Night at the home of our son's girlfriend, and decided to bring a bottle of wine. Her parents aren't big fans of wine, especially reds, but the only unopened bottle we had on hand was a bottle of the Pinot, so I reluctantly brought it. As it turned out, that was the night that our son and now-daughter-in-law announced their engagement, so it was nice to have a special, splurged-on bottle to toast the news.

When I told this story, the husband, Jeff, reminded me that they were waiting for their daughter's boyfriend (whom we'd met the night before) to propose to her, and that maybe this wine would work some more magic. I wished him good luck, and said I wasn't sure if they should open it first to make it happen, or save it for when (or if ever) the announcement came. It would age well, so if they had to wait a long time, the wine would still be good anyway.

A couple of weeks later, I was ushering at a concert and Lynda came in. She told me, "They opened the wine". I immediately caught on and said, "You mean...?" and she said, "Yes, he proposed to her last night." The kids had called to tell Jeff and Ellen, and as soon as he got off the phone, Jeff had uncorked the bottle to toast the news.

Well, that made my day. To meet someone once and now have a unique bond through engagements and wine is pretty special. And now I---and the people with whom I've shared the story---have a new catchphrase: when a couple gets engaged, they "opened the wine". Kind of a nice metaphor for starting a life together, too.

Green

2010-05-07T18:54:00.000-04:00

Ever since the first Earth Day forty years ago, I've tried to be ecologically responsible. In 1970, I tried driving 50 on the highway in my old Plymouth Duster and got about 35 MPG, whereas before it'd been closer to 27 or so. Then I bought a little Honda Civic back in 1976. I added foam board insulation to the walls of an already-insulated house that I restored in Portsmouth, New Hampshire, back in the late 70s. (My wife said it wouldn't gain us anything in resale value, but two years later when the house was done and the economy was in the crapper, people were excited about the extra insulation.) I won a cash award for building a superinsulated house in Maine back in the eighties.

None of which is is blow my own horn. I'm just saying, I'm glad the world is catching up. It's been frustrating for years. While Hummers gained popularity and SUVs ruled the roads, I wondered where the conscientious people were. Now smaller cars are becoming popular again and, more importantly, people are seeing conservation as a priority.

What really drove it home for me was seeing a popular comic strip recently in which a character rants about people changing oil every 3,000 miles instead of 6,000. When pop culture uses "green" topics as a teaching/humor tool, that's good. Consumer Reports actually discovered years ago, in controlled tests, that there was no significant advantage to changing the oil in one's car every 3,000 miles---that 6,000-mile changes were just as effective.They also pointed out that if everyone who changes every 3,000 would do it half as often, hundreds of thousands of gallons of tainted oil would be eliminated from the waste stream every year. But still people think 3,000-mile oil changes make sense.

About fifteen years ago, I began washing every foam meat or vegetable tray we got from the store and began storing them in my attic, on the theory that someday they would be recyclable and I would have kept all those trays out of the landfill. After a year or so, I gave up. Now I have some extra insulation up there, but I don't think those trays will ever be reused in any other way. Oh well. Sometimes you're ahead of your time--and sometimes you're just overly compulsive. Can't win 'em all. But I'm feeling like I--we--are winning on some important stuff.

Sweepstakes

2010-05-04T10:09:00.002-04:00

I was just entering some sweepstakes. It's easy online. Some even take you to a list of other contests you can enter after you've entered the first one. You can submit as often as once a day on a lot of them. Of course, as I do this, I'm well aware that I'm just wasting my time--but it is, as a friend once said to my wife and me as he was buying a Megabucks ticket, "buying a ticket to a dream". The difference with a free online entry is: there's no monetary expense. I can spend a few minutes dreaming about what I'd do with the money, or the car, or the trip to Hawaii, and all I've invested is time.

I don't go so far as to subscribe to sites that keep you updated on new contests. That is reaching the point of obsession, I think...although if it entertains you, who am I to criticize? It's free entertainment.

A few years ago, when the local PowerBall was at an all-time high, we bought two tickets. We knew we were probably throwing away two bucks, but it gave us the chance to dream. If you've actually paid something for an entry, I think it's easier to imagine what winning might really be like.We decided that the mistake some winners make is just going crazy, spending money on everything they've ever wanted, and more. Then the novelty wears off, everyone's asking them for a donation, their life has no purpose and they get depressed. I think the answer is to become a philanthropist.

Say you win twenty million bucks. After taxes, you net around nine million. You splurge on $100,000 worth of stuff. You decide you want to quit your job and travel, so you set aside, say, $300,000 to spend per year, invested in pretty safe funds. If you figure you have twenty years to live, that's six million. Interest should more than cover the cost of inflation. Now you still have three million. This could be given away to charities, or it could be invested. What if you make it your job to invest that money so it generates more money, which can be doled out to charities and worthy causes for the rest of your life? If you make yourself a financial expert through studying, courses, whatever, you could probably give away more over time than if you gave it all away at once. This would give your life purpose, rather than just sitting around as a member of the nouveau idle rich. The lack of purpose is the downfall of big winners.

See? I was able to develop this whole theory and feel good about it, all because I spent a few minutes entering contests. It doesn't actually do anyone any good, because I don't have these millions to develop and donate, but it's free. And it does make the point that I should be the one to win, because I'm prepared. Hear that, oh gods of sweepstakes? I'm the guy.

Moving

2010-04-26T13:30:00.000-04:00

My wife has finally agreed to move. Probably this year; if not, definitely next year.

This is exciting for me. For one thing, I can now put together an estimate of what the house I'd like to build will look like. There may be many changes before the house is actually built, but the one I've designed is close enough to what I expect we'll build that I can safely use it as a starting point. I can look into stuff that really appeals to me as possibly being a part of this project.

For example, I'm fascinated by the solar shingles that Dow Chemical is planning to release this year. They'll be like regular roof shingles, will cost less than solar shingles currently on the market, will be simple enough to be installed by regular roofing contractors, and will (presumably) look good. Some of the cost of solar will be offset by not having to install conventional shingles under the solar collectors, as is generally done now. And helping to keep the price down will be Dow's use of a plastic surface. Currently, solar collectors, even the existing shingle type, use glass to protect the components--but Dow, of course, has decades of experience and research in plastics, so they plan to use a durable plastic covering instead.

I also like the idea of using slate-look shingles that are made of recycled rubber and plastic, but they're about ten times the cost of asphalt, so the non-solar areas of the roof may receive a less interesting covering. But at least now I can seriously contemplate the pros and cons! Up till now, any research I've done about building materials has been an adult version of playing house.

Now I'll approach everything I do around this house from a different perspective, too. Instead of the nice sage green I planned to paint the inside of the garage, maybe I'll do a pale yellow, as suggested by one Realtor. Plantings will be more for curb appeal than for ourselves...and long-term plants like asparagus or blackberries don't make any sense. (Of course, now I can start dreaming about all new plantings for our new home!)

Even furniture becomes a consideration. If we're going to have a more open floor plan, coordinating room-to-room becomes more important. What size, style, color, pattern, might we want for new pieces? When we chose our current furnishings, we had a 32" TV tucked above the fireplace. Now that it's 50 inches, do we plan the great room differently? I like the idea of the TV disappearing behind false books or something when it's not in use. I'm already planning a hidden door in a bookcase between rooms. I've even toyed with the idea of a narrow opening through which an indoor clothesline could extend outdoors. Whatever else the next house has, it will include some fun features along those lines.

On one hand, it's overwhelming. On the other, for a design-oriented person, it's a chance to start over.

Talk Like Shakespeare Day

2010-04-23T17:56:00.001-04:00

Today is Talk Like Shakespeare Day. I should have written about this earlier, so people who read this would've had the whole day to, well, talk like Shakespeare. Of course, you can do that anyway, but it only makes sense if it has an official reason. Or if you work at a medieval style restaurant. Or if you're doing a Shakespeare play.

Most of us, however, aren't working at that type of restaurant (or any type, actually) or doing a play. So our only chance is to do it without getting funny looks is to do it on this Official Day. So, if you're reading this Friday evening, start. Now! There are only a few hours left.

Maybe it's better to start late in the day. It's very hard to talk like Shakespeare. Even if you get the hang of the thees, thous, thys, arts, hasts, doths and the other popular noun, verbs and pronouns, almost every other word has to be changed from modern versions. For instance, "You have annoyed me" might become "Thou hast pricked my curs'ed caddy-piddle", which isn't even legitimate Elizabethan English, but at least bears a passing resemblance to what Will might have said. He did know how to turn a phrase. But remembering those terms, or even making up authentic-sounding words,whilst speaking at a normal tempo, would tax the most skillful knave amongst us.

Anyway, give it a shot. If you go out for drinks tonight, you might try something along the lines of "Hie thee, o serving-wench, fetch me a bottle of thy finest Bud Light with Lime, for my thirst doth need slaking forthwith." (Wait a minute...you might want to cut the "serving-wench" part unless you announce the reason for speaking that way first.) Or, "Verily, by Beelzebub and his fiery minions, those Red Sox surely
are putting an ague in my heart." If you don't get punched, you may get complimented.

Thou mayst even find a lovely lass, with eyes as azure as the deepest chasm in Neptune's sea, who'll fall for that crap. Good fortune to thee!

(By the way, the cartoon above is available on a T shirt, mug, etc here.)

Live theater

2010-04-19T13:49:00.000-04:00

Despite having been involved in theater for years, I'd never seen a stage version of Cabaret till yesterday. Well, this was worth waiting for. There was a twist that the director came up with that still gives me a lump in the throat if I think about it. (I can't reveal it, because they may revive the production at a later time--and I hope they do.) For those who aren't familiar with the show, it's essentially a juxtaposition of the anything-goes morality in the clubs of Berlin in the 30's and the rise of the Nazi party. The contrast between the relative innocence of the characters and the coming darkness is powerful. And, as many musicals are structured, the first act is mostly an introduction of the characters and their relationships--you are only hit with the impending horror at the end of Act One, then Act Two turns darker.

We entered the theater, a space in which the audience seating wraps around three sides of the stage, to find the most appropriate set I'd ever seen in the space. I was immediately transported to prewar Germany. the pre-show consisted of the "boys and girls" of the Kit Kat Club serving people at tables around the edges of the stage and bantering with the audience, so we already knew a little about them before the lights went down. Once the show began, the Emcee became our guide through a wonderful evening of dancing, singing, acting, music, lighting and sound. Every phase of the production was top notch, and it fit perfectly in the small space. I've seen other shows in that theater that were meant to be bigger--a production of A Christmas Carol, for example, fit into the space well enough, but really deserved a bigger venue. Cabaret fit in as if the place was made for it--as if the space was, in fact, the Kit Kat Club.

I marveled, as I left the building, at how powerful live theater can be. The last time I felt that I'd seen something that could only be this effective in a live setting---that would have been diminished onscreen or on TV---was when I saw The Lion King on Broadway. Yes, I've seen other equally stirring shows since, but that show and the one I saw yesterday belonged absolutely to the stage. If I watched a DVD of yesterday's show, I wouldn't have the same intense experience, because I wouldn't be so immersed in the space. So I may regret that I attended the last performance and can't go back again, but I can embrace the experience I had that one time. No matter how amazing our technological entertainment becomes--3D TV, videogame headsets, surround sound headphones--there will always be a place for live theater. And while I love a lighthearted, upbeat show, musical or otherwise, as much as anyone, I will still be amazed and overjoyed when the next stirring, dramatic piece of theater rips my heart out and slaps me in the face. I was exhausted on the way home, and yet felt so alive...more so, perhaps, because, even with the lights, sound mixing and other technologies that went into it, what truly moved me was simply other people in the same room as I, taking me to places thousands of miles and decades away.

Sorry!

2010-03-25T16:35:00.006-04:00

I was driving along today and entered a highway via an on ramp. I wasn't paying close attention, I guess, and suddenly saw in my rear-view mirror that there was a car coming up close in the lane with which mine was about to merge. She had the right of way (assuming she wasn't speeding and suddenly appeared), and there wasn't anything close to an accident, but I felt badly that I hadn't seen her earlier. If she had honked at me, how could have indicated that I was sorry, I wondered. The American Sign Language symbol for "Sorry" is to form the letter "A" with your right hand and run your hand in a circle around your chest. Hard to show to someone behind you.

One could throw their arms up in the air, as if to say, "OMG! I can't believe I did something as stupid as that! I apologize!". Someone in front of me did that once, and I understood, but that could also be interpreted as "Ha ha; I'm not holding onto the wheel" or "I'm fed up with people honking at me". You could pound your fist on the side of your head, but that might hurt and make you go off the road, and the person behind still might not get it.

I think it's important when you make a mistake and anger someone enough to make them blast their horn that you sign your apology in such a way that they realize you're acknowledging your own error, and they are then moved to laugh at the way you're doing it. This diffuses the tension and takes care of the apology at the same time. Perhaps miming a gunshot to your head would work---but they may think you think they should be shot. You could hold up one hand in plain site and slap it with the other, but here again you're letting go of the wheel---always a bad idea. An exaggerated crouch like someone's about to whup you upside the head might work.

The problem with all these ideas is that they aren't universal. There should be one sign that becomes generally recognized as a sign for "I'm sorry" when driving. We all know what shaking your fist at someone or flipping them the finger means; why don't we have a standard sign for something constructive like an apology?

If anyone has any suggestions, let me know. And, if you think it's a clear signal, use it the next time you do something stupid. (Admit it. We all do stupid things occasionally when driving. Admitting it can help quell road rage.) And report back to me if the other party understands. Or maybe I'll just see it pop up some day as it becomes a common sign and spreads throughout the driving public. One can only hope.

And if your gesture is misunderstood, and you get honked at or yelled at again...click here.

Holidays

2010-03-24T12:27:00.001-04:00

Today is National Chocolate Covered Raisin Day. I know this because my QlownTown Holiday calendar hangs on the wall across from my desk, and it lists a different holiday or birthday for every day of 2010. It was a lot of work getting the dates together, but the result was so successful that I'm already starting to plan the 2011 calendar. (By the way, not to put in a plug or anything, but copies of this year's calendar are still available online for $10 each. There are still 282 dates to read about in 2010.)

But getting back to today's holiday: I don't particularly like chocolate covered raisins, but I'm glad that people who do have their own holiday. Holidays are generally fun, except for those few religious holidays that are all about atonement, forgiveness, or mourning--but even a little officially-sanctioned sorrow can be good for the soul, too. They're a good excuse to celebrate when nothing in your everyday life warrants it.

I was looking ahead a few days and saw that this coming Friday is Make Up Your Own Holiday Day, and no, I didn't make that up. I read it online so it must be true. I encourage anyone who reads this to send in your own suggestions for a holiday that you've made up. If it's a good one, I may even put it on next year's calendar. Of course, I'm not going to add new holidays willy nilly, because the purpose of the calendar is to provide information---mostly useless information, but information nonetheless---about real holidays. But one or two really good ones might find their way into 2011. If there's a particular date one which you think it should appear, include that too, with an explanation if applicable. The best way is to visit the blog and add your idea under Comments. (This blog also appears in my Facebook page and maybe elsewhere.) If you email dsmith-weiss@qlowntown.com, I can transfer your suggestion to the blog, but it's more efficient to go right to the source.

Tomorrow is Letting Go of Stuff Day. Ironically, it's also Maundy Thursday, which always reminds of the old joke "How can it be Maundy if it's Thursday?", but I digress. So we have a holiday that, every year, mourns a horrible event in Jesus's life which is also a day to stop worrying about things. But there are plenty of other things to let go of; for example, $10 plus shipping for a 2010 QlownTown Holiday calendar--not that I'm plugging anything. You could let go of a grudge you're holding, or let go of some old clothes that don't fit or are out of style, or let go of some anger you're feeling. And Passover is coming up next week, so if you're thinking of getting new stuff to replace the stuff you let go of, just Pass over it. Your life will just get cluttered again.

I tend to forget to look at the calendar every day, and I just discovered that I missed celebrating International Goof-Off Day two days ago. I worked Monday, and now I learn I wasn't supposed to. I guess I'd better pay closer attention to the calendar from now on.

Adjustment

2010-03-15T13:53:00.000-04:00

After several weeks dealing with my mother's declining health and ultimate demise, I can feel life returning to normal. I actually colored and uploaded a cartoon yesterday, something I hadn't done for several days--in part because I was wrapped up in family matters, and in part because my internet was down, due, it turns out, to a faulty modem even though all signs pointed to a server problem. Talk about bad timing! To be without internet access when you're trying to coordinate a memorial service, newspaper obituaries and all the other attendant matters of a death? Disastrous! Still, we all soldiered on. The obit will be over a week after the fact, but it will still say the same thing, and simply let people outside the core circle know about her demise a bit later than they would have if I'd acted more quickly. The organizations mentioned will still accept any donations people send, Mom will still have had a long life, and she'll still be gone. I haven't melted or lost my mind. Waves of sorrow appear unexpectedly, but for the most part, I'm handling it well. Part of it may be that I believe in Heaven.

Not the Heaven that we see in movies, books and TV. Not a place where we look the same as we did on earth...although someone made the delightful suggestion that everyone in heaven is in their thirties, because that's probably when most people have some money, have a loving family and are still healthy. I think it's indescribable. I had your basic out-of-body experience on an operating table once, and I recall a sense of calm so free of anything negative that I think I've only experienced that same calm for maybe thirty seconds total in all the years since--with that thirty seconds made up of a second here, two seconds there...we're talking True Peace.

It turns out that my experience was almost identical to that of many people who've "died" and come back. I described it to a friend years ago, having never read anything on the subject, and she told me with wide eyes that mine matched the descriptions she'd read by others who had "come back". Some scientific studies have suggested that neurons and electrical signals in the brain just fire and create these experiences in the brain; that none of it is "real" beyond our thinking it is. That may be true, although I have a very hard time believing it.

But it doesn't really matter, because if a person does just Die when they pass, they still live on in memories and in the people they've raised, befriended, or otherwise affected. I know that's a cliche, but I can't deny that things I do, the way I react in certain situations, little tics or quirks I may have, are all a function of the people I've known.

As a young man, I thought that it was a cop-out when people said someone has "passed" or "passed away", that it was just a way to avoid saying they'd died. Now, I think it's an acknowledgment that they haven't ceased to exist, but that they've moved on to another state. If the atheists are right, it still doesn't diminish the power of the aftereffects of a person's life on earth as a living thing. A life still counts, even after it's done. I'm quite comfortable in not knowing or trying to figure out what the afterlife is, or even if it's a part of some continuum that doesn't fit our conventional notions of Time. I figure it's either what I briefly experienced after floating above the O.R. watching the doctors and nurses rushing around and then "going to the light", or it's something else, or it's just the way we live on in others. I think there's a Oneness that we share and maybe merge into at some point. I don't know. No one does.

My mother passed away last week. Wherever she is or isn't, I have faith that although she's died, she hasn't Died, at least not completely. I have faith that she's in a better place in some form, a form of which I can't conceive; but those who don't believe that will have to concede that when I do something the way she would have, or don't do something because she taught me not to, she's "alive" in that action.

She did something funny that I only learned of after she was gone. A Virgin Mary is sometimes called a Bloody Shame, and, mixing up the two names, she once asked a waiter, unintentionally, for a Bloody Virgin. She was very embarrassed at the time. I just learned, however, that in later years she did the same thing on purpose several times, telling her dining companions and the waiter that she was old now, and didn't have to worry what people would think of her. My mother was always a bit straight-laced; you'd never hear her say anything risque or ironic--or so I thought. Now, whenever I write something sarcastic or edgy, I'll think of her. And if someone is offended, I'll say, "My Mom made me do it."

Anniversary

2010-03-05T12:08:00.000-05:00

Tomorrow is the one-year anniversary of QlownTown. Yep; I've been drawing this cartoon every day (but five) for the last year. To celebrate, I'm offering a free, signed copy of any QlownTown cartoon to whomever comes up with the best name for the orange-haired woman in the February 30th "Under the Weather" cartoon. She's appeared in several cartoons over the course of the last year, and I think she's an appropriate choice for the first recurring character to receive a real name. Of course, the best entry I receive might be something mundane like Jane or Sue, but I'm hoping for more creative and interesting submissions. Entries can be sent to dsmith-weiss@qlowntown.com. Judging will take about two weeks.

About those five non-cartoon days: no apologies. QlownTown does not yet appear in any newspapers, so I don't have to do one every day. Things came up. Power outages. A party. Still, I hear from many readers that reading the cartoon is the first thing they do in the morning, sort of a start-the-day-off-right pick-me-up. So I'm sorry in that respect. Okay, there's an apology after all. And I still intend to fill in those five days. If and when that happens, I'll let you know.

Anyway, while checking out the fact that the first anniversary is traditionally Paper, I noticed that the second is cotton. Maybe next year, I'll offer a cartoon printed on a pillow. Third is leather, which could suggest a whole new direction for QlownTown. Biker clowns? Clowns with whips? One shudders at the possibilities.

Fourth is fruit or flowers. Can I print a strip on a grapefruit? Would anyone want it? Fifth is wood---a box with a comic strip, of course. By the time of the tenth, Diamonds, I like to think I might be able to offer a QlownTown diamond ring setting. Maybe QT spelled out in diamonds? No. We'll see.

The importance of an anniversary is more about achieving the milestone, not what you give someone to mark it (although diamonds are nice). Since the site was delayed almost a year from when I originally intended to start it online, actually getting a year's worth under my belt feels like it's been a long time coming. I know that with any strip, you can see the evolution during the first year.
I can see the changes in my style over the course of the last year. Stuff that I thought was perfect a year ago looks kind of scratchy to me now...although I still like some of it. Next March, I expect to see even more improvement. Or at least I hope it'll look like improvement.

So for the coming year? Plans include getting the strip into newspapers, using more recurring characters (and naming them), working on the 2011 calendar early enough that it goes on sale in August or September instead of December, and maybe doing a couple of thematic weeks, like the Custer's Last Stand variations of January 25th to the 28th. Maybe even a storyline that extends over a week or so! Let me know if you have any suggestions.

Lots o' stuff

2010-03-02T17:30:00.001-05:00

A lot has happened since my last posting. We had suspected for awhile that my mother might not be with us much longer, and the doctor officially confirmed it last week. The bad part, obviously, is the anticipation, the sorrow, the crying, the goodbyes each time we leave her side. But for what it's worth, we're seeing a lot of family that we haven't seen for awhile, and we can stop worrying about her. We know there's an end to the timeline, and, while we don't know exactly when that will be, we don't have to wonder if she'll get worse and worse as years go by. She's 87, she's had a good life, her children are all grown, and we'll manage.

Of course, this ability to rationalize and recognize that things will get better and, eventually, easier doesn't serve to eliminate thinking about it in the back of my mind most of the time, so the last couple of weeks have been exhausting; but at least I had the temporary release of drawing cartoons every day. I have to smile when I draw a cartoon. I think it's a law. But Friday morning brought an unwelcome surprise.

I awoke in the early morning hours to realize that the electricity had gone out. There was the frightening sound of roaring winds and creaking trees, and if I wasn't so tired, I might have gotten up and moved to the middle of the house, away from any outside walls. Instead, I dozed off, knowing that our superinsulated house would stay warm at least through the night and telling myself that the odds of a tree falling on the house near me were slim.

In the morning, the electricity was still out. I decided to sleep late, then go out for a big breakfast while I read the paper, take my in-laws to the airport, and then finally go home to reality. Well, there were trees down on the way to the airport, and the road off which I had to take a detour on the way into the airport was closed off to traffic coming back. I took several alternate roads which, I discovered only after driving several miles on each, all turned out to be closed as well before I took the long way 'round to get back on the highway and head home. What would normally be a half hour trip took almost two hours.

When I got home at about 2:30, I attempted to find the inverter I'd bought after the Blackout of 2008. This inverter plugs into the car, and converts the 12 volt DC into 110 volt AC, so I'd be able to plug in our heating system. It took an hour to locate the inverter and enough extension cords to run power upstairs. I plugged in the heater and--a low hum, but no heat. Despite the amperage rating, the inverter didn't supply enough power for the electronic spark to ignite the burner. Okay--it was still warm in the house. At least I could run the computer, upload the weekend's cartoons and then deal with the evening later.

Wrong! After plugging in the computer, the modem, the wireless router, and the cable box in the basement, I still had no email or internet access. I later found out the provider was down, but, not knowing that at the time, spent an hour or so trying everything I could think of to get the system working. Not surprisingly, frustration was beginning to get the better of me.

My wife, bless her, called late that afternoon and said, "Let's go visit your mother and stay in a nice inn for the night." We left food and water for the cats---they have a pet door to come and go as they please---and drove north as darkness and cold descended.

We wound up staying in the (expensive) inn the first night and a cheaper hotel the next. Both were nice, the first one especially, and we could keep checking if power was on by phoning home: if we didn't get a message on the home answering machine, the power was still off. Finally, Sunday morning, the call went through. We spent the morning with my mother, then headed home.

Arriving home, we turned the heat to High. My wife began cleaning the refrigerator in anticipation of picking up the perishables that we'd left at my son's house on Friday. I noticed a couple of bits of dried-up dog poop in the dining room. I assumed that one of our grand-dogs, who'd visited a week earlier, had been so excited she left a few small "calling cards". Fine. No smell; dry from the cold and the passage of time. Easy cleanup with a wad of tissues. Then my wife found a whole mess of "calling cards" in the closet where the pet door is located. Well, I remembered that the dog had followed the cats into that closet when she was here, and figured she's gotten excited again. I grabbed another handful of tissue, squatted down and began picking up the stuff, and saw, two feet in front of me---a possum! Alive, nose twitching.

I didn't scream or panic--probably because the last week had been so terrible, I didn't have any energy left. Also, looking down on the nose of the thing (it was under a low shelf in the closet), I thought it looked kind of cute. I actually wondered if it was something else, because when I've seen possums out in the open, I've considered them grotesque. So I ducked lower, saw the angry-looking eyes (due to the dark color flaring out above the eyes) and long claws, and decided it was indeed a butt-ugly possum.

It took some doing, but after we blocked the internal opening into the living room, through which the cats come and go to use the pet door in the closet, and propped open the external per door, I was able to prod the animal with a stick slid under the door till it went outside. I thought my wife was right behind me, and I kept saying, "Did he go out? Is he gone?", till I realized she'd gone off to do laundry. Finally, I opened the closet and looked along all the shelves to make sure it was gone. I was a little scared at that point, because the internet was still down (grr!), so I couldn't check online to see how cornered possums act. But it had left. I cleaned up the rest of the mess, shut the door, and collapsed on the sofa.

I may reduce the size of the pet door opening so it's only big enough for our two cats, but not for awhile. I have to assume that our house has been possum-proofed. After all, what are the odds of finding a live possum in your house twice? One might say that, the way the last week has gone, they're pretty high; but at some point, things have to get better, and I choose to assume that one way this will happen is that there will be No More Possums.

Busy

2010-02-18T10:16:00.001-05:00

Life sometimes throws a lot at you. It feels like more than you can handle. If it is more than you can handle, something suffers. Something doesn't get done. That's how life is for me right now...almost.

I do what I can each day, keeping a bunch of different metaphorical balls in the air, and manage to keep the important things on schedule. An ongoing illness in the family adds to the stress. If life were perfect, I'd draw from x o'clock to y o'clock every day, then take a o'clock to b o'clock to finish a few projects I've wanted to get to for a long time, and so on. Instead, events move around in the schedule as if I'm playing some frustrating video game. I will shortly go out and put up posters for a concert I'm helping to present when I'd prefer to be drawing, then come back and draw some more, working later than I'd prefer, then memorize lines for a play rehearsal tonight when I could be drawing another strip, which I will instead draw tomorrow.

However, I will gradually catch up on everything, and the fact that, even with five or six inches of snowfall a couple of days ago, spring will begin to appear in a month or so encourages me. And the sun just came out as I'm typing this. That helps.

I guess I'm lucky in that I draw what I like to think are funny cartoons for a living. This makes other people happy, and I can't help but smile when I draw one. Neither wind nor rain nor snow nor an overload of burdens can deter me from my daily round of writing, drawing, scanning, coloring and uploading.

I never learned to juggle, and yet that's what I'm doing now. Not quite funny enough for a cartoon, but enough to amuse me as I go about my day.

http://donsmith-weiss.blogspot.com/2010_02_01_archive.html

The poop on biofuel

2010-02-10T11:40:00.000-05:00

When I built a house a few years ago, I subscribed to Small Flows magazine, a publication dedicated to septic systems and waste treatment. I was researching what sort of system to install, and I just never cancelled the subscription after I'd made my choice.

Well, this month's issue features a fascinating article for someone interested in ecology and that sort of thing. Researchers have found that they can use algae to treat wastewater, and a byproduct of the process, which is used primarily to clean the waste, is biofuel! Yes, a combination of sewage and algae---two pretty unappealing things---can result in clean water and fuel for heating, vehicles, etc. The article states, "In fact, many environmental experts believe that the combination of algae and wastewater may be the key to a low-carbon future--an oil utopia of sorts."

The use of algae to produce fuel was first tested in the fifties, and scientists began using it in 1978, after the oil crisis; but, as oil prices went down in the 90s, so did interest in the process. Now, of course, the idea is becoming appealing again. The cost-effectiveness of combining algae with wastewater easily trumps traditionally-farmed biofuels. With current technology, it's not yet commercially viable, but a pilot project is in the works.

Imagine home treatment systems--instead of just a septic system, you could have a biofuel plant and clean water for your plants! And, I assume, fertilizer would be another byproduct--although the article doesn't address that. On a national scale, imported oil could be replaced by fuel from our own waste. The cool part of this is that it treats waste that we already produce and always will, and which we have to treat anyway, and creates fuel as a byproduct. It also reduces costs by about half for both algae growers (who now grow it to produce biofuel) and wastewater treatment providers over their current systems operating separately. Countries without vast stores of oil might no longer be at the mercy of those who do have them. Imagine poor third-world countries being able to produce their own fuel, maybe on a local level!

A cost-effective technology is probably several years away, but it looks like this might become a magic bullet for some of our energy ills. I can see the slogans now: From Crappy to Happy! This Is Really Good Sh*t! Wastewater Purity = National Security. Flush with Pride.

Okay, I'll leave the slogans to people who know their sh*t.

Super Bowl

2010-02-08T09:49:00.000-05:00

I'm really happy for the Saints. My apologies to those who wanted the Colts to win, but New Orleans was a team that was trying to lift the spirits of a city that still, four years later, is recovering from the devastation of Katrina.

Once the Patriots (my home team) lost in the playoffs, I assumed I'd watch the Super Bowl with no favorite. Both teams had beaten New England in the regular season, and in fact the Saints embarrassed us more than the Colts. But the Saints were the underdog, and as the game began, I thought, these guys are the Patriots nine years ago: the underdog in the Super Bowl, whom just about everyone who writes about sports predicted to lose. A team that had never won a Super Bowl in its long history, but a team with loyal, die-hard fans nonetheless. A team that could represent a comeback from a disaster--after all, how appropriate that a team called the Patriots won the Super Bowl a few months after the 9/11 attacks, when national pride was strong. So as I watched the efficient Colts go up 10-0, I began to really root for the Saints. They were my team if my team couldn't be there.

I wasn't entirely happy about choosing sides. If you have no vested interest in the outcome, no result can hurt. But I thought of the time I spent in New Orleans. I had walked the streets that would be filled with happy crowds if the team won. I knew they'd celebrate as we in New England did in 2001. And I liked seeing a team that had worked its way up from mediocrity to greatness in a short time achieve so much.

(I also got the chance to educate a football non-fan at the party I went to about the basic rules of football and why I like the combination of the cerebral and the sheer physicality of the game--she may even buy a handbook to learn more now!--and this was a perfect game to illustrate that, with something as clever and dangerous as an onside kick to show how coaching decisions can be as important as who misses a tackle or gets open downfield.)

Even if the Saints had lost, I'd've been happy. They made it that far, and they were playing an incredible team. But the come-from-behind win (another hallmark of the Patriots for many years) felt even better.

So, congratulations, New Orleans. This is your time. Next year, I'd like to see my team play you in the big one, and if that happens, I won't be on your side any more. But for today, you are my team.

We Are the World

2010-02-05T09:45:00.001-05:00

I just saw a video clip about the upcoming remake of the '85 tune "We Are The World". The original raised millions for famine relief in Africa; the new version will aid the Haiti relief effort.

As a song, it's kind of mediocre. There's a direct ripoff of Do You Hear What I Hear? in the chorus ("a star, a star..."), and it's sort of a middling pop song, with a standard 4-5-1 chord progression that worked much better in Blowin' in the Wind, Viva la Vida, Always On My Mind, and others. It's surprising that Michael Jackson, arguably at his peak at the time, co-wrote this instead of something closer to Billy Jean or Thriller. But, despite that, it was an inspirational work that did a lot of good. Sometimes the easily digestible is an effective way to accomplish the morally imperative. You could say that musical junk food is a good way to get real food to people in need.

I'm looking forward to seeing who's on the recording; it becomes a record of the time. Seeing Kim Carnes (Bette Davis Eyes) and Huey Lewis (The Heart of Rock & Roll) reminds me how huge acts that seem like they'll be around forever can disappear from the public consciousness. I imagine some artists will return for the second one: Lionel Richie, who co-wrote the song, even though he's not making much of an impact these days; Springsteen, who still is; Kenny Rogers, who, if he does appear, will probably look younger than the first time around, thanks to extensive plastic surgery.

Maybe there'll be a a rap interlude, or a hip-hop section. There are ways to freshen up a tired tune. But whatever it sounds like this time around, it will be heartfelt, inspiring and a worthy effort. If you don't buy a copy, send the cost of one to relief aid---or to any charity to which you're dedicated. The important thing about this song and its various versions isn't so much if it's as good as Single Ladies, but that it makes us stop and think about how we should be helping others. And that's beautiful music to my ears.

Haiti

2010-02-03T16:39:00.002-05:00

I try hard to avoid political commentary in this blog, because I want people to enjoy the comic strip without thinking about whether they agree or disagree with my opinions. But I won't shy away from commenting on televangelist Pat Robertson's recent assertion that Haitians themselves were to blame for the earthquake that hit Haiti recently. Their crime? "Practicing voodoo."

First of all, I don't care if they blows bubbles and call them angels. I'm not pompous enough to declare that my vision of religion is the only one, or better than someone else's. Secondly, I don't believe God punishes people with earthquakes and tornadoes and hurricanes because they've been bad. And third, I wouldn't dream of kicking a nation of poor, struggling people when they're down.

These kinds of comments will just discourage some of his followers from donating. The Christian thing to do is to take care of your fellow human beings--there's this little thing I heard about called the Golden Rule, which I would suggest is generally held to be true by most religions, and by atheists, agnostics and Pastafarians as well.

I did a week's service a few years ago helping to add a second story onto an orphanage in the Dominican Republic. I saw the poverty there, and, on a day trip to the Dominican/Haiti border, saw the conditions the Haitians live in. We saw one man carrying a load of items on his head the size of a Volkswagen. One child pleaded to shine the shoes of one of my fellow workers, even though they were canvas sneakers.

That was on our last day there. The next day, we were stopped on our way to the airport by soldiers. The countryside is crawling with them the day after the one day of the week on which Haitians are allowed to cross the border and trade, sell their wares and make purchases in the DR, because there's always the worry that Haitians will try to stay in the Dominican. As poor as it it is, the Dominican is still a step up from the poverty and oppression in Haiti.

I see the earthquake as an opportunity for the international community to help make a better place of that part of the world. I guess Pat Robertson sees it as a chance to build his flock at the expense of informed discussion. Blaming people for natural disasters is judging those who do not deserve to be judged.

Johnny Carson

2010-01-27T13:30:00.001-05:00

Someone sent me a very silly link today. It's a segment from the old Tonight show when Johnny Carson was host. There's nothing to explain. Just watch it and enjoy. No one will be surprised that I found this amusing. It's an example of real clowns walking among us.

http://www.milkandcookies.com/link/138148/detail/

Cartoonist

2010-01-25T12:32:00.001-05:00

After all this time, I finally had a newspaper article done about QlownTown and me, in the Nashua, NH, Telegraph. The question of whether to reveal myself in my true form on the web is now moot. While the website only shows a cartoon version of me, the article shows a bunch of photos.

The photographer asked me to draw a bunch of cartoon characters to surround me, then do a bunch of poses myself. I figured he'd use the best one; he used five! I don't remember what I was doing with my hands; despite appearances, I don't have arthritis. Maybe I was trying to pump up my pecs; I don't know.

The response has been great, from friends and fans alike. There was a big spike in visits to the site: I should be in the paper every day! Oh, wait--if I start getting the strip in newspapers, I will be. Or at least the strip will.

I was wearing a QlownTown shirt in the picture. It'll be interesting to see if anyone orders any as a result. Same with the calendar. Of course, the whole goal of being in the newspaper is to increase sales of merchandise, or even donations to the site. (The internet has an odd rule: give stuff away for free in order to make money. The hope is that people who like the free cartoons will want to buy them on T shirts, mugs, etc., or make a small donation to offset costs and allow the site to continue.) But I have to admit: just being in the paper is pretty cool.

Having appeared in newspapers because I was a finalist in several cooking contests, in a magazine after I built a superinsulated saltbox up in Maine, and on TV being interviewed about the same house (a public TV special on energy efficient housing which appeared opposite the Super Bowl years ago, before Tivo or even VCRs, and was therefore seen by probably five people), I have to admit I enjoy the exposure. When I was a candidate to succeed Steve Thomas as host of This Old House, I was ready to hang up my tool belt for the glamor (is TOH actually glamorous?) of TV. So a day of local fame is fun. And it's interesting to go from a situation in which I'm totally in charge of the final product, from writing to drawing to coloring to uploading, to one where I answer some questions and trust someone else to tell the whole story for me. Luckily, Joe done good. Thanks, Joe!

Misguided fad

2010-01-22T11:41:00.000-05:00

I just read today that, because of Scott Brown's win against Martha Coakley in the Massachusetts Senate election this week, more Mass. residents are buying pickup trucks--specifically the GMC Canyon, the truck that Brown used as a "mascot" during his campaign. http://www.boston.com/

Now, whichever way you feel about who won or lost, a surge in truck-buying is bad. Americans should be going back to cars instead of trucks, which saves fuel, saves the environment, lessens our dependence on foreign oil, and makes roads safer. I don't fault people who use the trucks as trucks on a regular basis, but buying one because it's cool or macho is just stupid and backward-thinking. I used to have a truck when I needed one for my business, and I had a minivan when our kids were little. But both were more fuel efficient than a full sized truck. (Even when I had a one-ton stake-bed truck for my contracting business, it had a four-cylinder engine---and averaged 24 MPG.)

And don't start the "I'm tired of political correctness" stuff on me. That's like saying, "I'm tired of doctors saying I should quit smoking or eat sensibly or bundle up when it's cold," or complaining about having to wear deodorant or wash because everyone else does, or saying all this talk about pollution and conserving is boring. Get over it! I'm tired of people complaining about political correctness. It should be second nature to consider what you actually need vs. its environmental impact when you purchase something. Whether global warming is caused by people or not ignores the question of what our actions will do to our descendants. Why use up all the oil so our grandchildren or great grandchildren have none, when we might be able to make changes that extend the supplies for generations?

Brown's truck is made by GM. The Canyon is rated terrible in reliability. GM (and Chrysler) had to borrow money from the very people who didn't buy their (inferior) cars and trucks, and if we're going to buy from them now, we should be sending a message to them that we want more efficient and reliable vehicles. If you want to buy American (a good idea), Ford has some reliable and fuel efficient models, and they didn't screw up so badly that they faced bankruptcy. Even buying efficient foreign cars sends a message to American automakers that people want quality and conservation. It just seems that buying a Canyon is like buying a hole in the ground (pun intended) to throw your investment into.

There was evidently a run on Hummers when Arnold Schwarzenegger was elected governator because he drove one. So I hope Ed Begley, Jr. gets a hit TV show soon---maybe there'll be a bigger demand for electric or hybrid cars.

And that's my rant for Friday.

Snow

2010-01-20T11:19:00.000-05:00

The weather here in New Hampshire has been overcast, snowy and cold the last few days--and I love it. Sunniness is nicer, and that's what we have today, but the overcast days brought what may be the most beautiful blanket of snow I've ever seen in 23 years in this house. I took a bunch of pictures, and will probably use them as a slide show for my monitor this summer, when the temperature and humidity are high.

I truly believe there is no one "right" place to live. There are people who love warmth all year long and don't mind humid summers; people who want a wide variety of seasonal changes; others who want tropical temps all year long; some who like the desert in winter and tolerate it perfectly well all summer. I can't stand high heat, for example, and if the humidity is low, it makes little difference: my body can generate plenty of humidity on its own in the form of sweat, thank you. But I know desert denizens who don't mind the heat as long as it's dry. Since we can't all fit in one region, it's good that there are differences of opinion on where to live.

And then there is the magic of travel. I can visit Florida when it's warm but dry down there and it's cold in New England. I can go to Arizona in the winter months, when things are still growing but the godawful heat hasn't begun. Sunbelters can go skiing in high elevations and/or Northern climes. I wouldn't mind being on a beach on the Riviera right now; but since I can't be, I'll take what I see out my windows. And these were taken when it was still overcast. You should see this is the sun. Beautiful.

Eggnog

2010-01-12T14:59:00.000-05:00

I came up with a reduced calorie eggnog that is so good I will continue to drink it through the year. It's not entirely natural---it uses egg substitute, which has various gums and stuff (how's that for a scientific description?) to recreate the yolk portion that's missing, and fat free half and half, which has some white sugar and corn syrup [and, paradoxically, some cream]---but the calories are so reduced with minimal loss of flavor and texture, I consider it a healthy addition to breakfast, and a nice excuse for a snack. I usually mind the aftertaste of Splenda, but notice little if any when used in this. So here it is:

1/4 C.             Egg Beaters, Egg Starts, or other egg substitute
scant 1/4 C.    Splenda or similar artificial sweetener (Yes, it's supposed to be sweet!)
1/2 C.             fat-free half and half
3/4 C.             milk (I recommend soy milk or 1-2% milk)
a shot of         rum extract (optional)
                       nutmeg (Grate some into the drink and more on top.)

Blend all ingredients except the grated-on-top nutmeg in a blender, mixer, food processor, whisk or particle accelerator. Enjoy.

Yes, as an option you can make an alcoholic version...you've still saved a lot of calories and fat. Add rum, brandy, bourbon or your favorite eggnog-compatible libation in whatever amount pleases you.

You could augment or replace the nutmeg with cinnamon, ginger or COCOA! I had some commercially-made gingerbread eggnog on Festivus and it was DE-licious.

I guess, in honor of the comic strip I draw, I should really call this eqqnoq.

Time has come

2010-01-11T07:59:00.001-05:00

I'm a New England Patriots fan. Not of the team that lost, badly, yesterday---I think they were clones or something---but the one that's been around for most of the past decade. I was very frustrated, angry and sad when the game was over, because it was so lopsided. It was one of the few times when I've poured myself a drink to try to calm down. It worked. After an hour or so, I was able to look at it philosophically. Now my mantra is, "There's always hope for next year".

As Arizona won their game, I was reminded of going to a game in Arizona a few years ago. We were visiting my brother-in-law and his wife in Tucson, and he, being a huge Patriots fan, got us all tickets to the game. At the time, Arizona was in the basement of the NFL. I think their record that year included two, maybe three wins. New England, by contrast, was playing brilliantly, and the outcome of the game was pretty much a given---the best anyone could hope for that the Cardinals wouldn't completely bore us. As we walked through the parking lot to the stadium, there were tailgaters with their hibachis and coolers along each side, and a couple of them good-naturedly teased us that we'd come a long way to watch our guys lose. I said, "Not today. But don't worry; your time will come. It may a few years, but you'll get there."

Not terribly sage; parity in the NFL means that a bad team is likely to get better someday. (That's what I like about football. The salary cap means that no one can buy championships by spending more than everyone else to get the best players. The hiring of players and juggling of salaries, along with game planning, play calling and brute force makes the game a nice balance of cerebral and physical.) But whenever I see Arizona doing really well, I wonder if any of those guys I spoke to remember the guy from New England who tried to encourage them years ago...especially yesterday, when my team stank and their shone. I hope so. Sports---and so many other things these days---sometimes brings out the worst in people, and I hope that being friendly to The Other Side like that left a lasting impression.

So, my best to the Cardinals. And someday, our time will come.

Recurring characters

2010-01-07T14:53:00.001-05:00

The further I get into the process of drawing QlownTown, the harder it gets to change anything. I like never having to draw the same clown twice, and after almost a year, I hesitate to change that. But I've heard from a number of people that I should have recurring characters so people can identify with them. Now, I don't know that identifying with a clown is necessarily a good idea, but I see their point. It's funny to see Garfield or Monty or Snoopy in part because their reactions to a situation are recognizable as their own. So I'm going to try to pick some characters from the last ten months and see who I might want to learn how to draw more than once.

The idea to start on this project now was inspired by today's cartoon. When I drew the woman on the right, I thought, "She's a keeper". If I were a single clown, I'd probably want to go out with her. There's a freedom in the pencil sketch that can be hard to maintain in the inking process, but she looks silly enough to maintain her appeal no matter how stiffly I hold the pen. And, since I don't always put the characters in purely circus-style clothes, they have to maintain their "clown-ness" through their features.

There's another character I'd like to recycle, and I have used him several times, but I never seem to get the look the same as the first time I drew him. He even has a name---Mr. Binkles---and is on the most popular image in the QlownTown store. People have ordered him on T shirts, aprons, and even a clock. I also drew him in one of my favorite cartoons, one which never seems to amuse anyone else as much as it amuses me: the ducks in a row strip. I have it on a couple of shirts, but whenever someone sees it, they read it, smile wanly, and say "cool" or something else equally noncommittal--so those are becoming my new painting shirts. Anyway, I see that he looks the same in those two cartoons, so maybe I'll stick with him. I like the hat, the tie, the tux, and the fact that his nose is about the same size as his hat. And the wingtips he wears are a nice homage to the band I used to play in, The Wingtips. (Actually, his nose might be an homage to mine.)

But I now have about 300 cartoons with new clowns in almost every one. I have to look through months of them to see who grabs my eye as a possible regular. So if you, gentle reader, have any favorites, please let me know. You can reply below this post, or email me at dsmith-weiss@qlowntown.com. I, in the meantime, will look over old cartoons and see who looks promising.

Once the characters are picked, I may run a contest to name them. Of course, if no one suggests a good name, I'll retain the right to come up with my own...but my hope is that my readers are more creative than I, or at least have knowledge of more interesting names...although something simple like Bob the Clown or Dave the Clown appeals to me too. But I'm getting ahead of myself--I need to find out who these clowns are. In the words of the man/insect at the end of The Fly: help me!

Facebook hookup

2010-01-05T13:52:00.000-05:00

Today, Facebook finally let me attach my blog to my Facebook page. I tried it before Christmas, but for some reason, Facebook wouldn't let me add the link. Sometimes I love Facebook, but at times like that, I hate it. And I just wrote Facebook four times in three sentences.

Anyway, this is another step in my attempts to stick QlownTown in the face of as many people as possible. Now you can go to my FB page, then from there to the QlownTown website; from there to the blog, and so on. Once it's in newspapers, how many links do I list in the cartoon?

My initial goal, previously stated here, was to keep it simple. I now need to be clever or interesting in three places! And I suppose I need to blog more often now that more people may be reading it. In a perfect world, I'd draw a cartoon whenever I felt like it, blog whenever an idea hit me, and collect lots of money each time I did it.

But I can't complain. I had a great Christmas/New Year's season, and am now moved into my new office and almost all set up. I drew cartoons at my desk on a pullout side tray (instead of at the drawing table) for two weeks while the room was a mess. I didn't realize what a creature of habit I was till I had to work in what was basically a storage room. But this is nice now. Very nice.

We converted the old office, which has bookcases on two walls, into what we've named the Ben Franklin Memorial Reading Room. There's a small round table with an old fashioned lantern and two Windsor chairs in the center. It'll be mostly for show, because we have more rooms that we use on a regular basis, but I think I may use it occasionally to have a glass of wine and read about American history. And now, when lots of company comes to have dinner, I won't need to clean up my office!

Festivus/Christmas

2009-12-23T09:47:00.000-05:00

Friday is, of course, Christmas Day. We traditionally host dinner and eat around 1:00 or 2:00 PM. This year, because our daughter Erin has to work on Christmas and can't arrive till the afternoon, we'll eat at 4:00. This is a pretty big change for our family, which this year will include nineteen people at the table--well, tables; even with the leaf added, our main dining table only seats ten. We've always eaten in the early afternoon. Even when we were kids, both my wife's family and mine ate earlier. And this is the second time in two months we've eaten later: Thanksgiving dinner was also moved later in the day because of Erin's work schedule.

Yet no one has said anything about it being too late or that they'll be eating something else instead as a result. Maybe it's that we're all old enough to roll with the punches, tradition be damned, but I like to think that it is in part because no one would want to exclude Erin for the sake of eating at the "normal" time. However I look at it, it seems to me an example of how we make little adjustments in the holiday season to accommodate each other.

Today is Festivus, a holiday introduced years ago on the Seinfeld TV show and which has grown to be "celebrated" by thousands, maybe millions, of people. "A Festivus for the rest of us," as George's father proclaimed, was intended to counteract the commercialized holiday season with a gathering where you tell everyone what's wrong with them and battle through Feats of Strength (for many years, my son's high school Festivus parties included picking up a friend's Ford Fiesta). This year, my son will host, along with his wife now, what I think is his fourteenth or fifteenth consecutive Festivus party. And while the whole premise of the celebration is anti-holiday, it is in fact a gathering of old and new friends to play, laugh, eat and drink together. In fact, falling just before the holiday on which most of them will gather with their blood families to celebrate Christmas, it's a chance to join with their family of friends. That's three consecutive days of celebrating with Family, be it born-into or chosen. That's a pretty good way to spend some of the darkest days of the year.

Click here for a great explanation of Festivus. Or here for a clip from the show.

Happy Festivus!

Christmas lights

2009-12-21T08:36:00.000-05:00

On this date in 1882, the first Christmas light strings were sold. They replaced candles, which were responsible for houses sometimes burning down when the tree caught fire. Now more and more people are using LED Christmas lights, which emit almost no heat and therefore pose even less of a fire threat than mini-lights.

Nice thoughts for the week of Christmas, huh?

We went to a Hanukkah party this past Friday. It's a wonderful, annual affair at our friends Kathy and Jonathan's house. It has become the tradition that a group of men will peel, shred, squeeze, mix and fry the potatoes, onions, eggs and flour into an extravaganza of latkes, which is (are?) accompanied by applesauce and asour cream, brisket, kugel, the occasional vegetable, and many desserts. This year, some men brought their own aprons--next year, I'll have bring my own as well, although putting on a frilly red apron normally intended for Kathy or one of her daughters is always amusing.

Attending a Hanukkah party a week before Christmas is an embarrassment of riches for which I'm very grateful, and we've enjoyed it for every year but one over the last sixteen or so years. To be there for the lighting of the menorah is a pleasure and a chance to honor the rich history that goes with it. Since I spend my days being silly and irreverent for a living, it's nice to take time to be serious, respectful and grateful. I think the addition of a Hanukkah celebration to our Christmas season makes Christmas more fun for me. I always reach a point where I decide that the one more present I'd like to get someone will be unnecessary, that running around at the last minute to fight the crowds is counterproductive, and that I'll save my energy to be a better companion to that person on the day I'm preparing food and drink and tending to my guests' needs. While Christmas has Santa and Rudolph and presents and shopping attached to it, Hanukkah is still largely unspoiled. With all the gifts and hoopla and excitement and drama of the season, the lighting of the menorrah at the party and the lighting of candles at the 11:00 PM church service on Christmas Eve still are the highlights for me.

Then, of course, I'm ready for the opening of presents!

Moving into a new office

2009-12-17T10:10:00.002-05:00

We had the upstairs bedroom that used to be our daughter's painted about a month ago. This was exciting because I've always done my own interior painting, so to walk into a room that was magically transformed into new colors with no effort on my part (other than writing a check) was a treat.

The only step remaining before I can move into that room is to screw down the floorboards.

When I built the house, I used wide southern yellow pine planks for the floor, laid over black plastic and attached with common nials from a regular framing nail gun. I figured the combination of the little burrs on each nail, as the gun breaks off the wires connecting the nails in a magazine, and the glue on the shaft of the nail, which is activated by the heat of shooting it into the wood, would hold the boards. Nope. For years, the floors in our bedrooms have creaked. I screwed down the downstairs floors early on and had them sanded and refinished, but the upstairs bedroom floors continue to whine and moan when walked on. So as each room is repainted, I will fix the floors.

Trouble is, with the busy holiday season and my innate ability to get distracted by other things, the floors haven't been fixed yet. The screws are ready but I guess my resolve isn't. I should probably be doing that now instead of writing this, but this seems to be more fun. Kneeling for hours on a hard floor that you thought you'd done right the first time is an easy task to put off, at least for me.

I'd hire someone to do the floors, but that's too much money for a project that can be done relatively quickly. I'm thinking this may be a Christmas weekend project. If I can tear myself away from going to the movies, visiting with family and friends, and inhaling one more piece of pie or glass of eggnog (I make a mean eggnog), I may get it done then.

Note the upholstery. Click here to see more cartoons.

For my next house, I want tot rip 1/4" plywood--probably oak--into wide strips and glue them down to the subfloor, then add a couple of coats of different stain: one for the basic color and another to give them a worn look. Then a few coats of water-based polyurethane and I'll have old-looking, inexpensive, durable wide board floors that don't, and won't, squeak. I did several floors like this for clients in my old carpenter/handyman days, and they all worked well and saved thousands of dollars. And I like "getting away" with something like that. I guess it goes back to my theater days, building sets and props out of cheap materials and making them look expensive. I did a beautiful-looking mandolin from foam core board and the type of elastic thread in the waists of underpants.

But I digress. And the fact that I start out talking about finishing a floor project and end up writing about underpants--and that I easily do this sort of thing all the time--is why the floor still lies there, waiting for me. It's not like it doesn't complain--I just don't listen very well.

Energy efficiency and Christmas

2009-12-15T16:33:00.001-05:00

I do love Christmas. I love the festivities, trying to keep up with too many holiday functions, eating more sugar than (I think) all the rest of the year, making myself work out several times a week to make up for that, the inspirational spiritual aspect, the colors...it's just a fun time of year, and a nice consolation for the decreasing hours of daylight and the increasing cold for those of us who live in cold climates.

I've spent several days this month drawing Christmas cartoons while I listen to Christmas music. I almost feel guilty. But not quite.

Speaking of guilt, I know that even the mini Christmas tree lights use a lot of electricity, especially when you add up all the trees around the world at Christmastime, so we decided to buy LED lights for the tree this year. We bought them on Black Friday at a big discount. Now they're on the tree, and I like them a lot. White LED lights often look bluish outdoors, but on our tree, they look fine. They're also bright enough to light up the ornaments; our old mini lights were too faint. The blue, especially, is a beautiful, rich, almost mysterious color. And they come in different shapes, so you can have tiny dots of light or big, honkin' old fashioned bulbs. There are even special versions of white LED strings if you want the traditional warm color for your outside decorations. Target is one source of many.

LEDs use much less energy than any other type and will last for years longer No more studying strings of lights each year to figure out which bulb burned out and is causing the whole thing to fail--even though the box said they all stay on if one goes out! I read recently that we may all be using them as our primary light sources in our homes within three years. They're expensive for anything but tree lights now, but as demand and production increases, prices will drop. Of course, the ultimate savings in energy already offset the initial higher cost of the bulbs, if you're willing to spend the money now. They screw into standard sockets, so it'll be easy to convert as prices allow.

My dream (one of many) is to have a house with prewired sockets in all the windowsills so an LED candle can just be plugged into each window and be controlled from a central switch. They don't get hot, so there's no worry about melting window shades or burning curtains.

If you don't have them now, look for LEDs the day after Christmas at bargain prices. And remember, if you throw out fluorescent lights--don't! Fluorescents have a little bit of mercury in them and shouldn't be dumped into the environment. Recycle them. Most municipalities do now. If not, go here to find out more about how to recycle them.

The season is even more fun if you feel like you're doing something good for others, and this is an easy way to do that. And it's good for you too.

Calendar

2009-12-07T08:29:00.002-05:00

Order the calendar here, now!

I meet with the printer to approve the calendar proofs tomorrow morning, and then the calendar will be ready to ship in (I hope) a week or less. It's exciting to be doing the first QlownTown calendar, especially since it's grown from the original concept of just a large cartoon on top with the monthly calendar below to also including several interesting holidays and clown-related birthdays per month to adding a holiday or birthday to every day of the year, and one or two additional cartoons. Now it exists as a "Holiday" calendar, another way to give people a lift every day. As a matter of fact, people can still hate clowns but enjoy the list of wacky holidays. How bad can a day be if you know it's Rubber Ducky Day or National Kazoo Day, and that someone somewhere is actually celebrating it?

I'm hearing from more and more people that they always look forward to their morning QlownTown fix to get the day started right. I do that myself with other people's cartoons, so I feel lucky to be a part of a group that helps people get going on the right foot. I receive the daily cartoon myself via email, and I always check it to make sure it comes through all right. I frequently think of some particular friend or relative who I know will be especially entertained by whatever cartoon arrives that morning...that's how I get a lift from the strip.

And, for the first time, I also get to see the cartoon as my readers do.

As I've mentioned here previously, by the time I've gone through the process of writing, drawing, scanning and coloring the strip, the joke often seems lame; but seeing it arrive, fully formed, in my email gives me a fresh perspective. I sometimes laugh out loud at my own cartoon! This is when I know that 1) it's a good one, or 2) I may be the only one who finds it funny and I should be an accountant or burger flipper. Of course, I always choose to believe the former is true, and feel encouraged when someone writes to say they especially liked that day's cartoon.

Perhaps, in keeping with my campaign to start people's day right, I should go into coffee distribution. Qlown Qoffee, anyone?

National Fritter Day

2009-12-02T11:03:00.000-05:00

I turned in the artwork files for the 2010 QlownTown calendar yesterday. It was probably three months later than I should have gotten it ready (note to self for 32011 calendar: have ready in August), but at least it's now at the printer. I noticed as I looked at my 2009 calendar---which featured a few holidays, birthdays, and special occasions, but nowhere near the one-for-every-day of the 2010 one---that today is National Fritter Day. I've decide to honor this important day by making fritters for dinner tonight.

Here's a recipe that I like for corn fritters:

3/4 C. all-purpose flour
1/2 C. corn meal
2-1/4 tsp. baking powder
3/4 tsp. salt
2 T. sugar
1 egg, separated
3/4 C. milk
1-1/2 tsp. canola oil
1 12oz. can whole-kernel corn, drained (optional)
Oil for frying

Sift flour with baking powder, salt and sugar. With rotary beater, whip egg whites till stiff peaks form.

In another bowl, using same beater, beat egg yolk, milk, and 1-1/2 tsp. canola oil.

Gradually add flour mixture, beating till smooth. Gently fold in egg white. Add corn, if using.

Heat oil (at least 2 inches deep) to 375F. Drop corn mixture by large spoonfuls (about 1/4 Cup) into oil, a few at a time. Deep-fry, turning once, till golden brown (3-5 minutes). Drain well on paper towels. Serve with maple syrup, molasses, honey or jam; or, to really impress, with cob syrup, made by boiling sugar, water and corn cob together, then straining...a somewhat involved process that I won't do again, in part because I love maple syrup more.

You could also go the savory route, topping with salsa, tapenade, curry sauce or hoisin.

Happy National Fritters Day!

This has been a service of the QlownTown Test Kitchens

Thanksgiving

2009-11-24T09:15:00.000-05:00

It took most of last week for me to fully recover from the play I had been in. I was just a member of the ensemble, one of almost fifty onstage, but it was exhausting. Not so much the work--our dancing and singing probably only amounted to fifteen or twenty minutes of each show---but the excitement of undertaking such a large project with so many people and the inevitable celebration after every show took a lot out of me! I wanted to grab every moment of fun that I could, and I'm glad I did; but I'd pace myself more if it had involved more than one weekend.

I'm lucky. I was able to adjust my work schedule last week around the occasional nap, or start later and work later as it suited me.

I watched House last night. It was about a genius who intentionally drugged himself to make himself stupider, so he wouldn't have the pressures of being an overachieving writer and thinker. He says at one point, "I'd rather be happy than rich." I could identify with that. While I wouldn't mind being wealthy, the reduction in stress since I moved from being a kitchen designer to being a cartoonist is huge. I was taking anti-stress medication and Prilosec for indigestion every morning at the end of my designer days; a month later I was off both. The ultimate outcome of QlownTown will, I believe, be a very comfortable income--it's growing already--but I've already received the biggest payoff: I'm happy. I don't know how many times I've received an email or had someone tell me face-to-face that the first thing they do in the morning is check their email-box for the daily cartoon. The idea that I'm directly responsible for starting someone's day off right is exciting. I don't feel pressured by this, but I do feel honored. Of course, if I had a dollar for every time someone felt a lift from reading my cartoon...

So, two days before Thanksgiving, as I struggle to get the calendar all assembled for the printer (several months behind schedule, I know!), I'm thankful for being able to do this. I have a wife who works in partnership with me as I build this dream. I have friends, family and readers who encourage me. And I have a bunch of qlowns who make me laugh every day, even if I have to draw them before they can do that for me.

Free shipping

2009-11-12T11:01:00.001-05:00

Today (Thursday, November 12th) only, the Cafe Press store (www.cafepress.com/qlowntown) will be offering free shipping on orders on $50 or more. QlownTown merchandise makes a great gift, so grab stuff now and save a few bucks!

Use the coupon code SHIPSHAPE.

Busy busy

2009-11-09T10:43:00.000-05:00

When I embarked on the QlownTown adventure, I envisioned sitting at my drawing table playing with cartoon characters, which I would then casually scan, color and upload to the site for automatic release on the proper date. What I didn't envision was discovering that coloring them was as much fun as crayons were when I was a kid, and, as a result, spending hours playing with color and patterns after the initial black and white drawings are done.

This on top of being in Production Week for a play I'm in, doing work to publicize a concert for this coming Sunday, and trying to put the finishing touches on the 2010 calendar. The calendar has become an especially large undertaking since I decided to list a holiday for almost* every day of the year---yes, there are that many. So, after a 4-1/2 hour rehearsal, I found myself putting a cartoon together till 10:45 last night so it could go out to subscribers at midnight.

This is the danger of being only one day ahead on drawing the strip, but I plan to change that after the play and calendar are done. At least doing the play and researching the calendar are both lots of fun.

Interestingly, one involves working with about sixty other people, and the other involves working alone, yet I love both. I can't imagine drawing a comic strip with sixty people, and doing a one-man show would be nerve-racking. If those sixty people worked well together, the cartoon process would go really fast, though.

Anyway, this is the type of week one often refers to as Hell Week, but I think/hope it'll be Heaven and Hell Week. Next week will be Catch Up and Nap Week.

*I may ask people to suggest holidays for the few days that feature, as far as I can tell, no existing holiday or celebration, to be listed on the 2011 calendar.

Size matters

2009-11-02T17:27:00.000-05:00

I did an escalator cartoon on Sunday that was hard to see. [For those who read it and couldn't make out what was happening, the woman rides the escalator down, but instead of getting off at the bottom, disappears into the escalator, then reappears at the top, presumably riding down and up as long as she wants. I liked the idea as a whimsical reverie on what might happen if one didn't get off at the bottom.]

Actually, I drew it several years ago. I've been so busy lately that I hauled it out of the files, scanned it, touched it up and uploaded it to the site. Then, after all that work (sometimes using an old cartoon takes longer than just drawing a new one from scratch!), I realized that it might be hard to make out the details, but it was too late to do another one, so I left it as is and hoped for the best. I was looking at it on a 24" screen and it was a little small to me, so I could imagine what it'd be like on a small laptop--or, worse yet, a cell phone. Sure enough, some people mentioned that they couldn't make it out and one person thought the woman was male. It's making me rethink the whole approach to doing cartoons. Some of them, I figure they'll be easy to read when they come out in a book, but that doesn't help now, when they're only appearing online. I still have the goal of getting the strip into newspapers, but that'll always be secondary to appearing on the internet, I expect. So cartoons with nice little details may be a bad idea.

I also realized that I sometimes draw the characters smaller than I should in the space I'm using, even as I grumble to myself that I need a bigger area in which to draw, so I'm trying to adjust the way I've always drawn. I'm still grappling with the square vs. strip format, too---doesn't it make more sense to use a square if a lot of readers will be viewing it on a cell phone? As far as T shirts go, I'm not sure. A square can fit nicely on the pocket area of a polo shirt and be relatively discreet, but do most people who wear cartoons on their clothes care about subtlety anyway?

One cartoonist told me, "Do whatever feels natural for the strip. If you tend to do one-panel comics, use a square. Strips tend to be more linear storytelling, with several panels in a strip." I think my natural inclination was always to do a square panel, but my gut has always said, "Do a strip. There are more opportunities in newspapers for strips." So my guts are fighting with my brain, which is bad during flu season.

Anyway, my hope is that all future QlownTown cartoons will be clear enough that you can see everything if you're viewing them on your computer. On iPhones, it may occasionally be an issue, but when that happens, you can check it out at home. Maybe I should offer a special QlownTown magnifying glass in the store...

Hired pen

2009-10-30T12:17:00.001-04:00

I've been toying with doing commission work. People have asked me occasionally over the years, and I've done a few things--illustrations for a newspaper article, posters--but when I began this comic strip odyssey, the plan was to just do the strip. It's not that I don't like to draw to serve other people's ideas; it's just that I have a hard time coming up with cartoons for a particular subject. The stuff I do comes from various places: a road sign I see, a funny cartoon by someone else that inspires a new idea, misreading an ad and getting a joke out of what-if-it actually-said-what-I-thought-it-said; but it's almost never based on a premeditated subject: "now I will come up with a strip about babies," for example.

I did come up with an idea for next Sunday's comic which will be based on the show I'm currently rehearsing with a community theater group. I'd been brainstorming for a couple of months, and finally found one that works. I still don't know if it's as funny as some that I've just pulled out the air, but it is a good idea that came from working hard to do something on a particular subject.

Someone wrote me recently that I should ask readers what they do, what they watch, and what they'd like to see in a cartoon. This smacks of cartoons-for-hire to me and goes against my inherently lazy nature, but it would set up a nice challenge. I'd like to see how well I can directly serve the desires of my readers. So go ahead and send me your occupations, your hobbies, your advertising needs, and I'll see what, if anything, I come up with. You can e-mail me at dsmith-weiss@qlowntown.com, or reply in the Comments section of this blog.

I have every strip planned through May 2010, but when I get an idea I really like, I bump some planned strip to May and put the new one in earlier. I've also found that ideas that I wrote down months ago might not seem funny enough when they finally come up in the rotation, so they get dumped for a new concept...so your subject may appear sooner than that.

Conan

2009-10-22T15:49:00.000-04:00

Interesting: Conan the Barbarian is also known as Conan the Cimmerian, making my cartoon yesterday titled "Conan the Seminarian" an even better joke than I originally thought! I had originally planned on "Conan the Librarian" as a title and concept, but as I began to draw it, I wondered if I'd seen it somewhere else. Sure enough, it's an old gag. So I looked for something else that sounded similar to "Barbarian" that would be unlikely for Conan to do. "Contrarian" seemed too hard to draw clearly. I suppose I could've drawn him singing with the Beach Boys and called it "Conan the Barbara Annian", but no.

I was happy that I drew a pretty good Ahnuld-like character on the first try. I hate to re-draw; it seems that each time, you lose a little of the freedom of the original. As it is, I always feel that the final inked drawing loses a little vitality from the initial pencil sketch. I hope as the years go by, the pencil and pen versions become more and more alike.

Oops!

2009-10-22T12:05:00.000-04:00

Yesterday's cartoon, which would have been titled "Today's Cartoon" when it was sent to email subscribers, didn't get uploaded two days ago, so Today's Cartoon for yesterday never got emailed yesterday. I'd hoped to email it today, so the cartoon that was supposed to be Today's
Cartoon yesterday would have effectively been mailed tomorrow, relative to when it was supposed to go out. Confused?

All it means is that the system doesn't provide a way to manually email the daily cartoon. If I miss the deadline, it ain't gonna happen. Of course, once the strip is in newspapers, I'll be providing them three to four weeks in advance, so no little glitches like this will occur. Imagine if cartoonists were only a day ahead on providing cartoons to papers: there might be days when there'd be blank spaces on the comics page, then other days when there'd be extra pages. Wouldn't work.

That's a big reason the strip isn't in any newspapers yet. The time spent on getting the calendar ready, drawing the strip, and doing the other stuff that fills up my daily life makes it hard to get four to six weeks ahead. I also tend to do more coloring and adding textures, photos, and other background stuff to the cartoons to make them interesting--and to entertain myself.

My big "gimmick" that I'd planned from the start for this strip was to use words as textures in the background. For example, the "Kathy" strip on 5/18/09 featured grass along the bottom that was made from the words GRASSGRASSGRASS running along the bottom. Today's strip (meaning today's, on October 22nd) has the words WOODWOODWOOD as a texture on the bar top. I was going to use a photo of real wood grain, but I've done that before, and the words, while a little time-consuming, are fun to use. I worry that they won't be legible on small monitors, but they're there for some people at least, and it amuses me.

That reminds me: I have an old Beatles cartoon that I drew years ago that I should've used on 9/9/09. It's kind of outdated, except when the Beatles are in the news--as they were that day with the release on all their CDs, remastered. I could've used 99999999 as a texture! (If you don't get the reference, it's to Revolution 9 on the White Album.)

Once the site is opened up to your comments--that's coming on a future update of the site--we can see how many people, if any, are noticing the worded textures. In the meantime, feel free to comment here on the blog. Of course, the blog will get a makeover at some point, too, to make it more interesting to look at. But for now, I'm concentrating on the calendar, website changes, the play for which I'm in rehearsals, the house I'm designing, and trying to get ahead on the daily cartoons...so we don't have another yesterday/today/tomorrow occurrence.

Hey, the Beatles released an album in the US years ago called "Yesterday..and Today", and did songs called "Yesterday" and "Tomorrow Never Knows"--so this rambling blog actually all ties together!

Coulrophobia

2009-10-15T17:17:00.000-04:00

Yes, there is a word for an excessive or irrational fear of clowns: coulrophobia. I figured there must be a word for it, so I looked it up. Sure enough. Coulrophobia.

I was getting my teeth cleaned today, and the hygienist told me she'd checked out the site a few times, but that she doesn't like clowns. Now, disliking and fearing are different things, but the issue is the same: there are people who don't want to read the strip simply because it's about clowns. I suppose it's no different than someone not wanting to read Garfield because he or she hates cats, or not wanting to watch Yogi Bear cartoons because he/she is afraid of bears. But it's frustrating. I decided to do a strip about clowns because no one else was doing that. And I decided to make them everyday people--that is, put them in offices, factories, shops, rather than in a circus--because I wanted to use them simply as a vehicle for humor. The whole "life is a circus" metaphor.

Yes, they live in tents (which have framed doors and windows, not canvas flaps), but that's a play on our world if it were inhabited by clowns, just like the stone houses and real-pig garbage disposals in the Flintstones. Maybe if these people got to know the strip, they'd feel better. I do plan at some point to start using the same characters and give them names, but that requires drawing them the same each time, and that seems like a bit of a burden. No one ever said Gary Larson should have the same cast of characters!...although I'll concede that there was frequently the familiar cow, fat kid with glasses, fat woman with glasses, etc. Anyway, maybe having a familiar clown named Rupert or Elvis or whatever will enable coulrophobics to embrace (figuratively, not literally!) the denizens of QlownTown.

Hey, maybe I could actually cure some clown-haters or -fearers by exposing them to clowns that they might see as often as, or even more frequently than, their favorite uncle Howie. Familiarity breeds contentment, sometimes. Therapy through the funnies.

In the meantime, if you're telling anyone about QlownTown and they say, "Oh, but I hate/am afraid of clowns", explain to them that these guys are a harmless vehicle for delivering the same off-the-wall, insightful, literate humor that other cartoonists--some of whom may be among his or her favorites--do. Once they start appearing in newspapers, they'll frequently be in black and white anyway. Maybe that will be less threatening or offensive. But it's the 21st century. Isn't it about time we accepted all people of color...even if it's just makeup?

Normal

2009-10-12T11:38:00.000-04:00

I was talking with Sarah, my web czar, about one of the most popular items in the QlownTown store, the "Find the normal guy" poster. It's a full-color version of the teal-and-aqua background that appears on the QT website. There is one person in the whole thing who isn't a clown--he is clearly an "average" person with no makeup or silly clothes. The object, as the title suggests, is to find that person, a la "Where's Waldo?", in the midst of a coven of clowns. (An embarrassment of clowns? A buffoonery? This may be fodder for a future blog...)

Now, Sarah writes a lot in her blog about labels, expectations, assumptions. As soon as I said "normal" I realized that it might seem like one of those labels people apply that is, at best, a judgment. I explained that within the context of QlownTown, "normal" was not so much a subjective label as a way to differentiate one from a clown. Sarah didn't seem to be concerned anyway, but it did strike me that I had used the word normal without thinking about its implications.

I try to avoid using the word normal unless I'm sure that it applies to an irrefutable truth. For instance, a round orange is normal; a square orange would not be normal. I've seen some that are grown in boxes so they're square, and they look pretty cool, but I wouldn't consider them normal. As used on the poster, "normal" is arguably a bad thing---he certainly doesn't fit in. And it's also a satirical or irreverent use of the word. If you accept that you're in QlownTown, you should realize that the normally non-normal is normal, and the word normal becomes something else.

The potential for someone to mistake the word on the poster as a judgment is part of the adventure that is political correctness. And despite the fact that yes, there are times when being PC can go over the line, it's generally a good idea to try to be super-aware of what a word or phrase will mean to others. A friend once said, "Political correctness is just common sense." So is that statement. If "Redskins" was originally a pejorative term for American Indians, they certainly have the right now to be offended by the name of the Washington football team. How one resolves that issue after decades of established usage is not a simple issue, but being annoyed by the hassle of dealing with it doesn't make it a non-issue.

We take small steps. Our local high school football team is the Tomahawks. They used to do a chopping hatchet move and chant "woo-woo-woo-woo" in pseudo-Indian, and that's a easy thing to get rid of. (I haven't been to a game in several years, but I hope and assume that the "war chant" has been dropped.) They're usually referred to as the 'Hawks, and maybe someday the name will be officially changed.

But back to normal. I bet no one has looked at that and said, "Who is he to judge who's normal?". This preemptive essay on the use may be stirring up something that no one ever thought about. My urge to address it once I thought about it, however, was the same reaction most sensitve people would have.
It's normal.

Criticizing fellow cartoonists

2009-10-09T10:16:00.000-04:00

This is a touchy subject. Some cartoonists are very outspoken about whose work they don't respect. Bill Griffith, for example, who draws the comic strip "Zippy", has said he hates Dilbert, that it isn't funny at all. Whenever I think about criticizing anyone else's work, though, I always think, "What if I'm at some gathering and I meet the person whose work I've trashed?" How do you say hi to that person without feeling awkward? And what if they've read what you said and bring it up?

Now, I don't worry about retaliation. If I say something bad about your work and you come back with a similar criticism, it may be just retribution, or you may have never liked my stuff anyway and just decided to speak up because I did. It might hurt, but it doesn't make my opinion of what I do any different. I may even take some of the criticism to heart and try to make improvements. But I'm concerned about turning off readers who like QlownTown but may decide they don't like it if they don't like my opinions. I'm wussy that way.

Having said all that, I do confess a personal dislike for cutesy cartoons that don't really have a strong punchline. Family Circus often features cute jokes that don't make me laugh. I know I do the occasional clunker myself, but an abundance of unfunny comics makes me wish they'd work harder. Polls evidently show that that's one of the most popular strips, so what can I say? But cute without clever just seems like a greeting card. Likewise, "Rose is Rose" is one of the best-drawn strips out there and so I read it every day, but it traffics in a sweet, cute style of humor when I think the brilliant artwork deserves smarter stuff. Again, popularity 1, me 0...ah, what do I know?

There are also a couple of pet strips I could name that never make me laugh, yet they've been around for years. I recently decided that I do like Garfield, however. I've read a lot of criticism about how it's the same five or six gags all the time, but I still laugh out loud occasionally. In today's strip, Odie starts to drown in his own drool, a surrealistic sight that could only make sense in a cartoon.

And I think Dilbert is always funny, almost always very funny, and deserves the popularity it enjoys. So my own tastes do sometimes mesh with the prevailing view.

I hope that when I'm at the Reuben awards (the comics industry "Academy Awards") someday, either accepting an award or wishing I'd at least been nominated and wondering how I even got invited, that anyone I've mentioned will forgive me, shake my hand, and say something nicer than "Congratulations. But just so you know, your stuff makes me barf."

Synchronicity

2009-10-06T11:28:00.003-04:00

What a coincidence! Mark Parisi, who draws "Off the Mark", did a cartoon today about the Mona Lisa, the same day I did one! Different punchlines, and I think both were very funny, so no harm done.

What I find happens more often is that another cartoonist will draw the same idea I'm planning to do later. Mike Peters has been an especially frustrating guy in this respect. He did about a half dozen strips that I had planned on over the months that I was waiting for the site to launch. "The Hatchback of Notre Dame;" a puppet complaining that his parents/puppeteer were "too manipulative;" and the list goes on. It's no one's fault; two people just come up with the same brilliant idea at the same time! (For awhile, however, I harbored a secret suspicion that someone was finding out about my ideas and sending them to Mike...even though I've never met him.)

As I've said here before, I have every day's cartoon planned through the beginning of next May. I figure that one or two of those ideas, of which I may have conceived a year or more earlier, will appear in a similar form in someone else's strip before I get to use them. So goes the cartoon world. I did manage to convert the "manipulation" cartoon into one where the puppet says, "I've had it up to here"---which was funny, but not as good as the manipulation gag. Sometimes reworking the original idea can be funnier, though--today's cartoon was supposed to feature Leonardo da Vinci with his shirt sticking out of his zipper. While I pondered how to draw that without making it look obscene (I was thinking a plaid or checked shirt), I decided to check online to see what he would have worn. "Flowing robes" was the answer, so I switched to toilet paper stuck to his shoe, which I think is funnier anyway--especially since they didn't have toilets back then. At least not the white porcelain type I show in the next room.

I have a Picasso cartoon planned, and every time I see a Picasso appear in the comics (which isn't often), I think I should get going and put mine out quick. But then some other idea might get bumped and be done by someone else first, so I can't really stress about it. There are enough jokes to go around--I just hate it when one of the really good ones gets snapped up by someone else first. Today, we did 'em at the same time, and they were different takes on the subject--proof that create(ive) minds think alike.

Airlines

2009-10-05T12:49:00.002-04:00

I got back from a trip to California a couple of weeks ago, and was struck, as I always am when I fly, by how impractical the off-loading procedure is on an airplane. Obviously, first class gets off first--that's a given. But why is it that the masses at the back of Coach have to wait as each row, one-by-one, gets their carry-ons down from the overhead bins, working from front to back? I would propose several steps to improve getting off the plane.

1) Anyone who has a connecting flight for which they only have, say, a half an hour to meet, would be allowed off first. This could be verified by the flight attendants so no one cheats--the rest of the passengers could spend the extra time this might take getting their luggage down. It's the airline's fault that these people have a tight schedule anyway, so they should be responsible for making it easier for those passengers. I have actually missed a connecting flight because I had to wait for the plane to unload, and I'm annoyed that the airlines don't inform their flight attendants when someone has a short layover and have them call those people to the front of the plane first.

2) Anyone who had no carry-ons or has their luggage already in hand would be allowed off next. Again, no cheating: if you have to get it out of the overhead, you don't get in on this round--even if you're quick.

3) Next, anyone who gets their luggage down during the previous two steps would be allowed off. These would generally be people on the aisle, but they might be traveling with others whose luggage they could also retrieve. And no standing in the aisle while you gather your belongings; remember, this is a courtesy system, and you should stay the hell out of the way.

4) Last would be the remaining passengers: this group would not be delaying people who were in a hurry or were more organized than they. There is invariably a jam where someone who has sat in their seat for the first several minutes of unloading sees that it is his or her row's "turn" and finally gets out, moves into the aisle, blocking the way, and proceeds to get his/her overhead stuff down while the rest of the passengers wait.

I suspect that plane disembarkations that take twenty minutes to a half an hour could be reduced to fifteen minutes or less via this method. Why no one at any airline has ever instituted this is a mystery. They must know that travelers experience a lot of frustration with air travel. Wouldn't this be a simple, no cost way to improve that experience? And in doing so, an airline would help to foment good manners and create a positive public image in the process; sort of a Please-treat-each-other-with-respect-because-we-do" message.

I have no power to change this. The one means at my disposal to perhaps spread the word a little, besides this blog, is that I can do a cartoon about it. I don't have one in mind yet, but there will be one. Oh yeah, count on it.

And if nothing ever changes, at least I can say I got a strip out of my frustration. Maybe, when that comic comes out, you could print copies and leave them all over airplanes. Sort of a change-by-cartoon campaign.

New things

2009-10-02T15:06:00.002-04:00

Wow! What an exciting phone call! I just got off the phone with my new net guru, Sarah. She and I will be making lots of changes, big and small, to QlownTown in the coming months. And QlownTown will be living on its third server in less than a year soon, but it takes time to move an entire town.

One idea Sarah threw out was: do I put photos or cartoons of myself on the website and/or blog, instead of the cartoon character who now appears there? (We're planning to put up more than one image of me.) I said that one possible advantage of cartoons is that no one can see how old I am, or what color, orientation, weight, show size or astrological sign I am. (Okay, I admit you can't tell a person's astrological sign from a photo--unless they're wearing a big "Leo" medallion.) You can believe that I'm whatever you'd like: a twenty-two-year-old bearded artist type, or a fat, nearsighted old man with a kindly demeanor, or a voluptuous Lithuanian woman who happens to have a man's name and would be the perfect life partner for you. Whatever category suits your idea of someone you'd like.

A photo, of course, puts a human face to the person who appears sometimes erudite, sometimes offbeat, and occasionally just silly/stupid through the comics he writes and draws. And, I could take a bunch of photos at once and be done with it, in less time than it takes to draw multiple cartoons.

There's also the option of posting a photo, but changing it every few months to a photo of someone else so you never know who's the real I*...but that would just be messing with people with whom I want to make a connection. There's a part of me that wants to do the strip with no boundaries, to say "damn" when the cartoon character is saying "damn", instead of writing #%@!...but I really like the idea of welcoming almost everyone and alienating almost no one. I hope to do it while avoiding cutesy, heartwarming, gee-life-is-really-like-that-isn't-it cartoons (names will not be named here, but there are daily strips that require no clever thought to conceive that are getting too much space in newspapers); but I want to build a community of people who visit the strip, or whom the strip visits via email, on a regular basis. People who like the strip will generally assume they'd like me if they met me, so what do I present to them?

I ask you: as a reader of the strip [if you're not, go check out the website right now; I can wait while you do], what do you think you'd prefer?

* That's the erudite part of me, not using "me".

New things Happening

2009-09-10T09:24:00.003-04:00

I began the process of switching servers yesterday. This will allow me to update stuff on the site more quickly and make some relatively big changes on the format of the site. I have plans to expand the offerings in the store, including more items on which the cartoons will be available and some altogether new media; to add a guide so you can look up old cartoons by subject---now that we're six months into the site being online, there are enough cartoons to do that, and I've been cataloging them for that very reason; and to eventually offer forums for reader input, in the form of "write-your-own" captions, comments on the daily cartoon and more.

This will be made possible by my hiring of an old friend, Sarah Dopp, who is much more internet-savvy than I and does this stuff for a living. I don't know why it took so many months of reading her online comments to realize that she might have better insights into web marketing. She and I had a wonderful adventure together years ago and I've always enjoyed and respected her. The coolest thing is that she's as excited about the strip as I am, and excited people bring more to a project!

I'm also working on the 2010 calendar, which is, predictably, behind schedule. I'm trying to find a program that will let me lay out a calendar month with the month, dates and day names in whatever font I want, and allow me to do it forever, rather than starting with someone else's template each year. Suggestions are welcome--but I use a Mac, so no Windows or Word, please!

I accidentally wrote over one cartoon that I thought I might use for the calendar; it was in a high-res, color-separated format, but after I messed that up, I had to pull a lower-quality version from another file to save in the "high res" file. It'll be fine for a book, but blowing it up to calendar size would really require rescanning and recoloring the whole thing, which had already taken the better part of a day. Grrr!!

Still, it's nice to be at a point where I can look at what's been happening the past six months and decide what I want to change or add based on that. I originally envisioned this whole thing as me just drawing my cartoons and the website being a simple means to present them, but the site now seems to have the potential to grow and do a lot more. We'll see where we are six months from now. I expect there'll be a book by then, but who knows what the site will include?

Ahead of schedule

2009-08-13T09:38:00.002-04:00

I now have every cartoon written till the middle of March 2010. Not drawn, but scripted. I know what cartoon will appear every day till then. (I actually have more ideas sketched, but they haven't been assigned dates yet.) I came up with a Valentine's Day joke which is already scheduled for February 14th, for example. There are several Halloween strips planned for October. A week or more of Christmas cartoons for December.

It feels good to know what will appear when, although I continue to juggle them. There was a recession joke that I was going to plug into March 2010, but then I realized that maybe the economy will have recovered sufficiently by then (hey, it could happen) to make the punchline dated, so I moved it to September of this year. I'm not worried about that fast a recovery!

Sometimes when I'm drawing, I'll come upon an idea that seemed funny when I entered it a month or so earlier, but when faced with drawing it out, I decide that it doesn't work as well as I initially thought...so I either bump it to a later date when I hope to revisit it and find a way to make it funnier, or jettison the idea altogether and put another one in its place. This is a big advantage of planning 'way in advance. Of course, there are always the Six Stages of Idea Development that come into play:

1. Initial Idea is conceived and quickly sketched or written down. I actually prefer some of these quick scribbles to the more laboriously-drawn final versions. At this time, I generally find the idea hilarious, a sure-fire winner, and give myself many kudos.

2. Revisiting the Idea: a week, a month or however much later the idea is again encountered as I open my list prepare to draw it. This is a second chance to decide if it's really funny, or if the seed is there but needs development, or if I was stupid to originally believe the idea had any promise at all.

3. Penciling: The concept has passed muster, and the initial pencil drawing is executed. Here is where I may begin to seriously doubt the hilarity of the concept.

4. Inking: More doubt arises, as I've lived with the idea for several hours, and it's not funny to me at all any more. Here I remind myself that I'm too close, too far into it, to realize that it really is good. (Occasionally, I'm still happy with the idea at this point. Then it's a real keeper!)

5. Scanning and coloring: Now it begins to seem funny again. It may just be coloring someone's nose red or their hair purple or their shoes yellow that makes me smile, but I begin to feel good as the final product takes shape.

6. Uploading to the site: At this point, I'm either going to have to wait, hopefully, for someone to write to assure me that it was indeed a comic masterpiece, or I'm satisfied with the end result already and hate to move on to the next one, where I have to repeat the whole process.

It can also be called Six Degrees of Exasperation.

But there's never the pressure of not knowing what I'll be drawing two or three weeks from now. I hope I can always be several months ahead, because it takes a lot of stress out of the process. The only stress this does cause is when I have what I think is a boffo cartoon and it isn't scheduled for a couple of months. I want people to see it now! Sometimes I'll switch a couple of strips for that very reason. Kind of like a little kid who can't wait to show his new toy in Show and Tell.

I hope I always feel like I'm a kid doing Show and Tell.

Why Q?

2009-08-06T07:02:00.002-04:00

Dave P. emailed me, asking why QlownTown is spelled with a Q. There are several answers: some legitimate, some whimsical. At the time I conceived of the idea, there was already a website called Clowntown: it featured games for kids. It has since disappeared, but the name is still owned by someone else. Consequently, I began looking at other names: Clown Acres, Clown City, Circus World. But Clowntown still appealed to me the most. I've always disliked the misspelling of "C" words with "K"--it just seems Korny to me. But "Q"--ah, Q. No one uses Q much. It would place my strip or site in a more distinctive place if someone were searching sites alphabetically, or looking for a strip on a site that listed them that way. And, once I dropped the anticipated "U" after the Q, it became even more distinctive.

Pronunciation didn't worry me. The Beatles took a common word and made their spelling the dominant version: at least to people of certain ages, if you say "beetles", they'll think of the band first. People will learn the spelling and pronunciation of a word if they see it often enough. Besides, "Iraq" ends in Q and no one thinks it's pronounced "Irack-qway" or "Irack-qwuh".

QlownTown could be trademarked, and so I did. That was important, because as word gets out, evil claim-jumpers can steal a title. If someone with a "Clowntown" or "Clown Town" or other, similar business name complains at some point, my feature has now been established. Besides, there's room for multiple companies named "Acme", as long as they don't create confusion among the products. Businesses in Maine" using the term "Mainely" number in the dozens, at least.

It's also memorable. Once you know how to pronounce it, you're likely to remember it with the Q. It's easier than Albuquerque, certainly. English has never been known as a language devoid of odd or inexplicable spellings.

The original version of the "Origin of QlownTown" essay on the website---which ran to about eight pages and was therefore severely edited---explained that the native people in the area which became settled by clowns was "QlownTown," a term that translated as "place where silly people live". While this is of course made up (there isn't really a QlownTown, folks--they're cartoon characters), it's nonetheless a sensible explanation in the reality of the characters' world.

I also wanted an offbeat spelling because the strip is offbeat. I hope it's closer to The Far Side than to, say, Family Circus. I'm not interested in cute. Witty, clever, literate perhaps (as literate as one can be while drawing clowns). Acerbic, occasionally. I'd rather have someone say "I don't get it" or have to look something up than say "Awww, that was so sweeeeet". I'm actually working on a Family Circus parody. Oddly, Family Circus was the most popular strip in one survey, suggesting that I'm barking up the wrong tent--but one does what one believes in. (Note to those who are as grammatically anal as I: I know the previous sentence should end with "one does that in which one believes", but sometimes, you gotta say it without too much pretension.)

Anyway, back to the why of Q: once I settled on Q, I liked the wacky spelling. It looks normal to me now, and that's the real goal of the strip: to create a world in which the offbeat seems normal. Except for occasional strips, the daily jokes are not about them being clowns; they're about the characters being wrong, or mistaken, or hapless--just like real life for the rest of us.

Funny, though--it's gotta be funny. And I think Q is funny.

Ah, the wonder of the internet

2009-08-05T14:38:00.002-04:00

When I began on the journey that has resulted in QlownTown, my simple goal was to draw cartoons every day, post them on the internet, and make enough money at it to feel comfortable. I have since realized that I really need to set up an RSS option, a Twitter feed, and a bunch of other things that I still haven't done yet. You can, however, subscribe to this blog by clicking on the Subscribe option at the bottom of the page. If enough people subscribe, I'll make sure I blog more often.

I'm also tied up right now choosing cartoons for submitting to newspapers. I will of course refer them to the website, but they want 4-6 weeks of strips printed on paper (just like the old days!). I'm taking ideas from people now about what their favorite QlownTown cartoons have been. Based on feedback so far, I know the Sunday strip, Imminent Collision, will be in there, along with Evolvolation; Bottles of Beer; Alien, the QlownTown version; and (one of my personal favorites) the Ash and Elmo twins. Looking at the descriptions of other strips, I've found "offbeat" to be a frequently-used word which also describes what I try to achieve. Thirty years ago, there were no offbeat strips...now they're everywhere. But only mine features clowns!

Composing the cover letter to go with these collections is always a challenge; I don't want to send out a dozen packets, then realize I left out the word "wry" or whatever word seems to communicate something distinctive I was trying to get through to the editors reading the letter.

So the ongoing struggle is always the same: get things done that aren't Drawing Cartoons. I know that the more successful the strip becomes, the less time I'll be able to dedicate to just doing that, but the alternatives are much less attractive.

2009-07-27T12:42:00.002-04:00

Today is Take Your Pants for a Walk Day. (Of course, you know that if you've printed out the the July 2009 calendar from the FREE page at QlownTown.com.)

I don't know who comes up with these holidays. I may have to start one of my own. Maybe March 6th should be QlownTown Day. After all, that's the day QlownTown debuted, and it's in a month when people tend to be depressed and tired of winter (at least here in the Northeast), so a ridiculous holiday would fit well there. I don't know if I just announce it and it becomes so, or if there's a Holiday Clearing Board somewhere. I may just put it on the 2010 calendar and proclaim it to be official. The worst that could happen is that someone proclaims it Not QlownTown Day, but then that would imply that every other day was QlownTown Day, so it would work to my advantage anyway, wouldn't it?

I sent all the rest of the 2009 calendar months to my web guy to place on the FREE page of QlownTown. The 2010 calendar has been bumped to September (I'd planned to start printing it in August). The 2010 won't be free. The 2009 calendar has been, because the site, which was supposed to launch in late October 2008, was delayed by the bonehead who put the site together for me, and by the time it appeared, no one was looking to buy a 2009 calendar. I'd already laid out the pages, so I've been posting them for free. That was three or four full days of work down the tubes in terms of earning money off the calendar, but at least the response to the free pages has been positive--and maybe it'll push sales of next year's calendars. (Not-so-subtle plug)

If you have any suggestions for which cartoons should appear on the 2010 calendar (or suggestions for original cartoon ideas), send 'em to me at dsmith-weiss@qlowntown.com.

Now I'm going to walk my pants into the kitchen. It's lunchtime. It's always best to eat lunch with your pants on--especially if it's a hot lunch.

Power of subscription

2009-07-23T10:38:00.002-04:00

It occurred to me today that I can use the extra forum of the message that accompanies the daily cartoon email that I send to members (subscribers) to explain potentially confusing comics. Tomorrow's cartoon features a reference to a Rolling Stones song that not everyone may pick up on. People who just check out the site might not get the joke, but if you have signed up for a (FREE!!!) membership, you'll get instructions on how to figure it out. I've learned that some people don't realize that one can sign up for free and it'll get them the cartoon every day via email. I'm in the process of learning how to edit the site myself, and when I'm proficient at that, there'll be some changes to tell people they can sign up for free, with no strings, no need to tell us your age, shoe size, hobby proclivities or birth date (although if you include your birthday when you sign up, you may get a birthday wish at some point). I originally conceived of the site as bursting forth full grown at the beginning, with maybe a major overhaul every few years, but now I'd like to make small tweaks on a pretty regular basis. This does, of course, run counter to my original plan of just drawing cartoons and shipping merchandise with as little other work as possible, but hey! things change.

I like doing cartoons that not everyone may get sometimes. I did one a few months ago about two seagulls meeting in a bar which featured a post-punchline in French. I didn't translate it for anyone. One person said that a woman in her office spoke French, so they all enjoyed it. Another person looked it up online (the internet can make almost any reference decipherable, unless it's just a bad cartoon). The joke worked fine without knowing what the gull said, but her French was kind of an extra gift for those who cared or wanted to figure it out.

Speaking of bad comics, there's a website, www.comicsidontunderstand.com, that deals with those cartoons that one or another person just doesn't get. I look forward to appearing on the site--not because I hope to do a strip that can't be understood, but because it's free advertising. Feel free to submit any QlownTown strips that you find confusing--I won't mind. There's also an "Ewww!" award for icky cartoons at Comics I Don't Understand, and I suppose my "muscle shirt made of real muscles" cartoon could've been submitted for that.

By the way, anyone who downloaded the July calendar from the FREE page on the QlownTown website may have noticed that yesterday was Hammock Day. Hope you took some time to hang around in one.

Rain

2009-07-02T09:28:00.002-04:00

This is the first blog in over a month. When I first decided to do a blog, I figured I'd be writing four to six a week. I mean, I have plenty of opinions on the things I read, encounter or hear about in my day-to-day. But once the blog had been established, I was so wrapped up in frustration over the shabby work that my former web guy was doing, the blogs became more rants, so I waited till I had a new guy. By that time, I'd lost the flow of writing.

What inspired me to write again was an odd, delightful and unexpected experience with my cat and my computer. We have two large dogs living with us temporarily, and the cats have been pretty much hermits in the master bedroom or outdoors for a month or so, with the exception of daily visits to my office from Lucy, the friendly one. Midge, the other cat, only appears every couple of days.

Last night, Lucy finally came into the living room and sat down and allowed herself to be patted just a few feet from one of the dogs. This was a breakthrough. (The dogs are locked in their room upstairs during the day, so this is when Lucy has been showing up on my desk. )

Just now, she came in from the rain and brushed against the computer screen in her latest attempt to distract me from my work and demand attention. This left about two dozen droplets of water on the screen, which glow like multicolored crystals from the light of the screen behind them. On an overcast day, following many previous overcast days, this was cause for rejoicing, a bright and tiny show of beauty in the midst of cabin fever and boredom!

And now, as I write this, the final drop has dried out, and my screen is again a flat slab of words and formatted graphics. But now I know that I can carefully apply several drops of water to the screen and enjoy my own little light show. I hesitate to suggest this for anyone else, because the electrons on the screen might react with a wet fingertip and cause, if not major damage, some small discomfort or electronic failure. (I don't know this stuff. That's why I draw cartoons instead of programming space shuttles.)

But it's nice to know, as the rain pours down in a metaphorical cloud of misery, that there are little miracles of light waiting on a wet cat.

Hurtin'

2009-06-15T10:53:00.002-04:00

I decided this past weekend would be "Other People" weekend. I'd agreed to help other people on various projects, so on Friday, I decided not to do anything on the comic strip and instead did some planning for my cousin Norm's new deck, and then did drawings for a passive solar collector and an efficient house framing technique and sent them off to Re-Member, a group that I've worked with on the Pine Ridge Indian Reservation.

Saturday, Norm rented a two-man hole digger, which has a gas engine with four long handles coming out the sides. A heavy (80 lbs.? 100 lbs.? By the end of the day, it feels like a thousand.) steel auger hangs down from there and spins into the soil. You each hold two handles and assume that the auger will just dig into the earth easily. Not when there are lots of rocks! It got caught repeatedly under the edge of rocks, at which point we'd have to wiggle it back and forth and try with all our might to lift it out when it was finally freed. It would buck and toss us around when it hit an immovable object, and sometimes we'd see a big rock coming to the surface and then it would just disappear back into the hole, followed quickly by a yank on the handles. To get down to the required four-foot depth, you also need to add a (heavy) extension rod between the auger and the engine, making it even more top-heavy and harder to lift. By the end of the day, I had three broken blisters on my palms and a number of bruises and scrapes on one arm from when I backed into a hole and fell down and the machine came down on top of me. We were both sweaty, exhausted, tired, sore...yet had a sense of accomplishment. Good times!

When I got home and into the shower, my hands hurt so much that I washed almost my entire body using just my little shaving brush, because I could grip that with my fingertips and not get too much soap into the raw blisters. I shampooed using my fingertips, because the mint shampoo that normally makes my scalp tingle wonderfully also made the blisters tingle horribly.

Waking up sore on Sunday, I went over to my son and daughter-in-law's house to help them and her dad wire and re-frame their kitchen. As long as I was concentrating on doing something I felt fine, but if I stopped to rest, I'd notice how painful my hands and arms and pretty much everything was. So, on a day that I had thought I would ideally liked to have sat around doing nothing, I was grateful for a chance to work at something distracting. And at the end, I had a real sense of accomplishment.

Today I'm still sore, but my hands are not in constant pain and I don't have a half a box of Band-Aids on anymore. The cartoons may look a little amateurish for the next week or so (yes, even more so than usual!), as I am working with something more akin to a lobster claw than a human hand right now. (Oh--I also forgot to put on sunscreen or wear a hat on Saturday, but somehow avoided even a mild sunburn. I guess that's some sort of good karma payoff.)

Once the pain wears off, I'm sure I'll figure out a way to get a funny cartoon out of all this. And Norm has already sent me a funny clown cartoon by another cartoonist off of which I may be able to spin another idea. So two days of hard work could result in two strips. That's almost like working on QlownTown for the two days I didn't!

Ideas

2009-05-19T12:22:00.002-04:00

I just put up a new comment on my Facebook page: "I wish I had a frigate, because it's a friggin' nice day". After posting it, I envisioned a cartoon featuring an old British Navy commodore on his poop deck saying "What a friggin' nice day".

This is something I encounter on a pretty frequent basis: If I--or someone else--says something funny, should I save it for a QlownTown cartoon? Do I jot down every funny thing I encounter?

No. I recognize that while I've made a choice to do this comic strip, I can't expect to save all the humor I encounter in life for the strip. I've already cataloged every strip I'll be doing through the end of 2009, anyway---so I don't have to stress about ideas. (At least not yet; we'll see how I am a year or five from now.)

Some things that I hear are very funny in the context of what's happening, anyway, not funny enough for a one-shot cartoon. [The strip may evolve over time into a more situational strip like For Better or For Worse or Monty, but I really like the punch of a self-contained comic. You don't need to know Mr. Binkles (yes, there will be regular characters in QlownTown soon, and they will have names) to laugh when smoke comes out of his stovepipe hat when he's grilling burgers, or know the two bears with clothes strewn about the forest floor around them who comment that "that was a grisly encounter".] Some things in my life are very funny and I/we laugh out loud, but they're a part of life and belong to me, not to my website. Real life is for living, not doing one's job all the time.

I'll admit that sometimes, when I come up with something that really tickles the person I'm talking to (or vice versa), I'll pull out my trusty phone/PDA/camera/jet pack and jot down the idea; but more often than not, I come up with ideas as a regular practice, as part of my workday. I sit at my desk, read the paper and online stuff, and sketch out ideas as they hit me. After all, who can complain about thinking up humorous stuff being part of your job?

So, for now at least, the frigate/friggin' joke will just remain a Facebook comment. Now, in a year or five from now...

Optimism

2009-05-11T10:59:00.002-04:00

I recently commented on Facebook that I was finding it difficult to write a totally optimistic song without sounding maudlin or corny. For every Walking On Sunshine or Shiny Happy People, there are a dozen Afternoon Delights or Everything Is Beautifuls. A friend asked if that was because I was a "cynical old fart". I replied that indeed I was; but another friend corrected me. Point well taken. Yes, I am actually an overly optimistic optimist.

It's appropriate than I've wound up drawing cartoons. I'm better at coming up with a funny moment than an ongoing tale of tragedy and woe. If I had to come up with ongoing storylines all the time, I'd go crazy. The first real storyline that I'm planning for QlownTown involves a trip by some of the characters to work on a Indian reservation. It will deal will injustice, poverty and frustration, yet I plan to end every day's strip with a humorous moment. It may be humor born of sarcasm over a ridiculously wrong policy or a bitter humor that informs (one hopes) while it amuses, but I think I can find those funny moments in the pain that appears overwhelming from the outside. Even in my conscious goal of teaching people about the things I earned working on "The Rez" for a week, there's a conscious goal to amuse in the process. There's the old saying, "You catch more flies with honey than vinegar". (Of course, the two together make a nice vinaigrette, and I hope that's how the series turns out.)

Mission trip[

2009-05-05T15:14:00.002-04:00

I just returned from a week on the Oglala Lakota Indian Reservation on South Dakota. It was a week of eye-opening lessons. The standard questions like "Why don't they just move away?" or "Why don't they just pull themselves up by their bootstraps?" become ridiculous when you've seen the conditions there. A combination of spiritual beliefs (isn't America supposed to promise freedom of religion?) and severe poverty exacerbates the problems. The US has violated every treaty it ever signed with the Indians, and yet we wonder why they can't dig themselves out of the rut we've put them in. We guaranteed to protect them--a compromise since we took away their lands just because we wanted them. There are no easy answers, but there are steps that can be taken. I'll try to educate anyone who will listen a bit over the next year...through blogs and, I hope, through cartoons.

The organization we worked with, Re-Member, is doing great work. A large part of that is to educate volunteers so we can spread the word. It was fun to watch people who were skeptical and who nonetheless took the trip with us change their attitude as they learned more.

Re-Member is also educating the people on the Rez to realize that some outsiders try to do right by them. Unfortunately, we're still in the minority on that. In a nation with a black president, increasingly equal treatment of women, and forward-moving attitudes on civil unions and/or same-sex marriage, we still treat the people who were here before us worse than we treat our pets. These are not "noble Indians", nor are they lazy. They are people, like you or me, who are in a financial morass not of their making.

Let's hope that we can correct this in this century.

Grey's Anatomy

2009-04-24T09:33:00.002-04:00

Okay, I admit it. I like Grey's Anatomy. Critics complain that it's sometimes exasperating, too soap-opera-ish, too unrealistic. But what I like, and I realized it last night, is the slow process by which characters grow and learn to accept each other. This part of the show is realistic. A self-centered, obnoxious person in real life doesn't suddenly become lovable and understanding. He or she may soften and become less rigid as time goes by, but there's always the seed of what they were at their core.

Last night, Meredith, the somewhat damaged, fragile title character who has a half-sister, Lexie, whom she didn't even know about for years, last night told Lexie, "You're my sister. You're in my wedding (party)." It took about two TV seasons for her to come around from resenting, hating and ignoring this woman for having their father around all the years she was growing up (he had left Meredith and her mother when she was young and started a whole new family) to actually bonding with her as a sister. It was a true Kodak moment. (For those too young to know what this is, look it up.)

I realize, as I reread the previous paragraphs, that it sounds like a muddled, silly soap opera. And I suppose it is. But it's also frequently funny, making me laugh at the same time I'm moved by a tragic turn of events. The nature of a dramatic TV show based on characters more than situations is such that those characters will go through more, and bigger, changes than regular people. It almost unavoidable over multiple seasons. Most of us don't have interesting enough lives to adapt into a year-after-year TV show. But the enjoyable thing in a series is when those little a-ha or uplifting moments occur when you don't expect them. In an episode in which two friends of 20 years were feuding, a doctor held a dying six-year-old in her arms for hours while the father was off trying to raise money for a hopeless shot at a cure instead of being with his child, a father cut off a trust fund for his daughter because she announced she was gay--and happy, and a doctor with a 5% chance of beating terminal cancer plunged into the depths of chemo therapy, my favorite moment was when a very flawed woman accepted her sister as if it had always been thus. A simple moment topped all the drama.

Lest I seem too much of a softie, however, I also like The Office and 30 Rock, two shows that largely revel in the absence of true, heartfelt emotions.

Earth Day

2009-04-22T12:59:00.002-04:00

Well, it's here. One of my favorite days of the year. Partly because it's in the spring, and partly because it's meaning more to more people now than it has for years.

I remember the first one, around 1970. A lot of my classmates walked miles to school instead of driving or riding. It made a difference, but just for that one day. A lot of those same people grew up to buy large, gas-guzzling cars, move into big, poorly-insulated houses, and generally ignore the idea of caring for the environment. Too bad people didn't care about building better cars and buildings 'way back when the topic was raised so long ago. Think of the hundreds of thousands of houses that have built to what would now be sub-code standards, and the millions of gallons of extra gas used that have helped raise the current price of gas and pollute the planet.

Still, it's finally fashionable to care. One good thing I've read is that part of the stimulus plan will include making improvements to existing homes to make them more energy efficient. This is a case where creating jobs has multiple good effects: people get work and income, others save money, and the planet will be cleaner in the long run, which benefits us all. And people like me don't get quite so cranky.

So, on Earth Day, do something extra special and helpful that you wouldn't normally do. If you only do it one day, it makes a difference. And if it makes you think the next time, it could make a difference for a long time.

Overlap

2009-04-21T09:22:00.002-04:00

I finished acting in a local play this weekend. Rehearsals, memorizing and set building consumed a lot of my time. And, of course, we had to go out for food and drinks after each show! The weekend's performances were well-received, but there generally follows a Monday letdown. This year, however, I have next week's trip to South Dakota to work on the Pine Ridge reservation to look forward to, so there's the excitement and anticipation of that to counteract any potential letdown. That, and the need to draw and prep more cartoons to make up for the lost week of very little drawing, scanning and coloring. I work several weeks ahead, but falling behind now will mean I'm behind several weeks down the line. So I don't have to worry about this week being a downer--just another exciting week. After a week where the play was the thing, it's nice to get back to concentrating on this bunch of clowns! (Not to imply that the actors and techies were a bunch of clowns--they also wore makeup, but they were all professional and skilled. Well, the actors wore makeup, not the technicians, except the women might have, but that would be normal makeup---never mind.)

Since several QlownTown subscribers who will also be going on the trip won't get to see next week's cartoons--there's no internet on the res--I'll print copies and post them daily on a bulletin board there for those who are used to reading them every morning (except for the last few days and some last week, as our server undergoes updating and repairs). It'll be fun to be physically posting these cartoons in real time, since they're usually posted electronically several weeks ahead and go out automatically with no control or effort on my part. Sometimes, someone will tell me in person that they liked that day's cartoon, and I have to ask them what it was; there's a slight disconnect between me and the current strip. Next week, I'll deal with my own cartoons in the same time frame as my readers.

We're ba-a-ack!

2009-04-16T09:23:00.003-04:00

I guess the email snafu got fixed--at least for now. I received my emailed cartoon today, and I assume all the other members did as well. I gave me a big lift, first because I like the absurdity of the cartoon, and second, because I thought it wouldn't be fixed till next week.

I pondered whether to make the attacker naked or not. I originally drew the cartoon when I was planning to present the dailies in black and white, so drawing clothes never mattered. Then, when I colored it, I thought, "Man, that guy is naked!" I thought of adding some clothes and smudging them to indicate movement, but since the humor in the cartoon is really based on the absurdity of the situation, I figured why not keep him nekkid? Makes him even crazier. I may be the first person to draw a widely-distributed naked clown. Maybe that's not such a wonderful distinction.

The cartoon was inspired by a true-life typo in an email that our website editor sent to the employees where I used to work. There were some changes being made to the site, and some pages would be unavailable for awhile. She wanted us to warn customers whom we might send to the site that this would be happening. She ended, "Please excuse the incontinence".

I wrote back that some people might be disappointed, but I didn't think they'd have that strong a reaction.

Problems

2009-04-15T09:30:00.002-04:00

There have been no new Daily Cartoons sent out the last three days. This follows a couple of days of the site being partially down after someone hacked into the server. (Coincidentally, I had asked, several weeks ago, for a full copy of the site from my server provider, since a friend's site had disappeared completely after their server went down. I still haven't received my copy.)

I've emailed my provider for the past several days, but he hasn't replied. I tried calling him, but his answering machine picked up, so I couldn't talk to him. I was going to leave a message, but his mailbox was supposedly full, so I couldn't leave a message, either. I receive the daily emails along with all you members, and that's when I get to experience my own first-hand response to the strip. I pencil, ink, scan and color it, and at the end of that process, I can't always see objectively how it's turned out. But getting it in an email in the morning, I can gauge a more gut reaction, and say, "I should've done this differently" or I really like that detail" or, heaven forbid, "Oops. That wasn't as funny as I thought it was".

All this about the website problems is to explain that if anything else goes wrong, you were warned. I assumed (silly me) that when a website goes online, the server will provide a reasonable level of service. I hope that this will all get straightened out and you'll receive uninterrupted service from now on. Until then, I'm trying to come up with a funny cartoon about this. It doesn't seem very humorous right now, but maybe I can at least get a cartoon out of the frustration.

On the lighter side, this is a side benefit of drawing a comic strip. When something goes wrong, it can be fodder for a joke. An opportunity to make lemonade from lemons. Or mashed potatoes from potato heads.

Comic strips as a daily ritual

2009-04-10T11:54:00.003-04:00

I just looked through the several comic strips I subscribe to or check regularly online. I get about two dozen emailed to me, and have bookmarked several more. Sometimes I'm busy in the morning and just want to get to work, and it seems as if looking through them will just waste my time; but then I remind myself that I need to come up with a new cartoon myself every day, and I am frequently inspired by other artists' work. (Sometimes I am bummed by other artists' work, however--in the year it took to develop the strip and site, Mother Goose and Grimm featured four or five cartoon ideas I had already drawn! Occasionally, I can twist the gag into something new, but sometimes, as with our mutual Hatchback of Notre Dame, there's nothing more to be done with it.) I came up with two new ideas based on other people's stuff today, so reading comics actually becomes Constructive Work for me!

But I read one today, on the Argyle Sweater site, about a black sheep with a clogged dryer lint filter, that just made me laugh. I do these strips because I enjoy a good cartoon, where the art, concept and wording all come together. I find too often that there's something I don't like about a cartoon I've done--usually something in the execution of the drawing itself--but when I feel I've nailed it on all counts, I get a rush of satisfaction. For example, there's a bear cartoon coming up next week that I actually like as much as I like other people's work. See if you agree. Then buy it on a shirt, or a mousepad, or a mug. I may do that myself.

The fun part for me--okay, one of the many fun parts--is when I realize that some part of my formal education is actually being put to use in my work. When I went to art school, I learned about composition, and when I was a theater major taking Directing, I also learned about setting a scene onstage. Sometimes, when I'm trying to decide how to illustrate a situation, I'll find myself using that training to compose the scene. It surprises me when I realize that being an art student, and then a theater student--both of which so often lead to careers in completely unrelated fields--actually help me with my work. It's as if my education actually paid off! This is normal for people who studied medicine, law, teaching, etc., but for a lot of us artsy-fartsy and/or liberal arts types, it can be a revelation.

(Interesting digression: I just had to inform my computer's Spellcheck that "fartsy" is a real word. There's probably a cartoon in there somewhere.)

I have to clean my office for Easter. See, I work in a room adjacent to the dining room, and we're having company Sunday. I like to maintain a certain level of messiness in my office--I know where things are, and when I come up with a new idea, it goes onto the appropriate pile. It's good for an office, bad for company. Draping sheets over everything won't cut it, so into boxes, drawers and cabinets go all the stuff. Then Monday, I'll have to figure out where everything is. That might result in a cartoon, too. If you see an office-cleaning cartoon in a couple of months, you heard about it here first. And if Mike Peters does the same thing in Mother Goose and Grimm first, boy, will I be bummed!

Radio interview

2009-03-31T12:39:00.003-04:00

I just finished my first interview on the radio since launching the website. It was actually a lot of fun. I had to remember not to make my answers too long--I know I can run on talking about stuff that I'm interested in. But the host, Bruce Arnold, said I did great, and with luck, I'll pick up more members and/or visitors. So far, I think Rich from New Mexico is the farthest-away subscriber, but on the Internet that means nothing anyway. Still, once I can say I have members in 50 states, that'll be something.

Now, Phase One of my Master Plan was getting the site online. Phase Two will be to get the strip into newspapers. In terms of income, papers aren't worth a lot, but in terms of getting people to check out the website, they work well as advertising. Note the button on the Home page where you can contact your local paper and tell them you want to see QlownTown in it--please use it! There are other phases as well, but these first two are enough for the first year or so. I have ideas for all sorts of cool products based on the strip, but those will have to wait.

I was cleaning out some files on the computer yesterday, wondering if I should delete the outlines for website pages. I'll save the sketches, because I had a teacher in art school who told us to save everything we ever do, just in case, but I, like a fool, threw out many pads of drawings that I now wish I could add to the archives. Not that they were brilliant stuff, but some people (like me) like to see the arc of an artist's journey, so to speak. Now part of me says Clear out some stuff because it takes up a lot of memory, but another voice says You'll be happy someday when you print your ten-year retrospective book. I plan to do the strip for at least fifteen years; that works out to about 5,475 cartoons. I've planned ahead, so now I only have about 5,200 cartoons to go and I can retire. I can see why a lot of cartoonists say the pressure to produce can get intense, but I'm hoping I can stay ahead of it. I mean, it just seems wrong to be stressed if you're drawing cartoons! I've always drawn them to relieve stress.

Speaking of which, I'm feeling that I'd better get back to work.