Sanded in

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

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

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

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

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

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

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!