Yeah yeah yeah...I know. Let's just skip my apologizing for lack of posts for a change. Ok?
The trip was absolutely wonderful. Best moment? Probably the ride in our own private monorail car (totally in the back!) on our way for a swanked up dinner at the Blue Bayou on our anniversary. It pays to talk with the cast members. Whoo hoo! Is it time to go back yet?
Anyway, here's some of my favorites of the shots we took.
Of course a shot of the lovebirds in front of the castle...but smartly taken off to the side thereby eliminating people in the background. And I'm wearing mouse ears! Ok, I had to wear them like a yarmulka due to my enormous head...but that's a step in the right direction!
Hee hee.
A shot of the gang on Flick's Flyers in A Bug's Land. The rides aren't terribly exciting, but they're damn cute. Hemlich's Chew Chew train is not to be missed.
Oh...my...GOD! On our last day we decided to take a break and just enjoy some people watching from the hub. It was the motherload of characters! Much to our suprise we spied the practically perfect one herself! NEVER before had we seen Mary Poppins in the park. So Angie, Christian and I ran like fools possessed and begged her to pause for a photo before heading backstage. I love this photo...it made my boo so VERY happy and was the topper on a FANTASTIC trip. The only thing I regret is that I didn't jump into the shot!
Ladies and gentlemen, welcome to Walt Disney's enchanted Tiki Room. Before we can start the show, I'll have to wake up our host Jose! This came out so good. It makes the money I spent on the limited edition reproduction of the 1964 Tiki Room host shirt worth it. Ok...it was worth it anyway. :)
On Wired.com today, I ran across the article "The Mystery of the Green Menace". It's about Ted Breaux, a chemist and environmental microbiologist who's used his knowledge to resurrect a true absinthe. Something that's been lost over a century of demonization and criminalization. Its a facinating read and the best thing is that a Google search turned up his company, Jade Liqueurs AND their worldwide distributor Liqueurs de France.
I'm deeply excited by the thought of sharing in the madness that fueled Van Gogh, Lautrec, Picasso and so many other great talents. Who wants to join me?
...we'll be exhausted but enjoying the fireworks. :)
There's only one thing missing from this otherwise perfect picture from 11/00. And this trip we'll finally get to set it right! We have to make sure and get several photos of the whole gang this trip. Yay!
I came up with what I thought was THE perfect quote in a conversation with Christian the other day...but it was ruined by the fact that he didn't get the reference. So I called upon Lee and his parsley was just as orange. Dear readers, please tell me that ONE of you gets this:
Christian: I keep buying shaving cream thinking I'm out...and now I've got at least six cans. Chris: Your supply of Illudium Phosdex is alarmingly high!
Another attempt at observational humor. Because everyone's been asking that burning question "what irritates fleas?" It's really all about the drawing on this one, as its better fleshed out than most and the subjects have more character. Plus it has much more graphite per square inch than any of the series.
I know what you're saying...WTF? On vacation, my family stayed at a motel with a sign by the pool "Don't pee in our pool 'cause we don't swim in your toilet". Even at that young age, the weirdness of the sign stuck with me. And an early sign of my attraction to references that nobody else gets. Your parsley is SO orange.
Reason number 717 I'll never be a pig farmer:
I don't want to jack off a pig.
At least with the horse they used an artificial vagina...but they still to hold it. Eww. I hope the host, Mike Rowe, is well paid for everything they put him through.
Best line from tonight's episode...delivered while cleaning up a sow for artificial insemination:
I don't want to be too rough with her, but this vulva's a disaster
Christian's reponse to the question "is there anything your almighty team can not do?":
You don’t know the half of it. Currently on our task list is “Restore the ozone in the ionosphere” (Karina’s doing some high altitude reconnaissance to the Van Allen belt next week) and “Feasibility of Inhabited Mars Bases.” Libby’s making Chris do a quick trip to MS’s secret moon base next month. Oops! Forget I said that last part.
And Rick's response to the age old question "who would win in a fight - a bear or a gorilla?":
Let’s see, a bear or a gorilla… that’s easy. I would win. First, I would go after the gorilla [he is the faster one]. I would first take him off his feet with a quick drop kick to the face. Then I would follow up with a big elbow from a near-by tree. The elbow to the chest would knock the wind out of the gorilla long enough for me to slap on the full nelson onto the gorilla. By this time, the bear is charging at us. This is when I would use the bear to kill the gorilla. As the bear is approaching me from behind [I still have the gorilla in the full nelson] I would wait till the last second and quickly spin around as the bear lunges after me. Thus, the bear would be attacking the gorilla and killing it [since the gorilla has no way of defending himself from the bear attack because I have the full nelson slapped on him].
As the bear backs off and lunges in for another attack, I quickly release the dead gorilla from the “Kong Nelson” hold I had on him and perform a quick spin kick to the bear’s face. Now stunned, I grab the bear and give him a German suplex. I then slap on the figure four, breaking one of the bear’s leg. Now with the bear slowed down, I maneuver around the bear and put the sleeper hold on the bear. Since the bear has shorter arms, there is now way the bear can grab me off his back or flip me off. Once the bear is asleep [thanks to me cutting off the flow of blood to his head, using the patented “Bear Claw Sleeper”] I’ll carry him over to a cliff and throw him off.
The Sunday before last I was cutting a bolt with a dremel tool. I had my safely glasses on, but at one point I felt a puff of dust in my left eye. Shit. It didn't hurt, so I hoped I'd gotten lucky and went about my day. That evening it was still irritiated, so I had Angie help me flush my eye with saline solution (yes...I know I should have done that in the first place. *sigh*). I figured I was likely fine and the irritation had come from poking at it through the afternoon trying to see if anything was in it. Monday I went to work and it didn't get any better. So I scheduled a doctor's appointment for the next morning. Looking at my eye that night, I saw a black dot on the edge of the iris...but I wasn't sure if it was part of my eye or not.
The doctor put some drops in my eye and looked at it under a blacklight to check for corneal abrasions. Everything looked normal. No big surprise, because if I did have one, I should have been in a lot of pain. Whew! It was even kind of cool because he brought me to the mirror so I could see my eye fluoresce under the light. Then he pulled out the Ophthalmoscope and checked for debris...and found that my black dot was indeed a piece of metal. He tried swabbing it out with a q-tip, but found that it must be below the surface. So the doctor was really nice and called up a buddy who's an opthamologist to get me squeezed into their schedule. Here's where things get really fun.
After a bit of a wait, the doctor checked out the dot and away we went. They gave me a numbing drop, let that sit for 10-15 minutes and gave me a second. From there, he removed the dot with a needle, swabbed the piece off with a q-tip, and used a drill to smooth out the disturbed surface. A needle. In my eye. Take a moment to squirm on that one. Actually it wasn't that bad and didn't hurt at all. It was like someone just touching my eye. But I didn't get off that easy. I told the doctor that my eye was also irritated all the way out on the side. So he swabbed it to make sure we got everything. Swabbing here was not a light dabbing. It was pulling back the eyelid, jamming in the q-tip, and running across the eye. I yelped...and spent the next couple days feeling like someone punched me in the eye from the inside.
Everything has been fine for a few days now. And dear readers, the important lesson is:
"Safety GOGGLES, not safety glasses"
Oh, and if you're squeamish...you probably shouldn't have read this. ;)
...because I found a sculpture based on one today! Oh wait, it's in another "Touch of Ass" style catalog. Nevermind. But you have to admit that the second Dressed up Dachshund down from the top does seem a bit familiar. I should sue! All I want is what's coming to me. All I want is my fair share. ;)
If at first you don't succeed, try, try again. Looks like I could have used a few more tries.
How exactly did he get in there? Is it some sort of Phantom Zone style prison?
Exactly what I like to see...lots of improvements in ability and choices. More background detail and a more complex character design. The sense of scale seems to have gone downhill, but you can't have everything.
Kudos to my 10 year old self for knowing about the reputation of a vehicle that stopped production 20 years earlier.
Weird...looking for when the Edsel stopped production, the Wikipedia entry included the following information:
When coming up with a name for the Edsel, Ford also asked poet Marianne Moore for suggestions, and she submitted a list which included "The Intelligent Whale," "The Utopian Turtletop," "The Pastelogram," and "The Mongoose Civique."
I'm at a loss for words. Imagine that.
No real improvements...the original was better. Why isn't the fuse lit? Is it because Volvo's aren't actually bad cars?
While digging in a box of cassette tapes tonight, I found an old mix tape I put together labeled:
Slow Mix 2/92
for Jessica - Valentines Day
I've told many of you about the musical horrors in my past. But this is THE perfect illustration of just how bad my musical tastes once were. How in the world did I ever expect to get anywhere with a girl once she'd realized THIS was what I thought was romantic?
Here's the track list in all it's horror:
Side A
In The Air Tonight
Phil Collins
More Than Words
Extreme
Why Can't I Fall In Love
Ivan Neville
In Your Eyes
Peter Gabriel
Hello
Lionel Richie
Groovy Kind of Love
Phil Collins
She's Always A Woman
Billy Joel
Hold On To The Night
Richard Marx
Suddenly
Billy Ocean
Once In A While
Rocky Horror Picture Show
Jessica's Theme
Who Framed Roger Rabbit
Side B
This Must Be Love
Phil Collins
Open Arms
Journey
That's What Love Is All About
Michael Bolton
Take My Breath Away
Berlin
It Must Have Been Love
Roxette
And So It Goes
Billy Joel
Heaven In Your Eyes
Loverboy
Sittin' On The Dock Of The Bay
Michael Bolton
You're The Inspiration
Chicago
Lost In Your Eyes
Debbie Gibson
Eternal Flame
Bangles
She's Got A Way
Billy Joel
Dipping into the cesspool of mediocrity that is Phil Collins three times? What was I thinking?
Another of my heavy line art sketches from a recent drawing day, but scanned in for coloring in Photohshop. It's done with lots of adjustment layers so I can change the colors, intensity of shading and highlighting.
This image sprouted from a head shape that formed from playing with my kneaded eraser.
Today I got my order of super-slim dvd cases from SuperMediaStore.com. At a scant 5mm, they're almost 1/3 the thickness of a standard case (14mm).
There are a few downsides. I have to fold under about 3/8" of the back cover. You also only see about half of the spine. Most titles are still decipherable, but a few almost lose the title entirely. Then there's the ones with special cases. Those I may have to scan and build suitable covers for. But I'm certainly not going to do that for all of them. I did consider it briefly, but my slackerhood managed to beat out my OCD.
This is about as bad as it gets people. The good news is there's only two more installments until the hurting can finally stop (for all of us).
A hot dog...on skis. Whee! It doesn't get more whimsical than this...oh, to have the imagination of a young boy again.
It's funny that their father was taken from them...cut, de-barked, pulped, boiled, bleached, cut again, printed, glued. And amazing they could recognize him after all that.
Why yes indeed he is. Welcome to the bottom of the barrel, folks. I hope you enjoyed the ride. It's only upwards from here.
See, I told you it would get better. This one is a bit more sophisticated. I'm particularly fond of the bottles of Ketchup and Mowrer. Wait a minute...EWW!
Back in May, I did a logo for Dan Fleischman: Food Scientist. He's the guy behind colored marshmallows and the Taco Bell hot sauces. It's true (and quite impressive)! What a fun thing to design, especially with my love of 1950s better living through chemistry. This was one of my final three designs that didn't end up getting used. It really turned out rather well...
A lightly anthropomorphized first stage of a Saturn 5 rocket. Where's the human drama?
Ah! There it is. And look! I've evolved into using word balloons! Interesting that in this one I included all the letters of "Saturn V" on the side, whereas in the first one, the S and part of the A ran off the top. Maybe I had to explain it too many times.
First off, to whoever added to the comments that I was the original designer...a big THANK YOU! Tomorrow I'll be going through my top 5 likely candidates and see if I can ferret them out. :)
But I digress. Some of you may know that waaaaaaaay back in 1995 I designed the original shirt. I really wish that someone had contacted me to do the update...but I can actually lay a little of the blame on myself. This site also did a reproduction of the original shirt back in January. I came across it in February after the order period was up (I really wanted to order one! I've got a few, but they don't fit!). But I never got off my ass and dropped them a line. A situation I've rectified this time around. I might even drag out some sketches and photos from the production to share.
If you'd like to see my original, you'll find a copy of it in my portfolio.
Here's a head swelling thing I came across during all this: The shirts are now all around the world. 10 years and people are still excited about this design. That really made my day.
I really like my job. I got to design a set of icons and new color scheme for Autumn Bejeweled. It's a special skin for one of our most popular games, Bejeweled. It was a lot of fun and a real rush to play a game where I designed the pieces! One thing I learned; if it's going to end up in Flash, building in Illustrator is a waste of time. You can bring the shapes from Illustrator to Flash, but you lose all of your gradients (and alpha effects too, I think). Plus, I've found that drawing in Flash works well with my style.
I find it a bit sad that my 10 year old self had to deal with these issues. I blame "The Day After".
Understatement of the century. But why is H in quotations? Does it stand for something other than hydrogen? Happy, hilarity, hair, hussy, hotdog, horny, hippy, horse, house, Hitler, heart, hymen, hydrangea, hyper-keratosis...oh now I'm just getting silly. :P
Now that the pesky surface dwellers and their dessicated land masses are gone the kingdom of Atlantis will rule the planet!
They want to shoot our flag out of a cannon? Perhaps I should have thought about this one a bit more. Let's just pretend it's the Ayatollah Khomeini wiping his ass with the flag so we can all have a good chuckle.
Creating cartoons about misfit animals as a cry for help concerning my own social inadequacies? Nah...
I'm trying to figure out what I was going for in the partially erased version of this one. It looks like he's spitting out the ant...maybe an anteater that doesn't like ants?
Thanks to his fin implant, Bruce is finally able to strike fear into the hearts of innocent swimmers.
"How embrassing"?
At least my mispellings are consistent. :P
Where does a giant octopus get an enormous fountain pen? Where does he keep his inkwell?
One of the sites I visit regularly, Cold Hard Flash, posted links to a bunch of Flash tutorials a couple months ago. This past weekend, I finally got around to watching one that sounded particularly interesting: Drawing and Animating a Character in Macromedia Flash MX 2004. It's an hour long video and I HIGHLY recommend it. Good advice on how to quickly and easily translate your physical pencil sketch into well formed shapes that aren't bogged down with too many points. Tips on keeping file sizes down. Demonstrations of some common moves, including some 2d moves that make your character look 3d.
Today's batch takes us just over halfway through the journey. I know, I know...when will the fun ever start?
Anyways, here's a small group that didn't really fit neatly into a category.
"Benjerman Franklain"? Is that supposed to be a joke, or just really bad spelling? I do like that you can see the first attempt with the second having more weight and movement to the drawing.
The furnace is only lit every other day, so he has a fighting chance.
When I did my last big bunch of scanning, I included a few sketches that I've been wanting to flesh out with in Flash. Last night I tried to do just that using bezier curves...which turned out to be slow, tedious, and poor quality. So I decided to break out my dusty old Wacom tablet to see what results it could give me. The below grew out of one of my doodles and I'm quite pleased with it. :)
I'm sorry. Today's introduction is not in service. Please check the number and then dial again. But in the meantime, please enjoy these pretty pictures.
Editorial cartoon crutch #1 - the economy! But why is Baja part of the US? Perhaps it's yet another display of my mad divination skillz. After the village idiot declares himself king, he'll want to start expanding his empire...
Sports? Sports? Eww...I feel dirty. But at least I can pretty much guarantee I didn't watch that game.
The world's smallest man meets a very tall basketball player. Poor choice of title...Mishu and Kareem would have matched their locations on the page. That's it. I'm fired.
Not that you asked, but here's where the blog's name came from. I believe Angie and I were having breakfast at Cyndi's. Before ordering, I had to run to the bathroom. While telling Angie what I wanted, I hadn't fully decided and told her I'd have eggs...in some format. It's one of those phrases I found funny enough to write down. Stuff like "Well buckle my plughole" or "scientorfically proven". Not necessarily my own creations...but stuff worthy of being saved for the ages. If I come across some more, I'll be sure to post them.
Because the future is where we'll be spending the rest of our lives
What stirring insights did my 10-year old self have into the future? It seems that many species have died out and we've had to maintain the delicate balance of nature with robotic replacements. I might actually end up being right for once...
This one's already come true...I'm a prophet! Ok, I'll give you that it looks nothing like the Sony Aibo. In fact the shape of head came from the Star Destroyer on my Dynamite magazine poster. But that's not important. Let's focus on my obvious gift of divination.
Oh! And there's another odd thing on this one. I erased my signature in the lower left corner and replaced it with the one in the electricity over the dog's head. This happens on several other cartoons too. For some reason I got into incorporating my signature into the background of the drawing. I'm not sure where I picked this up. I'd love to say it was Al Hirschfeld, but I'd be a bald faced liar... it's probably from someone in Mad Magazine.
Environmentally conscious? Opposites day? Perhaps forseeing it's temporal importance in the Back to the Future Trilogy? How the hell should I know...I've got divination, not memory.
It's a biotech creature used to patrol our waters to protect us from the Atlanteans after their attack on...ooh. Perhaps I've said too much.
It looks like my first attempt had him as a jaunty mechanical man with arms and legs...I guess he didn't look robotic enough. Now he has wheels and tools for hands. That's what he gets for being jaunty!
The original design spec clearly called for 8 legs, but they had to cut back to 6 to keep production costs down.
And another incorporated signature...so subtle you hardly even notice it.
In playing around tonight I somehow eliminated my ability to publish my template. This is also keeping my comments from incrementing. It seems to be a problem logging into my FTP site. I may have to call speakeasy customer service tomorrow to see why I can't get on. :P
Oh well...at least I broke my blog instead of Angie's.
UPDATE: 8/20 5:31pm
Yay! Speakeasy reset the password for my shell account and all is right with the world. I'll post a bigger batch of images to make up for not posting last night. :P
I've got one for each of the major players in the 1980 presidential election.
Jimmy Carter - Make fun of his big teeth and smile...check. Damn! So much other well trodden ground left unvisited. And why oh why didn't I do something with everyone's favorite presidential brother, Billy!
Ronald Reagan - I was only 10, but I was well aware that Reagan was a doddering old fool. I'm curious...does this one actually make sense to anyone?
John Anderson - Ever the iconoclast, I was a John Anderson supporter. I had a button and everything. Unfortunately I'm at a loss for why I liked John Anderson...or what his stance was. Likely it was just the first major election where I was old enough to understand what was going on.
Oh...and more nostril fixation. Noses have 2 holes in them, so OF COURSE I have to draw both of them. It's a law. You can look it up.
While the air conditioning in my building has done a fine job holding back the recent heat wave...it met it's match today. I had my blinds open a little and that was all the invitation that Heat Miser needed to leave me suffering in a pool of sweat. Fortunately the small difference between mostly closed and totally closed was enough to even the balance. But for a while, I really considered going back on my promise of not installing some elaborate contraption to funnel all the AC from Libby's office into mine while she's on vacation. ;)
After seeing an office prank photo where everything was wrapped in aluminum foil, I had been considering going with mylar wallpaper in the office for The Factory feeling. I now see that would have been a big mistake. Twinkie big.
I was talking to the old man a few weeks ago about his latest obsession, Chicago style hot dogs. So I got to hear in detail about what makes this type of dog special. A natural casing all-beef dog on a poppyseed bun, with mustard, celery salt, neon green relish, onions, tomato wedges, and a pickle spear. I'll spare you the details about the particular companies in Chicago producing these products and Dad's attempts to add them to his stockpile.
Of course he's done a lot of research into hot dogs joints in Western Washington. After ratting off a long list, he paused to note that the Cyberdog in Pioneer Square serves a veggie dog...and that he didn't understand that. I told him they're actually pretty good. He continued that a veggie dog makes as much sense as an all-beef watermelon.
I'm not making this up...I swear. He really is that weird. But damn if that isn't one of the funniest mental pictures I've had in a while. I just see bright red hamburger spilling out of a big green watermelon. I've actually toyed with the idea of doing a photo shoot to preseve that image for posterity. Anyone up for burgers with a hint of watermelon?
UPDATE - 8/18 11:38am
This morning Libby (my fabulous boss who's currently enjoying a week of leisure and Oprah) read this entry and couldn't resist putting this together. Now that I see it, I think its even more disturbing. It's the future of genetically engineered food.
Ah, the tried and true comedy of saying something is the opposite of what appears. Such a simple premise but I still couldn't find the mark...hence the World's Biggest Nose actually being big.
By looking at this and the deeply unfortunate self portrait one might think I had some sort fascination with nostrils. But you'd be wrong.
This is Harold. He shows up in lots of my drawings of this era. Sometimes he's a person, sometimes he's a dinosaur...but mostly he's just a head (something I've long been guilty of). This illustration style stuck with me for quite a long time...though I'm really not sure why. Even more puzzling is why I found this funny. I was a weird kid.
