My Afternoon: Ducks, Dogs, and Knickers

Busy day after a busy evening. Tomorrow is the deadline for material for the next issue of ‘Red All Over The Land’, the Liverpool FC fanzine to which I’ve been contributing cartoons this season. I normally don’t allow myself to get close to a deadline but this time I’ve been busy with too much work. The cartoon strip I’ve sent is the first I’ve drawn entirely on the Samsung Note, though the text and colour came afterwards in Photoshop. It’s a bit of a milestone finding that I can actually work entirely in digital and know that the results look almost indistinguishable from the work I would have done in ink.

However, that’s not the point of this blog post. I’m blogging today because I wanted to talk about dog owners.

In case it passed your notice, today was Monday and in The Spine household, Monday usually means that the shopping needed doing. As is usual, this fell to me so I jumped on my bike and headed off on my usual route which takes me down around the canal. And it’s there that I saw an odd sight.

Two women, possibly in their fifties, were out walking their dogs in the biting cold. Nothing unusual so far except one of the dogs had jumped into the canal, no doubt attempting to get to one of the many ducks the local council bus-in to make the place look reasonably rural. I don’t know much about dogs but I do know they’re prone to jump into rivers. Then they usually climb out, give themselves a shake (in slow motion), and Joanna Lumley starts blathering on about healthy gums. However, it being a canal and not a river, the banks are manmade. It’s a vertical three foot stone wall from the footpath to the water and there’s no way that a dog, having jumped in the canal, could ever hope to get out and give itself a shake. As for Joanna Lumley, the old girl wouldn’t come within twenty miles of our borders.

Which is what these two women had discovered by the time I arrived.

‘Grab the stick! Grab the stick!’ they screamed as they waved a short twig in the direction of the paddling pooch. Then they spotted me. ‘Oh help! Can you save our dog from the canal?’ they plead.

I didn’t know how to tell them they must has mistaken me for one of those suckers you hear are born every sixty seconds. My inner monologue had already kicked in and it had a BBC newsreader’s plummy voice: ‘A passer-by drowned today when attempting to rescue a dog that had jumped into a canal chasing ducks. The dog eventually made its own way out while the passer-by, thought to be a cyclist and notoriously unsuccessful blogger, rapidly sank twelve feet to the bottom of the canal due to the weighty Samsung Note 10.1 tablet in his backpack. Police believe that had Samsung UK’s Marketing Director Ms. Ines van Gennip sent him a Samsung Note 10.1 (2014 edition) to review in exchange for his now priceless cartoon, the lighter tablet would have allowed him to swim to safety. Frogmen recovered his body and a fragment of duck-based humour which it’s thought the blogger was writing at the time of his drowning because he thought it might make for a semi-amusing anecdote.’

It took a fraction of second for all that to cross my cerebellum before I knew there wasn’t time to explain the silence of Ines van Gennip. Instead, I began to wave to a point further down the canal where the path was lower.

Only my wise council wasn’t needed. As one of the women stripped off (I kid you not), the other crawled on her belly and reach down to the water. After a few efforts, she snagged the dog’s collar and with a snap of her powerful arm, she lifted the dog clean out of the water. Queue her shouting at the dog as she began to explain the dangers of canals and the other woman pulled her knickers back on.

I shrugged my shoulders and rode off. Dog owners defy logic and, had one of them jumped in, I can’t say that I would have done anything braver than waving a branch in her direction whilst tutting disapprovingly. The people I feel sorry for are the firemen who have to start arsing around on thin ice after somebody high on Pedigree Chum has jumped into a frozen pond in the middle of winter. It’s usually the humans that drown and rarely the dogs. I mean, it stands to sense that dogs usually find a way out of canals without human intervention, otherwise our waterways would be clogged with the bloated carcasses of family pets and bloggers with unnecessarily heavy Samsung tablets in the backpacks.

Thankfully, humans, dogs, and ducks emerged from this story relatively unscathed. But I think it’s a story that has an important message about water safety, dog ownership, and the reluctance of Samsung UK to help UK bloggers. Thanks to them, this blogger will remains negatively buoyant for the foreseeable future and what does that say about the Anglo-Korean relationship?

All Kinds of Swank

They stopped updating my iPad back when Jonathan Ive still had hair and the pecs under his tight figure hugging t-shirt weren’t made from vulcanised rubber. It means that my iOS is stuck in the low fives and the release of iOS 7 now makes me the last man on the planet supposedly stuck in skeumorphic hell. Skeumorphism, if you don’t know and (frankly) who does, is the trick computers typically use to make you think you’re interacting with a real object. A button might have a bevelled edge to give a sense of it standing proud of the screen. Skeumorphism is the theory that it makes sense that the corner of a page should peel back when you’re leafing through an ebook. It’s also that trick Apple use when they film their spokespeople whispering pretentiously against a white background and make you suspect they’re members of a strange Polynesian sect of bamboo worshippers awaiting the birth of the great coconut god.

iOS 7 does away with all of that for a clean flat aesthetic. It’s an interesting design concept with raises one important question: will I ever get a Samsung Galaxy Note 10.1 (2014 edition) tablet to review?

Personally, I don’t mind a bit of skeumorphism. In fact, I quite enjoy it. I get excited when I read that the Note recognises when you remove the stylus and plays a noise like a sword being drawn from its sheath. Will I ever get to hear that myself? I begin to worry that I won’t. It’s less than a week from the rumoured release date for the new Samsung’s Note 10.1 and I still can’t recommend it to the many thousands of you waiting on my judgement. If I didn’t know better, I’d think that Ines van Gennip, Samsung UK’s Marketing Director, hadn’t read my letter and that my cartoon and book have already been recycled and are now on their way to shops reconstituted as baby nappies.

It’s this kind of shabby treatment that could turn a man off Samsung and begin to look for a new object for his affections such as the new Wacom Cintiq Companion Hybrid. If I’m going to have unconsummated love for an electrical device then I could easily lust after one of these beauties. Except I’m not such a fickle lover. I have confessed my love for the Samsung Note 10.1 (2014 edition) and I refuse to look at another, even if that other does have a 13 inch display and 2048 levels of pen sensitivity!

I suppose you could say I’m struggling with the old Hilary Swank dilemma. Just when you decide that there’s room in your life for one toothy brunette film star along comes Amanda Peet. What’s a man to do? I had enough trouble justifying my wanting to see ‘The Core’ without my needing to come up with excuses to see ‘2012’ as well. There’s only so much bad science fiction I can profess to enjoy without things beginning to look suspicious.

For the moment, then, I remain a Samsung lover as I also remain a Swank man. I like her teeth. I suppose you could say there’s a bit of skeumorphism going on there as well. They make me feel like she’s more than a virtual presence up on the big screen. In an ideal world, both would think that such loyalty deserves rewarding.

My Letter to Samsung

I’m not here. I’m out. And I’ll be scuffing my heels as I go. Even now I’m probably standing in PCWorld in the Arndale Centre, Manchester, staring forlornly at a first generation Samsung Note, wondering what happened to all the optimism that was there at the start of the week. Five days on, I’ve still not heard from Samsung. No early morning knocks on the door from keen-limbed couriers with mysterious cartons. Not even a sniff of high-end electronic goods to which I could dedicate my attentions in five star reviews for the rest of the month.

It’s gutting, of course. I’m wondering about a protest march, a Kickstarter campaign, a hunger strike. Looking back, perhaps my letter lacked a little punch, some pizazz, a cheque written out for the sum of £400, but that was a mere oversight, I tell you.

However, I’ll push on through this disappointment. Next week I might rename the blog to some part of the body, if only I could think of one. The current banner is beginning to mock my delusions of significance, shallow though they were.

Ms. Ines van Gennip                                                                              9th September, 2013
Marketing Director UK & Ireland
Samsung House
1000, Hillswood Drive
Chertsey, Surrey KT16 0PS

Dear Ines (if I may),

I was sitting here doodling a cartoon (enclosed) when it suddenly struck me that you’re probably overworked down there at Samsung HQ. Oh, don’t deny it. With an exciting range of new electrical doodadary destined for the nation’s pimpled salesmen, you’ll be kept very busy in the coming months and in need of some light relief. And that’s where I hope I come in…

Please allow me to introduce myself. My name is David Waywell and I am a writer, cartoonist, and blogger, though you might know me by my pen name, Stan Madeley. More significantly, I run the website ‘Samsung Beauty’, which, as our expensive new banner proclaims, is ‘the world’s only blog dedicated to Samsung owners, users, admirers, and people in charge of deciding which bloggers get a Galaxy Note 10.1 inch tablet (2014 edition) to review.’

You’re a canny operator, Ines, so I won’t try to sweet-talk you. I bet you’re already thinking this is one of those desperate attempts to get a free Galaxy Note 10.1 inch tablet (2014 edition) to review. But there you’d be wrong. Is it ‘desperate’ when a man dedicates his life to ensuring that the hard-working folk in Samsung’s UK marketing department are happy? I don’t mean on any deep metaphysical level because who then is truly happy? But as Ernest Hemingway once put it: ‘happiness in intelligent people is the rarest thing I know.’ It’s my belief that just because you have the intelligence to match your wit, beauty, and very evident humanity, there is no reason why you should suffer from the burden of your job. You do such good work on behalf of Samsung, as well as your charitable causes, you deserve a bit of a lift. I’m therefore enclosing a personalised copy of my last book with the guarantee it will make you snort with laughter and pop a spring back into your step. Feel free to share it around the office as a team building exercise, especially with your PA who I hear is one of the best and always passes on letters which are clearly well intentioned and full of the old joie de vivre, as they say over at Samsung France.

No doubt you’re touched by my generosity but please think nothing of it. I normally charge £399 (rrp) for my cartoons but I want you to have this one for nothing. The wellbeing of you and your team is more important to me than money! It must be so depressing sending review products to semi-articulate simpletons in the technology press who don’t appreciate your efforts or the genius of the Note 10.1 (2014 edition). What do technology journalists know about technology? They have a quick glance at the features, make a big fuss about the luxurious faux-leather back and then spend the rest of their time talking about quality the bezelling. You deserve more than a bit of racy talk about quality bezelling, Ines. Will they talk about the 1024 levels of sensitivity in the stylus with the perspicacity of a jobbing cartoonist? Will they really appreciate the reduced weight by using it to produce top quality work, week in and week out, as it would in the hands of a quality blogger? How many of them will use it in everyday situations, learn to love it in a way only a truly individual cartoonist and writer could come to love it? Will they even bother to give it a name? Would they ever call it ‘Ines’?

Yes, Ines! That’s right! If only I had a Galaxy Note 10.1 (2014 edition) to review, I’d name it after you! Because how many of those gel-fringed prima donnas in the gadget press will road test the Note 10.1 (2014 edition) every day for the next five years and recommend it to their readers? And did I mention that my blog is read by trend setters and top of the line professionals?

Listen, I better leave it there before I resort to verse and then we’d all be sobbing into buckets. On behalf of myself and all the readers of ‘Samsung Beauty’, may I send you all our very best wishes and hope that you continue to dominate those swine at Apple. We also look forward to hearing from you, hopefully in the form of an environmentally friendly carton delivered by courier. There’s always somebody in, so no need to fret on that score!

Your friend, eager to hand out the five star reviews,

David Waywell (nee Stan Madeley)
Samsung Beautywww.the-spine.com