The Sanest Evil and the Death of Akram Raslan

[caption id="attachment_3216" align="alignright" width="252"] Cartoonist Akram Raslan, murdered in Syria.[/caption]

Among the many hand-sized clichés we often reach for is the one that says that evil is beyond our powers to describe. Yet the phrase ‘I really don’t understand how they can do that’ is surely one of the most cowardly in our language because what it really means is: ‘I really don’t want to understand how they can do that’. We play linguistic games in order to find that easy path out of difficult areas. We resort to words like ‘madman’ to describe Hitler when his motivations and actions were based in a cold realm of logic taken straight from Nietzsche who argued that pity weakens us all.

It’s in this sense that Kurtz in Conrad’s ‘Heart of Darkness’ is not a mad man. He is man who has gone utterly sane. Kurtz has stripped back the layers of culture, behaviour, and morality to locate himself in a simpler world free from values. ‘There was nothing either above or below him, and I knew it,’ says Marlow. ‘He had kicked himself loose of the earth. Confound the man! he had kicked the very earth to pieces.’

The message of Conrad’s book is that civilisation must maintain a state of partial insanity in order to continue. In one of the great final chapters of literature, Kurtz’s intended asks Marlow if Kurtz mentioned her before he died. Marlow makes a profound choice, choosing to tell a lie because the truth – that Kurtz died expounding ‘the horror, the horror’ – would give her no solace. It’s like the many lies we tell ourselves: that our governments are benign, that politicians care about every single one of us, that good guys win, that talent triumphs, and that owning an iPad is the thing to do and totally without consequence. The truth is that we in the West live the lives we live because we exploit people in other countries. The even larger truth is that we are fighting the same battle for survival that has gone on for ten thousand years, only our tribe no longer slaughters the woolly mammoth outside the cave. We no longer see our fathers, brothers, and sons killing the rivals who covet our resources.

Reason taken like this to its logical extreme is ultimately nihilistic. We are just lumps of cells bound to a planet we might never escape before our civilisation is doomed by the death of the sun. Yet even if our far decedents find other planets to colonise, it will merely be a pause before the ultimate heat death of the universe. There is no greater meaning against that backdrop. Good and evil are relative temperatures; morality merely a state of warmth between something being hot and then becoming cold forever or until time itself comes to an end.

Such talk should rightly be offensive to our sensibilities. To paraphrase the advice given to the young Alvy Singer in Woody Allen’s Annie Hall: the entropic decay of the universe doesn’t mean we shouldn’t do our maths homework. Similarly, we want to leave the problems of ‘evil’ in some dark corner while we instead consider the things that make life worth living. In this sense, we all would be Kurtz’s bride. We don’t want the truth. We need lies in order to survive.

Call it habit, behaviour, tics, prejudices, programming, instinct or conditioning: we are all ‘mad’ in some small way and we should be glad of that. Cartoonists in particular are bred to exploit that madness. Their humour warms us because it’s borne out of the friction caused by our fractured subjectivity rubbing against the cold sanity of the objective world. It is the job of the cartoonist to revel in our human faults, fragilities, pretentions, delusions, and, yes, the madness that is sometimes needed to keep our blood pumping. The alternative is to succumb to the rising power of reason, systems, and programming. The sane act is to dress all our window cleaners in the same uniform. It’s to make call centre staff adhere to a corporate image and respond to every call by mechanically following a flowchart. Such things strip away our humanity, the unique eccentricity that comes from being living breathing people. The postman no longer cracks jokes as he does his round because he’s now a professional. We’re told it makes sense, that it’s surely the rational thing to do… Yet it’s the cartoonist who points out that none of this actually makes life better. The cartoonist points out that conformity is only a short step from the police, the army, and, eventually, the secret apparatus of a repressive regime. It is the cartoonist’s job to remind us that Hitler was not mad. He was sane. Criminally sane and the same is true of the tyrants butchering innocents in Syria.

Today I read that the cartoonist Akram Raslan has been murdered by the Assad regime. The full report is here but, really, what needs to be said is that Raslan’s only crime was to lampoon the President of Syria. Raslan stood up when others cower down, an act braver than anything I can imagine. Perhaps he is one of the very few really worthy of the honour of calling themselves ‘cartoonist’ because the true cartoonist defends the madness of our culture, our society, our manners, our faiths, beliefs, prejudices, pretentions, and hopes. The cartoonist maintains the humour that fires the human spirit in the face of those cold, rational, and deeply corrupt minds that routinely calculate that millions can die so a barbarous few can survive. True cartoonists do that regularly. It is their job to stand up and speak mad truths. It’s why the best are so very few and the rest of us merely scratch around in the dirt hoping to find significant meaning in the dust.

I suppose Akram Raslan wasn’t what every cartoonist should aspire to be. He was what every human being should aspire to be. You might say that it was an act of madness to defy a government ruled by cowards and thugs but surely it is the same madness that defines the noblest among of us. Sometimes our finest accomplishments make no rational sense but are supremely meaningful because of that: Van Gogh’s Sunflowers, Michaelanelo’s Pietà, the Marx Brothers’ Duck Soup. Rationalists rightly attack religion and accuse it of being the cause of much of the world’s trouble but we should not forget that the alternative they offer is one step closer to the gas chamber than anything found in scripture. The last century’s most notorious genocides were perpetrated not in the name of God but in the name of Nazi and Stalinist ideology where God had no place.

That isn’t to defend religion but to simply point out that sometimes we, as human beings, need the mystery of the established lie. Freedom is non-conformity, rule breaking, individual expression, and a love of things that make no sense. It sometimes makes us an enemy of the state but that is as it should be. Some call it anarchy but we never choose that entirely or, at least, never choose is entirely for very long. Civilization is founded upon the compromises we always make between order and chaos, truth and lies, silence and laughter. Cartoonists explore those compromises for the purposes of humour and sometimes enlightenment. Akram Raslan explored it to express the most important statement any person can make. He dared to laugh and then some coldly rational bastard silenced him for that and in the process they kicked the very earth to pieces.

 

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?

So I Saw The Back of Tony Husband's Head...

I don’t as a rule travel into any city or town on a Saturday evening because I have a rough idea about what goes on there once the shops close. However, I didn’t expect that nightlife to be as evident on the 4.20pm train into Manchester.

A group of girls arrived at the station. They were in their mid-teens but their clothes would make anybody hope it was the legal side of mid-teens. Their dresses were barely covering their buttocks; their short thick legs brutal, muscular and a strange shade of brown like those of some East European marathon runner caught short in their quest for Olympic gold. Their legs matched faces that were callous and calculated with the eyes of desperate maneaters. I recognised the type. In nine months those strong legs would be pushing flimsy prams, passed on down generations of single mothers.

Arriving in Manchester, I quickly realised that the city was already full of their kind. I walked through the gathering crowds of revelers and the last of the normal shoppers. The women were brazenly sexual, devoid of anything that I could find attractive beyond a pre-programmed admiration for breast or leg. They were trying to appeal to men who were similarly outlandish in their choice of clothes for a cold October night this far north. Gangs of four, five, six or seven were roaming making loud noises and drunken humour and wearing thin t-shirts over grotesquely inflated pectorals. There were arguments, posturing, playful fighting, and some of it was good-natured. A guy stopped in front of a beggar in St Anne's Square. He gave her a hat shaped like a bear and joked that he'd come back later and check that she was wearing it. Yet such generosity was rare. As darkness fell, the rowdiness increased. I felt jaded by witnessing such sad lives lived out publically and after a coffee in the main branch of Waterstones, I got out of the city centre and made my way to the art gallery behind the Arndale.

[caption id="" align="alignright" width="230"] Richard Goodall Gallery[/caption]

I arrived not knowing what to expect but finding the doors locked, a sign ‘private showing’ posted in the window. A woman working the button that opened the door didn’t seem keen on letting me in but when she did I explained that I’d been invited, which was embarrassing since the person inviting me had just passed me as he nipped out for a cigarette. I hadn’t recognised Bill Stott since we'd only spoken on email. I went after him, chatted briefly with Bill who was clearly on edge. The guest of honour was late and the evening couldn’t really go ahead without Bill Tidy. We went back inside and I left Bill to his worrying and began to wander around the gallery.

My impressions were so mixed. I was fascinated by the cartoons but the place didn't feel hospitable. Going to the Cartoon Museum in London had been so different. There I found people to talk to. Perhaps it was because they were genuine cartoonists or fans of cartoons. This was a different crowd, perhaps Manchester's cultural elite. I don't know... Here I felt daggers in my back. I felt so out of place and utterly unwelcome. Perhaps it was just my usual working class neurosis at play. I'd try to catch a person’s eye, start a conversation but the only responses were polite but cool smiles. Eventually, I gave up trying.

[caption id="" align="alignright" width="412"] Those closest I got to Tony Husband (his back to camera)[/caption]

I recognised Tony Husband immediately and then Bill Tidy arrived. I didn’t get anywhere close to speaking to either and felt so foolish to think that I’d taken my copy of Tony Husband’s book 'I Nearly Died Laughing' in the vague hope that I’d get him to sign it. There was no chance. They were soon trapped in respective corners by people seeking audiences. Yet it left plenty of room to study their cartoons diligently, which I did, doing circuit upon circuit of the room, finding the only pleasure of the evening in looking at some great gag cartooning. Bill Stott's were the most familiar to me but it was good to see so many in once place. Tidy's cartoons were surprisingly delicate for a man who made his reputation drawing broad stokes on a whiteboard. Yet Tony Husband's were the standout for me. It's too easy to dismiss them as being roughly drawn. They are but, looking at the originals, I found myself really appreciating the technique. This alone made the night worth it and might even encourage me to try a second visit, if they let me in...

As I studied the cartoons, behind me the audience seemed familiar to itself. I stood there speaking to nobody as a world moved around me, kisses exchanged between familiar cheeks, old friendships renewed, gossip, gossip, gossip. I drifted between these groups, feeling like I didn’t belong and thinking each moment that I would escape.

It reminded me so much of days at university when I’d stand in a room of middle-class southerners so familiar in each other’s company that they knew the rules of being social. Around the edges of the room would be the rest of us from working class backgrounds and places like Liverpool, Manchester, Leeds, and (as in my case) the wilds in between. These were be the friends I made and kept over the subsequent years. As a postgrad my friends would be from Ireland and America. Class seemed important then. It felt important now. There was never much mixing and same felt true here. I didn’t belong.



I waited until Bill Stott, Tony Husband, and then Bill Tidy had finished their live cartooning and I joined the rest singing 'Happy Birthday' as a cake was presented to Bill Tidy but then I was gone. I made a dash for my train through crowds that already stank of stale beer.

[caption id="" align="alignright" width="384"] Manchester[/caption]

I was delayed a minute by a group of pink middle-aged angels blocking the pavement with a rubber sex doll. I missed my train by a minute, took refuge in the Nero near Manchester Victoria. Coffee and hot food helped and I started to draw on my Note hoping to pass the hour there waiting for my train. Except a couple moved next to me so he could charge his iPhone beneath my seat. They hadn’t bought food or drink so they started to kiss, passionately, and so close to me that I was technically part of a threesome. I quickly got out of there, exchanging my hot coffee for a thirty minute wait as I stood shivering on a cold platform until the train arrived with more drunks but eventually I was home and swearing never again…

Hey Wayne!

Today I’ll be skipping my evening meal. I would normally call it my ‘tea’ but I’m reliably informed that you civilized folk call it ‘dinner’ and today I’m trying to raise my game. That means it’s a non-jeans day as I also give myself an early birthday treat. Birthday, you ask? Well, yes. Tomorrow, this lump of the corporeal jam marks the day when the Earth reaches the same arbitrary point in its orbit that it reached when I first had my bottom smacked by some firm-handed midwife. Famous people who also had their bottoms smacked on October 13th: Margaret Thatcher, Paul Simon and cartoonist Michael Heath. And what’s remarkable is that I’m a big fan of all two.

As to my treat: later I’ll be catching the Manchester train to attend the opening of ‘Hey Wayne!’, a new exhibition of cartoons from Bill Stott, Bill Tidy, Tony Husband and Chris Madden. It’s at the Richard Goodall Gallery starting at 6pm and ending at 8 with fisticuffs in the car park (Bill’s words, not mine). Now that I’ve advertised it here, I expect queues around the block, though I’d expect that anyway. This is a rare chance to see some of our most important contemporary gag cartoonists together in one room. If you like gag cartoons and live in the Manchester area, you’d be crazy not to attend. A prize for anybody who spots the tall nerd standing in the corner…

It’s my high level of cartoon nerdishness that gives me the confidence to attend, otherwise, it’s not in my nature to go to cultured events such as this. I usually plan to go and then discover a path of less resistance which takes me back to my more familiar routines. However, this time I’m determined to make the effort of showing up, standing in a corner, feeling extremely out of place, and then slipping away unnoticed. I wish I could be different, arrive with a flourish, slap Tony Husband on the back and give Bill Tidy a thumbs-up. Instead, I’ll be happy to finally meet Bill Stott, one of my favourite cartoonists and a really nice guy who displays remarkable levels of tolerance by enduring an email correspondence with a miserable would-be cartoonist plagued by a compulsion to over-draw everything.

Okay, now for a late lunch (dinner in these parts) and then I’ll get ready for the train. I’ll probably blog tomorrow. It’s my birthday but I try not to think about these things. I look younger than my years and I’m still a child at heart, even if you can count the years on the rings of my teeth. If I have the nerve, time, and figure out how to put a pound on my phone, I’ll Instagram tonight’s event. From here on, things will be bleak. Next week I’ll begin to anticipate the huge disappointment of not featuring in the results of the Observer’s short graphic story competition.

Community

Another late night working on cartoons. I now have five candidates to put into the competition but I’ll keep working until the deadline. Then I’ll either post them here or start another round of sending them to various publications so I can amass more rejection letters to insulate my office walls.

The weather has definitely turned. It’s cold so I’m happy but also late rising, late getting to my desk, later still writing this blog. But for that, I partly blame the gods of good comedy. I always work later than normal when I’ve got a good comedy series playing in the background. Since I finished an entire run of all eight series of ‘Curb Your Enthusiasm’, I’ve had to find myself a new show for late nights. I’ve settled on the US comedy ‘Community’ and last night I started the third season. To say that I like ‘Community’ is to reduce my emotions to something overly simplistic because I also hate ‘Community’. But to say it’s a love/hate relationship is also reductive. It’s a remarkable show in that I’ve never seen anything with so many bad ideas. One moment it’s sublime and the next just insane. Yet that’s its charm. It’s more off-the-wall than is usual with mainstream American shows.

I could compare it with ‘Portlandia’ except ‘Portlandia’ suffered from more bad writing; sketches which were just bad and went on for too long. ‘Community’ isn’t badly written as much as sometimes it stretches its conceits to points where I’m unwilling to go when I’m tired. Scenes can still be good but I’m more likely to write off an entire episode because, late at night, I want something familiar in my comedy. ‘Community’ is rarely familiar. It constantly ‘subverts the genre’ but I now hate myself for having written that. It’s one of those stock phrases that you usually hear from university postgrads who haven’t thought deeper than their dissertation on some lousy vampire novel. It’s like the phrase ‘doing interesting things with the genre’, which also means very little but sounds faintly intelligent.

However, ‘Community’ does do interesting things with… Oh, now, stop it! No it doesn’t do interesting things. It just plays games with genre, using the world of the community college to act out different generic plotlines. Sometimes the allusions to films work better than others. A few nights ago I watched the episode made in the style of ‘My Diner with Andre’ (crossed with bits from ‘Pulp Fiction’) and it worked really well. One involving zombies sent me to sleep. It’s a show which I look forward to, sometimes can’t get enough of, and occasionally, struggle to make it to the end of an episode.

Yet what impresses me most about the show is the cast. It’s a brave ensemble piece, which does little for the vanity of the actors, Joel McHale, Gillian Jacobs, Danny Pudi, Alison Brie,  Annie Edison, Donald Glover, and Chevy Chase. I could spend 1000 words talking about each of their characters without even scratching the depths of their complexities and neuroses. Yet what impresses me the most is that it’s the minor roles that have also developed and made stars of their actors. Ken Jeong holds nothing back at Chang (and like Kramer (Seinfeld) and Klingler (MASH), is one of the great supporting characters of American TV comedy), and Jim Rash is outrageously camp as Dean Craig Pelton. Both began in support roles but through the sheer force of their characters, have become the comic show’s comic staples. They both remind me of David Cross playing Tobias Fünke in ‘Arrested Development’, ostensibly a minor character who quickly became a comic lynchpin.

In fact, ‘Arrested Development’ is a good place to end. ‘Community’ is much stranger than ‘Arrested Development’, braver comedy and, for that, perhaps harder to love. Yet when it’s firing on all cylinders, it’s the only show of this kind that comes close to reaching the same comic heights.

Expert Extraverts

The Guardian is running a Twitter masterclass with David Schneider. It costs £50 for three hours of advice from the ‘Twitter obsessive with over 150,000 followers’, as well as ‘the BBC’s David Levin’ who ‘is a professional tweeter responsible for accounts such as @BBCTheVoiceUK, @BBCApprentice.’

I’m interested to know what advice they could give. Not fifty pounds of ‘interested’ but interested in a general quizzical-look-to-camera sense.  As much as I hesitate to offer the obvious observation, there is a reason why they a in a position to call themselves ‘experts’ and that is because one is a celebrity and the other is tweeting on behalf of celebrities. Their only advice should be: become a celebrity and then open a Twitter account.

I wish the world were otherwise but we’ve become a culture dominated by vocal types, eager to position themselves as experts in subjects that really defy expertise. ‘Twitter expert’ sounds as meaningful as sticking ‘ghost hunter’ on your résumé. The things that determine success are intangible and generally indistinguishable from doing a psychic reading on a bowl of blancmange. Yet it’s all part of this great social media hoax that’s perpetuated on all of us. Social media is a repulsive modern phenomenon, usually pursued by horrendous Americans with half a million followers and who only ever babble on about their methods for getting even more followers. They bring nothing new, beautiful, or even entertaining into the world. They merely feed on the dreams we all have of being recognised in an increasingly alienating world. They hog the bandwidth like the millions of motivational websites that earn their repulsive creators a fortune by misleading the gullible.

I’ve spoken before about the long time I used Twitter, where I got up to around 9,000 followers by pretending to be Uncle Dick Madeley yet never broke a hundred as myself. A joke written as Madeley would be widely retweeted and commented upon. The same joke posted as myself would die an ignominious death. The conclusion is that celebrity imbues things with a quality which cannot be replicated. It’s why these Twitter experts can stand there and offer advice but the essential truth is that we live in an age of marketing when brand awareness is the only true religion.

I suppose it all feels relevant today because I’m just about to start reading a new book on my Samsung. It’s Susan Cain’s ‘Quiet: The Power of Introverts in a World That Can't Stop Talking’ and the reason it appealed to me should be quiet obvious. I’ve always been an introvert but in recent years I’ve become more thankful that I wasn’t educated in these more ‘enlightened’ times when I would probably have been diagnosed with mild autism. Not that I think myself cold or detached but relatives sometimes say that I am. I'm not. I'm just not a big talker. The other day I was asked to do an eColour test as part of my new work. The result was that I’m ‘green/blue’ or a ‘relating thinker’. Personally, I thought the ‘science’ indistinguishable from physiognomy or even water divining. The results described me to a point but much of it was well off: I like my routines, get edgy if I change anything, but I don’t have checklists. I don’t enjoy ‘doing things by the book’ and I’m definitely not tidy. Nor am I a slow worker. In fact, I tend to work extremely quickly. It’s strange that anybody would judge me according to these criteria but that is what now happens. The real me is replaced by a corrupted version of myself, as offered by an expert website. We live in a world of experts whose credibility has never been tested but whose words carry power.

If cynicism were part of the ‘green/blue’ diagnosis then I might be less skeptical. Perhaps it comes from being an introvert. I’d like to think so given that one-third of people are apparently introverts. That statistic surprised me but also gives me some hope. I thought introverts were rarer than we are but now I can think that at least a third of you might also be introverts. Perhaps it explains the general silence on this blog, in which case, I welcome it with quiet satisfaction.

They're Chopping Down A Tree Back There...

I woke to the sound what I thought was one of those heavy duty strimmers that ‘gardeners’ seem to wield these days. You probably know the sort. They're carried by this new breed of professional gardener with his own van and t-shirt emblazoned with his own logo whose idea of gardening is planting nothing but attacking everything with a strimmer and a look of mania in his eyes.

The noise has been going on all morning but I’ve only just relealised it’s actually a chainsaw and that somebody is chopping down the enormous evergreen that stands on the empty ground behind our house. It’s so sad. It feels like somebody is cutting into my flesh but then I always get emotional when I see people cut down trees.

I love trees. I’m probably what you’d call a 'tree hugger' except rather than being one of those beaded types with whale stickers on the bumper of their tricycles, I’m actually the kind of person who does hug trees. Trees are one of the few natural things we experience in our lives that make us feel small, whose existence extends beyond our lifetimes. You can measure our lives by our trees: the trees you remember planting, trees you remember your father planting. It’s why I assume there are always people who want rid of trees, people who believe in making their mark on their neighbourhood. When I moved here, there were lots of trees in neighbouring gardens but as new neighbours came in, they chopped down their trees and then made us chop down some of ours. They are people who choose decking and plastic imitation street lamps over trees.

The tree that’s now gone was so big it was home to the entire local population of blackbirds, sparrows ,tits, and, unfortunately, magpies. I suspect it’s the magpies that doomed the tree. We’ve been overrun with them this year, waking everybody at dawn with their screams, even coming into houses attempting to steal food. I’ve had them tapping on my windows at 6am and cursed them every time but never wanting the tree taken down.

That tree was the last line of defence. The next tree they’ll come after will be the beautiful old red maple that sits at the bottom of the garden. I love that tree but I know that there will the day when somebody will come knocking on the door explaining why I should agree to chop down the last proper tree in the neighbourhood. I’ll refuse, of course, and have tears in my eyes as I do so. They’ll look at me with surprise that anybody could invest such emotion to a tree and it will be hard to explain why I’d rather they take me than that tree.

Okay, I have two fillings to pay for and I need to work.

Talking Cartoons

My Monday was very busy so I’m afraid I didn’t have time to write anything more polished or shorter than the video I’m posting here. This another over-the-shoulder view of my drawing a cartoon on the Samsung Note 10.1 and I’ve again provided some commentary. None of this is scripted, so I’ll have to ask you to excuse my stuttering, some terrible phrasing, and general ignorance and mispronunciations. However, I try to talk about cartoonists I enjoy and explain why I love the work of Robert Crumb, Ralph Steadman, Gerald Scarfe, Martin Rowson, Peter Brookes, Nicholas Bentley, Alex Gregory, Thomas Nast, Bruce Eric Kaplan and well as some of the old Punch cartoonists of the 1930. Even if watching me draw isn’t that interesting, I hope I at least say something to hold your attention.

It was also probably a good idea to record this whilst I can still speak. This post was timed to appear at exactly 9.10am, which was exactly the moment I’m due to sit in the dentist’s chair and have my finances probed. After that, I doubt I’ll be in the mood to blog. In fact, I’m considering getting out of town as soon as I’m out of the surgery. Manchester will be my small reward for actually going through with the appointment. I’m just hoping that I’ll need less than a dozen fillings and praying there’s no need for anything more involved that might mean putting my Samsung Note up for sale...

A Body Building Cartoon

You find me hot and sweary. I’ve lost my bloody S-Pen again and I now see that I have to do something about this habit before it becomes a regular part of my working week. I’ve had the Note for six days and I’ve already lost the pen twice, which means that I’ve now used up all the time I usually give myself to tidy my office each year. This can’t go on. At this rate, I’ll have the tidiest workspace in the country but I won’t be getting any work done.

It’s already Sunday and I have work backing up and what is sure to be a horrible week ahead. Tuesday I’m going to the dentist for a much delayed check-up, although that’s not strictly true. ‘Check-up’ makes it sound like I might need no work but who chooses to spend £50 on a check-up and inevitable polish if they don’t need to? A bit of a back tooth came away last week and I know it will mean work. Probably lots of work. My tongue tells me it’s a cavity the size of a small bungalow. I imagine crowns, extractions, months of appointments stretching ahead into the New Year. By the time it’s all done, in six-months, it’ll be time to start getting phone calls from the dentists asking me to make an appointment for a check-up. If they didn’t pester me so much, I’d probably go more often.

Once I’m beyond the horror of Tuesday morning, I need to get working. I have real work to get on with, two cartoon strips need to be finished for a football fanzine, plus I need to settle on which of my unpublished cartoons I’m entering into a competition. Since I don’t think I’ve got one good enough to send, that also means more drawing. In the meantime, I’d throwing today’s cartoon out there in the realisation that nobody would want this kind of thing. My problem is that the cartoons I like aren’t cartoons that other people like, or, specifically, cartoons they’d be willing to pay for.

But I could moan on about that for another 1000 words but it’s not getting my S-Pen found. And I have to find it before I also lose my spare…

Goodbye Friday

As I sit down to write this, there are thirty three minutes left of Friday. These are anxious times and a lot can happen in thirty three minutes. Bad deeds are often played out under this old dark moon. They cause the howls you hear just before midnight, the car doors that slam, the drunken arguments that echo across rooftops, the strange shadows that lurk behind curtained windows.

Just there, a cat screamed and set my nerves on edge. I’m anxious because I’ve had what is commonly known as ‘a bad day’. It was that kind of day when everything went wrong, when toast chose to land butter side down, my elbow caught the full glass of juice not the empty one, and when I did dumb things such as eat the S-Pen to the Samsung Note I bought less than a week ago.

It was around 2pm when I realised that I’d eaten the pen. There was no other explanation for why it had gone missing. My PC was four hours into a nine hour After Effects render so I’d been sitting at my desk ready to finish a cartoon on the Note. I had the stylus in my hand but momentarily gripped it between my lips as I typed one last thing on the sluggish PC. I seem to recall needing to type more than I expected so I put the stylus down. When I’d finished, I went to pick the stylus up but it wasn’t there. I hunted on the floor, on my chair, my pockets, through my bin, and I emptied my astonishingly-messy-by-anybody’s-standards desk but I still couldn’t find the stylus. Then I couldn’t recollect if I’d even been holding it in the first place. Perhaps it was a different pen. Perhaps it was a pencil. The S-Pen could be anywhere, so I began to hunt all over the house. A hot hour later, I was smacking my head against a door for having been so naïve earlier this week when I'd believed somebody like me couldn’t possibly lose (or eat) the pen within the first hundred hours. I should have bought a spare when I’d had the chance.

Determined that I wasn’t going to go the entire weekend without a pen, I dashed out and headed into Warrington on a warm moist day unsuited to dashing anywhere. The train was overcrowded with prams and mothers heading off to North Wales for the weekend so I didn’t get a seat but stood at the door, sweating out my misery and wondering why all the signs on our trains are written in both English and Welsh and why the Welsh usually comes first.

Warrington Bank Quay stank of washing powder, the chimneys of Unilever's soap works pumping out a heavy detergent smell that burned my nostrils and lasted until I reached the gardens outside the Parr Hall where large posters proclaimed the arrival of the superstar that is Barbara Dickson. The soap will surely wreak havoc on her vocal chords. I remember her from The Two Ronnies. Back then little Ronnie would introduce her as ‘Miss Barbara Dickson’ and I’d walk across the room to turn down the TV. Those were the days. No remote controls. No S-Pens. Just plastic knobs and two men called Ronnie.

I raced through the Golden Square and over to our ridiculously named Cockhedge Centre, significant because it has no hedges but lots of cocks. One stopped me outside Asda. He was a young go-getter, sharp suit, sharper tongue. I was hot, frustrated, fed up. He wanted me to ‘get down’ with his great ‘offer’ and was full of cheeky banter so I told him ‘no thanks’. He replied with more chirpy banter so I told him to ‘bugger off’. He laughed. I didn’t.

Argos was empty, though everywhere was empty. I wonder how small towns cope. These last few years, the shops are always empty. It’s the curse of Amazon and the government should do something though I don’t know what. Help reduce rents might be a start. It might save Warrington which was already full of pound stores before today when I saw my first 99p store. ‘Everything under a pound’.

At Argos, I bought a new pen but it wasn’t under a pound. It was, however, white, so it wouldn’t be as easy to lose. A quick browse around an empty Maplin and then I headed back, only stopping at Greggs to buy a drink and a cheese pasty. I didn’t have cash but they have a clever system for paying small amounts where you just wave your credit card in front of a black receiver. Or it would be a great system if Greggs accepted credit cards for amounts less than £3. It makes the whole system of waving credit cards for small amounts pretty redundant. In my book, three pounds isn’t a small amount. I can buy three items at a pound shop, fractionally more at a 99p store.

About two hours after leaving home, I got back with my new pen and a bag of doughnuts I didn’t really want and soon gave away. I was shocked to see that there were only three doughnuts in the bag. I remember the days of five doughnuts for a pound.

In my office, I sat down with my brand new white S-Pen to do some cartooning. My PC was still pumping out the heat, hours before the render job would be finished. It was nearly 5pm but at least I could do some work without interruption or anything that would make me scream with frustration.

And that’s when I saw the old black S-Pen sitting on the top of my monitor, almost invisible next to the last of the false moustaches stuck to the corner of my screen. I bought a packet years ago in order to send to celebrities. It’s a long story about limited success. I have one big black moustache left. I was going to send it to Roman Polanski but never got around to it. Now it just sits there, hiding S-Pens.

It’s now only 22 minutes before I welcome in Saturday. I might slip on the moustache. Disguise myself lest Fate has one final trick to end the week. Only then will I do some work with my choice of S-Pens: white or black.

Alpha Male / Alpha Dog

I have a list of work to do today that’s longer than my arm and probably a good deal longer than my ability to finish it all before midnight. Yes, it's time for a drum roll: I have a new job and it involves the word ‘manager’ in the title. Oh, you can mock but it's a small respite from the worry. I’ve never been a ‘manager’ before. King of the World, Ma! King of the World!

I’m delighted because I like the people I’m working for and I get to work from home. I only worry about the hours it will take me to produce the required graphics, promotional videos, and rendering the odd promo in After Effects. But before I get to down to that work, I wanted to blog and to blog about something significant. Which is why I’m posting a video I spotted this morning via my new favourite app, Flipboard.

We get very few moments in our lives when we stop and think that technology has taken a leap forward or that the world will never be the same again. Seeing the Shuttle launch was one such moment, as, no doubt, was the moon landing. Next year, I expect big things from Virgin Galactic. This year it’s Alpha Dog.



Watching this video of Alpha Dog made my bleary eyes open that bit wider. I’ve seen robots walking before but never with any conviction and they have usually been tethered to a power source. Honda have an untethered robot which has been walking around for a while (even appearing in their ads) but it’s a bit slow and looks so terminally constipated that it was never that impressive. However Boston Dynamic's Alpha Dog is the kind of engineering that makes me feel like I’m gazing at the future. Sure, Alpha Dog is a bit noisy but just look at the bloody thing move! I’m not sure how many miles we’d get out of it but I look forward to the day I can ride my own Alpha Dog down the street and terrorise the neighbourhood. I can see it now: the day when I take ownership of my own robotic attack dog, snapping at local ankles, and shaming the tattooed youth with their mere pit bulls and Doberman… Oh, there’ll be a few scores settled on that day, I tell you! A few scores settled! [Cue: maniac laughter…]

Doodling: An Adventure in Video

The thought of doing this fills me with horror but here goes… I doodled the following cartoon last night using the Samsung Note and I recorded the whole process which I’ve subsequently sped up and narrated. Yes, that's right: narrated. And it’s as bad as that sounds. In fact, it’s as bad as I sound. I’ve never heard my voice played back like this and I’m horrified to discover that I sound like some character from a bad BBC adaptation of an Elizabeth Gaskell novel about poverty in Lancashire mining towns. I should really be sporting sideburns and wearing a tall stove hat. I also sound like I have a cold: too damn nasal and I sniff too often. , I also ramble. The finished cartoon is just one of those things I normally wouldn't post and belongs buried in a drawer. However, it exists and it's original web content and that's the stuff that can fill a blog for a day.



Anyway, if any of you actually enjoys this and can stand listening to my nasal whine, I might do others. Tell me what you think. Despite it being real freakshow material, it was also lots of fun.

My New Professionalism

I wouldn’t want to encourage the decline of our civilization any further by suggesting that you should load ‘Simpsons Tapped Out’ on your iPads and Android devices, though if you do, be sure to add ‘StanMadely’ (note the spelling), to your friends list. It’s a strangely enjoyable game, mixing a love for the characters with delayed gratification. I’m currently forced to wait 24 hours until Krusty the Clown has finished walking his monkey.

Speaking of delayed gratification, I’ve finished three cartoons but I’ve had to stop myself from immediately publishing them here. I’m trying to be more professional about the way I conduct myself and that’s difficult given that I despise professionalism with every atom of my being. I’m just not cut from professional cloth. Ideally, I should have been born a century ago where I could have enjoyed the company of the determined amateurs who really led the way in everything. However, I’m motivated by a new urge to get at least one of these bloody cartoons sold and published in a proper magazine. I’m also trying to save my best work for another competition, so, again, I don’t want to ruin my chances by posting anything that might then be considered ‘published’.

This new found professionalism leaves me with a big gap to fill on the blog today but thankfully the Conservative Party (‘For Hardworking People’) Conference has been taking place not far from here in Manchester. A Tory Party conference is always a thing worth seeing from the ground. I used to work around the corner from the G-Mex and it was always hell during conference week when the city was overrun by a very peculiar form of beast: young men with big hair, sharp teeth, and the Oxbridge manner; women with headbands, curls and cruelty in their cold distinguished laughter. I’ve never understood that kind of person. I assume it’s that distinct breeding that comes with class and the belief that the world will give them what they want.

Yet what strikes me about conferences these days is that there’s very little conferring going on. It’s probably naïve of me to assume that the word ‘conference’ actually takes its meaning from the verb ‘to confer’ but this last week has demonstrated how too much of our politics has become debate free.

I flicked over to the Parliament Channel last week and stumbled across some minor session of the Lib Dem conference. They were voting on some proposition in a half empty hall, led by a woman who was from central casting’s idea of what an event organizer looks like. It was spiritually warming and I smiled because the whole thing was so damn charming. It renewed my faith in the political system, knowing that there were still people willing to spend their days debating issues and taking part in votes. The alternative was watching the Tories this week. It was as far as you could get from the old Labour Party conferences from years ago, when the whole thing was a badly organised slanging match held in something that looked like an abandoned bingo hall. Those were the days when Derek Hatton would storm around the hall waving ballot papers and important votes took place. They were ugly febrile events, full of passion, bad suits, and beer guts. These days, politics have got rid of that element. Politics have become a profession and it is consequently polished, spun, and utterly vacuous.

It’s why people like Nigel Farage do so well catching the eye. I’ve long argued that people don’t (in general) like professionalism and with each passing year I become more convinced that I’m right. Professionalism is often a thin veneer of respectability, promising excellence but offering a bland form of service. It’s most notable in TV news. Back when it started, Sky News was a slightly amateur operation but it was full of wit, banter, and intelligent people filling air time with intelligent talk. One of the few who remains and seems to embody that ethos is the brilliant Tim Marshall but his ad-lib lectures on the Middle East are relatively rare. So too is the banter between presenters. Instead, we have a polished operation, the same five or six new stories repeating every fifteen minutes until it’s taken over in the early evening by the same dozen London bloggers ‘doing the papers’. In this house, Kevin Maguire and Andrew Pierce have got their own fan club because they provide an antidote to all the professionalism. They provide good old argument, laced with humour and the occasional intelligent point.

And in many ways Nigel Farage is Andrew Pierce but without such good dental hygiene. He is far from polished and that makes him attractive even as he generally spouts 1950s-era bullshine. And that’s the problem with professionalism, in daily life and in politics: it is life led without the humanity. It’s the postman who runs around unable to stop to speak to his customers. It’s the shop staff who can’t crack a joke but must repeat the same ‘do you need help with your packing’ or ‘do you want stamp, cash or top-ups?’ It is the politician who is so keen to stay on message that he doesn’t say anything and we either switch off or start listening to people like Farage.

So I Bought A Samsung Note 10.1 (2013 Edition)

I posted the previous cartoon because it was something special to me. It was the first cartoon I’ve ever drawn on a Samsung Note 10.1 tablet.

Yes, I know I said I wouldn’t… I’m clearly a fool but isn’t that half my charm? Samsung didn’t respond to the letter, cartoon, and free book I sent to Ines van Gennip, their Marketing Director, by way of begging for a 2014 tablet to review. In fact, they didn’t respond at all. It meant that my resolve had to be stronger not to buy one of the new Notes. The price (reported to be £479) ensured that was easy to do. Less easy was avoiding the relatively cheap 2013 edition tablets which are available right now.



My resolve cracked yesterday when I jumped on a train into Manchester. I went for the silver version, which is actually a rather tasteful grey and looks much better than the white versions which, for inexplicable reasons, are usually the models you see on display in most shops. Since then, it’s been a crash course in Android and its apps. It also feels strange summarising my thoughts about an already outdated product.

There are plenty of reviews out there for anybody wanting to know about the old Note, so I’m not going to get into all that technical jargon or explain where the ports are. I did, however, indulge myself by buying a high-speed 64gb microsd card which I slipped into the slot on the top edge to expand the tablet’s storage from 16gb. The two types of memory aren’t equal, with anything stored on the internal chips accessed much more quickly. So, for my purposes, the 64gb will be taken up with music, images, and writing. As much as I can, I’ll try to reserve the limited 16gb for installed applications.

I primarily bought this machine because I want to draw cartoons when I’m not sitting at my desk. I also wanted to be able to browse the web, update this blog, and check my emails without my tablet crashing (something my inherited first generation iPad was doing all the time). If I could play the occasional game, that would be a positive, though I’m not going to talk about my sudden obsession with ‘Simpsons Tapped Out’, ‘Bridge Constructor’ or the totally wrong-yet-wonderful ‘Zombie Gunship’.

I’m not even going to dwell on the things that the 2014 tablet might do better. Of course, I would have loved that extra gigabyte of memory, that screen with twice the resolution of this. But neither of those things impact hugely on what I’d write in this review. Not that it’s even a review, rather the opinions of a scribbler on a very limited budget who has bought and used technology for more years than he’d like to admit and is generally hard to impress when it comes to technology.

That much said: this Note 10.1 has impressed me like no other technology I’ve ever owned. As I sit here, I’m trying to remember the last bit of technology that impressed me this much but it’s a struggle. This is the first time I’ve bought something that felt like the technology lived up to the ambitions of the designers.



And that’s the thing with the Note. This tablet is so easy to use and unbelievably useful. It just does what I ask of it. There’s no fussing around with cables, finding the right software to make a file transfer happen. No need to use iBloodyTunes. There’s little ‘I’m still setting it up’ involved. I turned it on, entered my wifi password, and the rest was straightforward. If I want to transfer bulk files, there is a cable. In fact, the cable is one of the few complaints I have. It’s too damn short and is unique to Samsung when I’d have preferred something in the USB family.  However, my complaint about the wide plug noted, the other plug is standard USB and goes straight into my PC, a standard file explorer window opens and I can drag my files where they needed to go. Incidentally, this is the first device with Bluetooth that actually connects to everything I own. Even my Apple keyboard which was always a bit of a struggle to get connected to my iPad connects first time.

I’ve had a limited chance to play with it but iPad owning friends are already looking enviously over my shoulder. That’s down, in part, to Android and the ability to use widgets on top of Live wallpaper. Android Jelly Bean just looks and feels better than Apple’s offering. Of course, personalisation can also be a euphemism for ‘clutter’ and my screen is already suffering from a bit of that. However, that clutter reflects my personality and I already feel like the tablet already reflects who I am, not how Apple want me to be. Where Apple’s iOS is simple to use and has a narrow range of options, Android’s possibilities seem to multiply the more you learn to use it.

Of course, the Note is more than Android. It’s also the S-Pen.

If you’ve used one of those capacitive screens such as you find on the iPad, you’ll know that it’s impossible to achieve any degree of accuracy with your finger. There are always some geniuses who can produce stunning work with them but I always found it next to useless for drawing. There are so-called styluses you can buy with rubber ends but even these don’t improve matters. That’s where the Note has a huge advantage.

Although it can also be controlled with your finger, the Note (along with the Pro version of Microsoft’s Surface) uses a Wacom stylus which captures very fine movements of the pen’s nib. Wacom have also brought out their own tablets, through they’re prohibitively expensive. An additional advantage of the Wacom stylus is that it also measures how heavy you press on the screen, meaning that drawing on the screen is like drawing with a real pen or pencil, making your strokes wider or stronger depending on the pressure. The Note measures 1024 levels of sensitivity while (I think) the Surface and Wacom measure 2048, though at twice and three times the price of the Note respectively.

Speaking of the S-Pen: I was wrong to question its size based on my experiences using it in shops. Despite my earlier reservations, I’ve found the pen a comfortable size once you get used to it. I had considered buying the holder, which encases the S-Pen in a larger barrel but, really, for the moment, I don’t feel like I need it. What is probably required is a decent dock because, even with a case, it’s hard to sit it on a desk when the cable is protruding from the bottom.

As to its practicality in cartooning: well you’ve seen my first effort, drawn entirely whilst lying on my bed. I’ve tried out a few of the drawing packages that are available including Photoshop Touch, Autodesk Sketchbook, Infinity Painter and Infinity Design. There were others, less notable, and, quite honestly, it was difficult finding one that really felt right. All packages seem to involve some level of compromise and I guess you choose the one that feels right for you. The package I’ve settled on and have now bought is called ‘Art Flow’. I hadn’t heard of it before but it’s brilliant at what it does. It has the best sensitivity (the ability to accept only pen input is a huge positive), the biggest canvases (some of the others, especially Sketchbook are very limited in this respect), and the pens just felt the most responsive to the way I draw.

It’s far from perfect and there are things it’s missing such as the ability to store favourite pen sizes or add text (which would save me time moving it back to the PC, though I suppose I could try exporting it to Adobe Touch). Art Flow has the option to toggle the pen and eraser using the button on the S-Pen but, so far, I’ve been unable to get it to toggle back to the pen after using the eraser. This means a slightly laborious business of opening a menu and selection the tool. However, I think the result is worth it. What I like about my first effort is that it looks like what I’d produce with a pen and ink. I generally hate the digital look. This feels and looks like working with ink, only ink I can erase perfectly.



There are other things I’d like to see improved but these apply to most packages out there. The canvas size is still a problem. I’m working at 2500x2500 pixels (I’ll have to experiment to see if it goes higher) but when I zoom in to work on detail, the pixilation is still pretty severe. It doesn’t matter too much when the final image is reduced for the web to 800 pixels wide but I’d like more resolution. I’ll have a tinker later today to see how far I can take it. Of course, the solution might be to use a package that creates vector art, such as Infinite Design (where the canvas size is supposedly infinite) but I’ve not seen one that felt responsive enough to for my taste. I did come across an interesting app called Papyrus which worked quite well but I’d have to buy the full version to unlock the ‘true eraser’ and I really don’t intend to get locked into buying many apps just to test features.

I’ll probably bore you still over the next few weeks with observations about the Note 10.1. Although I really had my heart set on the new edition, I ended up buying the 2013 edition because it’s what I could afford and it’s no understatement to say that I’m more than delighted with the result. In fact, I’m so impressed that I might even consider this a trial. Rumours persist that Samsung might bring out a 12 inch in the coming months and a slightly bigger screen would be one of the improvements I would have asked for. Perhaps by the time they release it, the work I’ve been doing will start to pay off and my workflow will be at a stage where I’m entirely comfortable working electronically. Perhaps by then, they’ll have even read my letter and consider sending me one to review.

 

A Cartoon About A Man Called Derek

On Samsung, Bond, Boyd, and Teeth

So, I think we’re back and, as usual, I’m probably last to get updated name servers, those mysterious doodads that translate the www address you type into your browser into the real life address of the computers where websites live. I’ve been looking at a grey screen all weekend, waiting for the website to come live. Now it is, I’m left wondering what to say.

I wish I could say I had a busy weekend but I’ve been distracted by, among other things, the terrible news that Samsung are launching their cheapest Note 10.1 (2014 edition) in the UK at the price £479, or about £130 more than I’d hoped and considerably more than I could afford.

Another disappointment is the news that William Boyd’s new James Bond novel, Solo, might be a bit of a disappointment. If we’re to believe the early reviews, it’s probably the worst effort so far. It wouldn’t surprise me if it is, given that I’m a bit of a Bond purist. I will often reread all the original Bond books every year or so and then relive the disappointment of attempting the continuation novels. I’ve not enjoyed any of these new writers writing as Fleming. I thought Faulks’s effort the least objectionable despite the monkey pawed villain and the book being generally dismissed by the public. Deaver’s effort is as easy to ignore as he found it easy to ignore the canonical Bond, choosing instead to create something new and different and (sadly) popular. I couldn’t read any of the novels by Raymond Benson or John Gardner. The best was Kingsley Amis, though Colonel Sun was more Amis than Fleming. One book that I did enjoy but haven’t read it in many years was James Bond: The Authorized Biography of 007 by John Pearson. Perhaps I should give that another go.

Having said all that, I don’t want to dismiss Boyd’s efforts until I’ve tried it, especially when reviewers customarily confuse the literary James Bond with the movie James Bond. Reading Amazon’s reader comments, I found this, typical of many:

Remember how Fleming would introduce a subject? M would mention a name and Bond, showing off, would fire back a couple or three facts about it in half a minute which was supposed to be useful, as if spat out by his card index system (no computers worth anything in 1960-70: I used the first, at Manchester, a KDF 9 in 1965 which needed punched cards). This Bond is more intelligent. He takes serious injuries unlike the original who is always unscathed, his looks just as handsome as before. This version even has a scar.

I don’t recall Fleming introducing a subject through M and then Bond rolling off all the facts. That was the movie Bond. Yet the bigger mistake is in believing that the literary Bond was ‘always unscathed’. The Bond of the novels was routinely battered, broken, and bruised. It was his defining characteristic. He spends nearly the entirety of Live and Let Die with a broken finger and Fleming is always commenting on his scars, including the scar on his face which has never made it onto screen. It’s Bond’s vulnerability that makes the books so great. The films have entirely different virtues.

Speaking of battered yet misunderstood heroes, I’m going to the dentist later today to make a long overdue appointment. I’d like to say it’s precautionary but life isn’t like that. A bit of tooth broke off last week and it needs fixing. As soon as it happened, I knew my Samsung dreams had come to an end given that my money will now probably go to fund my dentist’s next skiing holiday.

Server Upgrade

Just a brief note to say that the extremely good and tolerant people at Nativespace are upgrading their servers and that my blog will be moving to a new virtual home. In the process, the site might disappear. I’m not entirely sure when all this will happen (sometime at night, I’m told) but when it does, you might get error messages saying this blog doesn’t exist. I hope you’ll remember to come back and visit even if these messages carry on for a day, possibly even two or three. By then, I might have actually finished some of the countless cartoons on my table or even received a Galaxy Note 10.1 (2014 edition) to review…

Our Grand Theft Culture

I’ve played all the Grand Theft Auto games (yes, even the original) and I often thought the media reaction to them was largely misguided. Except in those very few people already on a psychological edge (in which case anything might trigger them), computer games do not make us overcome the deep taboos we have about violence. Characters like Keith Vaz might pop up on the news to play some cheap gesture politics but they're wrong to say that computer games make us more violent than the games I played as a child when buying a spud gun for a young boy was as normal as buying him a football.

Last week Grand Theft Auto 5 was finally released and I was surprised that the media were so outraged about a torture scene. I couldn't help but feel that the media again got it so very wrong. Only this time it’s because there’s much more about this game that deserves censure.

Having now seen and played GTA5, I have to admit that I’m worried. I’ve never seen such a well-crafted game so utterly ruined by unneeded sensationalism and a pervasive and deeply crass vulgarity. I’m not a prude by any stretch of the imagination, though, of course, isn’t that what prudes usually say? So perhaps I am a prude. And if I am a prude, it’s because I worry about the intellectual, moral, and emotional development of any child spending hundreds of hours in such a bleak and twisted world.

Speaking to a teacher the other day, I discovered that her school had noticed a drop in attendance the day that GTA5 was released. She even told me that many of her students had already warned her that they wouldn’t be in because they wanted to spend their day in Los Santos (the game’s thinly disguised version of Los Angeles). Now, I’m not such a stickler for education that it bothered me that kids do that. I’d prefer it if our youth made choices on their own and learned to live with the consequences. School has become a way for the state to teach us to conform and real education happens despite of school, not because of it.

Yet GTA5 is making me question my own liberal attitudes towards censorship and ratings. But let me be clear. It’s not the violence that offends me as much as the quality of life portrayed in the game. So much about the game is needlessly graphic. Take a few examples which might sound trivial when taken separately when what I’m trying to condemn is the total overwhelming ethos of the game... Within minutes of my playing the game I was listening to a radio broadcast describing two women engaged in what is more politely described as ‘water sports’. Many of the incidents in the game are also highly sexualised: one mini-game involves closing pornographic pop ups as they appear on a computer screen. Outside the building was a huge poster advertising ‘cougars’ (a term for older women who enjoy the company of younger men). It depicts a middle aged woman on her hands and knees, her breasts drooping like giant teardrops. One of the main characters is introduced screwing a woman (from behind). Another side mission involves a motorbike chasing a car but it begins with a character telling your protagonist that ‘you’re only here to suck ****’. I haven’t even bothered going into the strip joints… And then there’s the music... Even the music seems deliberately chosen to offend. Previous games had great but sometimes eclectic music mixed in with the popular. It even had Philip Glass alongside rap and hip hop and hits from the 60s. That meant that you could always skip through the music to find something to your taste. Perhaps I’m just older. Perhaps I’ve fallen unlucky in that game has no music I like. Yet there’s a difference between music I dislike and music that makes me wince.

There are few lyrics less family-friendly than Nick Cave’s ‘Henry Lee’ (a favourite of mine) but it’s a song I don’t listen to often because that stuff gets inside your brain. The music in GTA5, however, is wall-to-wall ‘fuck you’ this and ‘motherfucker’ that. The gameplay mechanic means that you’re constantly switching between cars, all playing different radio stations, so it’s hard not to suddenly find yourself listening to something that makes you pause the game to change.

The dialogue surrounding the music is also depressingly lowbrow, deeply sexualised and informed by the worst kinds of pornography. I’ve seen the ads on TV and I’m surprised they found snippet of dialogue suitable to broadcast. Yet my complaint isn’t that these elements shouldn’t be in the game. My problem is that these elements have entirely taken over the game and aren’t executed with any degree of real humour or even sauciness. Grand Theft Auto used to be the thinking man’s Saint’s Row (a game that ripped off the GTA formula but with more of a juvenile need to cause offence) but now it has chosen to adopt that Saint’s Row sensibility. Playing the game is like being stuck in the mind of a 15 year old boy and it’s every bit as bad as that sounds.

Probably the worst elements of the game involve the game’s black protagonist, Franklin Clinton. My white liberal consciousness has trouble processing these segments of the game which portrays the black experience as being almost entirely negative, racist, and deeply prejudicial. As a white liberal I’m already troubled by any use of the ‘n’ word but I’m also troubled by my being troubled by the ‘n’ word. It annoys me when I can’t use it, for example, when talking about a certain Joseph Conrad short story. Yet here, the patois of the black characters is laced with racial epithets which quickly become overwhelming.

I’m not sure I’m successfully raising my argument above the usual kind of crap spouted by members of the 'National Viewers' and Listeners'Association'. I don’t mind some element of these things in games, even if those younger than the age rating get to see them. Yet Grand Theft Auto 5 feels like a large plug has just been opened and our higher order thinking is being drained from beneath. It’s rated 18 but it’s being played by every boy upwards of 13 year old and, no doubt, probably many more much younger. The idea of children hanging around with these virtual characters is only slightly less worrying than if they were hanging out on the street corner with real gangsters, grifters, and products of the federal prison system.

It’s hard for me to equate my love for Derek and Clive, Richard Prior, Larry David, and The Thick of It with my reaction to hearing the language in GTA5 except there is a difference. The former use it to expose some absurdity about the world. GTA5 uses it to make us think that this is what the world is like. And that’s the problem. Swearing is a vital part of our linguistic machine. It allows us access to areas of the emotional register that are hard to reach with normal language. The new GTA doesn’t have emotional registers. Every other word is ‘motherfucker’, with use of the ‘n’ word so prolific that it’s impossible to justify. I’m well past my eighteenth, twenty eighth, and even thirty eighth birthdays and I have played computer games all my life. I also have a fairly liberal attitude to most things but every bone in my body tells me that this game is wrong.

For me, GTA5 is a struggle to enjoy alone, entirely unplayable in polite company, and a constant disappointment. Perhaps it exposes my own limits, the places where my taboos begin. Perhaps it’s a sign that I’m getting old. Yet I hope my reaction to this is something that is shared by people of all ages because the game attempts to push back our cultural norms, degrades us as it tries to shock us. It doesn’t teach us what we are. By entertaining our youth, it is showing them the world they’ll create. And as much as I looked forward to playing this game, I don’t want to be part of that world. I don’t want to encourage the makers even as they become the richest among us by showing us the worst parts of ourselves.

Window-Shopping

It’s still only September yet it was impossible to get the brain working this dark morning. The weather forecast sunshine but not much light reached the ground here in the North West where the sky was a brown murk for most of the day. There was also no news about the Samsung Note 10.1 (2014 edition), not even a launch date despite it supposedly hitting stores today. I'm beginning to think it’s time to retire my high-tech banner and get things back to normal. The whole venture has been an unqualified disappointment. Not even a smartly worded letter from Samsung thanking me for my book and cartoon. There hasn’t even been an email from the Emir of Qatar confirming my million quid.

Today was meant to be a day of cartooning. No sooner had one competition come to an end than a friend sends me details of another. It’s not a bad thing and might get me working again. The cartoons that don’t make my final selection will end up here, providing I can get this unreliable brain of mine to start producing something funny. I wish I understood how it worked. As I’ve said before, sometimes the ideas just rush out and I can’t scribble them down quickly enough. Other times, it’s worse than pouring molasses.

To get my brain going, I took the day off and cycled to the local PC World where I played some more with the first generation Note. I’m pretty certain that I won’t be able to afford the new Note but there’s a slim chance I might be able to pick up the first generation in the next month. I have a birthday coming up, the chance of some paid work, plus I understand eBay prices for organ donors are at an all-time high… Anyway, my second play with the Note was better than the first. I still think the stylus is *far* too small for my fingers (to the point that I find it difficult to hold) but Sketchbook Pro was really fun to use, much more intuitive than the PC version, and I found I could draw with a high degree of precision. I’m sure there must be settings to get the pen sensitivity working with Photoshop but I got it working with Sketchbook and it was pretty damn good. Palm rejection also seemed to be working too. It’s still not the same as working on paper but that’s to be expected. However, having layers to work with should make for a different, perhaps even improved, workflow: sketch cartoons before using a new layer to do the inking. But that’s me figuring out the technicalities. I can’t allow myself to think like this. I need to draw cartoons, stop being distracted, and hope some work comes my way in the next month.

Running Postmen, Creeping Dog Owners, and Your Surprise Free Gift

Why have postmen started to run? It’s a phenomenon I’ve noticed in the last few months but I’ve not been able to catch up with one long enough to find out why.

Our previous postman, Paul, was an old-school charmer who would walk fairly briskly but always take a moment to crack a joke and generally make your day feel a little brighter. He’d worked the round for about a decade before he disappeared last November and was replaced by a succession of nameless grey-haired postmen who literally jog walk the entire route. I tried to speak to one this morning and all he’d say is ‘good mo’ before he ran off. Can you believe that? I didn’t even get the full ‘good morning’.

I assume this ‘good mo’ing must be a new Royal Mail initiative. Perhaps the Royal Mail pay them more if they speed up, sack them if they slow down. Whatever the reason, it’s another of those small things that make the world colder, less inviting, and increases our alienation. In a few years, the Royal Mail will probably realise how they’ve damaged customer relations and they might encourage their postmen to start being friendly again. For now, I feel like I should meet the postmen at the gate because they treat walking up the path as such a huge inconvenience.

*

Speaking of the path, I need to build a man trap or some workable method of catching the swine who keeps allowing their dog to shit outside my front gate. Three times in the last month I’ve had to stride over the pile of excreted dog situated on the pavement right in front of the house. It’s a sign that we’re past summer. The nights are slowly drawing in and, once darkness falls, dog walkers head down our street to play their disgusting little game. As soon as I’ve finished writing this, I’ll have the pleasure of going out to shovel it up. If I knew who had done it, I’d go dump it in front of their house and see how they like it.

The scientific part of my mind won’t let it rest with not knowing. There has to be a way of working it out. The evidence should help me identify the breed of dog. I was wondering if stool width could provide an indication of the size of the dog and therefore the breed. I’ve searched on the internet for a chart of rectum widths of different breeds of dog. There isn’t one but there damn well should be.

So if you have a dog, I’d be grateful if you could grab a tape measure and leave the dimensions of its rectum in the comments. This is the first study of its kind and it will further humanity’s progress by helping men and women across the globe push the right stools through the right letterboxes.

*

Finally, behind my grumpiness, I’m hiding this bit of good news. This morning I had a remarkable stroke of good luck and I thought I’d share it with all of you who regularly read this blog. I’ve decided to buy each and every one of you a brand new Samsung Note 10.1 (2014 edition) tablet!

I know what you’re thinking but if you want to thank somebody, you really must thank Sheikh Hamad bin Khalifa Al Thani, the Emir of Qatar. According to the email I’ve just received from the Qatar Foundation, I’ve been awarded one million pounds. Obviously, the taxman will probably take a big bite out of that but I’m sure it will leave me pretty well off and I’d like to thank you all for your loyalty by buying you cutting edge technology. So, anybody who had read the blog more than four times in the last week (ten times over the past month) will get a free tablet, providing, of course, that the Qatar Foundation cough up the cash. I’m confident they will because they have an authentic Yahoo Hong Kong return email address, though the email came from an account at Poland’s University of Social Sciences and Humanities, which is where I assume the Sheikh is currently studying. Use the comments to state your preference: WiFi or 4G, 16/32 or 64 gigabytes, and whether you want it in black or white.

Since I’m also collecting dog data in the same comments, please label your comment either RECTUM or TABLET. I’d hate to get confused and send you a sample off the end of my shovel or push a brand new Note though the letterbox of some shit-shirking creep.

Postage and Toys

I hate missing a day because I know what happens. You think you can miss blogging for one day but then two days become three and then you’ve missed an entire week before you decide to make it a month.

I’ve written nothing of note today. Drawn nothing. My main achievement was posting off my graphic short story, though that didn’t go as I’d hoped. I wanted to track my envelope to make sure it arrives in London before Friday but it was £6 for the cheapest tracked mail option, £2 to send it recorded. Not a difficult choice to make but I’ll be filled with anxiety that my entry won’t make it on time. Not that I suppose I’ll know if it did… The winner is being announced in October but my nasty little scribble won’t even make the shortlist.

I’m just exhausted. I tried to work this afternoon, tried to string my thoughts into a cohesive whole, but I just couldn’t join the dots. Nothing connected. I’m still disappointed that Samsung never replied. Disappointed that there’s still no launch date for the Note 10.1 (2014 Edition). Disappointed that a work opportunity has still not come to fruition and that my slim chance of having enough to buy a Note gets slimmer by the day. I’m disappointed that The Guardian gave Stewart Lee a bad review and I didn’t have the energy to pen a defence. Most of all, I’m disappointed that this is going to be my day’s blog post. I can do better than this…

So in lieu of a really good blog post, here’s a link to a Youtube video which I found myself watching last night and couldn’t stop watching. It’s probably why I’m so tired today. This is one of series of videos about unusual toys and novelties made by Grand Illusions and are really one of the best things I've found on the web in a very long time. I have to warn you that once you start watching these, it’s hard to stop.

John W Henry: The Cartoon Strip

The second cartoon strip about Liverpool owner, John W Henry I've drawn for the Liverpool FC fanzine, Red All Over The Land.

I love Stephen King but he’s just so wrong about Kubrick

I notice that the BBC have interviewed Stephen King ahead of the publication of ‘Doctor Sleep' (great cover, by the way), his sequel to ‘The Shining’. There's a far better piece in The Guardian today, though it doesn't really add to the points I found interesting from the BBC interview. They came in the context of a brief chat with the now ubiquitous Will Gompertz when King explained how and why he dislikes the Kubrick film. Naturally, the BBC seemed to ignore this point entirely and punctuated King’s interview with clips from the Kubrick classic when they could have used clips from the 1997 mini-series adaptation of the book, starring Steven Weber and Rebecca De Mornay, which King himself has said he prefers. That they didn’t means they’re either lazy, indifferent, or implicitly stating where their own preferences lie.

King is of course bound to prefer the 1997 version given that he executively produced the series. It probably means that he’ll never admit that it was the kind of made-for-TV show you watch with mixed feelings about whether you can be bothered returning for the final episode. It is plodding, rather too gentle, and utterly faithful to the novel. He’s just as unlikely to ever admit that the series proves why he’s so wrong about Kubrick’s version.

Let me say that I really like King. He seems one of the good guys in a world filled with fakes, charlatans, and snake oil salesmen. I love listening to King talk, especially when he’s talking about the writing process and literature. However, I have occasionally found it difficult to get through his books. For me, his strict 2000 word a day policy sometimes translates into books that break down into 2000 word chunks, switching between characters in a way that hinders the forward momentum of the novel. He loves creating such full worlds of the characters that it sometimes gets in the way of narrative. On occasions, that huge vision works really well. I enjoyed ‘The Stand’ and ‘It’. Sometimes it works less well. I recently couldn’t make it through 1400+ pages of ‘Under the Dome’. I was sitting there desperate to know more about ‘the dome’ when King only wanted to give me endless backstory about minor characters. Eventually, I realised I didn’t care about ‘the dome’ or ‘the book’.

I seem to remember also struggling to get through ‘The Shining’ but that’s not why I prefer Kubrick’s version.

Kubrick’s film is the ultimate example of mercurial filmmaking: scavenging just enough from the novel but craftily layering it with the things that obsessed Kubrick. King says it’s too cold but that’s precisely why Kubrick made films and didn’t write novels. It’s intellectual horror, not the physical horror rooted in familiar themes that King enjoys. King says that Shelley Duvall is the most misogynistic representation of a woman ever put on film and that all she does is scream but, for me, Kubrick destroys her so ultimately (including in real life) that she eventually finds her deepest instincts for survival. King also says that Nicholson played the character as crazy from the beginning. I would agree, although, that’s why it’s intellectual horror. The supernatural elements are almost psychological in Kubrick’s version. The Overlook Hotel feels like being trapped in a warped mind. King says that Kubrick's version is 'a domestic tragedy with only vaguely supernatural overtones' but I think that's it's greatest virtue. King wants us believe that the family found horror on the mountain but I think Kubrick wants us to think they found horror within themselves and that message is far more potent.

I suppose it’s understandable the King doesn’t like the Kubrick version because his characters are all but missing from the film. Kubrick’s ‘Shining’ shines because of Kubrick. In a way, the BBC report just highlighted this discrepancy. Even as it tried to promote King’s writing, it was reminding us of how much poorer we all became when we lost Stanley Kubrick.

***

Other than deciding whether I’ll be trying ‘Doctor Sleep’ (Hey! a review copy would be great! Sorry... Little in-joke there between me and Samsung), I’ve had a busy twenty four hours. I drew a quick cartoon to celebrate the birthday of an architect and then, as I predicted, I ended up tinkering with my graphic short story ahead of sending it on Monday. I tinkered with it all day yesterday and until 3.30 this morning: more cleaning up the drawings, more crosshatching, adding a little more humour, smoothing the prose where it didn’t quite feel right on the ear, and then I changed the overall tint. Turns out that printing greyscale on my on Canon gives things a very slight brownish hint which was just the effect I’m after.

It means I slept late this morning but woke up to find a wonderful gift in my inbox. It was an interview with Sparks, in fact, possibly the best interview I’ve ever heard them give and nearly an hour long. I now intend to spend too much time on the internet seeing if Samsung have announced the price of the new Note 10.1 (2014) edition which, if rumours are correct, will be appearing in shops on Wednesday.

Word Heavy

I’ve been burning the midnight oil so much over this graphic short story that it feels like it's really taken it out on my body. This morning I ached across my shoulders for working on the tablet for too long. Even my jaw aches from clenching my teeth too much as I’ve been concentrating painting within the lines... I also feel a great sense of anti-climax and frustration.

At half past two this morning, I printing out the final copy and felt like it was finished. I’d post it here because I’d love to get feedback but my chances of winning are miniscule enough without my ruining them entirely by publishing it. A few days ago I thought it the best thing I’ve ever done. Printed out and spread out across the table, I now see so many things wrong with it and the whole thing feels like a disaster. Why couldn’t I have drawn it better? Is it too wordy? Too dark? Too negative? Too angry? Not funny enough?

The other day, Mike Lynch wrote about the ’10,000 hour rule’, which suggests that it takes 10 years of working 20 hours a week before you master any skill. I don’t know how many thousands of hours I’m into my 10,000 but this strip makes me feel like I’m much closer to the beginning than the end. I had intended to wait until Monday before I send it off but I now worry that this is going to annoy me so much that I’ll spend the weekend trying to fix everything that’s wrong with it and, in the process, probably ruin what little I have achieved. What I should do is forget it. I should go and post it and then lose myself for an afternoon pressing my nose up against the window of the local PCWorld and dream warm thoughts about the Note 10.1. Then I’ll come back and get back to drawing and submitting cartoons. I’ve not posted enough cartoons and this blog is also beginning to look word heavy.

Questions Raised About Strange Photo of David Cameron Asleep

Personally, I think it's been Photoshopped. Instagram via Popbitch. Yes, I know... Rushed job but I couldn't resist.

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.

Random Musings

Still no Samsung news, no sign of the postman squeezing a review Note 10.1 through my letterbox. Still no price of the tablet but the rumours I’ve been picking up on the web are to expect prices almost as painful as the postman squeezing Apple’s new iTesticles through my letterbox…

Did that joke work? Too needlessly vulgar? I don’t know. I’m already too busy to blog with real purpose. I’ve given myself this one last day of hard slog to get the strip finished. It’s now almost fully painted and almost entirely written. It’s just a matter of polishing it, making the text fit the space available and cleaning it all up. I also discovered last night, after about three long days of furious work colouring it in Photoshop that the strip probably looks best without colour, or, rather, with the colours muted or given a warm sepia tint.

Even if the finished result is a disaster, it’s been a learning process. It’s been a frantic few weeks and at times I’ve wondered if I’m insane even attempting this with my limited skill set. Wouldn’t my time have been better served doing something else like growing a beard?

Beards have become something I’ve been thinking about over the last few days. Beards have become vogue among a certain kind of modern hipster. I thought it might be a good trend. I’ve always thought genuine Grizzly Adams style beards reveal a certain approach to living which was essentially good. However, I don’t trust men who trim their beards and that’s the problem I see with the current fashion. It reveals some deep vanity in a person to spend hours in the mirror making those neat shapes with a beard trimmer. It’s the same with men who brush the hair from off their foreheads. It seems to say: admire my big forehead. In my experience: tricky blighters every one of them.

Beards are just one thing that puzzles me. There’s a great Larry David moment which summarises my average day. It’s in Season 7, Episode 4 of Curb Your Enthusiasm (the episode called ‘The Hot Towel’).  Larry is at a party for Ted Danson and Mary Steenburgen on the occasion of their anniversary when Jeff and Suzie given them a gift in the form of a song by their daughter, Sammy. Queue a horrendous rendition of the Andy William’s classic ‘You're Just Too Good To Be True’. As the rest of the guests kindly look on, Larry looks around bemused. ‘This is the worst thing I’ve heard in my life’ he announces before he quickly brings the performance to an end.

That’s the state I exist in every day of my life. There are things that just don’t make sense and I’m surprised that I’m the only person these things bother.

For example, why does skimmed milk cost the same as semi-skimmed? From full to semi to skimmed: we’re getting a diminishing product. They’re taking something away so shouldn’t we be paying less for it?

It’s like reading newspaper articles when people leave comments below praising the genius of the writer when it’s the most plodding lump of quasi-journalistic twaddle that has ever been committed to print. It’s almost as unfathomable to me as social media.

Somebody asked me this morning how to get followers on Google+. I stared back at them blankly. I’ve never been able to attract any kind of following. Facebook, Twitter, Google+: they all have left me behind. It’s not out of a lack of friendliness, I hope, but rather a belief that the word ‘friend’ is sorely misused. It’s same with followers. I don’t want followers. People with followers tend to inflict great evil on the world and I’m including Justin Bieber in that generalisation. Readers has always been a good word but I can see why social networking companies had to find other terms to make their services sound special. Except I’m not interested in amassing a totally arbitrary number robots, fake followers, corporate shams, web marketing loons, with a small smattering of real people buried in the mix. Give me one true reader and I feel a reason to write this blog. Except, if you’ve got a beard, then we might have to rethink our terribly sordid relationship…

An Architecture Cartoon

One of those mornings...

Stormy weather so I set out to buy milk and a few essentials from the nearest shop. Only I get there and discover they don’t have half the things on my list. I lick my finger and hold it to the breeze. It would be in my face going into town, behind me coming back. Decision made. I’ll head into town.

Ten minutes later, I’m in Morrison’s, another ten after that I’m in Tesco. The shopping is quickly done but an old smoker is fuming inches from my bike so I don’t bother packing my backpack and just set off with two bags of groceries balancing out my handle bars. I knew I looked ridiculous so I chose a quiet route home.

I climbed the hill really easy but at the end of it, found myself struggling through dozens of cars which have been parked down the road. A couple are moving away so I slip behind them. But this isn’t good. Soon I’m cycling with more cars behind me. I look over my shoulder and the guy behind is pointing at me and giving me a bad look. I know I shouldn’t be riding with bags on my handlebars and I know I look ridiculous but I didn’t expect there to be so much traffic on what’s normally a very quiet road.

The traffic then turns a bend, heading to the last bridge before my street. I know I’ll soon be able to escape this traffic but wonder if I should try cutting across to make the right turn.

Except it’s then that I notice the cars ahead of me. It’s then that I notice that I’m third in a funeral cortege. I was utterly horrified. I don’t think my two large Tesco shopping bags filled with assorted tangerines, pineapple juice, and red onions added to the solemnity.

It’s been that kind of morning.

I’ve been working until 3, sometimes 4am, trying to get this comic strip finished. It’s probably the best work I’ve ever done. The writing is 80% there but needs some tinkering. The inking is probably 99% done.

I thought that would be the end of it but I decided this morning to see if I can colour it. I’ve done a couple of panels and I think the colour improves it even more. It’s going to take days but I hope to make it before the deadline.

 

The Monday Pun