Wrong tree. Am I barking up one?
I’ve had requests to put poor old Zombie Reagan on stuff since I first posted him. Sadly, the original drawing is quite small. It would come out about an inch and a half wide printed at 300 dpi.
I have serious finaldraftophobia. If I’m too pleased with a rough idea, I will always fumble the final, for-reals version. So, rather than trying to redraw this illustration, I thought I’d try going back to the official portrait and do a Photoshop job. Fortunately, the photo is available quite large, and I doubt there are any copyright issues with presidential portraits.
The question is, is this creepier than it is funny? I can’t make up my mind. I haven’t invested a whole lot of time in it yet, and before I labor to overlay cobwebs and strings of executive beef jerky, I’d like a second opinion or ten.
You know that “line” people talk about? I can never see the damned thing for myself.
October 19, 2009 — 6:38 pm
Comments: 41
‘Tis the season…
I’m sure you’ve heard of Guy Fawkes Night in the UK, which is celebrated on November 5 with fireworks and the burning of Fawkes in effigy (or, more traditionally, the Pope in effigy, since the conspirators were Catholic). It commemorates the foiling of a plot to blow up the Houses of Parliament.
Which doesn’t look like such a very bad idea these days.
But I digress.
The holiday is a bit different in Sussex. There is a GIGANTIC November 5 celebration in Lewes, a kind of Mardi Gras with more fire, less nudity. Most of the major towns in the county (and parts of Kent) have bonfire societies which come to march through the town for the big one.
In return, each of the towns and villages has its own Bonfire Night and everyone comes to march in their celebrations, too. So they have to stagger them. Between late September and November 5, there’s a bonfire somewhere in the county pretty much every weekend.
And very pagan-y affairs they are, too. There are elaborate and spooky costumes, and torches and fireworks, and they pull the guy (the various guys, which are effigies of people in the news. I believe Dubya got immolated a time or two) through the town. At the end, there’s a HUGE bonfire (usually made of hundreds of wood pallets) and they blow up the Guy and several kzillions of pounds (in weight and/or money) of fireworks.
The first big one is tomorrow night, in Hastings. I don’t think we’ll go this year, but we’ve gone before. It’s most impressive. Last year, they saw it in France and sent out the lifeboats.
Oh, and the tiny village of Icklesham insists on defying local custom and having theirs on November 5 each year, so none of the other villages will show up or advertise for them. Go Icklesham!
October 16, 2009 — 8:31 pm
Comments: 18
Very small and very slow…
This little dude. I caught him nomming the last of the spinach last week.
We just got in, so I got nothing today. Had to visit some business associates of Uncle B’s from right t’other side of Canterbury. Yes, that Canterbury. The cathedral’s still there, but pretty much all the rest of the medieval town got bombed flat in dubya-dubya eye-eye. That bad Mister Hitler hit the town deliberately, so I hear, to demoralize the Brits. How the fuck he consistently managed to miss the HUGE cathedral in the middle of town is a mystery.
Oh, about a mile from home, I saw two shiny red orbs by the side of the road. And then the great gray woggly ass of a badger disappearing into the undergrowth. First one I’ve ever seen in the wild.
But now…bath, booze and bed!
October 15, 2009 — 6:52 pm
Comments: 20
World’s cleanest rat…
Check it out! My second score for the Havahart mousetrap (yes, yes…we have the mouse-crushing kind too, but I don’t much like spattering them all over the foodal areas). Man, it’s got to be that time of year. I’m bailing livestock out of this house right and left.
Charlotte had three confirmed kills yesterday. Uncle B swears when he went out to the greenhouse late last night, he caught her out on the path sucking a mouse dry like some kind of Countess Chocula. You may recall, she had dental issues and they pulled her chewing teeth last year, so there’s not much else she can do, poor girl.
I’m guessing he won’t be giving her smoochies for a while.
Oh, and did I tell you about the rat? Big ol’ woodrat kind of thing poked his head out of a hole in the kitchen wall weeks ago. We plugged the hole and didn’t see him again for a while, but there are plenty more holes. Something hollowed out a loaf of bread I left on the counter. And this morning, it looks like the little fucker has stolen a whole, brand new bar of hand soap that we kept next to the kitchen sink.
I wouldn’t mind so much, but it’s the second one this week.
October 14, 2009 — 7:48 pm
Comments: 15
Happy birthday, Mag-on!
Today is Baroness Thatcher’s 84th birthday.
Baroness. What a kick-ass title. I’d totally rather be a Baroness than some weenus Princess.
The chattering classes (including, sadly, the current useless pimple who heads the Tory Party) have convinced themselves that everyone hates Maggie as much as they do. So I’m hoping to convince them to package her up when she goes and send her off to the States. You can wall her bones up in the Capitol building (next to poor old Smithson, walled up in the castle) to ward off pussies.
October 13, 2009 — 4:49 pm
Comments: 28
…and the winner is…
And the winner of the Iowahawk Endowment for the Arts $33.18 Steel Cage Art Death Match is…
Racist Pixel by US Citizen of Traction Control. Congratulations, dude — I know that’s the one *I* voted for.
But Iowahawk was kind enough to single out this ‘umble weasel (and John Manders — dammit, I wish I’d thought of a Big Daddy Roth hommage) for the Imaginary Certificate of Special Artistic Merit, which includes the Jack H. Squat Memorial Monetary Stipend.
Gosh, that’s the largest single paycheck I’ve gotten since November!
It was honor enough making the front page of one of my favorite writists. I was all, like, ZOMG! ZOMG!!!! SQUEEEEEEEE!
Wow. I had no idea I could make that noise.
October 12, 2009 — 6:25 pm
Comments: 17
Gots to start somewhere…
Ordinarily, my MO would be to spend a week or two twiddling around with the graphics and layout and stuff, but I can’t resist jumping on the dogpile and taking craven advantage of Dear Leader’s latest humiliation….ummm…triumph…ahhhh….well-deserved award. So, here’s my test storefront and this links directly to my first shirt idea.
DON’T buy something to do me a favor, you wonderful bastards. I’ve turned the commission way, way down — as far as it’ll go — while I work out the kinks. I’d get pennies. I’m not doing this one for me, I’m doing it for Dear Leader.
DO, please…if you get a chance…go over and poke the buttons and pull the levers and let me know what you think of Zazzle and the interface and the range of products they’ve got. It’s all very rough at the moment, but that’s okay — the store template has customizable CSS, so I can really screw it up if I put my mind to it.
Oh, and my shirt idea. If you have suggestions, I can make changes. I want to get it right. It’s not every day that Obama gets accolades just for teh Awesome.
Oh, wait…yes it is!
October 11, 2009 — 3:19 pm
Comments: 44
Can we talk?
Hooray! We’ve reached Phase 2!
I’m thinking about…gently monetizing this blog. Nothing too exciting. Flog a few t-shirts. Run a couple of contextual ads. I dunno. At this stage, I’m just…buy-curious.
I hesitate to do this, because it’s ugly and stupid. Ugly all over my nice, clean monochrome artard blog. Stupid, because nobody is really making money. Ace gets precisely 200 times my daily traffic, and he still rattles the tip-jar when he wants to take a field trip.
But…what the hell. I spend way too much time here to make an actual living doing real work. And I’ve been unemployed for almost a year now; small change from the back of the couch would be a windfall (pennies a day is all it takes to keep a weasel in booze and spotted dick).
The one thing I won’t do is put up a tip jar. Beg pardon to those of you who have them, but that concept (from a user’s point of view) creeps me out somehow. It’s like telling your friends they owe you beer money because you’re so cool to hang out with.
Anyhow, I’m not rushing anything. But I figured I’d better say something before I start, because it means lots of screwing around with the site’s code. Guaranteed fuckupage. So if you turn up here and everything’s busted, close your eyes and think of Stoaty.
Good weekend, all!
October 9, 2009 — 6:30 pm
Comments: 57
Okay, now the guy is SERIOUSLY starting to piss me off…
He’s getting the most unhealthy, undemocratic, fawning, sycophantic, suck-up media treatment in the history of the Oval Office, and he’s whining about the ONE media outlet that takes shots at him.
WORSE, he thinks it’s appropriate to slap back.
The take-no-prisoners turn has come as a surprise to some in the press, considering the largely favorable coverage that candidate Obama received last fall and given the President’s vows to lower the rhetorical temperature in Washington and not pay attention to cable hyperbole. Instead, the White House blog now issues regular denunciations of the Administration’s critics, including a recent post that announced “Fox lies” and suggested that the cable network was unpatriotic for criticizing Obama’s 2016 Olympics effort.
YOOHOO! Princess? You are the President of the United States. You are the most powerful single individual on the planet Earth. You are Godzilla; our puny bullets are like unto stinging flies, okay? You got that?
When you yelp, you break the spell. Talking back makes you smaller.
October 8, 2009 — 7:31 pm
Comments: 30
Wiener
Because I can. Because there is no “why” in art. Because I got nothin’ again today.
My baloney has a first name…
October 7, 2009 — 5:37 pm
Comments: 30