I’ve got my own little Thanksgiving tradition now, whenever we’re in Chicago for Thanksgiving (which is most years). I run the Evanston Flying Turkey 5K and then swing by Hoosier Mama Pies to pick up a pre-order (this year: Maple Pecan and a Butternut Squash quiche).
I hadn’t been running a lot this year and so I decided to do a couch-to-5K program just for the structure of it. I picked a random one from a Google search with a cartoon of an Avocado on a treadmill on the chart (I’m not going to link to it) and worked backwards from this week. I guess it worked because I ran the thing just over 30 minutes, which is my usual “pretty OK” 5K time.
Official Results:
Time: 30:14
Pace: 9:44 min/mi
Place: 859 / 2747
Place in Sex: 545 / 1273
Place in Division (M50-54): 59 / 138
A cartoon Parker drew back in 2009
We had to say good-bye to Parker today. Erica had Parker since she was a kitten (Parker was found in the Vicksburg Military Park, hence her name) and she became my cat too 10 years ago when Erica moved in and we blended our cat families. She was big and vocal and friendly and she mostly loved to sit on Erica’s lap, but every now and then I’d look down and there she’d be, nestled into my lap without me even realizing it. She wore costumes like a champ and was always up for a photo project with a minimum of fuss.
Fairly often out at restaurants, the server or food runner will approach our table with two plates: a steak or giant, multi-layer hamburger, or some similar mound of meat in one hand and a salad or light chicken dish in the other and try to put the heavy dish down in front of me and give the salad to Erica. You know, of course, by the way I have structured this that the salad is usually mine and the big meat platter is usually Erica’s.
There is, however, a way that I do resemble a Felix Unger-esque character from a ’60s sitcom (or a cartoon cat): I love sardines and anchovies. And Erica doesn’t really like the smell. So I’ll wait for an evening when she’s out of the house to make a sardine sandwich or, as tonight, to get… The Salt Pizza.
Apart Pizza, my favorite-closest pizza place*, makes what they call a “Calabrese”. Anchovies, capers, black olives. So salty. So good. I get a 10” (the “small” at Apart) and 7 slices is the perfect amount. But then I don’t want to leave a piece out and offend Erica’s sensibilities, so I eat the last slice as well and it’s just a little too much salt and I’m a little dried out and burpy the rest of the night. So worth it.
* I mean, of course I have lots of favorite pizza places, with all the different kinds of pizza in the world, but Apart definitely wins out of anything I can walk to.
Legends of Ooo is a point-and-click style adventure for the iPhone, with Adventure Time characters. It’s fun, especially if you like the cartoon. But it’s also about as short as this review.
FuzzyCo: B+
Sorry about the cartoony naughty bits, but that’s how a succubus roll.
P.S. Last week I made GeorgeGabe play and he won, first time out of the gate. Kid’s gonna get a swelled head, I tell you.
It's been a little while since I've done a MBW. I usually go for cartoony, but someone else had already done a tshirt joke that I was thinking of and so I started doodling with a digital pencil and these Gatormen just ended up looking all sad.
Back in 2009-2010, I did one of my periodic self-imposed artistic challenges and drew 366 cartoons over a year. This weekend, as a surprise for our sixth wedding anniversary Erica gave me a book she had made of 70 or so comics from the year that were us-themed, the adventures of Parker and Latte and the Schmuzzy and Schmerica comics. Now, we did have a complimentary bottle of champagne from the hotel, but it was a little surprising to me that I thought a bunch of them were pretty funny. Thanks, Erica, for the wonderful present.
I mean, when we aren't feeding dwarves to dragons around here, we love the little guys. Maybe you do, too, and you would like to support Kyle Bice's Kickstarter to print his whole book of them.
The Woodbooger is, I now know, a local West Virginian version of a Bigfoot. It's also the second week's challenge for Mythical Beast Wars. I'm never going to win this thing on detail (check out entry 3, for example) so I've been working on my own sort of spare cartooning style. It's nice to get out the ol' Pitt 'B' pen again and try throwing it a piece of paper.
I used to call my occasional 1 am to 2 am waking periods "insomnia", but now I've read a thing on the internet (so it must be true!) that makes me wonder if I'm just sleeping how people historically normally slept.
Anyhoodle, I got up tonight and remembered an idea for a cartoon I'd had this morning. And then once pen was in hand, I remembered another idea I'd had while throwing up a few months ago and had never drawn out. Turns out, I'm just as bad at layout as ever—just look at that towering column of words.
Samarost and Samarost 2 are beautiful little point-and-click Flash adventure games.
Samarost is free to play online. You're a cute little cartoon fellow hanging out on your little planetoid when you realize that another planetoid is going to crash into yours. You rocket over in your spaceship made from a beer can (the landscapes and objects are all a combination of cartoons and photographs of debris and junk) to try to deflect it. Some of the puzzles can get a little click-every-and-see-what-happens, but it looks and sounds so gorgeous, it's worth it.
Samarost 2 is a whole $5—it's available on Steam, but I'd buy it directly from the developers because then you get the soundtrack as well, which is well worth the whole price. The second game introduces the little cartoon guy's dog, which ups the cuteness level 200% (you have to rescue him from some naughty aliens).
FuzzyCo grade: A
The Expendables is an action movie with 1000% the budget of Killer Tattoo, and yet it manages to be 2000% less interesting. Someone managed to get all these old action stars signed up to do the movie and then washed their hands of the whole process. "We don't need to have a plot or dialogue or anything, right? I mean, we're going to have Swartzenegger on screen for 30 seconds, that's enough. Just make some stuff blow up and have some fights."
I mean, as I often protest, I love blowy-up-stuff and fights. But most fight movies have a consistent fight style. The traditional Hong Kong-style, for example, is very acrobatic and stylized. There are movies with cartoonish, over-the-top gore. And there are more realistic, and disturbing, fight styles—the sudden sickening crunch of bone and all. This movie mixes all three, seemingly at random. A fight is going along all slap-slap-slap, martial arts back and forth and then <crunch> there's a bone sticking out of someone's arm or whatever. Gross and weird.
The plot is laughable, the dialogue ridiculous, and the actors know and are embarrassed by it.
There is a scene for the record books, however, as Mickey Rourke and Slyvester Stallone have the most unrealistic tattooing scene EVER. Rourke sort of dabs at Stallone's back with a tattoo gun for about 30 seconds, while Stallone is shifting all over the place, and then viola, he's done with perfect lettering!
FuzzyCo grade: D-
I haven't been cartooning since February when I finished the 366 Cartoons, but thisisrabbit is visiting us and his sitting around on the couch working on his Doodle-a-Days inspired me tonight.
Two days before the end of this year-long project and I'm still drawing little toss-off ones like this.
365 would be a years' worth for most people, but I'm *inclusive*. Anyway, Coyote and Raven were right there at the beginning with their doubts, so only fitting they'll see the year out the same way.
Woo-oo!
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My wife is so great —I just mention shading and boom, she gets me a six-pack of grey pens.
So... I think I need to work on succinctness in my rants.
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Sometimes a euphemism isn't.
I totally misremembered a conversation Erica and I had, so this comic doesn't prove anything.
I went to the opening of a Jay Ryan paintings show at Rotofugi Gallery and ended up staring at this one piece for-ever. This is... similar.
Looks more like a fluke worm to me.
It's Dot!
Even X-Eyes Johnson could Fix It With Eyes!
Your guess is as good as mine.
Alternate title: Why the dinosaurs went extinct.
See, instead of Schmuzzy and Schmerica, it's scuzzy and scare-ica.
I'm not saying every steampunk novel has someone in goggles on the cover. Just all of them.
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Blue lines? Hard to read? Yep, it's a late night already-in-bed cartoon.
A transcript, since it's so hard to decipher: "You're a bad kitty! Bad! You're... aw, so cute."
I was trying to describe the Best Beer Stein in the World (with inset eagle statuette) to Erica (spotted at the Brau Haus) and failing, so I thought I'd just draw it.
So at Joey's Brickhouse they have a big chalkboard and chalk in the bathroom.
It's my boringest tradition! In 2009 I did:
for a total of 40 shows.
I also read 41 books, saw 60 movies, and played 11 video games all the way through.
I biked 672 miles, swam about 23 miles, ran 379 miles, and completed a couple of 5Ks and the Chicago Triathlon.
I posted 1,811 photos on Flickr (331 of which were comics for my 366 Cartoons project), posted 1022 tweets, and made 497 blog posts here at FuzzyCo and another 13 at the Chicago Metblog.
Numbers from 2008 and 2007.
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The 2000s really were a banner decade for novelty New Year's glasses manufacturers, and they just weren't quite willing to give up the glory days in 2010.
Erica calls eating black-eyed peas and greens on New Year's Day "your New Year's business". It's a Southern thing.
I wasn't sure if my Will.I.Am was recognizable enough or if I needed to have the line be "My God, Jim, why have you killed Will.I.Am?" I decided to trust my art (ha!).
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As we head into the final stretch of this year-long project, I think I'm going to have to get a bit meta about the project itself.
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Schmerica is a lady.
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