May20
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May21
Anyone who’s had the misfortune of listening to me talk in the last few years knows that I don’t just draw Hubris, or even just Hubris and The Buckets. I do a lot of advertising cartoons and I do (and have done for years) caricatures of various types.
Caricature. Tricky word. My mom still can’t pronounce it, and I was first paid to be a caricaturist nearly thirty three years ago. She tries, though. When I was sixteen, a buddy and I actually used to set up at the entrance of the local WalMart (the manager had the idea that little fair/festival type things every weekend made the shoppers happier. He may have been right.) Once, a fella came in, looked at our table, looked at the sign, looked at the samples and said. ”Them’re pretty good. Too bad y’ misspelled ‘character’.” So, if you didn’t know it before now, here’s your word for the day- Caricature.
And don’t misuse it, now that you have it. I have ad agencies call up and tell me they need a caricature. I ask for details, and what they want is a character. Literally, a cartoon character that can be licensed for some client or other. Not the same. If the character needs to have the features of a person or a kind of person, it might be a caricature. If it’s a blue furball that sells cleaning services, it’s a character.
But back to caricatures. Occasionally I get one that’s barely outside the usual request. Mostly, these days, I do the occasional party-style 4 minute caricatures for a few hours, or I do big 16X20 presentation caricatures that require a little paint and a lot of personal reference about the person I’m drawing. The person is usually retiring, or changing jobs, or moving to another town, and the corporation they work for is giving them a little send-off, including a big ol’ cartoon of themselves and the mess that used to fill their offices.
And now comes a Memorial. Kind of a sweet thought, that I would be asked to memorialize a customer’s friend who’s passed on. I hope I did him justice, and I’m not being irreverent by posting it here, but I was very pleased with how it turned out (Though the photo is kinda dark. It lost something when I lightened it, though). It’s not a caricature in the sense that I distorted anything in order to make recognition immediate. In fact, it’s more of a cartoon portrait filled with family and important things from a life.
So, just so you know that there is such a thing- Here’s a serious caricature.
May18
So on the first hot hot day when you walk the dog down to the kids’ school, the dog stumbles into the bushes like he’s going to faint.
Whattaya do next? You give him some water (by using the contents of another parent’s water bottle and a grocery bag you brought in case of poop collection) and take him to the vet where you are reassured but told, as you’ve already decided to do, to carry water and a bowl around with you on hot days.
Next, you order the dog his own backpack, like you’ve been meaning to do for so long. Poop bags, treats, bowl, water, extra water, brush, and an allen wrench I found in the zoo parking lot. There’s more stuff that will wind up in this dog pack, but that’s it so far.
REI dog backpack on Roscoe
I had to buy the Large, as my dog is about a hundred and twenty-odd pounds or so, depending on the last vet visit. If you read the reviews online, the packs seem to run a little large, and lots of folks who thought they’d need a large are using medium sized packs. The Large is good for mine. I’ve got about two inches of play left in the rearmost strap. Aside from that rearmost strap, there are two other quick-release points to deal with. One of the quick-releases connects into a three-point harness on the dog’s chest.
The fit’s good, after some tinkering, but I wonder if I’ve done something wonky, as the rig tends to end up after a while slightly off on Roscoe’s left side. That might be because 1) he tends to walk on my right, and go off that direction occasionally to check out stinky things or squirrels. (right. OR squirrels. I bet they stink, too) and 2) I have the leash connected to the pack. I could have the leash on his collar, which would solve the pack shifting to the left, but there’s good reason NOT to do that. I’ll get to that.
So the pack has a good fit, three-point harness, three quick release buckles, and a clip-in for your leash. It also has a handle on the top. I’ve been asked if I could use the handle to pick up the dog. No. Roscoe is 125 pounds at the moment. I couldn’t lift him by a handle in the middle of his back. I can carry the pack around while Roscoe plays in the lake, though. Good handle. I have heard of some people who keep a similar pack on a little Daschund who couldn’t climb out of their canoe. The little dog wanted out of the canoe to follow their larger dog into the lake, apparently. And, apparently, the dog didn’t have anything in the pack that couldn’t get wet, ’cause they lifted the dog out and dropped him into the water with the handle. I was told this story second or third hand while discussing the handle on Roscoe’s rig. No idea what kinds of things were being left out of the story, or added. DId the dog look like he had little floaty wings on? Did the owners later say, “Oh, the ziplock on the dogfood in the pack wasn’t closed up very well. This looks like puke now.”
Back to Roscoe…We haven’t run out of room on either side of the pack, by any stretch of the imagination. Roscoe has all of his stuff, and sometimes carries the leash in there, too. He’s also has carried a frizbee, and my jacket. None of which packed the thing full up, even with a couple of water bottles, two bags of treats and a heck of a lot of those unecological plastic grocery sacks that work well for giant dog poops in civilized neighborhoods.
The clip-in for your leash at the front of the pack is nice. Without it, Roscoe tends to pull when we first start our walks. He’s ready to run, and my knees disagree with the right-out-of-the-gate method. The harness set-up in the pack seems to keep him from wanting to pull. It’s weird. You’d think that dragging against a collar around your neck would be a lot less comfortable than dragging against a chest harness, but there you go. A dog is not a horse. He won’t take off and strain at the leash when he’s in this pack.
He likes the pack too. From the start, it meant adventure, and let’s face it, he’s a German Shepherd. He likes the sense that he has another job to do. ”I carry the Pack.” He holds as still as he can (Excited to go! Going for a walk! Can’t stand to hold still! Whine! Yip!) while I pop the straps on, and he’s learned to hold still while I pop them off. When I lift on the handle after the pack’s loose, he ducks backward out of it and heads for the yard. Nice.
So these packs. Good stuff. And they’re on sale right now. Quit carrying your dog’s stuff around. He or she can do it themselves.
May14
The lure of Shelby Forest isn’t just the disc golf, or the camping, or the hiking, or the fishing, or the miles of roads you can bike on. Not even just the raptor rehab project in the nature center. Heck, some people don’t even know half that stuff is out there.
But everyone knows about the General Store. Taxidermized critters, snakeskins draped on the rafters, every kind of soda you could want, hamburgers made to greasy order, and all the rest. ALL the rest. Name something you imagine would be in a hundred-year-old store. It’s got a good chance of waiting on you there at the General Store. Name something you’d like from the average quicky market any time in the last twenty years. Probably in there somewhere. Fishing lures, VHS tapes, used paperbacks, bent-nail-puzzles, snacks, pickled eggs, candy bars you’d have sworn they don’t make any more. Go check it out.
Disc Golf. There are a couple of courses around here. Two I’ve played now, but they may count as one. See, years ago, there were eighteen ‘holes’ at this disc golf course, and about the time I quit going regularly, they’d added three or four holes to the ‘front nine’, which seemed nice. Rough holes. Lotta undergrowth and stuff.
Anyhow, flash forward to lately, and now behold! Where there had been eighteen holes, and then twenty-odd holes, now there are thirty six. Two whole courses, the East and the West.
The other course in town is in a more open park. Not so many trees, not so much erosion, and roots, and bridges, and fallen timber, and poison ivy, and mud. You can see why I haven’t rushed over there to play.
I expect the ‘crack’ of a disc smacking a tree at full force, thirty feet from the tee. Being able to SEE the hole from the tee? Crazy talk.
So, if you’re in the Memphis area, get yourself to Shelby Forest, out there North of town. Enjoy the time you spend in the shady forest, looking for where the heck that disc landed in all this… Hey, is THIS poison ivy, or is THAT stuff poison ivy?
Ah. Both. Good to know.
So, here the shot after my drive. It was a good drive. Can you spot the ‘hole’? It’s a metal doohickey with a basket and some hanging chains you can throw against. See it? You could click on the image, which will take you to the same image, then click on it again to make it slightly larger, then click on it again to magnify it in frame to make it bigger and easier to see. Wish I could do that on the course, of course.
