Hubris Comics

Canoe Club Cartoons

Oct08

by Greg Cravens on October 8, 2011 at 7:53 am

I used to belong to the Bluff City Canoe Club. Nice people. I was more of a kayaker, though, so I went off with kayakers. While I was a member, though, I did some cartoons for their newsletter. This is pretty standard when you’re a cartoonist. You join a group, you put your time and attention into the group, and eventually you use your one skill to add something to the group. And to show them that you’re NOT just a poor paddler, but a fine, fine cartoonist. Anyhow, here’s a twofer today! The first cartoon was a random, “Here, you can use this in the newsletter if you want. I’m thinking of drawing up a bunch of these and sending them to outdoors magazines.” The second was a sort of ‘Odd Couple with Boats’ theme that came up. I don’t know if there were ever any more than three or four of them drawn up.

└ Tags: camping, canoe, cartoon, comic, comic strip, cravens, greg, Greg Cravens, kayak, magazine, outdoor, outdoors, outside, paddle, Pop-Tart, tandem, tent, whitewater

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Antiques Rivershow

Oct06

by Greg Cravens on October 6, 2011 at 6:57 am

Posted In: Talk About Toys

I have a bad time throwing out gear. PFDs for instance.

I’ve heard, by the way, that the term PFD is being phased out by government safety offices. I can remember being baffled, years ago, when asked to call them PFDs instead of ‘Life Jackets’. It was the Age of Acronym, though, and I got used to it. Now, apparently, they’ve decided that the word didn’t get around to everyone, so they want us all to say ‘Life Jacket’ again. Whatever.

I haven’t thrown out any life jackets since I had one of those horrid orange horsecollar ones that you tied with white straps. Remember those? My most distinct memory of them is the rental ones you got at the canoe place. They didn’t expect you to use them, and you didn’t expect to use them except to sit on. The canoes were old aluminum Grummans, and by the end of the day you’d have a severe case of canoe butt if you didn’t sit on the ugly orange life jackets or the boating cushions they handed to you.

All that aside… look! Here’s a lineup of all my kayaking PFDs.

The two on the left end there are Extrasport PFDs that my wife and I used when we learned to kayak. The model was the ‘Quasimodo’ or ‘NoNeck’ or something like that. I destroyed all the pictures of us wearing them because they’d ride up, perched on your sprayskirt and you looked as though you were shrugging your way down the river. You didn’t dare hunker down and get a good running start at anything because the PFD would then obscure your vision. I dunno. Maybe they weren’t really whitewater PFDs, but we were young and extra floatation around your ears sounded good to us.

Then, that third one there? The one that looks sort of blue/purple? That’s a Lotus brand. I don’t remember the model name for it either. But I call it ‘Blanky’. I was so happy to have a stylish, comfortable, cool-looking PFD that I kept it around me like Linus with his security blanket. It was originally purple, but UV tears the &^%$ out of red dye apparently, and so the longer I had it the bluer it got, except where it folded over itself to zip. Lovely PFD. I abandoned it when I found out it had the flotation of a weeks-dead fish.

The next two were part of a barter deal. I got them with a canoe. So they became my wife and my semi-stylish canoeing PFDs. The trade name on them is whatever Dagger Kayaks gear brand was at the time. Who can recall?

The last one- the red one- is my current one. It’s a rescue vest, only I haven’t tricked it out with all the throw ropes and paddle biners. Mostly because I’m useless at rescue. I usually do as much getting-in-the-way as anything else. I did, however, write on the part of the PFD that’s hidden when all the zips and belts are in place. So if the PFD is all askew and unfastened, you can see the message “If you can read this, there’s trouble.”

So. Anybody need to borrow a PFD?

└ Tags: adventure, Dagger, Extrasport, greg, Greg Cravens, kayak, life jacket, Lotus, outdoor, outdoors, outside, PFD, River, Wavesport, whitewater

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Hold Your Fire

Oct04

by Greg Cravens on October 4, 2011 at 6:00 am

Posted In: Talk About Toys

I know a guy who can start a fire in over a dozen different ways that don’t involve matches. He’s one of those amazingly competent guys who’s great to have on camping trips. Not to start the fire, of course, but to amaze everyone with ways you CAN start the fire. He can do the Rubbing-Two-Sticks together thing (which isn’t of course, two sticks) and the Striking-Sparks-Off-A-Rock thing and all the others. He’s the guy that the Mythbusters SHOULD have had on the show when they tried to start a fire with friction between two pieces of wood. In the end, the Mythbusters said the ‘myth’ was busted, I believe, and I quit watching so much. I’ve even started a fire in my basement with so little effort as to be one of those things you see on the evening news “Local man (toadstool-headed moron) sets fire to own home in bizarre accident.” I was moving things around and dropped a bit of steel wool onto the rechargeable drill battery. Bam. Fire. If you ever go back in time and have to rule a clan of cavemen as a magician, you better have steel wool and a battery with handy terminals. It’s visually impressive- fire crawling along the metal fibers.

Anyhow, there are lots of people who like to start their campfires in various and sundry ways. Typically best is, of course, to lay out your tinder, kindling, and fuel all Boy Scout fashion then reach for a lighter. Unless of course you’re too macho for lightering your fire and you want to show that it can be done with a single match. I’ve done it a couple of times. Once to see if I could and once at Webelo Den Leader Training. There were a bunch of us leaders there, and you’ve never seen a fire so confidently started with one match, I can tell you. If you were trapped in an avalanche with wet feet and were five minutes from death and had one match, you’d want to pull this crowd of Cub Scout Akelas out of your pack, man, ’cause we were ON it.

Living where I do, the whitewater must be travelled to. And hotels are boring, plus you hate to either slop through the lobby in stinking dripping kayak gear or , y’know, pay them to sleep there. So my buddies and I camp out on our kayak trips, which means campfires. At one point, we had hats made up for our group. The hats had the logo on the front, like usual, but unusually, they had a little pocket on the side of the cap. It had a zipper to close it up and everything. And it absolutely sucked for putting your driver’s license into- it’d FIT, but barely, which made getting it out a horror, plus it then would have the same curvature as your head, which was weird and made the cops look at you funny. The pocket would hold money pretty well, but if were coins, your head sorta jingled. That was distracting. And if you kept bills in there, they came out smelling like they had been alive at some point and now weren’t. No, we decided, that little pocket was for FIRE. Bottom line of this story? There was a group of people who, for a while at least, when asked for a light would automatically reach up to the right side of their own heads. Odd behavior.

There are even different sorts of lighters. You can get the classic Bic, or the micro Bic or the cheapo gas station lighter with the infuriating child-proofing. If you’re camping out of a big box or out of your car, or if you’re pulling a grill so large that it has its own tires, you might prefer one of those wand-type lighters that keep your had a few inches from whatever it is you’re trying to light. If you’ve ever tried to start a fire with slightly damp material while using a regular ol’ cigarette-style Bic, you might find that having a lighter that doesn’t cook your thumb a handy thing to keep around. They even make those cool butane lighters that are supposed to be windproof and waterproof. They cost a lot, though, and that rankles when you actually melt one while using it. (Honestly, if that seems like an issue for you? Get a tube of fire paste. Hilarious stuff. Light it and get your hand the heck out of the way. And you don’t need Tinder so much. It’s the safer way to carry gasoline in your backpack. Just remember to take it out before going through an airport. Security does NOT like fire paste.)

So. How do YOU hold your fire?
Here you go- classic Bic. Do what the clever folk do. Get about FIFTY, and scatter them throughout the house, that way when you need to fuse the end of a nylon rope while you’re standing around in the spare bedroom- and who hasn’t- then you just grab one of the lighters sitting festively all around the place.

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Commuter issues

Oct02

by Greg Cravens on October 2, 2011 at 10:01 am

Posted In: Non-Hubris comics

There’s a park here in town that I like. It has some nice trails- a couple of nice dirt trails for bikes and horses, a BMX track, and even a long paved trail for kids bikes, skateboards, joggers, walkers… you get the idea. There are lakes and meadows, playgrounds and parking lots. Even a disc golf course. It’s very fine, and we’re very lucky to have it. During the last economic boom, one of the major ‘development’ players tried to get the local government to hand the north edge of the park over to him for development, and that was horrifying. But worse is the fact that a lot of moneyed people live to the East of the park, while most of their jobs are on the West of the park. That leads to a lot of high-powered commuters pissed off because they’re trying to get to their jobs and the park is in the damned way. There are always plans to carve up the park (which runs on both sides of the main road thereabouts) to make commutes easier. The defeat of those plans will, of course, go on until the park is ruined- all it takes is one big setback and the park will begin it’s slide into oblivion. The fight to save the park sometimes includes editorial cartoons like the one below, which I did for a group working to save the park.

One wonders why folks that work downtown wouldn’t want to live a little closer to it, but that’s a whole ‘nother can o’ worms.

└ Tags: bicycle, bike, cartoon, comic, comic strip, commute, commuter, cravens, Germantown, greg, Greg Cravens, hike, Memphis, outdoor, outdoors, outside, paddle, park, raccoon, Shelby Farms, skate, skateboard, Tour De Wolf, unicycle, Walnut Grove

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Click and Win… or not.

Oct01

by Greg Cravens on October 1, 2011 at 11:05 am

Posted In: Dirty Pictures

You’ve seen those ads… click on this and tell us why you should win, and you get a chance at… whatever it is we’re selling.

Earlier this year, I entered one through Outside Magazine (Don’t you love Outside magazine? Currently, the only reason I fear the demise of print and bookstores is magazines like Outside) that they’d partnered with Ford Explorer to promote. You wrote where you’d go if they’d loan you a brand new, fully loaded Ford Explorer. If they figured you had a good story, you’d get the Explorer and a film crew that’d follow you around like papparazzi and hope you’d do something worthy of a commercial.

It’s very exciting to enter such a thing. You get to daydream a little about what you’d do with the prize.

What’s better is when you get a call-back. The ad agency in charge of the promotion called me about my essay wherein I said my family and I would load that Explorer down with our boats, bikes, tents and such, then we’d go either East, West or North. We’re too far South for there to be much reason to go South. It just gets flatter and hotter that way. I figured, four of us + three directions to choose from= something would come up a winner.

That must have got the agency’s attention, ’cause like I said, they called me back for the next round of eliminations.

I yapped on as enthusiastically as I could- the logic being that they’d want somebody who’d yap to be on camera, right? Lots of sound bites to pick from. Lots of the stories were about me and my brother, whose family we had just met halfway across the country for an adventurous vacation. The agency asked if it’d be cool to call my brother, too. I said of course. Worst case scenario- neither of us would get the trip, best case scenario- we’d both get an Explorer and we could meet in the middle of the country AGAIN and have another cool trip and maybe wind up in a commercial… and there were all the possibilities in between.

Just to hedge our bets, I sent the above cartoon illustration featuring me, my brother and our various kids (and bigfoot). I should have included the wives, too, but they never seemed to want to talk to our wives. I thought that was odd.

Anyhow, it was the Worst case scenario this time around. Neither of us heard back except the one message saying that they hadn’t eliminated us yet. That was a while back, and the contest is long over, so I guess we got the point.

Time to go find another contest to enter.