Charlie

  • by Drew

The nickname we have for the doctor who kind of went nutbag with my diagnosis over a year ago is in somewhat questionable taste, but it sure does make me and the old lady laugh and laugh. Really, I look back with something akin to gratitude, because while he his doctoring skills are way off in the crappy part of left field where he must spend a lot of his time searching for some bedside manner, his overreaction (for lack of a better word) did put me on somewhat of the straight and narrow. So… thanks for that.

I still wish I had my old doctor, but the ridiculous games the various health management organizations play (those same games that have all but destroyed private practice among decent physicians under the age of 50) chased him away. My new doctor is great. I have seen him a couple of times in the last year and he really doesn’t disappoint. But <blank> <blank> Charlie (again, the nickname is sort of in bad taste) really soured me on the medical profession. So much so that I was almost ready to but a couple medical texts and see if I could find an ekg machine for sale. You know, really embrace my personal medical health and say “screw you” to the establishment.

I mean, I still say “screw you” to the establishment, but I do so with a documented primary care physician. So… that’s a proper, adult decision, right?

Media Wall

  • by Drew

For a minute there I thought my little flat screen was fried, the one in front of my elliptical, and the daily grueling exercise regimen that keeps me off crazy-ass medication was about to get significantly more tedious. I was saved by a little old school CRT from the kitchen that has barely been watched since number 3 was born. I got the little flat screen working but I kind of prefer the old school TV for a couple of reasons, not the least of which is shear volume. Over the grind of the elliptical in mega-resistance mode coupled with the fan that keeps me from sweating a river that could drown the kittens, the added decibels helps.

But it all reminded me of a plan a couple months ago that I’m glad fell through. I’m not one for floor stand mounts and funky home theater contrivances, but on a whim I bought a clearance  wall mount for smallish flat screens a while ago. I had just installed the LED monster in our living room, so I have an idea how much these things cost, so the clearance one was a worthwhile gamble. It was my plan to get my little exercise flat screen off the glorified plant stand and onto the wall so I could move my machine forward a foot or so and free some extra footage for the home studio. Alas, my little flat screen was not compatible with the inexpensive wall mount. Then I saw a Black Friday deal on a smallish flat screen that would definitely fit the mount for something like a hundred bucks. But I just didn’t have it in me to risk a tramplin’ at the Kingston Best Buy at 4am with a bottle of Vinho Verde and Mom’s incredible stuffing still metabolizing in my gullet.

Ah well. Anyone need a low profile mount for a 20-24″ flat screen? I’ll give you a good deal. <wink>

Dig the pics Skateboard Heroes fans!

  • by Drew

Holy freeform progressive lenses, Batman! Have you seen the new Friends of Skateboard Heroes (F.O.S.H.) page? We finally got around to loading up the awesome sketches collected at the New york Comic Con a few months ago. Sure, it’s been a bit of a wait, but we were busy setting y’all up with new comic pages. But now, as we draw to the conclusion of the Issue 1 Antecedental story, we have another sketch or two on the backburner. So, we’ve got to work through the backlog. Only fair, right?

The Mechanical Cover

  • by Drew

The astute music-file/recording artist/duplication provider may actually find the title of this post amusing because it combines some musical terminology that may not be familiar to the general public. See, when you cover a published song on a distributed recording, you have to pay royalties to the songwriter(s) and publisher(s) of the source material. It’s called a mechanical royalty and is based on the number of units you produce. Interestingly enough, you can actually perform any covers you want live (as long as they are not recorded or broadcast) without any sort of royalty payment ot the intellectual property owner. So… we can blame that little lapse for the mind numbing number of times I’ve had to hear Piano Man while trying to enjoy a nice meal in a mid range restaurant with my bets girl.

Anyway, the thought that inspired this post was my love of album or CD covers that use mechanical or industrial objects. Sometimes it is just an object. Sometimes it it is a collage or constructed image using metals and spools and pulleys and things. I just love that kind of stuff. Shiny, rusty, greasy metal. So cool.

Examples? They may date me. Or maybe not. My tastes are pretty fixed.

Check out these awesome covers from Jawbox, The Orb, and Cop Shoot Cop.

  

 

Ms. Potts and Miss Lane

  • by Drew

It was hard saying goodbye to Maggie. She was a good cat with a hell of a lot of personality. At least when she got sick, the end came quick and she left us peacefully. And now it looks like she’ll be the subject of my next comic project, in line with Skateboard Heroes style, but a bit more off the wall.

But I’m not here to talk about my old friend. I’m here to talk about the new friends that will be joining our family soon. Actually, it’s the naming of these little critters that really is my subject. The kids all fell in love with these little sisters at the adoption agency, so there really was no choice in the matter. Of course, the adoption process is pretty wackadoo, but it involves getting the kitties spayed, which is an absolute requirement on all sides.

But naming the two balls of fluff is hard. And when the names have to be approved by three kids and two adults, all with strong creative opinions… it’s tough.

We tried brainstorming and word association. You start out okay with names like Tallalulah and Butch, but pretty soon you’ve got kids shouting out muffin fluffy cheddar custom swing sets richmond va honey cookie…

We discussed “Real” names (my personal preference). The problem, though, after naming three kids, you’ve exhausted a large proportion of the good “people” names that two adults can agree on… let alone three kids.

And then there is the consideration that the two cat names have to sound reasonable together. You can’t have Charles and Lickety Split or something. It sounds like a jockey and a race horse. Or like you really respect one of them and think the other is a damaged dink.

But we have managed to settle on two names that everyone likes and even the three year old can pronounce. (My new German Cinema directors concept was shot down on this basis… as well as the fact that we’d really need 4 cats to properly represent the movement.)

Maybe I’ll let you know what we picked somday…

Snap! Water

  • by Drew

It’s a rhyming thing, mostly driven by that last post and something I wanted to add. I mention that people have been giving me more and more grief over the years as bottled water became such an important thing to so many people – specifically about the fact that I prefer – or at least, have no problem with tap water. Clearly there is a reason that people are so against tap water. I think it’s pretty clear that the bottled beverage industry is telling us that our tap water is crap water. And that’s just not right.

In fact, about 12 years ago when I was working in advertising, I had a client that is one of the largest manufacturers of toothpaste, mouthwash, and related oral care products in the world. At that time they were sitting on multiple studies that showed tooth decay and oral health issues were on a steep rise in the US after decades of decline. The culprit named by all those studies?

Bottled water.

Yup. Most municipal water systems add, among other things, flouride into the water. Not in bottled water,  my friends. So… make sure you brush. A lot. And visit the dentist. A lot.

Tap Water

  • by Drew

My new exercise watch today was a documentary on the bottled water industry called Tapped. While I have been known to choose bottled water over certain other beverage options, I have frequently been mocked and maligned by friends, acquaintances and strangers for being a tap water drinker first.

Watch this documentary and see who the real imbecile is. I actually have known for many years that nearly half of all bottled water in this country comes from municipal water systems. In other words, Coke and Pepsi run tap water through a glorified Brita filter and call it pure.

They even do it when the surrounding communities are experiencing droughts. Gotta love that. Take a walk through those lovely richmond doors in greater Raleigh or suburban Atlanta and you’ll fall in love with the dusty, scorched earth, while nasty old city folk are sucking down your life giving H20 at their overpriced health clubs.

PURE?!? Purified is not pure. If I bleach my toilet, it may be purified of germs, but I wouldn’t refer to it as a pure source of anything. Then again, I have an excellent well, so it might just be that my toilet water trumps Dasani and Aquafina in the race.

Somehow we’ve taken the most important building block of life and ruined it. We’ve made pure something artificial. It’s purificial.

I should trademark that. It’ll be the brand for my toilet water. I’ll put a mountain on the label. It’ll be so sweet.

New Skateboard Heroes

  • by Drew

Get ’em while they’re hot!

(The free comic pages, I mean. That would be… and hot from your own printer if you decide you want hard copy. Unless maybe you have some sort of steampunk-esque tube-driven computer monitor that gets pretty warm. So the onscreen pdf pages would be noticeably hot, as in hot off the press. Even though there’s no press. But we covered that already in this no somewhat unwieldy parenthetical aside. right?)

www.SkateboardHeroes.com

 

Hero Up

  • by Drew

Have you read the newest Skateboard Heroes pages? You had better hurry up because even more new pages will be posted in the next couple days. In the post-Sandy northeast, what’s better than free comics, right?

And who knows what Dr. Inferno will be toting in these upcoming pages. We’ve already seen a crossbox. What could be next? Flamethrower? Machine gun? Feather razors? Butterfly knives? Pizza cutter? You never really know. Dr. Inferno is a total maniac after all.

Can you dig it?

Lyrical Meandering

  • by Drew

So I got caught up in my Beyonce hate, and really, I don’t like her at all, but I forgot the important thing about lyric sites… the comments. If you can stomach actually reading something Beyonce has sung, more power to you. I enjoy seeing how they write out all the oooohing and ahhing and dibble-dee-doo and other vocal gymastic nonsense that Billboard just loves to numerically catalogue these days. One man’s jibber jabber is another man’s onomatopoeia.

Seriously, though. Wave your arms to clear the air of the scent of versace perfumes, armagnac, and that “new Adidas smell” and read what the kids have to say about the poetry of Beyonce. I mean, they fight. Not just verbal sparring, but they threaten and attack one another. All it takes is one “Beyonce sucks” post to get the masses in an uproar and start the violence a-flying.

One emo kid on an aging laptop in a Idaho basement can rile thousands of acolytes into a Koresh style act of commenting retribution. The future is here and it is bleak. It is also trite and exceptionally cliche.

And woo woo woo, why can’t you-ooo-oo-oo-oooooo…just understa-haa-hand me-ee-eeya.

 

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