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Today’s Peanuts re-run is a great reminder of just how unsentimental Schulz’s work tended to be. Where most child-centered comics put their focus on what makes kids different from adults (mischief, malapropisms, and innocence), Schulz’s best work tended to focus on the humanness of his characters. Adults were never so much absent from the strip as irrelevant to it; anything that might be said about adults could be said more eloquently through his regular cast of prepubescents.
As I read this comic in today’s paper and pondered this blog post, the radio began playing the John Mayer song “Waiting For the World to Change”. I’ve always hated that song, and here Schulz demonstrates why. We can’t look to the next generation to fix our mistakes. Each generation has to take responsibility for its own actions and behavior.
Max vs. Max by Wes Molebash
One of my favorite webcomics is Wes Molebash’s Max vs. Max. To say it’s about a young divorced Christian man trying to get on with his life is perhaps accurate enough, but really do the comic justice. Molebash has a wonderfully quirky sense of humor, which keeps everything light and fun. And he quite deftly manages the difficult task of writing his Christian faith without it ever becoming forced or preachy.
Today’s comic is a particularly fun example — and it has spurred some great discussion on his blog to boot. Worth checking out.
Last week I participated in a sketching workshop at the Birds of Vermont Museum in Huntington, VT. It involved some warm-up contour drawings, a brisk sketch-and-stroll in the woods, and finally some time at the bird feeder yard, sketching whatever was there.
Incidentally, the museum has a webcam on their feeder yard. By the look of it though, at this writing, it seems to have been inoperative for a few months at least.
A lot of blue jays that particular day, along with a red-winged blackbird, an oriole (which never did stay around long enough for me to sketch it), a few woodpeckers and catbirds. All in all it was a great way to spend a lazy summer afternoon.
I’ve got more of my bird sketches posted in my online sketchbook. Hope you like them!
"Stone Soup" by Jan Elliot
Boy, can I relate to this comic. Whenever I go to the grocery store in the summertime, I put on a sweatshirt on my way through the parking lot. I learned the hard way that if I don’t, I will end up with shivers, blue lips, and numb fingertips – even when I stay out of the frozen foods section!
Now, with my slender frame, I am often chilly when others I know are not, but I’ve only had serious issues when I’ve been in supermarkets. I can go to an air conditioned mall and most other retail businesses and be perfectly comfortable. So why do grocery stores feel the need to make their indoor environment feel like outdoors in mid-November? (That’s mid-November in the northeast, of course, not Florida). I imagine it probably has something to do with keeping produce and other items fresh, but surely there must be a way to do that without making the whole store into a huge refrigerator.
In light of the energy crisis we’re experiencing these days, it seems like it would behoove the supermarkets to find a better way to keep temps down. In fact I recently read a related article somewhere that I was impressed with. Some big professional company (can’t remember which one) was urging its employees to forego the jacket and tie dress code in the summer months so they could set their A/C at 75 degrees; something we would all do well to adopt in some way.
