Central coastal Oregon, a continent and ocean away from the fighting, had soldiers camped there. They were logging Sitka spruce (Picea sitchensis), the lightest, strongest wood for its weight and was used to make airplane frames. It only grows along a four-mile (1.2-km) fog-shrouded band on the coast from northern California to Alaska. Before the war spruce was viewed as good for nothing but making fish boxes.
I’m afraid soon I’m going to read a statistic stating more people believe there’s a chance they could be eaten by a shark in a tornado than believe in global warming.
One of my favorite statistics is that you have a better chance of being killed by a soda machine than a shark. The cans in a soda machine are in its upper half so they roll down to you. People sometimes shake a machine to try and get a stuck can out and the whole unbalanced thing falls on them. You’ve got to love natural selection. Continue reading →
I just listed this item on eBay: one used copy of TheNew York Times Ferocious Crosswords: 150 Hard Puzzles edited by Will Shortz where I’ve already done 100 of the puzzles. Starting bid: $15
Here’s why this copy is worth at least $5.05 more than it sold for new in 2009.
You see an intriguing man or woman in the airport or on the subway, a man or woman you want to get to know better, a man or woman you want to impress. How do you go about it? Walk up and say, “I graduated summa cum laude from Harvard and Apple made me a seven-figure offer for my app.” Continue reading →
This is an article I wrote for Classic Car Magazine in 1990 interspersed with lots of my cartoons about driving.
1951 Plymouth And Me in 1987
Getting Sixteen Miles per Rolaid in a 1951 Plymouth
When my great aunt in Tacoma first handed her 1951 Plymouth, The Grey Ghost, over to me, she barely let me drive it around the block. The suggestion that I practice on side streets early on a Sunday morning sent her into hysterics, disconcerting, since I planned to take the car home. Home was 3,000 miles away in Washington, D.C. Continue reading →
I doubt it would have done as well with the titled Fungi Reproduction. That’s why this post is titled Slug Sex, not “The Mating Habits of the Ariolimaxcolumbianus?” I do want readers. Plus, while slugs may be slow, the way mate is pretty racy.
A common rule in nature is that if a creature is smaller than you, eat it; if it’s bigger than you, run from it; and if it’s the same size as you, mate with it. Continue reading →
I don’t draw political cartoons for various reasons.
The main one is that they don’t make much sense a few years, if not a few days, later. Half of my current income comes from commissions. The other half comes from reselling old cartoons.
Would you buy a cartoon about Edwin Meese? “Who?” I assume most of you are asking. He was Ronald Reagan’s Attorney General. I hope most of you at least have a vague notion of who Ronald Reagan was. Anyway, even though I’m the one who drew these two cartoons about Meese in the 1980s, I can’t tell you what incident they’re about. I’m assuming they were once funny. I was paid for them. Continue reading →
“Why are there no more pictures of your puppy on your blog?”
That’s what many of you have asked. Well, truthfully, no one has asked that. I mean that’d be like asking a new grandparent to see pictures of their grandchild. Only a masochist poses such a request. Or a really really good friend.
Sammy Adorable
The other reason I haven’t posted any pictures of my adorable fur ball, Sammy, is that he is in constant motion. I took over 500 photos to get the above one. Most photos I’ve taken look something like this.
Sammy on one of his slower days.
My cat, Squeaky, on the other hand can sometimes be mistaken for being a catatonic.
My cat Squeaky showing some signs of life.
“Ha, ha,” Squeaky tells me via mental telepathy. “Puns, the lowest form of humor next to dead baby jokes. You should be ashamed of yourself.
I am. Mea culpa.
To make it up to you, here are some dog and cat cartoons. When shown to lab rats, nine out of ten of them died laughing. Squeaky ate the 10th one.
My puppy, Sammy, ate a cantaloupe-size clump of llama wool in one gulp the other morning.
Fret not. No llamas were attached to the clump. My neighbors, Toni and Paul, run a llama rescue operation. Just a few months after moving here from urban southern California they said I had to come over to see what they got at the Lincoln County Fair. I figured they’d bought some homemade pies or maybe splurged on a quilt.