More Awesome Stamps (incl. Dracula)

I got some very pretty stamps on another Postcrossing postcard from China last week:

But the real crown jewel for this month's postcard philately comes from my friend Tara, who was traveling in Ireland around Bloomsday:

Why aren't there more stamps with Dracula?

DAMN! Now, that is a STAMP!

Somehow the postal rate increase took me by surprise, so I am not ready with enough small-denomination stamps or whatever. I just spent an hour or more trying to order the right stuff on the USPS website (which is a miracle of clumsy web design).

But on the plus side, check out this year's Lunar New Year stamp.



It's enough to make you want to send mail, I tell you.

The Scuba Santa of Christmas Island

Okay, so for almost two years now I have been participating in a hobby called Postcrossing, which uses the web to arrange one-time, one-way postcard penpals for you, mostly from international and faraway destinations. It's pretty fun.

Sometimes the postcards I get are really awesome, and sometimes they come with awesome stamps on the back. Case in point:



It's Christmastime in Australia, too, even though they're a week into summer. And you have to figure that if your country contained Christmas Island, you'd do a stamp for it at this time of year.

What my Ph.D. Means to Me: Holiday Edition

I finally got my grades done on "Monday night," a little before 5:00 AM.

The last day of classes was December 7. Over the following twelve days, I graded that entire stack of papers. How much do you think it weighs?

Answer: nine and a half pounds, if we're just talking literally.

Maybe it's not as bad as it looks. I am only returning the ones above the shift, about halfway up. The others were read but not marked. But that top half of the stack has had its grammar marked (every misplaced comma, every confused homophone), along with critiques of the argument or pacing or metaphors.



Now I get to think about the holidays.

For the record, I got my Ph.D. about nine years ago, at one of the most prestigious institutions in my field. You might think that by now I would have felt some sense of professional advancement.

Instead, I have every reason to expect this workload (or more) until I retire, quit, or expire in the saddle.

The next time my students suggest that they are thinking about going to graduate school, I'm going to ask, "Do you like grading papers?"

And if they don't answer, "Like it? I LOVE IT!" ... well, I feel a strong moral obligation to discourage them.

But I shouldn't complain. I am lucky, in fact, in that I even have a job.

Sonnets on Student Radio (for a Limited Time)

Yesterday my friend Liz and I were on the radio to talk about and read a few sonnets that she and I have been writing, mostly as a game for each other, over the past couple of years.

I think the conversation was pretty entertaining, and I think the sonnets have turned out well. If you'd like to hear the program, I'm pretty sure you can stream it until next Wednesday morning (Oct. 26), when it'll be replaced by the new week's program.

Follow this link, then follow these instructions:

Click on the "stream" button next to the "Proximate Blues / Writers@WRUV" segment of the Wednesday schedule. Once the stream starts running, our interview is about one hour and five minutes (1:05) into the program. It lasts about 45 minutes.

Let me know what you think, if you get a chance to listen to it.

Junior Woodchuck! Junior Woodchuck!

Not that kind of Junior Woodchuck, actually. I have to tag this post "not comics."

I know I have posted backyard wildlife photos before, but I don't think I have mentioned my favorite backyard denizen, whom I have been calling "Charles" since shortly after I moved in here.



Charles is a burly, surly woodchuck, who is prone to strike a pose not unlike the one found on the local cider label. He's skittish, and I don't have a zoom lens, so I rarely get a good picture of him, but it's good to know he's back there.



He seems to live under our garden shed. I see him a few times every summer, munching the flora of the back yard.

Well, today I spotted a different specimen of Marmota monax:



This new little fellow, designated Chip, is clearly a good deal smaller than Charles.



Below, for contrast, see Charles (on a different day) in the shadow of that same shrub:



And here is little Chip again:



The theory is now that Charles has secretly been a lady all along, and Chip is a new addition to the family. (Woodchucks have their babies in the spring, after the grownups are done hibernating.)

Here is Chip right by the garden shed. He's barely bigger than a squirrel, really.




You have to dig Chip's extreme cuteness.



Look at that little face!

Where Have I Been?

Sorry for the long silence. Expect it to continue.



This is what I graded over the Thanksgiving break. A lot of that stuff is printed double-sided, and I wrote on every page.

I have a half again as much to do between now and the end of the semester. Then, I may breathe (and blog) again.

Festival of Cartoon Art, Day 2: Some Abstract Rectilinear Landscapes of Columbus, Ohio

Here, without labels or other commentary, are some hard-to-draw interiors and exteriors from around Columbus. You can click each image to make it bigger.

Two Poetry Podcasts? I Guess So.

Sorry for the blog silence these last few weeks, folks. It's the end of the semester. Regular posting will probably resume in a week or so.

Meanwhile, here's an odd collection of two poetry podcasts:

One, here, has the audio from a reading I gave last month at the art museum here on campus. (I read with another poet, Abby Paige, who has the second half of the reading.)

Another, here, went out on the radio Thursday morning when my advanced creative writing students took a field trip to the campus radio station to read their poems on-air.

I think they're both pretty pleasant to listen to. My thanks go to Chris Evans, whose "Writers@WRUV" program hosted both the broadcasts and the podcasts.

Holy Nostalgic Camp, Batman!

Oh, man, you guys.



Someone has gone and archived audio for every one of Burt Ward's Robin's "Holy Something!" exclamations from the Batman TV show. Who knew there were so many?

Favorites include:

What to say when you meet the knock-off actor, Ted Damson...

Is it still a catchphrase if it becomes predictable? ...

What to say when you start a pilgrimage to the Hyde Park Bar & Grill...

Don't ask Adam West how to pronounce nuthatch...

...And of course, the ode to Fredric Wertham.

They're downloadable samples, so get your beatboxes fired up to do some remixology. I want you to get all Art of Noise on this business.

Thanks to our pal Gerry Canavan for the tip.

P.S. I don't mean that doodle to be a caricature of Burt Ward in particular. It's just a grotesque little Robin cosplayer, in a sort of stylistic homage to a Tony Millionaire story I read this weekend.

Daily Drop Cap: Fun Type Design

have you seen this new(ish) art-and-design blog called "Daily Drop Cap"?





eautifying your blog in the style of a cool old manuscript has never been easier, thanks to Jessica Hische.






lthough the Daily Drop Cap will probably be most useful for most bloggers when Hische gets around to designing the first-person pronoun (which will happen on Monday, if she sticks to her schedule), there are already eight kicky capitals there, ready to dress up plain text as long as it starts with the right letter.




o on over and check it out. Bookmark the site for future inspection. Swipe a letter or two for your next post.








ven someone without a devotion to "display lettering" could have a lot of fun with these letters.






ould I be abusing the graphic possibilities that these fun initial capitals allow?






efinitely. But there's something about these Hische's work that really invites playful participation. And what is that je ne sais quois? ... I think the word for it is:



un.





(In case it's not obvious, those letters are the creation of "Daily Drop Cap by Jessica Hische.")

A Link to Click

Nothing major to report, but here's my review of Beth Ann Fennelly's most recent book, Unmentionables. It's a good book. If the review gets you interested, here's a link to a place where you can buy the book itself.

The Academic Decathlon Team We Root For

As far as central-California high-school Academic Decathlon teams go, there's only one that really stokes my team spirit.

Here are the fightin', thinkin' Grizzlies of Granite Hills High, of Porterville, CA, getting psyched for another round of competition at the recent Academic Decathlon competition in Sacramento:



Those are some sharp kids, with a fine sense of team style, wouldn't you say?



And what's that interesting heraldic device adorning the backs of their team colors?



Doesn't that look familiar? Yes, indeed, they're wearing an enlarged version of one of my Darwin cartoons. No kidding.



Their academic coach, Mark Harriger, found the cartoon a few weeks ago with Google. (In fact, "Darwin cartoons" is one of our most popular search terms these days.) Mark emailed me and asked whether he could use the cartoon on their shirts, and I was only too happy to provide him with a high-res (and slightly improved) version, on one condition: that he let me post a few photos of the team back here on the blog. (Thanks, Mark!)



Go Grizzlies! We salute you!

Isn't the internet awesome?

A Link or Two to Click

Well, check this out: one of my poems that got published in the latest Hayden's Ferry Review is available online. Enjoy.

Also, my review of an excellent book of poems by one of my favorite living poets, Maurice Manning.

Happy Birthday, Mike Sterling

Today's the birthday of Mike Sterling, the inimitable author of Progressive Ruin, one of my favorite comics blogs.



If it's the last time in your life that "XL" fits you, Mikester, wear it well.

Other brithday tributes to Sterling here, here, here, here, and here.

Oh, and also here, albeit tardily.

Same to You, Captcha.

Sometimes, when I leave a comment on someone's blog, I get something hard to type, and sometimes I get a weirdly appropriate neologism.

But I've never had anyone's blog machinery seem to curse me until this afternoon:



It's being fairly old-fashioned about the cursing, but still: that's the sort of insult that stings.

And to be taunted by random letters generated by software? That's the sort of sting that

and lasts.

Not Comics: Snow and Frost

As long as Mike's posting holiday snapshots, I thought I'd put a couple of Vermont images up on the ol' blog. Who knows—maybe a cartoonist will find these useful for reference or something.

This is my first winter in Vermont, and I've really been aware of how much different snow, ice, and frost are up here, even compared to New Haven, just a few hours away. When it snows in single-digit (Fahrenheit) cold, you get a really different sort of effect than when it snows in thirty-degree mush. The flakes come down as flakes, like the ones you cut out from folded paper when you're a kid (but with proper sixty-degree symmetry, instead of ninety-degree symmetry). Sometimes they're spiky and blow around like little bits of down; sometimes they're plate-like and sparkle like glitter.

I've been trying to catch some of these pretty patterns with a camera, but it's not easy.



I increased the contrast on that image in photoshop, but I think that's fair. You can click these pictures to enlarge them a bit, as usual.

Here's some frost on my windshield a couple of days ago.



It's really wonderful to live in a place where I wake up to that sort of beauty on a regular basis.

I haven't made any postcards of these images yet, but I get the feeling I probably will.

Halloween Fun Punkin!

BOO!

I know I should be grading papers tonight—and I'm about to get back to work—but I just couldn't let the season go by without doing something to mark the arrival of Halloween, which is my favorite holiday. Last year, as a special treat for our blog readers, I posted some Halloween Fun Comics, a choose-your-own-adventure story that is included in Satisfactory Comics #7.

This year, because we're likely to get trick-or-treaters here in Burlington, I decided to do something people could enjoy without being on the internet.

It started with one of the best demons from our Demonstration book, the Dark Abbess.



(Well, actually, it started with a bunch of sketches and doodles. I was originally thinking that I might make a punkin with the werewolf from "The Graveyard of Forking Paths.")



But once I'd settled on the Dark Abbess, I had to figure out how to make the shading work. I couldn't put her pupils in the middle of her eyes and also carve out the eyes for light to come through...



... but it looked like this was going to work. (I did have to upgrade to a bigger pumpkin.) And so, with a little handheld pumpkin jigsaw knife and a regular old craft knife, I started carving, and about an hour and a half later, I had this:



Let's turn off the lights and enjoy that the way it's intended to be seen. You can click this picture to enlarge it.

Highbrow Kirby Character Collage

Not much time today. Maybe my last "Swansea Find" post will come next weekend.

But this floated (electronically) across my desk today, and I thought it was worth taking out of context:



There are two Simon & Kirby heroes, The Fighting American and The Guardian, both of them variations on Captain America. (To me that looks like fanzine art, maybe even traced from a couple of different comics, but not Kirby.) In the background, the Smithsonian Castle, in an old postcard image (printed badly, with seriously off-register color).

The creator of this little collage? This man:



Here's the New York Times article, to provide some context.

Discuss.