Waffle

Geir just emailed me a link to the website for George Lucas' forthcoming Sky Captain movie. This is what White House in Orbit would look like if it had a mega budget and some actual creative talent at its disposal. Even the character names are similar! "Polly Perkins"? From now on that will be President Samuel T. Perkins' wife's name.

Professor Buttumsup is still a lot cooler than "Dex" though.

Anyway, we're contacting our lawyers and as soon as we find one that isn't afraid of being eaten alive by George Lucas' lawyers, or his neck, vengeance will be OURS! Muahahaha!

Slightly predictable but funny in the execution: at the new parody webcomics review site Modern Humor Authority, there's a contrarian review of Chris Crosby and Owen Gieni's insight-free political satire/gaming comic Sore Thumbs:

Owing equal amounts to Paul Conrad and Calvin and Hobbes, Chris Crosby and Owen Gieni's Sore Thumbs is a blunt yet pointed satire of leftist thought in the United States. The strip uses the device of its protagonist's fantasy world to poke fun at popular Democratic-party standards, while simultaneously endorsing the creators' own ultraconservative ideals in the subtext.

It's easy to mistake the strip as a raucous, nasal Democratic broadside, and no doubt some readers remain blissfully ignorant in that belief....

The punchline:

...The double-edged politico-comic is a clever idea, but leftist Bruce Tinsley has been doing the same thing with his own Mallard Fillmore for over a decade.

I spent a day cycling with Sidsel. We started off at 10.30 from her place in the south of the city, in the direction of Roden and Leek, keeping an eye on the weather to see if we might have to turn around early to avoid the thunderstorms that we'd been warned for. In Leek, the clouds were still scattered, so we carried on to Zevenhuizen and then Ureterp, a Frisian town right at the bottom left of my cycling map. When we arrived there it was still mostly sunny and in fact pretty hot, so we stopped for ice cream (lots of ice cream, in my case. Enough to go into a caloric coma. When I start doing some serious speed-oriented cycling I'll observe dietary discipline but when I'm just touring I'll eat ice cream when I damned well please) and plotted our journey back. Distance covered at that point: some 36 kilometers, which is nice enough for a trip we'd planned at short notice with a dramatic change in the weather later in the day in mind.

(more...)

I was surprised to find the other day that folk violinist Dave Swarbrick, who has been very ill with emphysema, had somehow managed to record a new album. The fact that despite being practically bedridden, he has been able to play at all is miraculous enough, but what makes it even better is that English Fiddler: Swarbrick Plays Swarbrick is such a strong album. Being a collection of classic tunes written throughout the man's long career, it's not groundbreaking by Swarb's standards, but it has fine playing from everyone involved and the arrangements are as daring as ever.
Musicians on the record include Swarb's old friend and partner Martin Carthy, old Fairport Convention stalwarts Simon Nicol and Dave Pegg, more recent Fairport Convention stalwarts Martin Alcock, Chris Leslie and Gerry Conway, Whippersnapper guitarist Kevin Dempsey and Swarb's old mentor Beryl Mariott. They revisit the tunes they were originally involved in, sounding occasionally under-rehearsed but performing with skill and feeling. Sadly, Swarb doesn't sing on the album because his illness has cost him his singing voice, but the violin work is still a joy to listen to. There's even a return to the electric violin sound from his Fairport days. The other musicians get plenty of space to make themselves heard as well. The best example of this is in the final tune, "Miss Stevenson/Turnabout", where they get to jam for almost 2 minutes in the middle of the song before Swarb cuts in with the electric violin.

English Fiddler is out on the Naxos label, so you may have difficulty finding a store that carries it. Naxos is mostly known for commissioning inexpensive recordings of classical music and reissuing jazz and pop from the period before World War II, but they also have a great selection of folk music from across the world (the bluegrass album Little Grasscals has become a favorite in the studio), and it's all red-book compliant and cheap!

(Note: Oddly, Amazon lists this item both under Popular Music and under Books. This may have something to do with Naxos' distribution arrangements. When listed under books, it's a special-order item, but the music listing says it should ship within 24 hours.)

Adformatie reports that Finnish publishing giant Sanoma have bought out Malmberg, publishers of Hello You among others. Sanoma are not known for having equitable contracts with freelancers, so this may affect my ability to work for them after my fourth season drawing Floor (Malmberg's current contracts are pretty fair when it comes to intellectual property rights).

Several people wrote in to say that they didn't think the fade-outs were working. I think I agree, so this will be the last page with fade-ins and fade-outs for now.

I think they *ought to* work, though, so I'll revisit the idea at a later date.

...In the Modern tales Newsletter this week, Ursula Vernon praises Dangerous and Fluffy.

...Ursula Vernon's Digger is the webcomic I judge my work against. Her brilliantly unique, funny, and incrediably creative tale of wombats, Hindu Gods, and Shadow Creatures is such a wonderfully unique voice - the only thing I can think of that one can compare it to is China Mieville's Perdido Street Station. The river of sheer creativity washes you away, and before you know it you've lost yourself in an entirely unique world.

...And yet, evidently, she's excited by my comic. I'm really not sure I can absorb this properly yet.

Sorry I haven't written much on the blog. I actually had quite a few things I wanted to write about, but they were all long, comparitively thoughtful things that I'd have needed to take time for, as opposed to just writing up a link with a quote and a comment. Instead of doing that, I decided to work as hard as I could on the comics, so I'd stay ahead and be in a position to take a quick break or two as soon as the weather improves. (It's moved to the soul-destroying drizzle stage, which I find the most depressing of all).

I have just uploaded the comics for next Monday and Wednesday, putting me (narrowly) three updates ahead. I have also been looking at Bitpass again. It's been almost a year since I abandoned my plan to make Courtly Manners available as a Bitpass feature, and while I still don't think it's worth the work to publish only that comic that way, I've been thinking about making more comics available as Bitpass comics. That way the work would become routine and the Bitpass section would be more attractive from the start. I'm undecided though. Like with many other business/publishing models, I don't think I have the reader base to pull it off succesfully. Maybe I should publish more material for free to attract readers before even thinking about adding more for-pay comics.

I have got my tax refund for 2003, and I may spend some of that on promotion. Even if I don't, I will start doing more work to promote ROCR in the very near future. It's long overdue.

Tamlin, long missing from RoCR (for shame!) continues his Dangerous and Fluffy cameo in this week's comic. The background cameo concludes next week. HEre's a smidgen of that script:

"drink"

...I didn't say it was a useful smidgen.

Crooked Timber's Ted Barlow would rather cook lamb than argue with Glenn "Isntapundit" Reynolds' latest bit of bollocks. Can't say I blame him myself. MMM lamb.

He says that Michael Moore (who is responsible for writing and directing left-wing films of questionable accuracy) is the American version of the Iraqi rebel cleric al-Sadr (who is responsible for killing our soldiers and running a repressive fundamentalist regime in Fallujah). Etc., etc.

I could argue with this nonsense. But wouldn’t all of our time be better spent sharing a genuinely delicious recipe for braised lamb shanks in red wine? I think so.

The recipe is impossible to screw up and requires little attention. I usually make it for just two people, which means that I only cook two lamb shanks with the same quantities of vegetables and liquids. Since the skillet easily holds two lamb shanks, this is a one-dish meal for two people.

Lightly adapted from Cooks Illustrated.

6 lamb shanks (3/4 to 1 pound each), trimmed of excess fat
Salt
1 tablespoon canola oil
2 medium onions, sliced thick...