Tuesday, November 30, 2010

KMUW cartoons

Here are toons drawn for KMUW's website and not yet posted here:

Some of my weird irrationality

A caller to the Eagle's Opinion Line said that the Republicans swept the election in Kansas in spite of my "weirdly irrational" cartoons. I love that. I want a t-shirt with "weirdly irrational" on it. Here are some of the cartoons he or she was talking about. These ran during my long blog-black-out period so I will post them here.

Friday, October 8, 2010

De-cycling

Yeah. I know. I did it yet again. I went umpteen weeks without posting anything on my "blog."

And even though I am very sure that I have driven away every last one of the good souls who once came here every now and then just in case I had posted something, and just in case it had been worth reading only to be rebuffed by the lack of anything new at all being here, I am revving it back up.

This time I have a really good excuse for the absence. Really. It was surgery. After years of steadily worsening lower back pain, I finally made the decision to let then slice me open and perform a couple of procedures called a laminectomy and a spinal fusion. So on August 30 I checked into the Kansas Spine Hospital and they did the deed.

I learned something: surgery hurts. I had a morphin pump but I'm pretty sure it was just full of sugar water. I wore a sizeable calouse on my morphine pump thumb and I'm kind of proud of the night I tapped out the drum solo to "In-A-Gadda Da-Vida" on that sucker in a vain attempt to get enough of it into my system to ease the pain.

But after 3 nights or so, the pain began to ease considerably. They took away my morphin and gave me Percocet and Valium, which it turns out, is a muscle relaxer.

And here we are 3 months out, exactly. I'm happy to report that the surgery seems to have worked. Whereas before I could walk Ollie for half a block and had to turn around and head home, now I can go for 30 or 40 minutes without much pain at all. Pretty sweet.

That's why I quit for a while. And then, like when you put off writing a letter to a friend (back in the olden days when such things were still done) and you wait so long to write that the guilt snowballs and the next thing you know it's all just too embarrassing and you end up in a cycle of guilt and procrastination until you become catatonic, I stopped posting.

Herewith I jump off the cycle.

Friday, August 27, 2010

Another perfect Luckovich toon

The Atlanta Constitution's Mike Luckovich is the Gary Larsen of editorial cartooning. Larsen's "Far Side" cartoons were by far the most consistantly hilarious single-panel toons of all time, in my humble opinion. He came very close to batting .1000. I see Luckovich almost the same way. Just go over to his blog and scroll through this week's cartoons. Every one a jewel. Most cartoonists are hit and miss (present company at the front of that line!) but the Luckster just keeps 'em coming.

This one on Glenn Beck is killer. I've never actually watched a Beck show, I'm proud to admit. Life is way to short for that. But I've seen little clips of it and I know about his blackboard fetish. This toon works on lots of levels. A good caricature. A funny joke. A good sort of deeper meaning to it, as we see Beck is actually vandalizing Abraham Lincoln's legacy.

One more cartoon for me to throw in my bin labelled: WIDT (Wish I'd drawn that).

Tuesday, August 24, 2010

Look familiar?

From R. Crumb's "Cradle to Grave" print, which isn't everybody's cup of tea.

On consumerism

Here's a short excerpt from the British film "The Age of Stupid."

Monday, August 23, 2010

Heartstrings

I wrote this little ditty to promote a great program at Trees for Life.

Balbir Mathur, president of Trees for Life, was presented with a world-renowned Manuel Rodriguez & Sons classical guitar in Nov. 2009 after speaking at an international conference in Spain.

“I would like to present your guitar to the children of Nicaragua,” Balbir told the president of the guitar company. “Those children have no musical instruments, and their hearts will sing with such a gift.”

“Books for Life, an educational branch of Trees for Life, has 50 libraries in Nicaragua. Your guitar will go to one of the libraries, where many children can enjoy the music of your precious gift,” Balbir told him.

The guitar maker was inspired and offered 200 guitars for only $50 each.

Now you can join in by providing a guitar worth $350 to the children of Nicaragua for only $50—or giving a share of a guitar for as little as $5.

He hearts (and lungs) Wichita

My KMUW commentary: WSU football

Listen here or just read below.

Lots of good folks locally feel pretty strongly about college football. Some of them are convinced that Wichita State University made a wrong-headed move when it punted its own football program into the trash bin of history at the end of the 1986 season.

There is always a conspicuous absence of WSU on the sports pages this time of year as Kansas State and KU become the subjects of endless speculation about this season’s football teams.

I’d put myself in the camp of those who think dropping football was the right decision. The more I read and hear about college football programs, the huge amounts of money spent on coaches and staff and facilities and such, the more I think of the proverbial tail wagging the dog. Are football programs an extension of a college or is the college merely there to support the football program?

Yeah, I know, it’s a school spirit thing. Sis-boom-ba, rah rah rah and all that. But what it’s really mostly about is the money. That’s been apparent for a long time but the recent conference reshuffling was as brazen an admission of money’s importance as could ever be.

Seems to me that college football has a three-fold purpose. It exists for our entertainment, it exists to make money for universities and it exists to serve as a free minor league program for professional football.

So when I read recently of all the excessive travel charges which KU’s athletic director, Lew Perkins, had racked up, it wasn’t much of a surprise. Yawn. More of the same. One very muscular tail wagging that Jayhawk furiously.

I can live with WSU getting shaken up a little less than KU and K-State every fall. They bobbed off that tail 24 years ago.

For KMUW, I’m Richard Crowson.

A Chopra moment

I like this phrase used by Deepak Chopra recently when telling about his first 2 days in America. He says that he quickly got into the system of "spending money that I hadn't earned to buy things that I didn't need to impress people that I didn't care for."

Saturday, August 21, 2010

Why, it's Perry introducing Hank Snow!

A great song, Music Makin' Mama from Memphis, by a great performer "in the country tradition" introduced by the great Perry Como!

Wednesday, August 18, 2010

Weurker toon

Monday, August 16, 2010

What went wrong?

If trucks still looked like this all would be right with the world.

We're overdue for another Perry moment

I make no attempt to disguise my unabashed love for Perry Como. And I don't mean it in an ironic way. I simply love Perry. Nobody else even came close to singing in his laid-back, easy-going style. He seemed to channel peace in his music. Let's have a little Perry music in honor of the recent Perseids meteor shower.

Simplification

Like a lot of people, we've been forced to learn to do more with less at my house, especially after my layoff almost 2 years ago now. And along the way I've gotten interested in some of the Buddhist/Eckhart Tolle thought regarding materialism. So this article from the New York Times was right up my alley. Maybe you'll get something from it as well.

This is just the beginning of it. Read the whole thing here.

It's long but well worth your time. Another reminder of some of the great reporting and writing that still comes out of the NYT.

But Will It Make You Happy?

By STEPHANIE ROSENBLOOM

Published: August 7, 2010

REPRINTS

SHE had so much.

Enlarge This Image

Viktor Koen

Weekend Business: Tim O’Brien and Stephanie Rosenbloom on what makes consumers happy.

J. Emilio Flores for The New York Times

Roko Belic, a filmmaker, moved from San Francisco to a trailer park in Malibu and now surfs often. He is working on a documentary about happiness.

A two-bedroom apartment. Two cars. Enough wedding china to serve two dozen people.

Yet Tammy Strobel wasn’t happy. Working as a project manager with an investment management firm in Davis, Calif., and making about $40,000 a year, she was, as she put it, caught in the “work-spend treadmill.”

So one day she stepped off.

Inspired by books and blog entries about living simply, Ms. Strobel and her husband, Logan Smith, both 31, began donating some of their belongings to charity. As the months passed, out went stacks of sweaters, shoes, books, pots and pans, even the television after a trial separation during which it was relegated to a closet. Eventually, they got rid of their cars, too. Emboldened by a Web site that challenges consumers to live with just 100 personal items, Ms. Strobel winnowed down her wardrobe and toiletries to precisely that number.

Her mother called her crazy.

Today, three years after Ms. Strobel and Mr. Smith began downsizing, they live in Portland, Ore., in a spare, 400-square-foot studio with a nice-sized kitchen. Mr. Smith is completing a doctorate in physiology; Ms. Strobel happily works from home as a Web designer and freelance writer. She owns four plates, three pairs of shoes and two pots. With Mr. Smith in his final weeks of school, Ms. Strobel’s income of about $24,000 a year covers their bills. They are still car-free but have bikes. One other thing they no longer have: $30,000 of debt.