2019 January-June
Fatten Your Fauxcabulary and Phony Phrases
destinesia (dĕs tə nē′ zhā) noun. When you get to where you intended to go but forget why you wanted to go there.
Admit it, you’ve done it, eh? So you go back to where you started, resume what you were doing only to remember what you wanted to go for. So you go again. This is called round tripping out. Well, it could be; nobody actually does call it that.
How about the times you went to get something, picked up something else and returned with the wrong thing instead of what you intended to get? Which is like going to the store for some item, picking up some things on impulse and when unpacking the shopping at home realizing you didn’t get what you actually went to the store to get in the first place. This is called a shopping trip and fall. Or wanderlost, if you prefer.
Anyway, this forgetting getting things is why people make memory aids, also known as shopping lists. Which don’t help if you forget to take the list with you. Is there a word for forgetting a memory aid?
Filed under Betterize Your Fauxcabulary 6/27/19
The Big Day Has Arrived!
What’s so big about today? ’Tis the summer solstice. Making it the longest, hence biggest day of the year. And the shortest night. The earliest morning. The after-est afternoon and evenest evening. Or whatever. Anyway, about now the primroses and daisies start to bloom. Well, around here. Your results may vary. Mine do. That is, some of my gardening plans work and some gang aft agley, as the poet Burns would have it.
What I mean is some things grow too much, some too little, some in the wrong direction, and some in the wrong place. In which case they’re weeds. I’ll attend to all that shortly. But today I relax and watch the grass grow and the flowers bloom. Why not. It’s summer after all. How that gangs for the poet Burns is not for me to worry about.
Filed 6/21/19
Thursday’s Word of the Day
Though you are allowed to use it any day of the week. Not that that I would, or could, stop you.
nostrum (nŏs′ trŭm) noun, A medicine, especially one that is not considered effective, prepared by an unqualified person. [Synonyms: patent medicine, quack remedy, potion, elixir, panacea, cure-all, universal remedy, wonder drug, magic bullet.] A pet scheme or favorite remedy, especially one for bringing about some social or political reform or improvement.
Take two before bed and call me in the morning. If you survive. Take as directed or not, I couldn’t rightly tell you which would be worse.
Filed 6/13/19
From the Orbit (Cracked) Archives Number Ten
A Dog’s Breakfast
Gag Cartoons from Deep in the Orbit and Cracked Magazine Archives
Filed 5/13/19
Yesteryear is Here
This is the initial gag in a cartoon series that appeared in Orbit under the title of A Dog’s Breakfast almost thirty years ago. Aha, the true reason for yesterday’s rebus revealed! Anyway, I contributed this running panel cartoon for several years until I got so busy with Suck.com I had to give it up. At the rate of one cartoon every other week the reader can well imagine I have quite the file folder stuffed with old cartoons. So prepare yourself as I’m going to dig out the best of the lot a republish them here one at a time until there’s enough to fill out a feature for the “Cartoons” section.
Many of the best of these cartoons were republished by Cracked under the title of Oz&Ns in their “Backwash” section which I also hand lettered and illustrated. “Backwash” was a two-page spread of fake letters to the editors and short bits unworthy of being a feature. And that’s where they shoved in my cartoons. H-h-m-m-m-m. Were they trying to tell me something? Or not tell me?
Filed 4/30/19
The First “Fun and Games” Fun Game
To continue this week’s theme I give you the original game from the debut edition of terry colon dot com. Only this time it’s animated. Woo-hoo! How this bit worked originally I don’t recall and I didn’t save the html documents for some reason. The game was interactive somehow, but the method of the madness escapes me. Anyway, the ball on a string game is a timeless classic. Enjoy.
Filed 4/25/19
Via the Wayback Machine Again
Another gag cartoon from terry colon dot com version one originally filed under “That’s Not Funny, That’s Rude.” Seems I had a thing for bathroom humor back then.
Refiled under Gag Cartoon Gallery 4/24/19
Via the Wayback Machine
Yesterday’s theme of reprising bits from the very first version of the site continues today with a gag cartoon originally filed under “That’s Not Funny, That’s Rude.”
“Next time YOU wipe.”
Refiled under Gag Cartoon Gallery 4/23/19
Cold off the Drawing Board 5
I round out retro rerun week with a trio of spots done from just before my personal computer age. These are from the same time frame as the Scams, Shams, and Flimflams book illos. Only in color. Oo-o-o-h! Watercolor, to be exact.
One thing about this old school drawing and coloring method, as opposed to my current computer method, you get one shot at getting the colors right. On small spots like these it’s not that big a deal to do a second version if you really mess up, but on big pix… well, it gets daunting. You usually do thumbnail versions to work out the general color scheme before committing yourself. Then you have to plunge in and hope for the best, ’cause there ain’t no ‘undo’ with brush, paint and illustration board.
Filed 4/19/19
Cold off the Drawing Board 4
Another real old bit of art for Orbit that was only mildly successful. It was an attempt to update or play on the pretty woman/old hag optical illusion or visual ambiguity. I made it Michael Jackson/ Elvis. It went with a music blurb about something, but who remembers what now?
The original is called “The Boring Figure” after Edwin Boring who wrote a 1930 paper about it. Who did the original art showing both a young woman turning away and an old woman in profile, depending on how you look at it, is a mystery to me.
Filed 4/18/19
Cold off the Drawing Board 1
Doing some spring cleaning. Deep cleaning. Cracking open boxes and rooting through files I haven’t looked in for years. Make that decades. Finding stuff I’d forgotten I’d ever thought of let alone saved. Anyway, I thought I’d dust off some of this stuff and let the rest of the world have a gander at the world of Terry Colon of thirty years ago. Before there was a terry colon dot com. Heck, before there were any dot coms anywhere at all.
First up, the Mickey Mouse Calendar.
We’ve long had Mickey Mouse watches to tell us the time of day, But what day? What month? What year? So I came up with a Mickey Mouse calendar. With the twist that each month’s art was as if done by a famous artist. At least that was the idea I pitched to Disney. I mocked it up with twelve bits of “famous” art done in marker on layout paper. Some looked better than others, but it was just to put the idea down on paper. I mean, a fake Van Gough done in marker is never going to look like much.
In the end the folks at Disney didn’t go for in the least. Still, I thought I’d reproduce a couple of the better efforts here just for the fun of it. Top: Giorgio de Chirico. Bottom: Joan Miró.
I leave it to your imagination to come up with ten more from your own personal favorite artists or pictures. Rosseau’s The Sleeping Mouse? Duchamp’s Mouse Descending a Staircase? Dali’s melting Mickey Mouse watches? Plenty of potential, eh? Too bad the House the Mouse Built didn’t see it that way. Oh, well.
Filed 4/15/19
The Origin of April Fools
In days of Yore (King of Dementia, 778-821) April first was the beginning of spring and the people’s thoughts naturally turned to a sort of proto-baseball, called fooles back in the day, and the nights, too. They spelled it with the extra E because scribes were paid by the word and people wanted their money’s worth. Nobody knows how the game was played, but it is thought that folks batted each other with wooden sticks and then ran home. This lasted about a month until people got sick of it because it was a really stupid game. Over time the April fooles season got shorter and shorter until it was just one day, April first. Centuries later they introduced a ball into the game and it became baseball and the rest, as they say, is history. Believe it or don’t, but you’ve only yourself to blame if you do.
Filed 4/1/19
Back to the Drawing Board 7
Here’s a drawing, sketch, overblown doodle, (choose one) I did quite a few years ago. Somewhat different in look and feel to what you might be accustomed to seeing hereabouts. I can’t decide whether it’s more creepy or goofy. I really don’t know what the heck I had in mind when I scribbled it out.
Actually, I don’t know how thinking about pictures works really. You don’t really see an image in your head, yet you sort-of know where you’re going with it, what you imagine it’s supposed to look like. Though not exactly, sometimes it surprises you and turns out different, like some spirit artist took control and said, “Try it this way.”
Anyway, my brain is fairly well occupied in drawing the thing without also thinking about how I’m thinking about it. I just do it. Whatever it is. It’s a strange, mysterious thing. Stranger still (in my mind at least) that I was able to make a living at it. Some mysteries just defy explanation.
Filed 3/28/19
Back to the Drawing Board 6
This bit has no story, no meaning, no point really. I did it as a sort-of self challenge exercise, an etude if you will. I started with five basic shapes (circle, triangle, square, pentagon, lozenge), anthropomorphized each in a different drawing style, and then animated them tossing in a few gimmicks. You may not find it all that entertaining, but I did. Whatever. That’s why it’s filed under “Back to the Drawing Board.”
I explained my art making methods on the “About” page, now I’ll explain my animation methods. Actually, it’s not that hard. If it were I probably wouldn’t do it. I could show you all the code, but if you do this sort of thing it won’t be anything you haven’t seen a thousand times before. If you don’t do this sort of thing it probably won’t mean much. So I’ll skip that.
In either case, here’s how I basically work it. Let’s look at the square, Frankenstein. All the art bits are in one division which moves left to right. Inside that division the legs move back and forth, up and down. The same code applies to each leg, only the start time of the action is different for each so they alternate. The head and torso are in a second division nested inside the crossing division. This second division rocks back and forth, and within it the head slides side to side. That’s it. I told you it was easy.
To see what I mean, mouseover Frankenstein to show the divisions.
What makes it really easy is where it says, “infinite” in the animation code. That way you can just have one short bit of code for one walking step, repeat it endlessly, and “It’s alive!” Same for everything else. As long as you keep the timing lined up it just keeps going and going ad infinitum. Any questions?
Filed 3/15/19
Back to the Drawing Board 5
What we have here is a sample from the next set of books I did for Visible Ink Press after those features previously. (see Visible Ink Press in “Picture Galleries”) This represents the next step in the evolution of the Terry Colon drawing style which would lead eventually to Suck and beyond. While the similarities might not be obvious, some of the hallmarks are starting to arrive; curving arms, overextended lines, X in the ear. Smooth out the lines, make the legs stubby and the head ten times oversize, slap on some dullish colors and you’re almost there. Tune in tomorrow for the full picture gallery from the two volume set, Scams, Shams, and Flimflams –from King Tut to Elvis Lives.
Filed 3/11/19
Back to the Drawing Board 4
Above’s a self-portait from some years ago. Leaving aside the questionable resemblance and unhealthy, jaundiced palor rendered by the dubious color pallet, the genesis for this depiction was blueprints. Hard-edged line drawings with dotted lines representing hidden edges.
Mouseover pic to see underlying blueprint
Blueprints are real old school technical drawing, well predating the cad/cam wire frame thing we’re familiar with now. Of course, my picture doesn’t look very mechanical, the lines don’t really much follow any edges that exist in the human face, surface or hidden. It’s more a distilled blueprint of an expressionist sketch. Or something like that.
I played around with this basic idea for awhile, the line work getting more and more removed from reality eventually arriving at the pic below. The blueprint-iness is still there, but all sense of this world as we know it has pretty much gone by the board.
This is not a self-portrait, by the way. Very unsettling to think it were. Something like the unpleasant surprise of looking at my driver’s license picture and realizing, rather than a stalion in human form, that’s what I actually look like.
Anyway, I figured this schema could lend itself to rendering things other than blueprinted demons and sickly selves. Some of my efforts in this vien you will see in upcoming “Picture Galleries.” First up, The Machines. Well, what would you expect from blueprints anyway?
Filed 3/5/19
Back to the Drawing Board 3
Since I put up the cover art for Falser than a Weeping Crocodile and Other Similes yesterday, I figure it’d be apt to shove in art from inside same here and now. Art, with a small a, in a style and technique altogether different than the cover. Just your basic low-tech pen and ink line drawing. Somewhat along the lines of the early cartoonery I later put to paper for that repository of juvenile humor, Cracked magazine. (See links in control panel, left) Despite the gag cartoon format, they’re not really jokes. Maybe visual puns or something of that ilk, but hopefully fun.
Anyway, I did four books in this series the pics from which now filed as Visible Ink Press in the “Picture Galleries” department. It is’t all the illos, just the nine best from each book. In fancy-schmancy interactive page-turning book format. Quick link:
Illustrations from the Four Book Series: Falser than a Weeping Crocodile, …As One Mad with Wine, Every Bite a Delight, A Fine Kettle of Fish
Filed 2/28/19
Back to the Drawing Board
The “Back to the Drawing Board” heading here has a few meanings. First, I’m adding a daily post after two weeks of nothing doing. Second, if you noticed from that sentence, I’m not using the editorial we, which just doesn’t work for this and some other changes I’m trying out. Next, I’m slightly shifting the focus of the site and the daily; more visual, less writing. To that end I’ll soon be adding a new department called Picture Galleries. This will… well, you’ll see.
Lastly, applied to this particular post it means a different style of drawing. A sort-of what-if drawing. What if I never did Suck.com. What style might I have developed. It’s not like that’s the only way I can or did draw. Look at the Cracked archives and see for yourself. So I’m going to play around with that idea a bit. Because we is now me, and me wants to. At least that’s what I’m thinking now. In a few weeks, who knows?
Anyway, the opening pic is the first in a series of what-if drawings I was trying to explain above. There is no story for it. At least I don’t have one. Maybe you do. In which case feel free to take the art and run with it.
Filed 2/23/19
Weathergroundhog Update
Friday will see only a 20% chance of groundhogs, but a 100% chance of winter weather. This trend continues right through the weekend. If you’re travelling, bundle up and keep an eye peeled for the occasional icy patch, odd groundhog or rogue snowman. Only a slight change Monday for the start of the work week with fewer groundhogs as the pace of Valentines Day ads and promotions picks up. Expect the weather to continue to be wintery since it is winter after all and only a goof would expect otherwise. You can follow the weather on our Weathergroundhog app (unavailable everywhere) or go outside and see for yourself.
Filed 2/8/19
Weathergroundhog Report
How much wood would a woodchuck chuck and how much ground would a groundhog hog etc. and so on? A pretty silly bit of folderol to get us into Groundhog Day, a pretty silly holiday. Being well informed and on the ball, the terry colon point com reader will already know a groundhog and a woodchuck are one in the same critter going by different aliases.
The name woodchuck is allegedly from the Algonquin wecyeka, “fisher.” So nothing to do with wood or hogs, nor with the actual animal called a fisher, also known as a pekan, which at any rate is more like a wolverine than a woodchuck. Groundhog is from… we don’t know except it isn’t ground hog, the other hamburger.
Now the facts, ma’am: Groundhogs (Marmota monax) or woodchucks (also Marmota monax) typically weigh 12 to 15 pounds and live six to eight years. They subsist on vegetables and fruits, can swim and climb trees, and whistle when scared or wooing a mate. Which is why some folks, though no-one we know, call them whistle pigs.
Groundhog Day grew out of the old Christian tradition of Candlemas, when the clergy would bless and provide candles for winter. The candles indicated how long and cold the winter would be. (Whether the holy men’s climate prognostications were done by means of shadows or something else we have no word.) At some point some Germans pulled a switcheroo so that hedgehogs did the weather predicting. Later, Germans settling in Pennsylvania pulled another switcheroo, hedgehogs not being thick on the ground in the Keystone State, groundhogs got the job.
The current Groundhog Day schtick is, when the little beastie comes out of its hole on February second and sees its shadow, it freaks out (for some reason) and darts back into its burrow, an omen of six more weeks of winter weather. If, on the other hand, it doesn’t see its shadow, it rubs its paws together and settles back in for an early spring. So then, when a groundhog/woodchcuck/whistle pig emerges from its burrow on the second day of February and whistles, better stock up on candles. That’s our story and we’re sticking with it.
Filed 2/1/19
2018 Obituaries of the News
Ten Things that Did Not Happen in 2018
- Despite years of research psychologists admit they still don’t know why the chicken crossed the road
- Due to inflation economists calculate a picture is now worth 1,685 words
- Astronomers shocked to discover infinitely massive black holy-moly!
- Russian assets infiltrate State Department… Oh wait, that happened in the 1940’s
- Episcopalians formalize policy of separation of church and religion
- POTUS redefines “life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness” as “entitlement, diversity and the pursuit of orgasm”
- New rehypothication rules mean Wall Street banks can have your cake and eat it, too
- Afghan War renamed Hundred Years War 2.0
- Exhaustive study finds there is actually only one way to skin a cat
- Brexit
The reader might think these are all (supposed to be) jokes, except number ten which was actually the case and so news. Unless said reader is a British voter, in which case the whole government handling of Brexit is a joke. Only not the funny kind. Just another case of making the world safe for bureaucracy.
Filed 1/4/19