Having a 'Boy Look'

In  Australia we have what is called 'having a boy look'.
A good example is where a man goes to the fridge looking for the beers he knows he left there the day before.  Yet even though he stands in front of the fridge for ten minutes looking and looking, he cannot, for the life of him, find his beers.

Eventually he'll slap his thigh and shout into the next room to his wife:
'Hey love where's my beer? Ya didn't drink it did ya?'
And then the wife will shout back: 'Naah, didn't touch it'
'Well I cant see it! You musta moved it if you didn't drink it'

At this invariably the wife will sigh loudly and drag herself away from the TV (unless she is watching Oprah,  in  which case she will wait for an ad break), go into the kitchen, swing open the refrigerator door and lay her hands on her husband's beers laying in plain sight.

She will then say to her husband, without a hint of irony :
'Well love, you musta had a boy look, eh?'

I know this doesn't happen in other countries of course, just here. ;)

But seriously, thank you for the kind well wishes. I am still in my brace. The six weeks will be up on Monday and hopefully I will be back on the keyboard then.

At the moment I am still using my left hand for everything. Which is why I am writing rubbish.

But I had two epiphanies yesterday.

Firstly I discovered that if I hold a knife in my right hand (the one that is secured in the brace) and I hold a tomato in my other hand, then,even though I cannot move my right arm and shoulder, I can cut the tomato by swinging my hips so that my right hand goes back and forth like a pendulum- and with it the knife.

Go on, try cutting a tomato with only one hand - I dare you. And you'll see what I mean.

 Admittedly at first I tried to skewer the tomato in place by sticking a metal skewer through it and pinning it to a bread board - but that didn't work because it was a plastic breadboard and the skewer kept bouncing of it.

 I also tried holding the tomato down on the bread board with my nose while I cut slices off it (the tomato), but after ten minutes I only had two slices, neither of which I could convince my wife to put on her sandwich.

I don't know why.

After all I had washed my nose before hand.

I guess she just wasn't hungry.

Oh these images? They are Bo Peep.
She hasn't lost her beers - she's lost something else.
I guess she's just having a 'boy look'.

thanks again for your kindness.
I'll have to tell you about the other epiphany next time.....
ps if you click the images they get big

Oh almost forgot to say that the genesis for this image is Bruegel's The Blind Leading the Blind.
Bosche and Breugel being two of my favourite painters of course :)

i love my opioids

sorry to be gone again 

s day came and went.

stands for shoulder day. 

now i have so much to say

and only two fingers to say it with.

heh ;0

s also stands for

subscapularis tendon 

ever heard of it?

me neither 

well not till a few weeks ago

when subscap breaks

they can reattach it with screws ?

(s stands for)

thank goodness for surgeons

afterwards they put your arm in a brace so you don't tear the tendon away

again - which would be silly (another 's' word)

so these images were done left handed. 

like the typing.

the monkeys are puzzled for illustration friday.

the next couple are for height .... well at least i think they are 

i'd be lying if i said that i knew what mice had to do with anything, but i just had the urge to entertain the cat... anyway, my brace comes off in six weeks, so if i comment on your blog in a taciturn manner it doesn't mean i didn't want to grargle on like i usually do

i'm using voice control for keyboard shortcuts but un fortunately the dictation software with vista doesn't like my australian accent

but before i go a brief commercial break

i really want to tell you about endone - it's an opioid they give you and it's just unreal,
trouble is,
you need to lie down in bed and put a seatbelt on thats firmly strapped to the matress,

before you 'drop' the tablet and then hold on to the sides of the bed
its like dreaming in blueray with dolby 7.9 surround sound


yaaaaaaaaaaaahhhooooo......

but seriously, thankyou for visiting, i hope you are well

yyyyyyyyyyyaaaaaaaaaaaaaaahhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhooooooooooooooooooooo

:)

ps heres a pic of a subscap tear that i didn't make (image from here )

and some great yucky pics here of the biceps tenodesis 

thanks to everyone who wrote and sent good wishes :) much appreciated!

The Master Race

Well, if you've been around blog-land for a while, you might have guessed, from certain slip-ups on my part, that I had blue eyes.

And that of course makes me part of the 'master race'.

You might think it's easy being part of the master race - but in fact it's a lot tougher than you think.

For one thing, if you leave me out in the sun too long, my beautiful pale alabaster-like skin goes an interesting pink colour.

And if you take me out on sunny days you won't see how blue my eyes are - because my face will be screwed up against the glare so much you'll just see slits.

Of course people with blue eyes are higher up on the evolutionary scale than people with brown eyes. 

Everyone knows that. 

Well, everyone who's never had a chance to read a book on iris evolution.

The truth is, us blue eyed people ... well, we're... er....  mutants. 

Plain and simple. 

You see, originally we humans had three layers of pigment on our irises.

The bottom layer was blue, the middle layer some yellowy browny hazel colour, and the top layer a deep velvety chocolate colour.

And somewhere along the way we blue eyed people have lost the outer two layers of pigment.

You can still see it sometimes in a bio-microscope - you'll see little islands of brown sitting up above the sea of blue. (Here's an image from this site to illustrate).

Well, while we are on the subject, did you know I almost went to Vietnam?

If I'd been three years older my number would have come up.

So the chap in the top image is me, born three years earlier, in another country, to people who still had three layers of iris pigment.

He was lucky enough to return home.

Thank you sincerely to everyone who commented on my last post. I've been working my b$#@5om off trying to finish a project before "S" day - which will happen in about two weeks.

I'll be round to visit soon.

And let you know what "S" day is on my next post :)

see you!

Swamp

           TWO roads diverged in a yellow wood,

 And sorry I could not travel both

And be one traveler, long I stood

          And looked down one as far as I could,

    To where it bent in the undergrowth;

"The Road Not Taken" (first stanza): Robert Frost.

Ahh, there's nothing like a good snippet of poetry to add resonance to an image, eh?

Sorry I did not type much today.

I was going to tell you how the "Swamp' was an extended metaphor for life, and that the geese were in fact you and I, and that the creek was the not a creek at all but the River Styx (Charon has nicked under the bridge for a comfort stop and discovered that it is true about trolls) and that I have tried to make it all child friendly by bumping up the saturation...

But I knew you would have already guessed that ;)  

Thanks for looking. Again :) Please feel free to click for big.....

Shades: A Horror Vacui

Have you ever lain on a sandy beach staring up at the beautiful cloudless blue sky, feeling the sun light warm on your face - and thought about what it would be like if suddenly gravity vanished? How the earth's rotation would fling you into the heavens so fast that your eyeballs would sink into the back of your head, and as you sped into the universe your body would be suddenly surrounded by a never ending 'blueness'.

You know, the wonderful thing is, that if you   lay there on the beach and let the blueness of the sky surround you (like standing in front of a Field Painting) and concentrate hard enough it really does happen. And when it really does happen you don't exactly achieve nirvana. In fact all you get is a horrible spinning inertia driven queasiness as the sandy beach spins around you like a .... like a revolving sandy beach.

I guess, in a way, it's the epiphany of what it would be like to not have gravity.

You remember epiphanies? When a sudden realisation of a particular truth comes whistling out of the air and whacks you in the back of the  skull like a pea  sized comet? And afterwards you are left with a zinging clear brained  head and a realization that the universe is not quite the same as it was two seconds ago. 

To be honest, as I've grown older I don't have ephiphanies any more - I have, what I call, gradiphanies. 

Gradiphanies are kind of like slothful epiphanies that sneak up when you least expect it - like when you are flossing your grandmother's dentures, or measuring the length of your big toes to make sure they are the same size on either foot (they aren't). Or just hanging out outside the lolly shop waiting to be arrested.

Quite often these gradiphanies are epiphanies that you have had before - and have forgotten.

I have a particular one quite regularly - and I had it while I was jogging on the beach yesterday. (see pic at end of post).

Yesterday, as I came closer to the northern headland and it filled my vision, I had the particular peculiar feeling that, despite the sound of the waves and the feel of the wet wind on my shoulders that everything surrounding me wasn't quite real.

Well, to be perfectly specific, that it was myself who wasn't quite real. And that if I wasn't there, then it would make no difference to anything at all. I know it's cliched, that's it's a kind  of tree-falling-in-the-forest-not-making-a-noise moment, but in fifty years time the rocks and the cliffs and the dunes and the ocean would still be there - but it was myself who would be gone. Really truly gone.

But that wasn't yesterday's gradiphany. Yesterday's gradiphany was that, in truth, that it was my presence that made the landscape real, that, in fact, when I was no longer there, when I was no longer observing it, all the light falling from the sky would vanish, the sounds of the breaking waves and the rustling sand dune vegetation would stop, and, finally, the wind would drop away to leave an awful and still one dimensional horror vacui.

Strange isn't it?

Sometimes I wonder what it would be like to be a huge piece of rock lying at the base of one of those cliffs, watching  each generation of beach goers growing old and feeble and becoming nothing but dust.

Still, it's better to have lived and died, than never have lived at all.

At least I think it is.

And to be perfectly honest, we don't get a choice really, do we?

Oh, this is the beach I jog at. :)

And if I can blame someone for this post I would like to blame my outrageously talented (both writer and visual artist) friend Linda Hensley who recently was kind enough to give enough to give me the Genuine Blogger Award for modesty, intelligence, good looks, charm and all round good old fashioned 'niceness' - not to mention brilliance and a penchant for telling lies about myself.

But seriously, thank you Linda :) 

You can find Linda's blog exceptionale here. If you haven't seen her work or read her words then, when you pop in for a visit, you are in for a stupendous treat.

Yield

Hay! Thanks so much for all your kind welcoming comments on my last post. :) They made me feel all warm and fuzzy (could be hot flushes actually  - apparently you start to get them at about the age of 41, especially if you eat a lot of chicken)

Recently I have been reading the Girl With the Dragon Tattoo, and it's an interesting book because, (spoiler alert) the girl with Dragon Tattoo (Lisbeth Salander) is a wild kind of Goth, who in the course of the first two books , beats up a bunch of Hells Angels Bikies, tortures a sexual molestor by tying him to the bed and tattooing his crimes on his tummy, jumps in and out of bed with whoever she wants, all the while escaping a nationwide 'man' hunt, simultaneously tapping into the computers of the famous and infamous alike, transferring millions of Kronor into her own offshore accounts, and living the high life of your average Asperger's Syndrome person, while surviving a hurricane and having breast implants, and, at the same time, high-society-chameleon-like, being able to charm the suit and tie off any man (note: must be father like figure) she comes into contact with..

After a while you kind of start to like her. If you are un homme d'un certain age (and not a Hell's Angel Bikie) you think "gee, why aren't there more girls' like this in my neighbourhood?'.

And if you are a woman I think you are supposed to think: "Yeah, go GIRL!" Power to the Sisterhood!"

But I'm not really sure if that's what women think. After all, the book is written by a male (sadly deceased) who seems to have cast his alter ego as the main male character (totally irresistible to women etc) and let his own corporal fantasies build the framework for the novels.

Mind you the books went viral last year and became the world's second best sellers. So, dead or not, he must be doing something right.

So the 'nice parts' of The Girl with Dragon Tattoo (and there are some wholesome parts on page 37 right down the bottom in the second last paragraph) are the genesis of this image. 

Even Lisbeth Salandar was a child once.

thank you, once again, for looking :) please feel free to click for big - I won't be offended in the  least.

Heart of Darkness

The Hand Of .... err.....  "Death"

Do you know that scene in The Heart of Darkness (Apocolypse Now) where Martin Sheen's head slowly arises out of the dark waters of a Vietnamese river, his face covered in greesepaint so it won't pick up the light as he sneaks up the river bank and assassinates Colonel Kurtz (Marlon Brando)?

Well, apart from the fact that there is a yellow rubber ducky in this image, this post has nothing to do with that Heart of Darkness scene at all. 

Well that's what my therapist said I should tell you...... She insisted I head you off at the pass, so to speak, before you jumped to any mixed metaphors.

So, to get to the quick of things I'd like to say I am sorry exponentially. I am so sorry to have been away so long. I do have an excuse though and it's a long story, so pull up a chair, pour yourself a nice glass of orange juice, crank up the air conditioner and send me the electricity bill care of Jack's Foster's blog. (billing address at end of post).

Well you see it goes like this.

On Thursday the 22nd of December last year at approximately 5.41 in the afternoon I was riding a mountain bike home from work. It had been raining, there were puddles everywhere, and unfortunately the front wheel hit a huge crack in the road and I went over the handle bars and landed on my face hands and shoulder. 

But hold on. That's not my excuse. I am only telling you that so I get a bit of sympathy.  

 Mind you, to be perfectly honest it bl&#@dy fr&^5gen damn well hurt!

Of course it wouldn't have hurt so much if I hadn't done it  in front of 33 cars stopped at a set of traffic lights in peak hour traffic. 

And it would have hurt even less if I hadn't been wearing the pooncey pooncey bright purple helmet that I'd given to my wife the previous Christmas - a helmet that unfortunately had fitted her like a German WWI helmet might have fitted someone with microcepahly.

 Not that, I hasten to say, my wife has a small head - it's just that mine, being jammed packed full of brains, sand and salt water is abnormally large - and consequently just the right size for the XXXXX helmet I'd bought my wife.

Why am I telling you this...... hmm?
Oh yes, shoulder,sore, concrete, cry sympathy, excuse.
That's it: I am making an excuse!

So, unable to surf and laid up in my imaginary hospital bed surrounded by a bevy of beautiful, curvaceous Teddy Bears of all shapes and sizes, I have been working  on a few books. That's my real excuse (well that's what my therapist told me to say)

How cool is that?

But seriously, my therapist has also been teaching me to be more child friendly. The images here are the result of my first week of sessions. She tells me I need more work but I am not convinced.
:)

 Thank you for looking - again. They get big if you click on them. 

Which kind of freaks me out a little. :)

see you!

PS this one for If's 'Intention.'  At least I think it is.

The Last Stand of Captain Pugwart

Oh dear, Christmas almost, tinsel and lights and cake and cake and cake and cake and cake, and... err ..... tinsel.

Did I tell  you that I wear vinyl belts now? Unlike leather belts, they stretch - which is good.

Of course, like the pianist Liberace, they go the other way as well .... ie they don't just stretch, but shrink.

To be honest, so far I have not investigated their shrinking properties - though I once read in the Norwegian Adventurer's Handy Hints Guide (April 2009)  that if you leave them  in the freezer for three months they shrink two sizes.

With that tit-bit of information we can conclude (well,  it goes without saying, really)  that, if you go to the North Pole as a Santa Volunteer and happen to have a penchant for vinyl belts, there is small but calculable chance that you will need abdominal amputation if the temperature drops too far - courtesy of the tourniquet effect.

Hmm. Did you ever notice that I type rubbish in my posts? :)

I'm just trying to keep up with my friend Linda - who as a wordsmith has no equal - and types anything but rubbish!

Thank you so much to all my friends for your kind visits this year. It means very much to me. I count myself blessed to have met such a talented, friendly, encouraging, good looking and intelligent bunch of artists with superb taste and style. :)

I sincerely hope you had a WONDERFUL year - and that next year is double good.

I'll be round later and give you all a hug :) Let me know if you have sore ribs or anything like that.


PS: this is for IF's "Sink" - and yes, Elves always wear their pants (and coifs for that matter) in the bath.

Don't you? :)

Thank you so much for looking.


Merci beaucoup à tous mes amis de votre aimable visite cette année (even Leo the Toucan) Cela signifie beaucoup pour moi. Je compte myslelf béni d'avoir rencontré un tel talent, chaleureux, encourageant, tas beau et intelligent des artistes avec un goût superbe et le style. :) J'espère sincèrement que vous avez eu une année formidable - et que l'année prochaine est le double de bon.
Je vais être ronde plus tard et vous donner tous un câlin:) Laissez-moi savoir si vous avez les côtes endoloris ou quelque chose comme ça.

Muchas gracias a todos mis amigos por su amable visita este año. Significa mucho para mí. Cuento myslelf bendecido de haber conocido a un talentoso y agradable, fomentando grupo, guapo e inteligente de los artistas con excelente sabor y estilo. :) Espero sinceramente que usted ha tenido un año maravilloso - y que el próximo año es el doble de bueno. Voy a estar todo más adelante y darle un abrazo a todos:) Quisiera saber si usted tiene dolor en las costillas ni nada de eso.

Tusen takk til alle mine venner for typen din besøk dette året. Det betyr veldig mye for meg. Jeg teller myslelf velsignet med å ha møtt en så talentfull, vennlig, oppmuntrende, gode jakt og intelligent gjeng av kunstnere med ypperlig smak og stil. :) Jeg håper du har hatt en strålende år - og at neste år er dobbelt bra.
Jeg skal være runde senere, og gi dere alle en klem:) La meg vite om du har såre ribbein eller noe sånt.

Vielen Dank an alle meine Freunde für Ihre Besuche in diesem Jahr. Es bedeutet mir sehr viel. Ich zähle myslelf gesegnet, erfüllt eine so talentierte, freundliche, ermunternde, gut aussehende und intelligente Horde von Künstlern mit herrlichem Geschmack und Stil haben. :)
Ich hoffe, Sie hatten ein wunderbares Jahr - und das nächste Jahr ist doppelt gut.



(Oh if you are reading this before the 19th go here if you would like a free taste of Poser - a program originally designed for artists to pose models without having to talk to real humans.... it comes with a stack of 'models')

Suspendering My Disbelief.

I've been reading The Voyage of the Dawn Treader  (C.S. Lewis) for a few days .. well actually I have been reading it for the last few nights. 

Specifically, very late at night.

You know that time of night when, tucked away  in bed, you tend to fall asleep with a book suspended by one stiff arm above your face. Regardless of whether your eyes are open or closed, the book hangs like an executioner's axe, threatening to fall and dent your nose or, at the very least, give you a bloody set of lips, should you release your grip for a moment.

It all goes to prove, without a shadow of a doubt, that it is a dangerous thing to be a reader of books.

I can only thank my lucky stars (read: Bank Manager) that I cannot afford an e-reader - because I fall asleep while reading so often that my nose, already bent like the beak of  the South Australian Yellow Breasted Nosy Noodletwit (genus: eripydies), would have been plastered all over my face by now.

Still, back to the subject at hand, what ever that was... 


..... ah yes, C.S. Lewis. 


The greatest thing about The Voyage of The Dawn Treader is its first paragraph. As a 'hook', as an entre, as a 'warmer-upperer', as a piquant sorbet, this paragraph is without equal. 

For example, the first line is: 

"There was a boy called Eustace Clarence Scrubb, and he almost deserved it."

Unfortunately C.S. Lewis must have had an apocolypitic attack of epiliopithy after he wrote the first paragraph, because, without so much as a deeply bated breath, the book soon sinks into the depths of of authorial narrative intervention. (eg: Dear reader, you should not worry yourselves about Eustace, our erstwhile hero, because he is nought but a scoundrel who never changes his socks, even on Sundays.) 

Lewis's clumsy interventions are clumsy enough to make us certain that he (Lewis)  is clumsy keen for his  readers not to be hung up by their clumsy suspenders of disbelief.

And the fact that it is written for twelve-year-olds is no excuse for these lapses.

Mind  you, I am older than 12 and I am still reading it, suspenders or not.

So, the cover of The Voyage of the Dawn Treader is the genesis for this image. 

It's also a bow, not only to the cover of Shaun Tan's book The Arrival, but to the techniques of my wonderful artist friends Janne and Mita.

Oh, I almost forgot: this Illustration is for IF's prompt "Separated", a word that I have only recently learnt to misspell. Thank you for looking. 

One more thing. Do you need a good laugh? Check out Penspaper Studio. :). Elizabeth has a great sense of humour. 

The Sky is Falling

My good friends  Karen and Shirley put me on to the SCBWI challenge about the Sky Is Falling - a story I confess to having never read till two days ago. Very interesting....

If you are doing this challenge please feel free to leave a note. I would love to see your approach.

Of course me not being in the SCBWI could be a problem :) If you are in Oz and a member please let me know what it's like so I can be tempted :)

cheers from here 

Thank you for your visit!

Brigade

Thank you so much to everyone who checked out my new portfolio site.

And thank you for enjoying hump day and being good sports :) 

There are some few people I would still like to visit. I am the tortoise in that Aesop's fable, you know, that one about the dog and the tortoise where the tortoise (named Rhonda)  has a nanny nap .... 

'Rhonda'? Hmm must go and look that one up :)

So my deepest apologies to you. You know who you are.... 

Meanwhile I hear Bella Sinclair has some wonderful news :) She rips!

Congratulations Bella !!!

Oh this image is for IF's "Brigade". I gave the colonel a Santa beard and hat, but he looked silly. That's why the dog is running away.

see you and thank you very much for your visit!

(note to self: time for this image 6.14 am till 9.50 am)

Round, Humpty Dumpty Day, and Portfolio Links

    Do you have the expression hump day where you live?
    'Hump day' is used to describe Wednesday's position as the middle day in the five day working week. As a 'go word' or a catch phrase, it's something that has spread into our local language surreptitiously over the last few years.
    For a long time it belonged mainly with the business generation - along with such phrases and gestures as 'touch base', 'do lunch', 'network' and air kissing.
    During the ridiculously short time I have been on the planet, I have noticed a few things. And one of them is this: Expressions are like Irish people, in that they tend to migrate. (Finnie's Third Theorem)

    So..... the other day I had to call one of our dealers and the phone was answered by a charming middle aged woman. It was a Wednesday, so, as you do, I said:
       "Hi, it's Andrew Finnie. Happy Wednesday!"
        "Yes, hi Andrew! Happy 'hump day," the woman said chirpily. She has a very refined voice, very lady like, very motherly.
        There was a bit of a pause then, as we both pondered the ramifications of her use of the adjective that proceeded the word 'day' - and what other meanings it might have colloquially. Finally there was a small embarrassed 'titter' from the other end of the phone and the refined feminine voice said:
        "Well, I never thought of it like that, you know..."
        "Oh, oh," I said, trying to think of the fast retort that didn't involve 'hump signs' or 'camel humps' or monosexual amoeba.

         But the only thing I could come out with was a meek: "Me neither."
         Of course for a lot of people Saturday night is 'hump day' - in that it is the temporal fulcrum of the weekend and everything else is down hill from there till Monday morning.
         So I offer you this image as a kind of celebration of 'Humpty Dumpty Day" - which I have just invented and am still to choose a date for (I was humping for December 25th but apparently that one is gone)
         It's genesis is not only 'hump day', but an image I saw last year by Rene Millot, whose work reminds me of Maxfield Parrish - an ace craftsman artist (first half 2oth century) who built up luminous paintings by not mixing his colours on the palette, but by blending them optically as glazes.

PORTFOLIO SITE and PRESS REVIEWS


Ahh this is sounding like a church news letter. Last Sunday immediately after church, a large white pigeon named Neville pooped in Mrs Saurekruat's left eye as she was looking up in the sky to see if anyone was really, truly watching her....

Oh  I made a portfolio site. I have a few books on the go and have finally sent one of them away - 'bout time. It's a site like this one with most of my blah blahing removed. I'd be honoured if you take a look. (There's also some press reviews here if you are curious :) )

Please click on a face and you will be magically transported to a new page. Alternatively you might like to right click open in new tab.

Any comments are very welcome. The fact that there are 34 pages of images is on the downside I think.
Thanks again for your time.

see you :) from Oz!