This is another strip from my “Best of 2014” entry in the National Cartoonists Society annual awards. (See yesterday’s post.) The NCS requires 12 samples from the calendar year being judged. Whenever I thumb through the old stuff to pick out my favorites, I always am reminded the strips I like sometimes are not the strips you, the reader, favor. So maybe you wonder what I am looking for when I pick out 12 of my favorite strips in a given year. Of course, “funny” is the gold standard. The cartoonist who can be LOL funny every day is going to be a wealthy person, but that is nigh impossible. Even 12 times a year isn’t easy. Second, I look for “fresh.” I look for comic strips with a different and meaningful take on ordinary circumstances. This is, after all, what artists across multiple disciplines strive to do.
204 responses to “Polished Approach”
c x-p: ‘My resident multi-lined ground squirrel [“chipmunk” to me] – at least one of them – has apparently decided to come out and forage in our feeders.’
Cannot remember just where you live, but am thinking that it’s farther east than any ground squirrel other than Tamias striatus, the Eastern Chipmunk. Unlike most ground squirrels in Spermophilus and related genera, they do store food underground. They are also light hibernators, and do come out occasionally in winter and forage. Not at all surprising that they visit your feeder.
Peace, emb
Northern IL.
OK, you are within the current range of S. tridecemlineatus, the 13-lined or simply ‘striped’ ground squirrel, U. MN mascot. The site below has pictures; there is no mistaking them for chipmunks, and lots of other good info.
http://animaldiversity.org/accounts/Spermophilus_tridecemlineatus/
Written by a current[?] mammalogist at alma mater [grad], U. Mich., Ann Arbor. emb
I wear a lot of flannel, too..to keep warm. I never used to have a “keep warm” problem. I guess it comes with age (I will be 67 tomorrow). I also have some shirts that are not flannel but are much warmer than flannel. Several layers in each garment. This coming Sunday we will be going to church with temps around zero and wind chills way below. Please, eMb, keep your lousy weather in Minn. Debbe and I and others here can do without it. Thanks.
Steve Moore
Happy birthday, Sam!
We have literally not had winter here. My stone Mason who is building a second concrete river bed through middle of my property going north south to meet the one that runs east west to drain the flash flooding that now goes around my house is trying to get concrete dry. He says we may get sleet or snow this weekend. Last I looked it was going to be 60s?
Does anyone besides Ghost wear ties? To work, to church or socially?
The idea of casual pants less Friday is appealing in some cases but not all.
So how’d you know Gal? Happy birthday Steve-Sam I am.
Low tonight of 27 at 7 a.m. then high in 40s then going to 60s and 70s rest of week.
c x-p: She wrote that article in ’99, presumably as an undergrad or grad student at the U. Mich. Mus. of Zool. She is now a volunteer at Friends of the Rouge River Watershed [or such], in Dearborn, MI. Infer she may have another source of support.
http://www.zoominfo.com/p/Sally-Petrella/68741360
Sam, As I used to write in my monthly stargazer columns, ‘the management is not responsible for the weather’.
Peace, emb
Jimmy, I can relate to today’s original strip. I played with Lincoln Logs when small, and Legos when bigger. One is a major slip hazard and the other is a cheap and easy substitute for caltrops.
And anyone with cats has had the experience of stepping on something uncomfortable too. Bottle caps, nail files, what-have-you.
Happy Birthday Sam. You make three of us who have had birthdays in February and it’s not even halfway through the month. That gives me an idea, wonder how the birthdays distribute through the months here in the Village. No dates, please. Just months. (don’t want to give id thieves any help)
Jackie, the forecast for the Tulsa area. 10 day forecast below.
http://www.wunderground.com/q/zmw:74101.1.99999
Happy birthday SAM….may your candles melt the icing 🙂
One of my friends just left wunderground weather. Something about company being sold and contracts not renewed but he rapidly got a new job with a creative company. He isn’t weather, he’s computer geek, a really funny and crazy one. He said it was fun to work for them. I think it was idea he might have to cut the beautiful long hair and beard. He acts and is one of the best re-enacts I have ever seen, does so many periods, I say his costume trunk must be size of a freight car.
All I can say, Sam, is this:
May the candles on your cake,
Burn like cities in your wake!
Exhausted and need to make my bed, take med and go to bed. I just can’t do work to midnight or all night. Of course I am lugging heavy clothes around and reaching and hanging them high overhead with a torn rotator cuff on right arm. Left is torn but right is completely torn. No surgery until January 2017.
Made immense progress. You cannot find your clothes when someone mixes them up so badly. And don’t get me on whoever washed my black clothes with a mop! I do all my own laundry from now on unless my right arm falls off.
Debbe 😉 “…love is not always on time…”
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=htgr3pvBr-I
Jackie, I believe I read last year that TWC has divested itself of its digital assets, including weather.com and Weather Underground, selling them to IBM.
Yes, that is who my friend said. They were supposed to be also doing dress codes and hair and beard codes but I an sure that isn’t only reason a lot left. He dresses quite well, if casually but it is the magnificent hair, beard and mustaches he wears in his period acting roles. I think it’s a family tradition, his mom passed away but I’ve seen photos of her in costume too. I know him for his boat building but his wit is amazing. And this is all without pay so you’d have to be fascinated with history as well as costuming and acting.
My brother has done civil war reenactments for years. I may see one some day but I kind of feel like it’s celebrating war.
Thanks, eMb. If it reappears, I’ll make a point of looking at the lines more closely. I suspect we have the smaller one – the chipmunk.
I had also checked on google.com in the meantime for information.
Happy birthday, to Sam and anyone else to whom that is an appropriate greeting today. Sometimes I wish I were as young as you again but, then, I’d still have my knee replacements ahead of me – not wonderful.
Good morning Villagers…
Really overslept….gotta go
ya’ll have a warm Caterday…I’m not
Cat woke up and is down terrorizing the small couch at end of bed. I hope my minions show up late today. I am going back to bed. Hope the rest of cat pack is cuddled in one of the cat houses. I may have to do laundry to stay warm as the central heat in that part of house is toasty. The one that keeps going out is the one in my half, always has. I keep thinking of my employee in Texas whose washer went out and she couldn’t afford to repair or replace it because her oil exec husband was out of work.
So, she wore her mink to the laundrymat to stay warm while she did clothes. We said sell mink, get washer. She said she couldn’t, her mama would find out. A southerner would understand that. Wonder how oil execs are faring about now?
Not well, I suspect, if they were counting on their stock options to keep them warm.
P&PHS was dressed rather modestly the other day. Of course, for her that meant black skinny jeans and a filmy black shawl thing over a blouse that was décolleté to the point of being not quite proper. In other words, just right for me. 😉 She never disappoints. As I’ve mentioned, she had lost some weight over the past year, a bit too much for my taste. Now she looks just right, having put just the right amount of “Pneumatic” back into “P&PHS”.
Oh, and Happy Birthday, Indiana Sam. Wish you could have been there to see P&PHS’s cleavage. 🙂
From what I see on the Idiot Box™ this morning, something called Cupid’s Undie Race is taking place in a number of cities. (It’s a fund-raiser for the Children’s Tumor Foundation. )
http://2.bp.blogspot.com/-It7MoK3xIr8/UvKVGsMeU-I/AAAAAAAADVw/wuAl5rQlTGo/s1600/start_NYC.jpg
It’s just what it sounds like, and in some of those cities it is VERY cold. Leading me to wonder if a more accurate name might not be “The Pokie Mile”.