It isn’t hard to imagine where I got the idea for this one. When I drew it in 1990, I was a much younger man living on the shores of beautiful Pickwick Lake on the Tennessee River. Aluminum was right up there with hydrogen and oxygen as a common element.

I need to clear something up. When I said, a few days back, that the number of visitors to this site suddenly declined slightly, I wasn’t counting your comments. I was looking at data from my Web server that tracks such minutiae. There was a small drop in visitors last week that exactly corresponded with the winter storm in the middle of the country. However, I want to thank those of you who went to the trouble to post a comment to cheer me up. It did, actually!