Happy (and safe) holidays from Dave's Ink!

WinterHazards12

Don't be distracted by the kids jingle belling and everyone telling you "Be of good cheer". There's a lot to watch out for this time of year.

Statistically, emergency rooms and trauma centers see an upsurge around the holidays, which is little wonder when you consider the inclement weather combined with alcohol and overloaded electrical outlets.

Besides those described in the illustration above, here's a small sampling of other potential life-threatening hazards awaiting you this winter:

(If only my snowblower threw snow as well as it throws that wrench and dismembered hand.)

So put on your boots with the studded soles, hold onto those handrailings, and let's enjoy the holidays, carefully!

Newt Gingrich and the REAL war on Christmas

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"From the foldings of its robe, (the Spirit) brought two children; wretched, abject, frightful, hideous, miserable. They knelt down at its feet, and clung upon the outside of its garment." ……….. "Have they no refuge or resource?" cried Scrooge.

"Are there no prisons?" said the Spirit, turning on him for the last time with his own words. "Are there no workhouses?"

Once again this year, victims of the "War on Christmas" are warning us to be on guard against those who aim to pervert the true meaning of the holiday, as was spelled out so clearly by Linus van Pelt in "A Charlie Brown Christmas". Never mind the fact that many of our dearest Yuletide traditions, such as the Christmas tree (Nordic Pagan ritual) and gift giving (Saturnalia) had secular origins. Meanwhile, the REAL "War on Christmas" seems to be waged by those who seem to have forgotten the hallmark of the season, kindness and generosity toward the poorest among us.

From it's earliest inception in the United States, Christmas has had a distinctly secular side. It wasn't celebrated by the founding fathers, who viewed it as an English tradition. It was finally declared a national holiday in 1870, thanks largely to the writings of Washington Irving and especially Charles Dickens, who in 1843 penned the instant classic novella, "A Christmas Carol".

In early 19th century England, as well as in the U.S., unemployment was rampant, the gap between the rich and the poor was growing wider, and those in the lower classes who had jobs withstood dismal working conditions. "A Christmas Carol" was a scathing indictment of the greed among the upper classes and the exploitative nature of the business practices of the day, including forced child labor. It's not a stretch to draw comparisons between Dickens' England and the frustration felt among today's Occupy Wall Street crowds.

So, mindful of this history of Christmas' early celebrations in the U.S., it's odd and yet somehow fitting that Newt Gingrich chose the beginning of the holiday season to put forth his idea to fire union janitors in the poorest inner city schools and replace them with low-paid students, to instill in them a sense of "work ethic" and more importantly, to save money. Besides taking jobs away from main bread winners in families that can least afford it, Gingrich's big idea would take money that might have been spent locally out of already depressed communities. With this latest assault on child labor laws and organized labor in general, and with his recent advice to Occupy Wall Street protesters that they "take a bath and get a job", Newt Gingrich is doing his utmost to win 2011's "Scrooge of the Year" award.

It took just one Christmas Eve night and three ghosts to turn Ebeneezer Scrooge from a miser into a benevolent friend to all of mankind. But Newt Gingrich may be one of the tougher nuts to crack this holiday season.

Happy holidays and God bless us, one and all!

Va'u: new animation style

Lately, I and fellow illustrator Jim Swanson have been developing various ways of doing “live drawing” animations that progressively appear on the screen. This is the first one of mine that I'm willing to show. It was created with the help of Chipp Walter's fantastic (and FREE) "Scribe Assist" script. So, you ask, what's with the pyramids in a Polynesian themed drawing? (shrug) I guess they just seemed to fit the composition. Anyway, it's a fun technique and I’m looking forward to doing lots more of them.

The soundtrack is "Va'u" from the album "Percussions Polynesiennes: South Pacific Drums".

The scariest movie EVER!

When I was a kid growing up in Chicago, local TV station WGN aired scary movies late Saturday nights as part of their "Creature Feature" series.

Right from the unforgettable opening montage with the whispered voiceover and twangy guitar riff, you knew some good scares were to follow. For the most part, the films were spinoffs of the "big four" of monsterdom: Frankenstein, the Mummy, the Wolfman, and Dracula. They generally followed a formula that was comforting and predictable and in the end, were more amusing than scary. On one fateful Saturday night, however, after the WGN vaults had been mined for every standard monster movie and their sequels, they aired a little known film called "The Beast With Five Fingers". I rolled my eyes at the title, expecting a cheesy burlap covered sci-fi creature or poorly made up B-list actor, but instead what followed was the most terrifying adventure ever hurled from the screen. What? Don't believe me? I’ll let the trailer captions speak for themselves:

I wasn't easily frightened and until that moment, wasn't prone to sleeplessness or fear of monsters, but for whatever reason, this flick scared the hell out of me. So what was it about the film that caused me to lie awake that night? The plot of the movie was pretty simple: A classical pianist living in a big gothic mansion falls/is pushed downstairs and dies. His hotly disputed will threatens to cut his musicologist/secretary (Peter Lorre) out of any entitlements. After a houseguest is choked to death, it's discovered that one of the dead pianist's hands has been severed and can't be found.

The dismembered hand is subsequently the top suspect in a series of strangulation murders. What made the movie so disturbing to me at the time was the fact that the "monster" in this case was something so familiar and yet possessed of a mind of it's own: truly a "phantom limb". Add to that the creepy performance by Peter Lorre, who is at his snivelly and sinister best.

As it turns out, "The Beast with Five Fingers", made in 1946, was just the first of the infamous "crawling hand" movies. There's even a blog post featuring the "Top 10 severed hand movies", which includes 1963's "The Crawling Hand" and 1981's "The Hand" starring Michael Caine and directed by Oliver Stone. "Thing" from The Addams Family TV show and films was also clearly inspired by "The Beast With Five Fingers". Sadly, this horror semi-classic is rarely seen on TV these days, even in the cable TV Halloween listings. I can only assume that it's considered too traumatizing for broadcast standards, though I think it may be available on Netflix.

Happy Halloween and BEWARE THE HORRIBLE HAND!

Riding the Chicago Skyway

"As I was walking a ribbon of highway I saw above me an endless skyway"

- Woody Guthrie "This Land is Your Land"

This year, with both my kids attending Indiana Universities, I've had the opportunity to make repeated trips along the stretch of tollway known as the Chicago Skyway. The nearly eight mile road was built in 1958, near the end of the Eisenhower administration, which was responsible for building the interstate highway system as we know it today. Before then, the only option for long distance road travel was a patchwork of county roads and smaller highways, the most famous, of course, being Route 66, which ran from Chicago to LA.

So it's fitting, given the era in which it was built, that the Skyway gives off a vibe that reflects that optimistic, Disney Tomorrowland outlook of that period, from the extruded Art Deco block lettering over the entrance to the steel truss bridge spanning the Calumet River.

My first trip on the Skyway was likely at the start of a family vacation, when we made the trip out east for the epic 1964 New York World's Fair. I was too young to remember much about the trip, though I have a vague memory of barfing somewhere along the windy roads of Pennsylvania.

Today, the Skyway entrance looks a bit dingy and dated and the bridge doesn't look quite as majestic as it must have when it was first built. The tollway system, which was supposed to be converted to a freeway system once the roads were paid for, is still around and of course, costlier than ever. The automated i-Pass system, which is supposed to work in tandem with Indiana's i-Zoom system to operate the automated gate with the wave of the magic transponder, frequently has problems, and I'm required to yell the I-Pass number into the tinny 2-way speakers on average once or twice every trip.

I usually make the nine hour roundtrip between Bloomington, IN and Chicago in one day, so by the time I hit the Skyway heading home, it's dark and I'm on my 4th or 5th caffeinated drink. It's just at this point that the tollway splits off into two single lanes flanked by 5-foot-high, shoulderless concrete barriers which weave back and forth. The effect is similar to Luke Skywalker navigating the Death Star trench at the end of Star Wars, and it's always an eye opener no matter what time of day or night. Presumably this is due to some temporary construction rerouting, but it's been this way for years with no sign of a fix.

In the next several years, I expect to make about a dozen or so more trips each way across the Skyway. Maybe a some point during that time, it will be part of that proposed massive infrastructure overhaul that will keep it standing for another millennium or so. Or at least until we finally get those flying cars.