opinios

This cartoon was partly inspired by the ridiculous levels that I see people letting themselves get caught up in materialistic pursuits, partly by an article I read in The Australian (which reads a little too much like an Myer ad but is still worth a read), and partly just that good old-fashioned play on words that I love exploring...

Must get around to reading Growth Fetish, Clive Hamilton's book on Australia's escalating consumerism.

I actually drew this old man from life.

When we were in Nagasaki a couple of weeks back, I spotted him shuffling along in the marketplace. I only happened to notice he was moving because I was so amazed by the squillions of lines on his face and the several layers of traditional clothing, and ended up staring at him long enough to realise he wasn't standing still.

I hurried ahead of him, propped myself against some milk crates on the cold concrete and began to sketch. But after a few minutes a truck backed up and wanted to park where I was sitting (some motorists can be so inconsiderate!) He was getting pretty close to me by this stage so I didn't mind upping and hurrying down the street to hide behind a takoyaki stall to finish the job.

I'd like to think that I was reasonably discrete so that he didn't notice me the whole time. But old people in Japan are often a helluva lot sharper than they look.

Maybe he didn't mind. I'd like to think so.

I was going to clean up the image to get rid of the ring bindings from my notebook, but decided I liked the effect.

By the way: Happy Birthday Mum!!

When I questioned him on the potential for such an ambitious project to impede on his ability to have a life, Daryl Campbell of 30mins.org responded as follows:

"I would think I'm probably more active than a lot of people, I have a young family and I love the out doors, my current obsession is power-kiting, I also go surfing which is fuckin' cold in Ireland. I see 30mins as a very important project which I will continue for a least a whole year. Once that year is up I have various ideas about where I want to take it.

I see it like this, people sit in front of a TV and boil their brains every evening for longer than it takes me to do this illustration. The west is being brainwashed into thinking in certain ways, the media cannot be trusted and governments have lost it big-style. I cannot sit around and watch this going on, as an artist I want to draw attention to things which happen under our noses. I just hope people will use my work to look a bit deeper into the issues. I come from a culture rooted in hatred and violence (Belfast, N.Ireland) when you see your community suffering so much conflict, You feel it, you can start to understand what it must be like for a family living in the West Bank or Iraq etc. When I think of this it is no problem to allocate an hour or two of my time each day for this project."

Check out Daryl's fantastic and topical Photoshop illustrations at www.30mins.org.

Drawing cartoons is always a good avenue for those jokes that just aren't funny when told out loud. But I have settled upon this character with big ears and a big nose, and his girlfriend who I like giving wavy hair using the thick and thin of the pen's tip, so at the moment anything goes. Perhaps someone can help me think of a name for either of them?

I drew this on one of the nights in a ryokan while we were on the road. One of the nights that we weren't playing Waterworks.

Huh? I hear you ask.

That's right, we have discovered a new card game. Remember when you were young, before Commodore 64s and Gameboys and Playstations, when card games used to be THE only way to kill time? You would sit down and play for hours and hours with mum, dad, grandma, grandpa, the neighbours, anyone who you could convince to join in. During Christmas and Easter holidays when your family would migrate half the continent you would break them out in the back seat of the car with your brother, and when you got to your destination you would play them with your cousins until the early hours of the morning.

You know the ones - Uno. Rage. Luck Plus. O'no 99. And if you only had a regular deck of cards handy, Snap. Cheat (aka Pig's Arse). Old Maid. You would just never tire of them.

Well, Kim and I have stumbled upon an absolute gem. I don't think it was ever released in Australia but we were introduced to it by a Japanese friend of ours. And it's called Waterworks, the Leaky Pipe Game. Apparently it dates back as far as 1972 in the US.

It is a simple concept where players have to construct a pipeline of a certain length before connecting your tap end to let the water flow. But it can become quite complicated as other players meddle with your masterpiece, adding leaky pipe sections, T-sections, faulty valves and curved connectors to force your pipe to point away from the direction you want it to. Of course you can use your wrench to fix the leak, but use it sparingly as you only have two! It is both ingenious and addictive.

On our travels we picked ourselves up a pack from Toys R'Us in Fukuoka City. Of course, the rules are all in Japanese so we are not 100% sure of whether we are playing it absolutely correctly or not. We had to modify our rules a few times ("Ok, this is bullshit. I say we limit the number of T-sections you can put on someone's pipeline to three at a time, you're killing me here!") But basically we have it worked out and we are both hooked.

Who could have thought that plumbing could be so much fun??

Just got back from a week travelling around western Honshu and the island of Kyushu. Kim's 468 emails beat my 265, but of course 90% of it was spam and there were only a handful of actual messages waiting for me in the inbox. We had a fantastic trip despite Kim dislocating her knee (we think). I'm sure she will document the journey (with photos) much better than I could, so check 35 Degrees for an update soon. My new year's resolution is to write more. Well, to post more often. Whether that is a cartoon or some writing has yet to be seen, but plenty of people have emailed me to tell me that it just isn't good enough, dammit.

I'm sure this is the new year's resolution for many a half-arsed blogger out there. I do have an excuse, though - it is a pain in the arse for me to update the site the way it is organized. I have to run a couple of scripts and then transfer over a bunch of different files. So before it happens I have to do some more reorganising around here. 35 Degrees is now happily running (semi) smoothly on Movable Type, and now that I have a better idea of how to use it I'll move this site over to it as well. With a substantial visual rearranging at the same time of course.

The other reason I sometimes don't write much is because I am aware that I crap on a lot. I have my finger in a bunch of different pies, and I make the mistake of sometimes trying too hard to anticipate my readers' backgrounds. This is just something I have to get over. Not everyone will understand or relate to every post I make, but that's their problem, not mine. But if you want to read my drivel, I am happy to produce it. So this year there will be a lot more. I'm not saying it won't all be crap, but there will be a lot more of it.

Anyway, I actually am quite excited about the little web-based projects I have planned for this year. One of them is a very optimistic Japanese character learning site which I have all planned out (including the database schema which I have scrawled out over three different bits of A4 paper) and it will showcase some cartoons I have come up with that supplement the learning.

I also have a few other random cartoons that I have jotted down lately. I definitely got inspired to draw cartoons again after living with my cousin Nick, who churns out quality comic strips like there is no tomorrow and is on the verge of actually getting paid for it. There were quite a few nights at our shitty rundown rented house in Preston where we would set up in the study with our pencils and paper and frantically jot down messy ideas that would then find their way into comic strips. We would bounce ideas off each other and crack each other up with who could come up with the worst joke in the form of a cartoon.

This latest cartoon however is no joke.

It was inspired by our visits to the cities of Hiroshima and Nagasaki during our travels. I had no idea of the number of nuclear tests that are still being conducted by the countries that currently possess nuclear warheads (primarily the USA, Russia and France). The US have the nerve to piously decree that North Korea is not allowed to have any nukes when they are running so many tests (I think 19 since the Clinton administration resumed testing). Honestly, one visit to the A-bomb museums at either of the cities who have been bombed is enough to make you vehemently against these weapons. Video footage of a black charred baby's corpse is the one thing that sits in my mind the most. Complications and cancer from radioactive poisoning 10, 20, 30 years after the bomb was another reason to scratch my head and why nuclear states should reconsider using them. Ever.

If only the world leaders were made to walk through these memorials and museums in Japan to see the impact that they had on the lives of ordinary people (70% of the 150,000 people injured or killed in Nagasaki were women, children or elderly), we might be able to one day hope for some kind of notion of world peace. Yes there is a context in which the bombs were dropped, but putting Japan's aggression into perspective doesn't make me empathise that it was necessary to drop them though. It makes me angry.