Ten Laws of the Universe

Here are some laws of the universe. I post them here, gentle reader, so that you don't have to find them out for yourself:

1. He who tries to be loved by everyone will have the friendship of no one.

2. Rearrange a brick wall with your head, and then you will know how to change another man.

3. Tyrants change the world; Saints change themselves.

4. Here is the truest test of a wife: paddle a canoe with her for twenty miles.

5. There is nothing more hateful than a forced laugh.

6. Any man who claims to know himself is a liar; any man who tries to explain himself is a bore.

7. The grasshopper did only what he wanted, and died of cold; the ant stored up for the
winter, and died surrounded by seeds. Now find the happier of the two.

8. There is such a thing as being too decisive.

9. The only way to deal with anxieties is to ignore them to death.

10. Live simply, and you'll live free.

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The Problem with Reconstructing Deinonychus

So as you may know, I am partly obsessed with dinosaurs. Scratch that - there's a small lobe of my brain devoted to dinosaurs. I love em, God help me. I even have a super-double-plus-top-secret dinosaur comic maybe in the works...but you didn't hear it from me. Anywho... Part of my problem is in the reconstruction of said prehistoric beasties, namely those icons of American dino-obsession, Deinonychus ( Velociraptor to you Jurassic Park aficionados...it's not just a Hollywood bastardization, there's a complicated story behind it which I covered in this old post ). Now, we all know what Deinonychus looked like: wolf-size, sleek, toothsome head balanced by a long tail, grasping front claws and of course the eponymous "terrible claw" on its hind foot. The shape is burned into our collective unconscious; you could construct the most fantastic amalgam of different bits and pieces, but as long as you include the sickle-claw, you're golden. The devil, of...

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A Tribute to Antediluvian Salad

Hello there, gentle readers. As you may have gathered, I'm a dinosaur nut, the Terrible Lizards being the first thing I could draw reliably well. While I love drawing dinosaurs, I've found my technique getting a bit stale lately; it seems like I'm quite a bit behind the times in terms of dinosaur science and our understanding of these creatures. Much of this is cultural baggage left behind in the wake of Jurassic Park , but there's also a fair amount of aesthetic prejudice - that is, "I want my dinosaurs to look or act like this" - and God help any scientist who suggests otherwise. It's the Cool Factor: we want our 'Raptors deadly intelligent, hyperfast, scaly, and able to disembowel a sauropod in minutes flat; our T rexes must roar triumphantly through elegant, shrink-wrapped faces; our Ceratopsians and other large herbivores must be essentially bison or rhinoceras-like. Anything else offends our sense of dino-propriety. What do you mean, Deinonychu...

The Penguin

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