Take a break. Grab a beer. Relax.

Whew - that's a lot of uploading. Here's a picture of me, relaxing:

Ladies, feel free to faint with passion.

That thing on my head, by the way, is the hat I just crocheted - my friend Lauren showed me how to do it. I'm very proud. Here it is, up close:

Unfortunately, I made the crochets on the first round way too tight, so it squeezes my head (I have a friggin' huge noggin), so I'm planning to take it apart somewhat and correct the situation. At least it doesn't fall off my head. The nice thing about making your own clothes - besides the fact that you look so impoverished, no one would dream of mugging you - is that they're all custom-made. I have problems with winter hats: they are either beanies, or way too big and hot. This way I at least have a hat I can stand, and I have no one to blame but myself if it's uncomfortable. Also, yarn is pretty cheap. I'm planning to make some fingerless glove kinda things, too.

Anyway, by next post I'll have returned to uploading comic pages. Stay tuned.

Rick Out.

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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...

Artist Spotlight: Tom Eaton

I wanted to do a quick artist spotlight on Tom Eaton, best known for his work in Boy's Life Magazine. I used to have a subscription to Boy's Life when I was a kid; unfortunately I didn't keep any of them, as they just weren't...I don't know, not really worth keeping. I just remember it as being 90% toy advertisements, some "how to get along with others" advice, the same camping article reprinted 20 million times, and some half-funny comics. As the years went on, the advertisements got bigger and louder, the articles became less interesting, and the comics section got shorter and shorter. But there was one gem hidden in the midst of the mediocrity: artist Tom Eaton. He wrote and illustrated "The Wacky Adventures of Pedro" ( BL's burro mascot), "Dink & Duff", and myriad other comics, crossword puzzles, games, and short pieces. He was the magazine's resident cartoonist, and about the only reason I actually read the magazi...

Paleontology: The sailfin-water connection

Sails! Yes, I'm talking about the tall vertebral fins running across the backs of, most famously, Spinosaurus aegypticus and Dimetrodon ssp. These weird structures have driven paleobiologists crazy for years: what were they for? How did they work? What benefit did they impart to the creatures that used them? Two interpretations of Spinosaurus. From the excellent blog Mesozoic Archives. The picture is complicated by the fact that Dimetrodon and Spinosaurus could not have been further apart, taxonomically speaking: Dimetrodon was a synapsid - like mammals - while Spinosaurus and other dinosaurs belonged to the archosaur supergroup, like crocodiles. Their last common ancestor was some kind of primordial lizardy thing, and since then they had nothing to do with each other. They were also separated by 207 million years, which is three times as long as the span separating dinosaurs and us. Source: Wikimedia Taking an even broader view, things get weirder. Just after Di...

The Penguin

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