a great day for redheads

Tomorrow marks an historic occasion for redheads (AKA ginger kids) everywhere. Conan O'Brien will begin hosting The Tonight Show Starring Johnny Carson. The show may even have to change its name.

For as long as redheads have been around, we have been the object of intense jealousy by damn near everyone else. We understand. We are intrinsically awesomer by our very redheaded nature. The ability to Rock long and hard is in our DNA.

You may ask, then, why it has taken so long for a redhead to be the President of a major late-night television show. To that we just chuckle and shake our heads. Oh, the things non-gingers don't know.

I may be a blogger, but I am not petty. I'm not here to lord my awesomeness over you (which is an 11 on a scale of 1-10, by the way). I'm also not here to betray the Code of the Redheads (a code which I am forbidden to reveal, sadly). No, I'm here to celebrate a great day for redheads.

Here's to you, Mr. O'Brien. May you live to be one thousand years old.

Can you smell what the Friday Robots are cooking?

Dwayne Johnson sure knows. It's Friday and he is enjoying his retirement from the Evil Robot Fighting Squad. Little does he know there is one last job he needs to do before he can finally kick back and enjoy the margaritas. The world's fate hangs in the balance. The Rock is the only guy man enough (and with the technical know-how) to fight these evil non-organic beings from another dimension.

We're behind you 100% Rock! Well, all of us except robots who are posing as people in an attempt to infiltrate our government, media, and national cartooning societies.

originality

Recently it was brought to my attention that original ideas are often not the same as commercially successful ideas. This cut me to the core. After all, I believe people love to accept new ideas. Just think how thinkers of new thoughts have been treated in the past.

I began thinking about how I could use this information to better my chances at comic strip syndication. Falling Rock is fairly original; I haven't seen too many curmudgeonly owls or large lizards wearing baseball jerseys populating the comics section of the newspaper. What I need to do is think up a thoroughly non-original idea.

My first idea clearly has potential: Barley Clown.
He's a real blockhead. He can't ever kick a soccer ball, his basketball team never wins, and his pet chihuahua Loopy is temperamental and demanding. What could be funnier?

I'm diligently at work on my submission packet for Grapenuts, but here is the first strip just to get a taste. Hopefully it will be the next comics sensation!

Friday Robots

You may have noticed that Welcome to Falling Rock National Park has gone into Summer Rerun mode over at my website. The site that distributes Falling Rock goes on summer sabbatical because most subscribing newspapers are colleges: no students, no paper, no comics needed. It will return with a vengeance in the fall. I plan on filling the summer with drawings nonetheless. Friday Robots (and this here blog in general) will continue without interruption!

What I'd really like to know is, what would you be interested in seeing on my website or right here? I've stopped taking requests from the pervert: NO MORE PERVERTED REQUESTS, PERVERT. For the website, would you like reruns of really old episodes of Falling Rock? Or do you want to see the newest stuff? (You can also buy one of my books to relive Falling Rock hijinx!)

Onward and upward with the arts. Today's hastily drawn Friday Robots:

it occurred to me

Venn Diagrams are a fun and easy way to compare things to other things. The average Venn Diagram looks a lot like this:

Where "One Thing" represents a thing of some kind, and "Another Thing" represents a thing of a different kind. The dark space in the center, where the circles intersect, represents what those two kinds of things have in common.

Usually the intersection is not large, but I think I found two things that have a very large intersection: people who are way into LEGOs, and people who love Star Wars.

My eureka moment came whilst strolling the aisles of BrickFest '09, the annual LEGO celebration that happened to take place in Portland this year. Me, along with my friends Ian K. and Caitlin, were taking in the sights and noticed there were a disproportionate number of LEGO sets devoted to the Star Wars galaxy. Not only that, people had taken it upon themselves to build parts of the Star Wars galaxy that LEGO had not even thought of.

My hunch is that, on this planet, there exists an entire Star Wars galaxy in LEGO form. We did not see more than the tip of the iceburg at BrickFest. In the dens and basements of this dear world, boys and men (and maybe one or two women) have done what scientists deemed impossible: the creation of a universe within a planet. That universe is completely fictional, and it was built with colorful plastic blocks, but that should not diminish the importance of this effort.

LEGO Yoda would be proud.

what in the sam hill?

Our trip to the Maryhill Art Museum was not all about bad peacocks. It was nothing less than a trip into Oregon's peculiar history.

Oregon's past is chock full of characters. Boogymen, vampires, lumberjacks, Lewis & Clark: it took a special breed to brave the rain back before there was a single Fred Meyer grocery store. Sam Hill was one of these strange individuals.

Sam Hill was a visionary. It was his planning that brought the interstate west along the Columbia River. When lesser men said it couldn't be done, Sam Hill got his own crew and began digging. When people scoffed "What in the Sam Hill is he up to?", Mr. Hill proved that he was up to no less than the Future of Our State. When people said Portland couldn't support a proffessional basketball team, Sam Hill played alone for eight years (his record in the league was 8-648). Sam Hill was truly one of the men who took a decagon and turned it into an Oregon.
After his work with the interstate was done, Sam Hill did not rest. No, he wanted nothing less than a house that would stand for 1,000 years after his death. Maryhill, situated in Washington overlooking Hill's beloved interstate as well as the river, was built of concrete and steel beams and can withstand even the strongest gust of wind blowing through the Columbia Gorge. It is so safe that Dick "Nixon" Cheney used it as a hiding space when the terrorists wanted to kill him, and then again later when the hippies wanted to kill him.

Ironically, this safehouse to the conservative standard-bearer is located within eyesight of hundreds of windmills. One can only imagine Cheney's rage when he would venture out of the bunker and see the enemy's power source spinning in the breeze, mocking him mercilessly. It is said he still awakens from his sleep sweating and cursing windmills, ineffectually fending off the night-terrors.

Although Maryhill may be Dick Cheney's worst nightmare, it is quite pleasant if you don't hate nature or art. There is a beautiful sculpture garden in the shade of trees.

(Quantum Man)(Taco Bell)
(Seriously!)

Inside there is even more art, if you can believe it. Sculptures by Rodin,
a variety of chess sets from across the globe,

and, of course, Hill's magnificent gun collection. It is said he used these to ward off the zombie attacks Maryhill regularly endured in the 1920's.There was more, but I ought to let that be a surprise. After all, what happens in Maryhill, stays in Maryhill.

If you're up for a Portland day trip, if you like history and art and politics, then keep Maryhill near the top of your list. Just watch out for the peacocks.

BAD PEACOCK

You are looking at the face of evil.
A. and I had planned on a peaceful picnic in the Columbia Gorge. All the omens seemed be in our favor: outside it was sunny without much wind, the traffic wasn't bad on the way out of town, the blueberry muffins were on sale at the supermarket. It all seemed so perfect.

We opened our cooler at our selected table. Our picnic, which began so beautifully, was rudely interrupted by the ferocious lunch-stealer and her obnoxious boyfriend.
It was so bad we actually had to switch tables. Yet they followed us. The peafowl were not fooled by our rudimentary escape plan.

They didn't say much, they just crept closer and closer until their beady black eyes stared directly into our very souls. "Give me some of your sandwich," the peahen seemed to implore. "Surely you're not going to eat it all." I was going to eat it all, but my message did not penetrate her pea-brain.

Let this be a lesson, dear readers. Nature, as the Chaos Theory clearly states, will find a way. On this fateful day, nature clearly wanted this peahen and her peacock to eat our lunch. The only thing I can do is warn the rest of you to BE AWARE and, if you see this peahen, DO NOT eat a picnic lunch near her. The blogosphere is a useful communications tool, and I hereby invoke blogger solidarity to STAY AWAY from this peahen. I will post one more photo to make sure you know what she looks like.

Heart of darkness, dear readers. Heart of darkness.

This has been a public service announcement of Falling Rock National Blog.

Falling Rock Signposts

For those of you still unsure of Falling Rock's authenticity as a National Park, I present these photographs as evidence. I can assure you my love of Photoshop knows no bounds.

Friday Robots

I made two versions of today's Friday Robots, the difference being one is darker than the other. I was unsure which one to use, so I present both the Original and the Director's Cut in their entirety. You can decide which is which.

lake powell and the colorado river

Thanks to NASA and the Landsat 5 satellite, we have this series of images of the water level in Lake Powell and the river that feeds it, the Colorado. Lake Powell, as readers of this blog are no doubt aware, is a man-made lake at the head of the Glen Canyon Dam.

Due to a natural scarcity of water in the southwest, Lake Powell hasn't been at full capacity for (I don't know how many) years. I'm one of those canyon-huggers who believes the dam should be taken down so the Colorado can deliver its nutrient-rich silt downstream to the Grand Canyon. Not to get all Lorax on you, dear readers, but I think the fish need the water more than the region needs the negligible amount of electricity the dam produces.

In any case, the images are worth checking out. On the same website you can see satellite pictures showing how much Dubai has grown in the past 9 years. Gosh, I remember when it was a wee lad of 1.130 million.

guess who thinks I'm an idiot?

In the country I call my own, America, innovation is supposed to reign supreme. The free market economy will produce the best products at the lowest prices. In that way, old, outmoded products will be replaced with modern, more efficient ones.

That is an America that doesn’t actually exist. In that America, the domestic car companies that recently were given billions of our tax dollars would have been out of business long ago. We’d all be driving sleek, efficient Japanese hybrids or (gasp!) electric automobiles.

In the real America, American automobile companies have been stifling ingenuity for at least the past four decades. Instead of spending their hard-won money on research and development, building the next super-selling car, they lobbied Congress to keep fuel efficiency down and to keep foreign car companies from importing their products. In short, they sought arrogantly to maintain the status quo. Companies designing automobiles were more concerned with maintaining immobility in the market instead of moving forward, an irony I’d savor if it wasn’t at the expense of the health of me and billions of people I happen to share the planet with.

The Big 3 spent billions of dollars over the years stagnating the market, telling themselves that Americans wanted to buy the cars they were making. Guess what happened? Nobody wants to buy their cars. But worry not for Chrysler and GM: they get our money anyway directly from our pockets, via the government. We can’t have these huge companies laying off hardworking Americans just because their corporate offices are composed of brain-dead business school dropouts who spend more time playing golf than considering what kind of car a person would lay down $25,000 to buy.

Flush with losses, Ford decides the best thing to do is blow it on a website. According to an ad I saw in the New Yorker, Ford is “see[ing] the future differently” by designing hybrid cars. Gosh, it seems like only yesterday the first hybrid car was sold in mass quantities to the public. How 12 years slips away so quickly.

Don't make the mistake that I am in any way blaming Ford's marketing department or those brave souls who had to design an ad campaign and website explaining how optimistic Ford is about its future. They had to work especially hard to convince the American public that we are either stupid or incredibly naive. A company so opposed to innovation for so long is now fighting for its very existence, and some poor web designer was given the task of telling us that Ford has suddenly changed! for the better!

Ford is, in its own words, “driving in the right direction,” but that metaphor is incorrect. They are being pushed, kicking and screaming, by an overly patient American public who they have continually let down time and time again.

In the same ad campaign, Ford bravely announces they will have plug-in vehicles by next year or so. This comes a mere 170 years after the first electric car was built (thank you, Scotland). We can’t say Ford didn’t spend a lot of time on design.

Thank you, Ford, for opening yourself to mockery and showing us all how out of touch the Big 3 car companies truly are. May you choke on your own exhaust.

the most beautiful band (in the room)

Everyone should take a listen to this new band I just discovered. I hope to make a few converts by singing the praises of Coldplay.

Coldplay is a band that hails from England. Like the visionary British group Herman's Hermits, I am sure Coldplay will one day rule the radio airways. Today, however, Coldplay remains a largely unknown group of rockers playing local bars and the occasional wedding. Soon after this blog post, I hope that Coldplay will sweep the US of A with their infectious brand of pop. A new British Invasion (I hope!!!)!!!

Viva la Vida has been playing nonstop on my car stereo for days since I discovered it tucked away on a shelf at my local neighborhood Wal-Mart. I can't believe nobody else has heard of them! I guess it is my luck that I can now "spread the good word" about the greatest thing since the electric turkey carver (incidentally, I also picked one of those up at Wal-Mart for only $14.67).

Track by track Viva la Vida holds up to such classics as the Eagles' "Greatest Hits," Steve Miller Band's "Greatest Hits," and a mixtape I made in the 90's called "Smash Hitz."

Track one, Life in Technicolor, starts off in a rollicking manner with an accordion accompanied by what sounds like a howler monkey being neutered.

Track two, Cemeteries of London, has the audacity to use a full-on mariachi band. Can you believe it? I bet nobody has ever done that before.

Track seven, the single and title track, is so ingrained in my mind that it is now coded into my DNA. I can't wait until I die frozen in a glacier and 10,000 years from now future scientists can use my DNA to recreate Viva la Vida. I bet they'll flip out!

Yes, dear readers, Viva la Vida may be better than entire food groups, but don't take my word for it! Rush out to your nearest big box retailer and purchase a copy for yourself! Then shove the disc into your car's stereo system and blast it for all the world to hear. Your neighbors will undoubtedly ask you what all the ruckus is about, and you can proudly say, "That ruckus is Coldplay." And a new convert will be converted.

what it takes

This post can be viewed here.

Friday Robots

Today is more "Friday" and less "Robot," but that's okay once in a while.
The trees in the top image are inspired by Dr. Seuss. The markings that look plantlike in the bottom image are inspired by an ancient Irish alphabet called Ogham.

Happy Friday, everybody.

today's comic

...is perhaps the closest I've come to transcribing a real conversation with my brother. I'm not going to reveal who is who in this dialog except to say that, whoever you think is better looking, is me.

Falling Rock is run mainly in college newspapers, so we take a summer holiday since nobody would be around to read it anyway. The last new strips of the 2008-2009 year are running now and will run through May 15th. I usually do summer repeats, but if you, dear readers, have a better idea I'd love to hear it. The blog will continue on through the summer, spreading rumor and scandal in its wake. Never fear! Friday Robots never rest.

It's been a good year for Falling Rock. I'm comfortable writing the characters and I found a drawing pen that I'm happy with. My goal is to get this comic syndicated in the dailies; this year I felt Falling Rock could stand up beside the majors. If you want proof, check out my archive or buy my book. Either way, spread the good word. Good readers like you are hard to come by.

the latest trends

In the absence of any real news this week, I’m going to write about what I’ve been enjoying these last few days.

Adventureland

There are movies in which plot is king. That’s probably the majority of movies, actually. Then there are movies in which a bunch of cool people hang out for a couple of hours. Adventureland is that kind of a movie.

A few hours after watching Adventureland, my brain was still humming along to the rhythm of the movie. I wanted to hold that particular feeling. It wasn’t the best movie I’ve ever seen in my whole life, but it was pleasant, and fun, and funny. It gave me a good feeling and for that I have to share it with you, dear readers.

Jesse Eisenberg plays James, an overly-literate Jew who just graduated from Oberlin, drives an Aries K Car, and reminds me not at all of myself. James plans on moving to New York in the fall and attending Columbia’s school of journalism (because he admires Charles Dickens’ travel writing so much). These plans are thwarted when his father is “transferred” (we are not told why, although it might have something to do with the fact that he drinks nonstop everytime we see him) and his parents have no money to fund these extravagances. James finds gainful employment at the local theme park, Adventureland (what is the theme, you ask? ADVENTURE!).

In spite of Eisenberg playing the lead, Kristen Stewart (playing Em) truly steals the show. She takes the thankless role of “love interest” and fills it with that indefinable quality that makes men trip all over themselves and act even goofier than usual.

Here, as in many movies unfortunately, the guys are defined by what they do (or want to do) and the girls are defined by what is done to them. In spite of this, Stewart makes her character deeper and more involving than the script provides. I was so interested in her, ah, acting that I checked to see what other movies she’s been in. Turns out she is best known for being in some teenage vampire movie. Crazy, right? I never would have guessed.

Throw in hilarious performances by Martin Starr, Bill Hader and Kristen Wiig, and you’ve got a real winner. While not as hilarious as Superbad (the director’s previous film), Adventureland is extremely addictive in the same way the best TV shows tend to be. I only wish Adventureland was episodic; as it is, we only get 100 minutes with these characters.

The Complete K Chronicles, by Keith Knight

I never got a newspaper that carried the K Chronicles when I was younger. That’s a shame, because it is quickly becoming one of my favorite comic strips. I can only wonder how obsessed I would have been if I started to read the K Chronicles when I was 12.

Better late than never; I’m about halfway through this impressive tome. At 500+ pages, it truly feels like a “complete” collection of work. Still, I have to wonder what Knight feels like when he sees years of his life condensed into a single book. I imagine it is the same as an editor at National Geographic must feel when he sees decades of the presented on a single hard drive. Information is getting more compressed, but that doesn’t make it any less powerful. At least, I hope not.

Each episode of the K Chronicles is overstuffed with words, pictures, and jokes. Instead of the four-panel format, each K takes up a full page (usually 9 panels). Knight can tell whole stories in the space. Unlike some of the terrible comics that forever recycle the same lame jokes and stock characters, K deals in the real and the now. You won’t find any lasagna jokes (I haven’t yet at least), but you will see fresh takes on race, class, gender, from a black man living in San Francisco.

Also, he’s got a weird fixation on sheep. It gets funnier the more you read, trust me.


Adventureland and The Complete K Chronicles have absolutely nothing in common as far as I can tell. If I was writing reviews for a real newspaper I’d have to find something to close this post, shoehorn some weird “and so they both blah blah blah the end.” Fortunately I’m a hack blogger, so I’ll just say ROBERT PATTINSON IS TOTALLY HOTTTT!!!!!

Friday Robots: Telescopic Robotropic

As our friends over at West Lawn Park pointed out, a very special anniversary just passed. The Hubble Space Telescope was deployed on April 24, 1990.


Possibly the most exciting and adventurous NASA mission since Apollo, Hubble continues to learn us good about the universe. In honor of the telescope furthest from the Earth, here is a Friday Robots salute to Hubble.


Yes, the HST is not above telling a few off-color jokes in between snapping pictures of the universe in its infancy.

Interestingly, Hubble's iconic shape was not conceived immediately. Below are a few of the alternates NASA considered before arriving at "tin can with wings":

Personally, I'm glad NASA stuck with science over giant art installation in space. Especially that bottom right one. Looks too much like a spider for this blogger's taste.

Happy belated birthday, Hubble.