SHOULD SHORT MEN PURSUE TALL WOMEN?

Yes, of course they should! Is a girl likely to accept such a man? No, why should she? There are plenty of tall men to choose from. Is the short man likely to be humiliated in the futile attempt to get a tall woman? Of course! It'll be a horrible experience for him. Should he attempt it anyway, even if the odds are overwhelmingly against him? Of course he should! Let me explain!

Men exist to compete with each other for women. That's the role that nature has given us to play. It's our lot in life to be disappointed, humiliated, frustrated, chased away by other men, and be otherwise miserable in our attempt to get women who are simply not in our league. A man who can make rational calculations about love and then act on them is an alien creature, devoid of human emotion.

I think tragedy is part of life and it's unnatural to go to extremes to try to avoid it. We are made better by the pursuit of the tragic end. The short man will try harder when he goes after the tall woman. He'll learn to dance, he'll try to get a better job, he'll try to cultivate wit and conversation. These will all come in useful later when he's eventually (and inevitably) snubbed by the tall woman and enters the competition for quality short women.

By the way, I'm not short myself but I see the dramas that are being played out on the street and I can't help but form an opinion about them. By trying too hard to avoid humiliation short men deprive themselves of essential, ennobling life experiences.

WHAT DO YOU THINK?

HEADS THAT ARE GRAPHIC STATEMENTS!

It seems very odd to me that some people choose to make a graphic statement out of their head. Even more odd is the fact that some people deliberately choose to make their heads resemble favorite objects or foods. I call your attention to the man above who appears to have modified his upper body and head to resemble a salt shaker.


Here's a guy (above) who's made his head into a mushroom. A mushroom is a friendly, simple and sophisticated food which I guess makes it appealling as a head shape.


This man (above) appears to be paying tribute to the humble, flacid penis.


Here's (above) two feather dusters, one facing down and the other facing up. I kinda like feather dusters too but I don't think I'd want to look like one.

Here (above) is a head modeled on the cap of a Bic pen. People really like these objects. A modern pen cap has no threads and no clickable button like old ballpoints used to. A modern cap is simple and useful and these qualities appear to have attracted admirers who wish they could be pens. It's a real tribute to the product designers (I know bobbed hair goes back to the time before Bic pens but I assert that the bobbed hair enthusiasts of our day do it for a different reason than their predecessors).


The simple egg has it's admirers and imitators. My guess is that the individual above used to dye Easter eggs when he was a kid and it was such a pleasurable experience that he decided to be an Easter egg when he grew up. He's not alone. Lots of people try to be their favorite foods.

A FEW INTERESTING PICTURES

A friend turned me on to this killer WW2 syphilis poster (above). I don't know the artist's name.

Here's a detail (above) of a painting I'm especially fond of, Delacroix's "Orphan in the Graveyard." The girl looks stupid to me but she's portrayed with great nobility as if the artist was saying, "Even a girl like this is a human being and as such she has a divine spark and the potential for greatness."

Here (above) is the whole Delacroix picture. Below is an old drawing by John K where he's trying to out-Woverton Basil Wolverton.

LIFE DRAWING!

These are horrible pictures. The anatomy doesn't make sense, the line quality is non-existent, the shapes and volumes don't fit into each other. ..terrible! And the color looks like it was done by a five year-old. I almost threw these away a dozen times. Now I'm glad I kept them because they're a memory of a session which proved to be a breakthrough for me. That was the night I realized I could draw and paint anything I wanted, regardless of what the model actually looked like.

All of the pictures on this post are of the same model. I drew her fat, thin, long-armed, short armed, red-haired, black-haired, small breasted and big breasted. I love the thin forearm. Imagine what she'd look like if she let her arms hang straight down!

Here I added wallpaper just for the heck of it. I do that a lot now but this is where it started. I'll post some more from this memorable night when the drawings turn up.

OK, LINE UP! THE FILM DOCTOR IS IN!

ASK DOCTOR UNCLE EDDIE:

This week's question: "I love the cartoon I'm making but I have to admit that it doesn't really take off till the middle. By then half my audience is gone! How do I start a cartoon?"

-Perplexed

Dear Perplexed: "It's easy! You start a cartoon the way a dirty joke teller starts a dirty joke. The first thing a joke teller does is make you like him, the teller. He establishes his own personality first. He dominates the scene, he gets a rhythm going, he exudes playful mischief, he creates an atmosphere which is electric with potential."

"That done, he gets started on the set-up. The set-up is the most important part of the joke. It has to be ignorant as hell. The teller gets you to smile and even laugh way before the punch line. It's as if the real joke was that the people in the story would put themselves in such an improbable and silly situation. The punch line is just an excuse to justify the funny set-up."

"Transpose all of this to a cartoon and you have your beginning. How do I know it works? Because this is more or less what Bob Clampett did. He'd start a barnyard cartoon by first establishing that it was a cool barnyard, where cool animals live. He infused the cartoon with a bouncey rhythm and a sense of life and playfulness before the plot ever got started. He took the time to make friends with the audience. A lot of animation directors seem like they're scared of the audience and try to keep it at a distance. Directors like Bob and Tex liked the people they were making cartoons for and took pains to bring them in."

BTW, the caricature of Uncle Eddie is by John K.

BOOK REVIEW; "WHY LITERATURE IS BAD FOR YOU"

I love this book! I also love literature and so does Peter Thorpe, who wrote the book. What he's saying is that literature, even the best literature, has an unrecognized dark side and that it's hurt almost as many people as it's helped. Here's a sample of Thorpe's style:




Sorry about the underlining. I hate to read a book after someone else underlined it. Usually I do all my underlining lightly in pencil so I can erase it if I have to. It looks like I used a ball point pen here. Sorry.



A few chapter titles: How Literature Seperates Us from Our feelings/How Reading MAkes Us Lazy/Our High Toleration of Incompetence/Oversimplifying Human Nature/Why We Write Badly/How Literature Gives Us the Lust for Revenge.

Interesting, eh?

"TALES OF WORM PARANOIA": DRAWINGS THAT DIDN'T MAKE IT TO THE SCREEN

This (above) is from a deleted scene where Sally finally realizes what the Worm's intentions are. I did the sketch and Tuck Tucker did a genius job on the clean-up. The scene was deleted for time.

These last two drawings are inbetweens from the brilliant animation Glenn Kennedy did on the Worm addressing the audience in the beginning of the film. He had great teardrop theories and a beautiful, cartoony line that made me regret the necessity to color the scene. The originals of these drawings, along with a bunch of others, were stolen from the studio before they could be photographed. Luckily I had xeroxed a few before the thief got them.

Glenn did the scene over again, and he did a good job, but the first version is the one that lingers in my mind.