Hector’s gone.

Udo’s like a lot of us — he has to be dragged to his happiness and then can’t resist it when he gets there.

Still scanning photos and Stinz pages (hey, I just want to throw some home photos up on the internet, just in case… and a lot of them are fading!). It’s going to take a LOT of organization before I can get these pages into line for the Ka-Blam site and for this one.  Or maybe I should just throw whatever I’ve got up HERE and then work in more detail on the Ka-Blam books.  Whatever….

If it seems like all I’m doing is farming and not drawing or writing blogs, it’s just because I’m in the beginning stages.  The hens are pretty much taking care of themselves.  Soon as I get the new bee hives painted and put out, then it’s LEAVE THE BEES ALONE.

There is no way in hell anyone is allowed to put his hands on an officer like this, or in any other way — period — but Kjars and Udo have a special relationship.

Speaking of officers — Jack Davenport, in his first appearance in the Pirates, etc., movie, gets the facial expressions and instincts of hierarchy exactly right.  He is cool, kindly, patronizing to the child of his superior, hard-browed and even cooler to his inferior — but the moment his superior shows up, he goes all worried-eyebrows.  I’ve never seen anybody else do it quite so well, if at all.

He’s rather wonderfully world-weary in the 21st-century Miss Marple series, as a cockney police superintendent.  His performances in the second pirate movie, and in the Around the World, etc., film, with Jackie Chan, are deliciously degraded.  Nobody quite does proper-man-gone-all-to-hell like he does.

The Winzig/Udo fight wrote itself.  They are the model of Bosom Enemies.

I have to get this in tonight because I have to run up to Neah Bay to cover a mobile science lab that’s coming into the Makah nation. Any excuse to go to Neah Bay.

They have wifi 24-7 in the Marina, so I’ll be able to send a story without any trouble.

The usual hunting around to find tribal terms and attempting to understand their relationships with one another, if only superficially, and how we (oh we know who “WE” are) botch our attempts to make sense of them in return.

Actually had the temerity to ask a Makah elder (= nobody kills you before you get gray hair) “What’s with all the Lummi jokes??”

Did you know that absolutely EVERYBODY thinks the guy next door is feckless?

(At least I don’t go filming the chief’s grave without permission!  Geeze, DO some research!  Or meet some people.)

Ah, racism raises its ugly head. But that’s what Kjars lives for, right?

He’s seriously got a lot of problems. We got a swastika-painter up here; has defaced a former bank building (Bank of America… might be tempted, myself…) and the kids’ memorial rock at the entrance to Sekiu.  All the white locals are really mad about the immigrants — you know, those part Indians coming up from Mexico.  This bunch pretty much cleaned out their own Injuns in their own towns (well, except Clallam Bay, where everybody’s intermarried). As the Elwah say about the smallpox massacres and the subsequent eviction, “We were supposed to be dead.”

But WHAT is about the Lummi jokes?  All the Indians tell them.  They are the Polish Jokes of the Salish/Nootka. What did the LUMMI do?  Or refuse to do? Or did they just whomp the Makahs’ butts at bone-gaming and go home with all the winnings one year?

Udo’s just living his own Freudian Slip — coming from his background he’s going to want to get married, whether he believes it or not.  He’s simply — to quote the Decameron, “put the nightingale into his own cage instead of someone else’s.”  So don’t feel too sorry for the little man.

The great Scanning Project has begun.  Of COURSE, in testing the new scanning system, I managed to scan ALL of AFTERDEAD 3’s first episode (38 pages) into the wrong TWAIN system through PhotoShop.  The one that DOESN’t work with Irfanview (one of the reasons I still have a PC laptop — Mac’s Automator doesn’t do dpi changes for free.).

This was just the test project; I’m going to start concentrating on all the Stinz pages once I get enough experience scanning some of the extra art — some of it going to Norwescon’s art show.

Hector’s still here.

I have to remember these very amusing emoticons Dave put in for me to use.

“CoolGlare” just looks the way the Peach is feeling about Udo.  This is the Peach at his worst stick-up-his-butt stage. Then again, dealng with Udo and his happy little schemes, any of us would start to feel arboreal anuses (ani?).

Octopi/octopuses: it’s “octopuses.”  Because octopus is Greek, not Latin.

Everybody is saying “Bob and I” for all uses of the phrase, in an attempt to sound edumicated.  So it comes out “She saw Bob and I” which equals = “She saw Bob and she saw I.”

And the people using it this way will correct You on it if you use it correctly. This started as far back s the ’70’s, by the way. Oh, well.  Languages change.  Don’t get a former Catholic started on uses of “transpire.”

This is known in the army — or at least among 1970’s Madigan Hospital WACs — as handing your head on a plate.  The other guy doesn’t want it.

I recently got out of serving on a jury without meaning to.  The morning of duty, Hector had a nasty bleeding ulcer attack.  I gave him Kaopectate and MSM, and then had to drive to Forks.  My name puts me in the front row of the jury box.  I kept trying to straighten out my miserable face — which probably looked worse than if I’d just left my teeth clenched.

It was a stupid suspended-license case, just another instance of some Forks meth-head or logger trying to get out of an obvious law-scoff.  As other people tried to get out of service — lengthening the whole process — I took off my silver Makah bracelet and was playing with it, trying to control rising impatience and not hit the guy next to me.

That’s when the prosecution attorney said, “I’ve been watching you and you look very unhappy.”  (This was embarrassing. He probably assumed I was pissed about the stupid case.)  “Will you be able to serve on this jury?”

I explained I was monitoring a dying animal, and it had had a bad attack, but I was sure I could serve for at least a day.

“Are you sure?” he said.

“I can do it for a day,”  I repeated, admittedly rather snappishly.

The defense attorney asked me if I thought it was possible to not recognize someone at a distance.

I was pretty pre-occupied when I said, “It depends on how far away the other person was, what the weather or light conditions were, whether they were looking at you, and how fast they were moving.”

Neither one of ‘em wanted me.  Would YOU put a twitchy, pre-occupied, snappish, hyperbrained woman on YOUR jury?

(After I left the courthouse I called Dan and Hector was much better, even eating.  The meds worked.  He’s still here today, but very very thin.)

No, there really is no more depth to these pages than me drawing horses.  Which is a perfect theme, because peace is brought about in both sides’ heads by the equine princess. Her power and refusal to put up with people acts as the negotiator.

(How’s that?  Is that pseudo-deep-bloggy enough?)

Oh, just lots of horse drawings.  There’s no other reason for this page.

And pointing out that Arnold’s favorite pulp books may have had a core of truth.

A discussion of a recent western in True West (not recommending anyone read this mash of nostalgia and amnesia seriously) brought up belly shots, and whether someone could survive them.  In the movie Will Penny (Rat Patrol director), a kid gets belly-shot. He’s left in the freezing weather in an un-hitched wagon in front of a very raw frontier saloon and pig butchery, because it will hurt him too much to move him. The usually scum-bag owner says he’ll fill the kid up with whiskey — at no cost — until he goes. The kid’s party leaves him, and we expect we’ll never see him again.

Nearly at the end of the movie — after some passage of time — the kid shows up again.  He’s very weak and pale, but he’s walking on his own. It is possible that, keeping the body temperature very low — the Russians use it — combined with alcohol poured steadily through the gut — no virus or germ an survive alcohol — might have given the boy a chance to survive at least a few more years.  It’s well done and believable. It sounds right.

So if you’re ever belly-shot in the boonies, make sure it’s in the winter and you have lots of booze.