"Steal A Lot And They Make You King"

So this afternoon I was forced to go home and change clothes before I came back to work, all because I was wearing jeans and the NCAA folks are supposed to be coming through this afternoon on their inspection thing. Part of me understands that the university wants to put the best possible face forward for all of this crap, but another part of me thinks that if we're getting in trouble because I was wearing jeans instead of khaki pants, someone's priorities are not right.

An email from one of the librarians both made me cheer and made me weep this afternoon. See, Ozarks had this wonderful resource called Early English Books Online. It's a database of thousands of Early Modern English primary sources, ranging from books to pamphlets to sermons to royal proclamations to about anything you can imagine. It's a terrific source of primary material, and Ozarks got it right as I was starting the research for my senior seminar paper (a fortuitous coincidence of timing, I thought).

Anyway, when I came to OU, I was a little disappointed to find that this much larger, much more well-funded institution did not have EEBO. Instead, the OU library had the older, much more annoying microfilm version. Same material, but you have to sit at a microfilm reader and print off page by page, which adds up after awhile. I spent many weekends sequestered away in the bowels of the library, scrounging around in the Early English Books Microfilms, digging for sources and hoping they'd have what I needed, and then spending entirely too much money trying to get decent printouts of the sources.

Well, OU has finally remedied that problem by getting EEBO...after I no longer need it, of course. I've finished my primary source research. That stuff's been done for ages. But I'm still glad they've got it--I'd hate for others to have to go through the hell I went through.

Okay, that's not true. I want others to suffer as well. But I may go and print off a bunch of sources that I don't necessarily need but would like to have, just because.

In his post for today's Shaw Island, Zach Stroum (a funny, funny man) summed up exactly what it is to be a cartoonist:

"Some people lead countries, I tell burrito jokes."

That's about the way it really works, y'know. The purpose of cartoonists is to entertain and, occasionally, maybe make people laugh.

One quibble I do have with Shaw Island now is the art style. I think Mr. Stroum (I hesitate to call him Zach or Stroum, since I don't know him well enough for the former and respect him too much for the latter) has hit the same stylistic barrier I hit about a year ago. Like me, he also has not had any formal training (that I know of) in art, but has instead just sorta picked it up as he went along. Which is fine, since the jokes, characters, and stories have always been what's drawn me to his comic anyway (no pun intended). But he's reached a point where the character designs are too stiff and too blocky. His art has the hallmarks of a guy who watches lots of anime and wants to emulate what he sees, but doesn't quite have the ability to make it work, and so it comes across as too derivative. He needs to break out of his current style. I'm willing to bet that in the next few months, he probably will.

Anyway, the comment still amused me and managed to penetrate the early morning fog that's wrapped around my brain first thing in the morning.

~chuck

Song of the Moment: Bob Dylan, "Sweetheart Like You"