If I were a song AND a commercial...

Sometimes I get a little down. Feel a little low. And then I just think about how awesome just about EVERYTHING is.

If I were a song, AND a commercial....

...this is what I would be.

Check it out.

Vegans and Dinosaur Products

This is actually true. I removed and sold a kidney to the gas station attendant so I could fill up my tank of gas. It's okay, you can live with only one kidney. I don't know what I'm going to to tomorrow though...

But thinking about gasoline so much got me wondering...why are Vegans allowed to use gasoline?

...follow me here.

Gasoline is made from crude oil.

Crude oil is, among other things, basically the decomposed juice from billions of dead plants and *GASP* animals.

Vegans don't consume anything made from animals.

Vegans drive cars.

I don't know, you tell me.

I think if we could convince the Vegans to stop using gasoline (and they should, to really be Vegans!) then there would be a little more gasoline left for the rest of us. And the more we put off finding alternative energy sources, the better.

After all, there are baby seals to consider. (See Previous Post)

--A--

I Don't Feel Sorry About Killing Things That Wouldn't Feel Sorry About Killing Me

I feel like a person has two choices in this life: Be on the side of the baby seals, or be on the side of the Polar Bears.

Everybody says we are killing polar bears with global warming. Okay, maybe that is true and maybe it isn't, the science is actually not as conclusive as you would think. But that isn't the point. The point is that Polar Bears eat baby seals. You think the seals are happy about that? I bet seals are ALL FOR global warming. Seals, especially baby seals, probably hop up and down in fuzzy, incredibly adorable glee every time another SUV rolls off the assembly line.

I personally think that Polar Bears can fend for themselves. Anything that would GLADLY rip my face off and eat it doesn't need my help.

So, pick a side, ladies and gents. Who are you going to support this election season? The candidate who could chase you down at thirty miles an hour on icy terrain and rip your head off with one swipe of his massive paw...



Or are you going to support this little fella...



I think you'll make the right decision.

Contest

My Dear, Lovely, Friendly Readers, 

It's time for the first annual Sharpie Doodles "Things that Make Me Angry or That I Don't Get or That I Find Very Strange" submission contest! 

Got something that makes you angry? 

Got something that you don't get? 

Got something that you find very strange? 

Submit it to Sharpie Doodles and I will write a post and draw a comic about it! What fun for all! 

But wait, you say, how is this a contest? Is there a winner? Is there a prize? 

No. 

But I'm calling it a contest anyway. 

And.....

.....

.....

GO! 

Wiki Hows

Wiki Hows

How to Get Beautiful Women to be Attracted to You.

Step One: DO NOT work a sedentary job in Public Television, being exposed to no light other than neon bulbs and LCD screens.
Step Two: DO NOT eat fast food.
Step Three:DO NOT make the fact that you are really enjoying the John Adams biography the topic of every conversation.
Step Four: Enjoy a fulfilling and non stop dating life!

How to Write an Annoying Blog Post or Facebook Note

Step One: Be a teenager
Step Two: Feel ways about stuff.
Step Three: Express your emotions in hackneyed metaphors and badly structured whines about things which surely no one else has ever experienced, interspersed with mind blowing (to you) revelations as to the nature of life, the world, and human nature, such thoughts the likes of which you can't believe no one else has ever thought of.
Step Four: Enjoy comments from your equally brilliant friends about how smart you are.

How to Get People to State the Obvious

Step One: grow facial hair.
Step Two: Shave.
Step Three: Listen to people walk up to you and say "You Shaved!"

How to Make Yourself Feel Like a Schmuck

Step One: Think about how hard you believe your life is.
Step Two: Think about the fact that your life is easier than 99% of everyone else's life on the planet and that YOU didn't have to dig through a garbage heap in your bare feet for dinner last night.
Step Three: Think about the fact that you really don't let this simple knowledge make you grateful for every single day that you draw breath on this planet.

How to Destroy the Lighthearted Tone of a Blog Post

Step One: See above.

How to Get Andrew Marshall to Make Instant and Unfair Judgements About You at First Glance.

Step One: have blonde hair, wear really big sunglasses, and drive a late model car that your parents bought you. Complain about the car.
Step Two: wear shell necklaces, tight fitting polo shirts, leather flip flops, and have a shaggy haircut under a precariously perched, pre-frayed baseball hat with a store logo on it. Play Halo 3 badly.
Step Three: Quote Jon Stewart as your source for all political, social, and economic information.
Step Four: Enjoy as Andrew finds himself powerless to be a good Christian and attempts to ridicule you in conversation without you even knowing.

How to Break Writers Block and Make a Long Over Due Post

Step One: Become fascinated by Wiki How.
Step Two: Become inspired by Wiki How.
Step Three: Rip Off Wiki How.

My Very Exciting Magic Carpet Just Sailed Under Nine Palace Elephants

First of all, Simon, Nick, Adam, Dawn, Albright...thanks for commenting on the Gore Porn post. It's nice to know that A) At least five people read this and B) you guys agree with me. Adam, feel free to rant whenever you want. That goes for everybody. Just don't make it too angsty. Remember, it's the Sharpie Doodles way.

On to the post!

So. Remember a few years ago when a bunch of astronomers got together and said, "Hey guess what folks? Pluto isn't a planet anymore. What's more, Pluto has NEVER been a planet. We've just been classifying it wrong."

Sure, Andrew, we remember. It was kind of a big deal. A bunch of stupid people were, for some unknown reason, very upset about it.

Okay, so remember when those same astronomers said "Hey, we've changed our minds, Pluto is back to being a planet (a dwarf planet, to be exact) but the thing is, since we've included Pluto we also have to include these two other things floating around in our solar system that are Dwarf Planet sized. They are Ceris and Eris. "

No? Don't remember that? Neither do I. I only found out about it recently, and you'd be amazed at how far I had to dig around to verify it. Yeah, it's a pretty odd thing considering how big a stink was raised when we dropped down to eight planets in the solar system...that practically NOBODY knows that there are now eleven planets to be remembered. I have a theory about why this is. It goes something like this.
Now, before anybody comments on that, let me just say that I like Obama. And I find the democratic process this year incredibly fascinating. But there is, occasionally, some other news worth reporting, that's all I'm saying. I think we need to get over ourselves a bit.


Anyway, National Geographic had a contest and some little ten year old girl from Montana came up with a new device to remember the additions. I made it the title of my post today and I must say, it beats the crap out of "My Very Excellent Mother Just Sent Us Nine Pizzas." Anytime you have magic carpets sailing under elephants in palaces, you've got an A in my book. Good job little girl.

But my thoughts have been running towards the trend of space lately. I'm still thinking a lot about black holes.

I've been doing my best to live like the world is going to end, and for the most part I've been successful. There are TWO conversations I can think of that I would want to have before the world ends...and I'm just trying to figure out if they are actually worth having for the sake of my little intellectual experiment.

Anyway, here are two more little doodles. I've been pretty prolific these last few days, I've only just now had time to sit down and do some scanning.

My favorite thing somebody said to me recently..."You went to art school and your drawings look like THIS?"

Yes. Yes indeed.

*Side Note* I feel like nobody got my Tremors joke in the last post. It makes me sad.

Me and the boys took a much needed vacation this weekend. We headed out to the town of Perfection, Nevada. We climbed the water tower, shopped at the general store, jumped on a pogo stick, and flirted with moderately beautiful geology grad students.

Here is a photo from our trip.



A Good Time Was Had By All!

Warning, No Doodles in This Post : A Rare Sharpie Doodles Rant

Hello my darlings!

First, some news. I've installed an "email subscription tool" to this blog. Yes, you can now have Sharpie Doodles delivered right to your door, rose bushes, sidewalk, or through your front window (speaking, of course, in Internet terms) Look for the subscription tool on the left hand side of the window. It will ask you to enter your e-mail and then badda boom! You no longer have to spend the 15 extra seconds actually coming to the blog to read it. Ain't technology great! Special thanks to Kelley for sending me that link.

Now, Kelley, I must apologize because this post might be a little long winded. In fact, you might just want to stop reading now because there ain't gonna be any pretty pictures to look at either.

Okay, here we go. It's a Rant, yes, and not very funny, but please read it. It means a lot to me.


Spring is here and Summer fast approaches, dear readers, and that means lots of things. Baseball, cookouts, mowing the grass, sunburns, 200% humidity, shame and embarrassment at various beaches and lakes...

...but it also means movies. Lots of em, new ones out every week, and, here's the thing, most of them will be pure escapist entertainment.

Which is totally fine with me. Yes, I'm a cinema snob but not near as much of one as nearly everybody I went to school with, and I'm certainly not as much of a snob as your average newspaper movie critic. I love movies that make me think, that make me question, that I don't know how to feel about...but the summer movie season is what it is and I roll with it joyfully. I plan on happily crunching my extra butter popcorn, scarfing down my peanut M&M's, and slurping my medium (twenty five cents will take you up to a large, sir) cherry coke while Christian Bale kicks butt in the Dark Knight and Harrison Ford relives his glory days in Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull.

I'll see the action movies because they are fun and I'll see the monster movies and thrillers because they are also fun. I like to watch things explode and I like to root for the good guy and I really, really like to watch Batman save the day.

I don't like to see people getting tortured.

But apparently, most of America does.

I'm talking about movies like Saw and Hostel of course. Those are the most well known examples but there are others, countless others. If you haven't seem them here is the basic plot.

1) People get captured by a sadistic madman.
2) People are realistically tortured for an hour and a half. There is much screaming.
3) People mostly die. One person may or may not escape. Sadistic Madman remains on the loose.
4) The end.

Movies like these aren't escapist entertainment. Pirates III is escapist entertainment. It may have sucked by crimminy, but at least it was harmless and fun suck.

No, movies like Saw and Hostel aren't entertainment. I don't even want to call them movies. Lets just refer to them by what they really are, shall we? Pornography.

Gore Porn.

Pornography doesn't have a plot. It doesn't have a story. Any story that porn does have is just a thin excuse to witness an act. In the case of gore porn, the act is torture.

Pornography doesn't have subtlety. It holds nothing back, it strips an act down to it's most base nature. Violence in cinema is a hot topic these days, but if you pay attention to most action movies, they don't really show you everything. Not like Gore Porn does. And if they DO show you everything, it is usually to make a point. Take No Country for Old Men. An extremely graphic movie. Very violent. But the violence in that movie was used as a tool by the Coen Brothers to make a statement about how violence affects humanity, how greed affects violence, etc...

The violence in Gore Porn IS the point. It's there just for you to watch and "enjoy" and that's it.

In pornography there are no consequences for the act being witnessed. The same in Gore Porn. This is one of the most disturbing trends to me...the sadistic madman always gets away with it.
Again, don't try to argue me into a corner here. I'm not saying that movies where the villain gets away with stuff are bad. To the contrary, I think those type of endings make for great storytelling. But that's just the thing. STORYTELLING. In an actual movie, when the villain gets away with things it's for story reasons. He faces consequences. He is changed in some way good or bad by what he has done. Or he isn't changed and WE as the audience are changed by wondering why HE hasn't been changed...etc.

In Gore Porn the only reason the madman lives is so there can be more Gore Porn.

And there will be, oh yes, there will. Because our culture has taken to this specific brand of pornography, hasn't it? After all, there are FOUR Saw movies to date. TWO Hostel movies. Dozens and dozens of stand alone films in the last three years alone. Why? Because Gore Porn makes a CRAP TON of money. You have no idea. You really don't.

So, where do we stand so far? Gore Porn has no value as cinema. It doesn't make you think, it doesn't touch your emotions (except perhaps disgust, if you are lucky) and it doesn't tell a good story. Which leads me to believe that the only reason that people see it is for escapist entertainment.

Wait a second. Millions and millions of people in America watch torture every year as escapist entertainment?

Yup. There isn't any way around it. And what's worse is THEY TAKE THEIR KIDS TO IT. You know it's true. Go to any ten o'clock showing of any R rated movie and I will give you a cookie if there isn't a five year old somewhere in those rows of stadium seats.

And then we wonder why we have a group elementary school children plot to kill their teacher with duck tape, rope, knives, and blunt objects because she reprimended one of them during class. They brought this stuff to SCHOOL ya'll. They were going to do it. Tie her up and kill her. Not across the country. Not in Detroit. Here. In an Atlanta suburb.

Here.

Here.

I'm ashamed.

I'm ashamed of my generation, a generation that profligates the making of Gore Porn by it's very insensitivity and apathy and unwillingness to speak out against it. We are a generation of causes. Global warming, yes. Darfur, sure. Gay rights, okay. But does anybody care that we are losing our very humanity ticket by every loving movie ticket?

I'm ashamed of my generation, a generation that profligates the making of Gore Porn by GOING TO SEE IT TIME AND TIME AGAIN. Hollywood makes Gore Porn because Gore Porn makes money. Period. I'm infuriated when I see one of these movies listed on someone's "Favorites" on the Facebook or Myspace or whatever. If you are not disturbed by the images in Gore Porn, you should be worried. Something is broken inside of you. You have a problem.

You are the problem.

I'm ashamed of my nation. Gore Porn is only the latest apparition of a greater problem, our society's complete loss of sensitivity: to beauty, to art, to violence, to the basic tenants of what it means to be human.

I'm ashamed of my species. We have such capacity for evil. It is a part of us. But I believe, I HAVE to believe, that our capacity for good far exceeds that.

But I feel like we aren't trying very hard. Not very hard at all.

I'm ashamed. Just so damn ashamed of us all.

What a waste.

An End of the World Update (and some other items)

Lots of interesting things going on lately. You might remember my interest in a certain particle accelerator in Switzerland and how that machine has an intsy bintsy teeny tiny chance of ending the world in May.

Absurd, right? Yes. But apparently there is a cult holed up in a bunker somewhere in Russia...WHO ALSO THINK THAT THE WORLD WILL END IN MAY. And the crazy thing is, apparently they came to this conclusion for religious reasons, not because of anything having to do with black holes and irresponsible scientists.

Creepy, no?

A girl was born in India recently. She had two faces on the same head. The name for this particular affliction is craniofacial duplication.

You hear about all these 15 year old cheerleaders who lured a peer to a house, savagely beat her for thirty minutes while some boys played "lookout", and video taped the whole thing to put on Youtube and Myspace? First the elementary school children plotting to kill their teacher with a steak knife and duct tape, and now this. WHAT IN THE CRUNCHITY CRISPITY CRAP IS GOING ON? Sometimes I really feel like things are going backwards, you know? If it wasn't for IBC Rootbeer, I'd write civilization off as a total loss.

On an entirely unrelated topic, here's a doodle.
This is actually a pretty accurate copy of my real Publix receipt from yesterday. I have a real problem, this certainly isn't the first time I've spent more money on books at the grocery store than I have on groceries.

Here's another doodle, what I call "The Mr. Darcy Theory".


As my good friend Derek said after looking at this doodle, "Well, at least part two is true!"

Well that's it for now. More coming soon.

--A--

Things Never Get Less Awkward

Pocket Sandwich

A brief struggle in my own head this afternoon.

Black Holes

Good morning, friendly readers. It's another late night (early morning) for a variety of reasons, not the least of which is this: since about three forty five this afternoon I've been a tad preoccupied with the thought that the world might end in about a month.

If your brain is of a sciency bent, you listen to NPR, or you read National Geographic, then you've probably heard about this huge thingamagumy called the Large Hadron Collider they are building out at CERN, an underground particle physics lab in Switzerland.

Basically this thing is a huge 17 mile wide device ten years in the making. Its sole purpose is to slam particles of matter together at incredible speeds so that scientists can...well, watch it happen I guess. Which is all groovy. I was down with it. I'm always up for some particle physics in action. But then I heard a scientist on NPR today talking about how one of the experiments they would be doing out there is using the LHC to create miniature black holes.


Okay, so obviously I'm not a scientist. Not even close. And this guy had lots of good scientific reasons why they wouldn't destroy the world by creating black holes under the ground in Geneva. But sometimes things just feel like a bad idea, don't they? Doesn't this just sound like we are asking for trouble as a species?
I can't help but get the sensation sometimes that one day a highly advanced alien civilization will come across our little smoking carcass of a planet and say "well, what the crap were they expecting? They starting screwing around with black holes!"

That all being said, I'm more irritated by all this than genuinely concerned. Is there a chance that some Swedish scientist will flip a switch and suck all of humanity into a lump the size of a grapefruit? Yes. But, mathematically speaking, there is ALWAYS a chance of that happening. There is a chance I'll die from choking on a gopher tortoise tomorrow, there is a chance I'll slip on yogurt and get my face stuck in the garbage disposal. These are fears that we all must live with.

No, what really irks me is that the world might end while I'm at work, of all places. And it might happen so quickly! I imagine it would be something like this.
So on my drive home today I got to thinking...maybe I should live the next month as if the world really is going to end. Worst case scenario: the Swiss beat the one in a hundred million trillion cazillion odds and kill us all, in which case I've told everybody in my life everything they need to hear and lived a satisfying final month. Best case scenario: I tell everybody in my life everything they need to hear, live a satisfying and fulfilling month, and some scientists get to watch an extremely expensive machine smash little bits of stuff into other little bits of stuff at high velocity with absolutely no ill effects.

Heck, maybe we should ALL be living like the end was near ALL the time. As hallmarky as it sounds...it might not be a bad way to go through life.

So I'm going to try it. If I say weird things, act in a strange way, tell you that I love you, tell you that I don't, or say or do anything out of the ordinary, don't worry. Don't fret.

It's only because the world is ending.

Possibly.

--A--