Auchtoon!

Originally published in the Ann Arbor News, Bay City Times, Flint Journal, Grand Rapids Press, Jackson Citizen Patriot, Kalamazoo Gazette, Muskegon Chronicle, Saginaw News
September 22, 2013

For those of you who don’t already know about ArtPrize, it’s:

A radically open, independently organized international art competition with an unprecedented $200,000 top prize decided entirely by public vote.

For 19 days, three square miles of downtown Grand Rapids, Michigan, become an open playing field where anyone can find a voice in the conversation about what is art and why it matters. Art from around the world pops up in every inch of downtown, and it’s all free and open to the public.

It’s unorthodox, highly disruptive, and undeniably intriguing to the art world and the public alike.

Links with more info: http://www.mlive.com/artprize/

Turns out, “unorthodox” “highly disruptive” and even “undeniably intriguing” are all ways I would describe the tea party’s ongoing efforts to deny, derail, and defund Obamacare. Passionate, dogmatic arguments. Visceral emotions. A fundamental desire to advocate for your understand at all cost. This is art, folks!

This past week, MLive newspapers debuted a redesigned layout. I think it looks great — fresh, crisp, but with a very established newspaper feel. Part of this is a new design for the Sunday editorial page and a new home for my cartoons. And there I am in the marque spot — to the right of the editorial and just above the Letters to the Editor! For somebody who has loved editorial cartoons all his life, this is a dream come true, and I’m thrilled. (I don’t quite yet know what to make of my floating head, but I can deal with that later.)

Originally published in the Ann Arbor News, Bay City Times, Flint Journal, Grand Rapids Press, Jackson Citizen Patriot, Kalamazoo Gazette, Muskegon Chronicle, Saginaw News
September 15, 2013

So a professor at Michigan State University, William Penn, went off on a rant in a class he was teaching. Apparently Professor Penn has some very specific opinions about Republicans and felt compelled to share them in his Integrative Studies in the Arts and Humanities class (re: not actually the topic). We know this because one of the students took a video and posted it. Trouble ensued. Click here for the complete  story.

I had a metallurgy professor in college who would occasionally take five minutes during a lecture to tell us a story that had nothing to do with metallurgy. He’d share his thoughts about this or that or tell us a story about growing up on a farm. It was wonderful. So I’m not fundamentally opposed to the off-topic aside. But I have also been trapped in rooms where people feel entitled to tell you exactly what they think and do so because, well, they can. That, too, happened to me in college. But it didn’t stop happening there. (Cue Dilbert.)

So I’m sure that it sucked having to listen to Professor Penn go on and on, but it was in fact a pretty good life lesson. And I would give the  student who thought to record and share the rant an “A” for doing something about it.

Originally published in the Ann Arbor News, Bay City Times, Flint Journal, Grand Rapids Press, Jackson Citizen Patriot, Kalamazoo Gazette, Muskegon Chronicle, Saginaw News
September 8, 2013

When you’re from Flint, one of the most annoying things somebody not from Flint can say to you is, “You never should have become so dependent on the auto industry.” Well, yes, in hindsight, smartypants, that may be right. But when the town was booming (and it was booming for decades) it was awfully hard to say “thanks, but no thanks” to well-paying jobs and a sturdy tax base. Think about it — how many people, let alone communities, have the foresight to turn down good money in the short term because at some undetermined point in the future it could possibly go away? Yeah, not many.

And so here we go again. Car sales in August were through the roof. The industry is on pace to make and sell nearly as many cars in North America as it did before the Great Recession. And even though all the jobs will never come back, Michigan is certainly benefiting. We still design, engineer, and build cars here. We’re doing what we do and making money doing it. So it’s okay if you’re from here to poke a little fun at our willful blindness in the good times. For those not from here, you can shut the #&@* up. (But keep buying those cars.)

Originally published in the Ann Arbor News, Bay City Times, Flint Journal, Grand Rapids Press, Jackson Citizen Patriot, Kalamazoo Gazette, Muskegon Chronicle, Saginaw News
September 1, 2013

Last week I was reading the “On This Day…” section of Wikipedia about the Pennsylvania oil rush. On August 27, 1859, Edwin Drake successfully struck oil in Titusville, Pennsylvania. As the article noted, crude oil had begun to be used as an alternative to whale oil as a lighting source for lamps and inventors and scientists began to test oil for other possible uses, including energy. So finding a plentiful source was a big deal. The problem was that Titusville was (and still is) in a fairly remote part of northwest Pennsylvania. The oil needed to be transported to a population center. Here’s the part that struck me:

In the first years of the oil rush, high overland shipping costs drove many well owners to float their product down Oil Creek to the Allegheny River as lumber producers did.[3] For decades, logs had been transported using man-made floods, known as pond freshets, created by successively breaking milldams along the length of the river. These freshets could carry up to 800 skiffs filled with crude oil downstream at once. Most skiffs held between 700 and 800 barrels (110 and 130 m3) of oil, but one third of that leaked out of the skiffs before they were even launched and another third was lost by the time the skiffs reached Pittsburgh. Furthermore, only three in five of the flimsy vessels survived the trip down river without being destroyed by collisions with rocks, fallen trees, or other skiffs.

Eventually pipelines and railroads were built to transport the oil more safely and reliably. But, dang, they floated petroleum on leaky skiffs down a river! Why? Because it made economic sense at the time and (here’s the part that inspired this week’s cartoon), there was no regulation!

Now I’m not such a hypocrite as I sit in my temperature-controlled office with my electric lights typing on my computer before I get in my gasoline-powered car to drive to work to say there should be no mining or drilling. Let’s face it, we’re still highly dependent on carbon-based energy and will be for some time. (Obviously a return to whale oil is not a strong option.) But let’s go about it sensibly. And let’s at least acknowledge that the same human wisdom and natural desire to maximize profits that led us to set giant tubs of crude oil to sail down a river is the same that will tend us toward unwise decisions today. So some amount of regulation, some amount of “hey, let’s think this thing through about transporting and processing tar sands oil” would be a good idea.