Recently this old west cartoon was published regarding the Pony Express. By the way, the pony express only lasted 18 months – from April 1860 to October 1861. It went bankrupt in that short time, and by then the telegraph was being used which made it obsolete.
I like to do these “living the dream” cartoons once in awhile – it’s usually regarding something that was ultra modern back in the day and we laugh about now. I’ve done old tv sets that were new at the time – getting a whole three channels on a big 12 inch screen; and I’ve done cavemen all confused about the new fangled tech device called fire.
I often think of those times – 100 years ago, 1000 years ago, whatever. Even today, we think we are living in the most modern of times, but think of 100 years from now, how so many of the things we think are the highest of tech will be laughed at as being primative.
I may have goofed with this old west cartoon because people are joking about that being post office is today, only they really aren’t joking.
I ordered a book not long ago which was shipped from California on the same day I purchased it. It got to Florida exactly one month later. One month to the day.
There was a time during election time where I was selling a bunch of election stuff on etsy – a lot was selling, but I had to discontinue because the items which normally take 3 days or less in shipping time, were taking a month or more!
Some of the comments I got from readers regarding the this “living the dream/pony express cartoon,” are:
“It’s still 12 days, with all our automation and computers, only 163 years later.”
“Looks like we need to go back to the pony express.”
“Takes that long to mail something from one house to the neighbors now.”
“Some things never change!”
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I’ve been doing a thing called Cloudy With A Chance of Faces, where I post images of clouds that look like things. I wrote about it here if you’d like to see more examples and links to the sites if you care to follow.
But now I am always looking at the clouds, seeking out faces and things. In the past, I would catch the image by accident, but now I am hunting for them. And it’s turned to all sorts of things.
As you can see here, I have a cowhide rug in my living room and I see things in that.
I see a dad walking a child to school, who has a dog on a leash. See it?
A guy or maybe a lady, looking at the clouds.
A child praying.
A southern lady entering the ballroom as a lady to her right ushers her in, that also looks like a heart dancing to her left.
The cowhide rug.
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There’s a new word – “Tipflation,” it’s regarding those non-stop tip requests. I hear that even self check-outs are asking for tips now. That’s how I came up with this cartoon. It’s also called, “tip creep.”
I love using self-checkouts, it’s great for introverts, we don’t have to interact with people and it seems to go faster, but so far, I have not seen this tipping request. I use the self-check out at supermarkets, Home Depot, drug stores, etc. So far, so good. No tip requests. But it really makes on sense. You don’t tip the cashier when she checks you out, so why would you tip a machine where you are checking yourself out?
But I do see it on lots of take-out apps. I use them a lot. It’s easy to order and just go and pick-up. I have used it for food delivery services, and alarmingly, I recently read about these delivery drivers asking people for extra tips if they want their deliveries to arrive! What do they do, throw the food out if they aren’t tipped enough?
I think I wrote about this before – at the beginning of the pandemic, when everyone was afraid to go anywhere, I would use the delivery services for supermarket delivery – Publix, Winn-Dixie, Whole Foods, etc. There were so many people using the services at that time, that they literally would take days to deliver the food.
They would let you know in advance, for instance, you would order on a Monday and they would have openings for food delivery on Thursday at 8 pm, something odd like that. But I read somewhere that if you tipped a lot, you will get faster delivery. So I tried that, I would normally tip $5.00, but I upped it to $20.00 and sure enough, the food would come days earlier, many times the same day! So there is something to be said for tipping ahead of time, although I’m not really a fan of tipping before I receive the service.
I tip on apps like Subway and other food apps where they are preparing my food, because unfortunately, they ask for the tip before the order goes in and I feel that they might do something with my food if I don’t tip. My mother used to always say you don’t argue with people handling your food and I guess that goes the same for tipping them.
At my local Starbucks, I don’t tip on the app where I order and just pick walk in and pick up the order, but every once in awhile I do tip $5.00 or $10.00 and I make sure they see me putting the cash in the tip jar.
I like these new hand-held things that restaurants now how. It’s just the push of a button and the tip is added and you don’t have to deal with doing math. The problem with all that is you never really see the final bill. I’ve asked for it to be printed out, but it never is.
I’ve also heard of people tipping flight attendants after a flight. I don’t think I’ve ever seen it done, but that seem a bit strange. What next, we tip our doctor or dentist for a job well done?
Years ago I bartended for a short amount of time. I didn’t care about the job and didn’t care if I got fired or not. It was for a Hyatt hotel and I had to deal with all that corporate crap which is insane many times.
If a customer left me a quarter tip for a beer or two, I would give it back to them. I would pick it up off the bar, hand it to them and say, “Here, you must need it more than I do.” I found it insulting and I wasn’t gonna scrounge for their tips. The staff knew I didn’t care about being fired, so they would use me to tell customers off.
One night of the week, there was ladies night and ladies would drink free. But they never tipped! So the waitresses would come to me and ask me to say something, so I would – and of course I would get attitude back like, “Oh, so that’s how it is?” And the non-tipping customer would walk away. But of course they never complained because they couldn’t walk up to a manger and tell them they weren’t tipping for their free drinks they were getting all night.
I always tip Uber, but I read recently that only 16% of people tip, which I find astounding. I’ve always tipped a taxi driver, why not Uber? I always put the tip on the app, and as I exit the car I say, “I’ll add the tip to the app,” and I leave. I usually forget until a bit later, but I always add it, and then I’m concerned about what the driver thinks, does he/she think I stiffed them? But now seeing that only 16% of people tip drivers, I guess just as long as I’m leaving the tip, even if it isn’t immediately, that’s a good thing.
So I guess I’ve been on both ends of the tipping spectrum, but I still find it odd to tip a self-check out register.
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Cartoonist Liz Climo creates cartoons with animals doing cute things. This one stood out to me because it reminds me of my own mother. I think about her every day and I guess since yesterday was Mother’s Day, I really had her on my mind, but I do think of her every day and one instance similar to this cartoon always sticks out in my mind, and I don’t know why, because I have millions, maybe billions of memories of her.
I must have been 8 years old, maybe a bit older and it could have only happened a few times. It must have been summer because my brothers and I were all home from school. And during that summer, early in the morning, I would go into my mother’s room and wake her up. My father had already gone to work, and it was still quite early.
I would wake my mother up and she would roll over groggily and say, “Good morning, do you want breakfast?” And I would say “yes,” and she would sit at the edge of the bed and say, “Ok, just give me a minute, let me get my bearings.”
She never yelled, she never said, “Get out of here, I’m sleeping!” She woke up smiling and happy to see me and I always remember that. I always remember her saying the “get my bearings,” part.
I’m sure she yelled at me a thousand times in my life, but I only remember her being kind and happy.
I don’t know if it happened once, twice, 10 times or what, but that one summer memory is always in my mind and this Liz Climo cartoon really brought it rushing back.
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I came across this great Al Jaffee video where the Mad Magazine cartoonist talks about his life and Mad Magazine-related things.
Al passed away in April at the age of 102. My father always used to say all of these old comedians lived long lives because they laughed all day and every day – George Burns, Milton Berle, Jack Benny, etc. I guess you could add Al Jaffee to that list.
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I got a great picture of May’s Flower Moon. It’s reddish, lit by the sun at night.
I took pics on Friday night, but they were not so clear, I was never able to get a clear picture of the moon in the past. But a friend posted a beautiful image she took the same night.
I said to her, “You always take such great moon pictures.” She said she took it with her iphone and she’ll show me how to do it.
Having no patience to wait for her to show me, I googled it and I found out how to take a picture of the moon with an iphone or any night shot for that matter. And on Saturday night, I got the image I was always trying to get. A beautiful moon image.
If you don’t have patience, like me, and don’t care about how to do it, just skip the rest of this below and just enjoy the pics here!
You need to use the 1x Wide lens or the 2x Telephoto lens if using the latest iphone. For some reason, the 0.5x lens doesn’t work for night images. There is a night vision icon (a moon) at the upper left when looking at the phone/camera. The icon usually pops on by itself, but if not, it will be white. Just tap it to put the night mode on.
I had seen that working the night before, it does a count down, holding the shutter open, but I didn’t know what it meant and I kept stopping it from doing it’s thing.
But that’s what you want – it will count down the seconds it needs to capture the night image – usually 3 to 5 seconds. Maybe more in a very dark space.
After that, you need to play with the editing feature on the phone. Edit the image to get rid of all the light and bring up the brightness of the image itself. Make the sky around it black.
Save it. And after saving it, you may see a halo around the moon. Open the image again, and darken it.
So you’re going to edit it twice – first time using everything you can to bring out the brightness and clarity. Second time, getting rid of the by darkening the background.
Hopefully that works for you.
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My friend was saying it’s a thing that happens, things sound and look the same.
A few years back I wrote about a little book I have called Steal Like an Artist which says says that there are no original ideas – everyone steals from each other.
Over the years I was positive people were stealing my cartoon ideas. I was so admant about it until it happened to me and I looked as if I was stealing others’ ideas. It just happens, there are just so many ideas. I don’t call it stealing, I just call it life.
Recently a guy suggested I took one of his ideas, but I wrote about how I came up with the cartoon and it has nothing to do with his cartoon.
I saw a cartoon recently that I came up with years ago. Only thing is I never published it and never told anyone about it, but there it was, created and published by someone else, and now I feel that I can’t ever publish my cartoon. I had been putting off redrawing it to fit the format I use now and I wanted to freshen it up a bit, but putting it off just caused me to look as if I am stealing someone’s work, so I guess it will never see the light of day now.
Many years ago I sent cartoons to a syndicate and a month or so later, I saw one of my ideas in a famous comic strip. I was convinced that the cartoonist saw my work at the syndicate some way and used it. Never mind the fact that he published 365 cartoons a year, I was convinced that one was taken from my idea.
My cousin sent me the link to a movie called Buona Sera, Mrs. Campbell, he was explaining it to me, he saw it the other night on tv. I told him that was Mama Mia! So it happens, whether the writers agree or not to the fact. In this case, the Mama Mia movie and play people say it isn’t the same thing.
So anyway, I’m glad Ed Sheeran was not convicted of anything. Things sound the same all the time and things look the same all the time. It’s the zeitgeist of life.
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Another great story on CBS Sunday Morning this past week.
Bill Blackbeard, over 30 years, has preserved 2.5 million comic strip artifacts – actual ephemeral newspaper comics sections. I love this, but I do wish he would have saved the whole newspaper of the times! Some go back to 1904.
He drove around the country with his wife and friends, collecting old newspaper comic sections, a lot from libraries who would microfilm the newspapers and then have no future use for them after filming them.
The comics are being featured at the Billy Ireland Cartoon Library and Museum at Ohio State University right now.
Included with the newspapers is the whole original set of 1931 comic art pieces of Blondie – actual drawn pieces of art from the time.
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I was wishing someone a happy birthday today on Facebook, and something new came up – past photos of that person with me, come up along with the birthday wish. This reminded me of my friend Vincent.
Years ago, when Vincent would send Christmas cards, he would include photos of you from the past year. I don’t know if he took the photos deliberately or not, but he would have photos of you at a Fourth of July picnic, or a birthday party or a trip we went on together or whatever.
Usually every December, when you opened your Christmas card from Vincent, out would drop two or three photos of yourself with others, including Vincent (0r not). It was usually some event you had forgotten about, nothing grand like a wedding but always a small event that faded from memory.
I was thinking of Vincent’s photos when the photos popped on on Facebook today, the Facebook photos aren’t current because I don’t take as many photos as I used to. I forget or feel awkward when we’re at a party or event or whatever, I think people may wonder, “What are you going to do with that picture?” But truth be told, everyone is taking pictures every minute of the day, so I wouldn’t be the only one. And 9 times out of 10, they say, “Send me a copy of that!”
Many times at events – with family and friends, I’m tempted to go around and get pics of people. Sometimes I’ll hand my phone to one of my cousins and say, “Go around and get pictures,” but they never do either.
One of my cousins is starstruck and he’s the first to get pics with some famous person or other, whether they want that or not. But I don’t have enough pics of family and friends. I’ve got to make an effort.
I don’t think I have anything from our family Christmas or Easter this past year when we all were together. There was a wedding a few months back, I don’t think I have many from that either.
I’ve got to make an effort to start getting pics of everything.
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I started this thing called Cloudy With A Chance of Faces. It’s images I see in clouds.
I’ve been posting pictures over the years and a friend suggested I make a thing of it. I add a few outlines to show what I’m seeing and there it is.
I live in Miami, right on the Bay, that combination makes for interesting visions in the sky. The clouds here move very quickly, if you see a formation, you have to capture it quick or it’s gone.
Every morning when I wake up, I look outside and there is something staring me in the face. Many times the clouds look like mountains, other times Snoopy or a lady or whatever.
You could get addicted. I could literally stand in one place and get so many images in a short amount of time. Now that I’m doing this Cloudy project, it gets a big hard not to be obsessed and just be staring at the clouds all day long, waiting for the next image to appear. But oddly enough, when I’m deliberately looking, I don’t see anything. It seems to be an organic thing, you know, it just happens when you least expected, you look up and something is staring down at you.
Snoopy over the bay.
A friend visiting from New York once said that our clouds have layers. I take that to mean they are very expressive. And they are.
If you’d like to follow my venture, I have set up two social media sites. I have the website CloudyWithAChanceOfFaces.com, too, but I haven’t done anything with that yet. I just wanted to get the name while it was available.
tomversation.com 