I saw this piece on CBS Sunday morning. It’s about the security guards at the Baltimore Museum of Art curating the art.
It’s fascinating because they are usually shadows. I totally ignore them when I’m at a museum. For one thing, I always feel they are watching me. They have asked me to stop filming more than once – snapshots are ok, filming not so much, I’m still not sure why, but usually because of that reason, I avoid them.
As one lady says in the piece above, the guards are around the art more than anyone else – day and night. And they know about the art. If you have a question, they probably know the answer. The question I most ask them is, “Where is the exit,” because I’m always getting lost.
But I see them in a whole new light and next time at a museum, I won’t ignore them, I’ll say, “Hello!”
Get my blog via email when it’s updated Click here.
I was watching a tv show on farmers markets and someone said, “Buy Local. Buy Fresh.” But I found out a few years ago that that is not always the case. One of my favorite farmers markets is the Green Market at Union Square in New York City. It’s my first stop when I get to New York and it’s a Saturday morning ritual. It’s where I get my first Mr. Softee ice cream of the summer and where I see fall pumpkins for the first time, also where I see Christmas trees being sold for the first time of the season.
But is everything straight from the farm? I’ve always pictured all those vendors trudging down from their upstate New York or Long Island farms, setting up and selling their fresh fruit, veggies, flowers, pies, honey, etc. But a few Novembers ago, I stopped at one booth to buy a small bottle of eggnog. I grabbed the bottle from the ice chest and handed the guy the money. There was no one else at the booth and he was standing in the center of a foldout table, you know, one of those 6′ x 3′ tables?
Well, he wouldn’t take the money. I tried to shove it in his hand, but he refused. He told me to stand in the center of the table on the 6′ side; I was at the 3′ end of it, where the cooler was. Again, there was no one else there and his hand was in reach of me handing him the money. Again, he said, “Stand in front of the table to pay me.” I got angry, put the drink down and walked away.
A few blocks away, I was walking by Eataly, the Italian grocery store at Madison Square, right across from the Flatiron Building, and I went in. I went to the dairy case and pulled out a small eggnog. It was the exact same company and bottle that the guy at the green market was selling. It had a homey name, Ronnybrook Farm, it was the same stuff for less money. This guy at the green market lost a sale because of his whatever it was, and he is selling corporate eggnog, which I pictured him making by hand in his Hudson Valley kitchen somewhere at his family’s Ronnybrook farm.
The New York Times describes Ronnybrook Farm’s as the “Dom Perignon” of dairy, so there is that, and they are in the Hudson Valley, so there is that, too.
After that I started noticing pies and fruit and things like that and realized anyone can sell at the farmer’s market, whether you own a farm or not. Just source your goodies, mark them up and sell away.
Get my blog via email when it’s updated Click here.
Professional bartender serving a cocktail in the glass with one big ice cube on the bar counter in the blurred background
I heard someone say, “check it” the other day, and it all came flooding back.
One night in the late 1980s, I went to a club in NYC with two of my cousins. I had purchased a brand new jacket, a thick, expensive winter coat.
In the club, I layed my jacket over some sort of room divider or half wall or something and this girl comes by and puts her drink on it. The drink looked like this image, same glass, but with lots of ice and lots of dripping on my jacket.
I started yelling at her, “Look what you did! That’s my jacket!” She yelled back, “Why don’t you check it!” Now being from Miami most of my life, I am not familiar with coat checks, so I thought, “Why don’t you check it!” was some sort of insult. So I yelled back, “You check it!”
And life went on. I remember that same night on our way home we stopped in front of the NY Public Library on 5th Avenue and got out of the car and danced to Pump Up the Jam, which was new at the time. Anyway, that’s my remembrance of the night.
20 years later, in 2009, I’m watching a movie on tv, literally 20 years later – and one guy says to the other, “Why are you carrying your coat around, why don’t you check it?” And that sentence came flooding back to me all those years later and it dawned on me, right then and there, that the girl was telling me to check my coat with the coat check.
The funny thing is I never wore that jacket again. Not sure why. I think it seems too puffy. I still have it in the closet somewhere.
Get my blog via email when it’s updated Click here.
We did our local arts festival yesterday and will go back again today. When I say did, I don’t mean we showed our art, I mean we walked around, ate, drank, kibitzed and enjoyed the show. For one thing, the town is mobbed with people and it’s impossible to get in and out so it’s best to just stay put and enjoy the event.
It is getting a bit out of hand with the $25 entry fee and $15 gyros and $18 taco dishes, but it is what it is.
This weekend every year is the busiest weekend of the year in Miami. There are a few arts festivals, the boat show and some other things. They say it’s impossible to find a hotel room or rent a car – they’re all booked for the weekend.
Oddly enough, it was cold all winter, where I love, but yesterday and I guess today, when a bunch of us go back, it will be very hot.
I ran into my nephew’s friend, he told me that he and his wife got in for free. He said to the people at the gate that they forgot to stamp him when he left and then he rubbed the wet stamp on his wife’s hand after they stamped him – sort of like we used to do at the clubs. So he saved 50 bucks.
I used to be part of this as a sponsor when I did the daily news around here so I would get lots of tickets to give out free. But not anymore, I’m now a peon like everyone else (which I love being by the way), but people didn’t know and I got so many texts and calls from friends and family asking me for tickets. Even the UPS guy was hounding me for tickets. How he got my phone number I’ll never know.
Get my blog via email when it’s updated Click here.
My fascination of ancient Egypt, Rome, Greece and all sorts of archaeology goes way back. I studied it in college as part of Art History. My textbooks, which I still have, are in my living room and I glance at them every once in awhile. Guided tours of ancient Egyptian sites are part of my bucket list.
I do a lot of cartoons based on ancient times, I enjoy doing those.
And now that I think of it, if asked, what I would do if I wasn’t doing what I do now, I might say, “I’d like to be an archaeologist , digging around in Egyptian deserts. But not now, I think.
A MEME THAT POPPED UP THE OTHER DAY.
I was shocked into reality the other day while watching a tv show on Egyptian and Greece archeology. They were digging up ancient Greek tombs and relating them to Egypt at that time and one of the archeologists said something like, “We’re lucky to find this one in tact. The tomb raiders did not find this tomb, but we did through sonar (or radar, he said something like that.” And I was stunned. Why is a modern archeologist, digging up ancient tombs any better than ancient, or even current tomb raiders.
The main difference is that tomb raiders are taking gold and silver and precious items. Archaeologists are taking bodies; actual bodies. Why is this any better?
One lady archeologist, I can’t remember her name, has a life quest to find Cleopatra’s tomb. And do what with it when she finds it? Display her remains to the world? Another has a quest to find Alexander the Great’s and Cleopatra’s ancient Alexandria under present day Alexandria, I guess that’s ok, as they are looking for cities, not entombed bodies.
I can understand digging up and finding ancient cities, but I’m having second thoughts about digging up entombed, embalmed bodies.
So I have to think on it now. Is desecrating an ancient body permissible in the name of science? Is it ok to dig it up, pillage, analyze it and show it off in museums? I’m wondering. I’m sure I will still do ancient Egypt related cartoons, because in my cartoons the people are alive and in their time in their settings.
Get my blog via email when it’s updated Click here. Go ahead, sign up – I won’t spam you.
This cartoon from Friday really hit a nerve with people. It got so many shares, likes and comments, more than any other I think.
A lot of people were saying they didn’t like it because it made no sense – how can you compare one cup of coffee to gallons of gasoline? But the point of the cartoon is that if a guy buys a $5.00 cup of coffee, most likely he is doing it daily and most likely, he is doing it more than once a day, so for him to complain about the price of gas is disingenuous. Plus, anyone who buys $5.00 coffee really has no right to complain about the price of gas. It’s just a big metaphor. That’s all. Sort of like Elon Musk complaining about the price of a space rocket.
And yes, I know gas is more than $3.00. I was surprised to see some of the comments from Norway and other far away places where gas is $7.00 a gallon! But it was cleaner to read making it $3.00 a gallon rather than $3.79 a gallon or $3.99 a gallon or even $4.00 a gallon, since $4.00 was too close to the $5.00 amount of the coffee.
I was driving around my county the last few weeks and saw that gas in less populated areas is much less than popular and more upscale neighborhoods. Some differences as much as 50 cents a gallon and these places are harder to get to than popular neighborhoods and areas. So none of it makes sense other than supply and demand I guess.
And might I add that Shell gas stations are always more than any other station on any give day at any time of the year. I gave up buying Shell gas years ago. For spite I think they are higher in price. If one station is $1.99 a gallon, Shell, across the street is $2.29 a gallon. If gas is $3.79 at one station, at Shell across the street, it is $4.15 a gallon. I think they do it to see how many people are too lazy to drive across the street for the cheaper gas – and it’s not cheaper brands, it’s name brand gas that is cheaper than Shell. Always.
Get my blog via email when it’s updated Click here. Go ahead, sign up – I won’t spam you.
A couple of us went to the Beaux Arts Festival in Coral Gables yesterday. It’s the 71st edition.
It was smaller this year, I guess due to covid, and they moved the location south a bit – it’s still on the University of Miami grounds, just not in the grassy, shady, lake area, near the Lowe Art Museum – it was more in a parking lot.
There wasn’t much food. A friend of mine, who fell off his bike, for like the 5th time, asked me to bring him his favorites from the festival, since he is still laid up – conch fritters and gyros. Only they didn’t have them. I think there were just a few food booths and nothing great. So I stopped by empty handed to visit him afterwards.
At the festival I saw a lot of friends, many of them are artists, who had booths set-up and were showing and selling their work.
It’s one of those things that comes around year after year at the same time – repetitive, but we look forward to it.
The weather was perfect, bright, sunny and cool – in the 60s. Today a cold front is coming through so it will be rainy and windy most of the day.
But that’s the beginning of a bunch of our art shows for the year. 2022 has started.
Get my blog via email when it’s updated Click here.
I’ve been all over the county this past month and every once in awhile as I’m traveling around by car, I come upon lines. They are out in the traffic lanes, usually spilling out into the right lane and they are endless. That’s where I got the idea for today’s cartoon.
I am assuming they are covid testing lines, or possibly they are vaccine lines or are they food giveaway lines? If we lived in a snowy area, I might assume they are snow delay lines, like what happened last week on I-95 in Virginia.
After Hurricane Andrew in 1992, our county – Miami-Dade, was devastated. There was nothing. No place to eat, no place to shop, no place to do anything. Devastation.
Every once in awhile as you drove around, you would see a line. And we would just get in the line. We didn’t know what the line was for, but we knew it was something we needed, because we had nothing left! So we would park the car and stand at the end of the line. Waiting, to see what was up front.
One time I was driving by Eckard Drugs with a friend, and we stopped. We got in line and when we reached the front, it was for batteries they were giving out. Another day, it was at another location and it was food, another time it was ice.
When I drive by these long car lines these days, it reminds me of that time so many years ago.
Get my blog via email when it’s updated Click here.
Over the years, I had these published in the Huffington Post, my own blog, Medium and other publications. I’ve interviewed, cartoonists and featured cartoons and comics and artists, comic strip creators including Jason Chatfield, Rina Piccolo and Scott Adams, among so many others. . But I’ve also interviewed authors, designers like Betsey Johnson and even Ryan Holt from Naked and Afraid.
I was was planning on doing more interviews for the Huffington Post, but I thought these columns should have a home of their own, rather than be at other websites. They live on forever and are always being seen and read.
Some of these stories have hundreds of thousands of readers, The Stephan Pastis article has over 1 million views! So why not have people read them on my own site, rather than other places? I wouldn’t mind 1 million hits! Huffington Post, Medium, and various newspapers didn’t promote the stories, people found them by doing searches, so why not have readers find the articles on my own site, right?
I now have 10 With Tom here, where you can find some of the past interviews and where I’ll add new ones shortly.
You can subscribe to 10 With Tom, and you’ll only receive 10 With Tom interviews (not this Tomversation blog, that’s a separate subscription), but I’m not sure if all the past stories I added will come up as one big email for your first email that you receive after subscribing. So if that happens, forgive me. You’ll usually just receive one interview after it is published.
I drove 30 miles south from home and while down in Homestead (a city south of Miami), I stopped to get gas. My credit card was declined three times at two different gas stations.
Then later in the day, I got a call from Citibank, claiming my card was being used fraudulently. I had to confirm it was me using the card so they would unlock it. They said it was “out of my buying pattern.”
I guess I never really leave my neighborhood and I only buy gas around home, so when they saw the attempts to charge 30 miles away, they freaked out.
I’ve been thinking of taking a road trip. That’s going to be some experience every time I attempt to buy gas along the way.
I remember when I used to go from one end of the county to the next – all in one day, for work – the county is larger than the states of Rhode Island and Delaware combined. And there was a period where I drove 100 miles a day, just to hang out with friends, night and day. Now I usually drive about three miles a day. But the weird thing about this incident is that I was using the card in my own home county, still considered to be part of Miami. I am glad to see they are trying to stay on top of fraud though.
I remember some years ago, I got a call from American Express. They said their was fraud on my card. I asked how they know, they said someone was trying to buy motorcycle parts, and they knew that wasn’t me. About a month later, I got a call from Visa – they said something about fraud, too. Their reasoning was that someone was trying to by Avon, and they knew it wasn’t me. So I fall somewhere in between motorcycle parts and Avon!
I have protected the cards all these years – I use those protective sleeves and so far, so good. I had seen some people, try to skim my card, but luckily they didn’t get through the protective shield around the cards.
Get my blog via email when it’s updated Click here.
tomversation.com 