Back when this was a simple all-in-a-line strip cartoon I would have used one of my continuous backgrounds to get the idea of the litter tray moving through a landscape across. Now I have to draw the same background four times.
Scrape
The real Cholmondeley tended to do this a lot. He’d start of scraping at the litter, then move on to scraping the floor and the walls. Bella has taken this one step further, by trying to fold in the sides of the litter tray once she’s done her business. She can’t manage it, but she uses so much force trying to do it that she ends up propelling the litter tray across the bathroom floor.
A distorted view
I came up with this one while I was in the shower, trying to work out what Bella was up to on the other side of the frosted glass panel. I don’t used Photoshop filters very often, but this time round I drew the strip as normal, and then overlaid a ‘frosted glass’ filter over the top of the inked artwork before colouring.
Jackpot
I haven’t eaten Kelloggs Corn Flakes for ages – is that still what the packet looks like?
Substitute
Harvest
When I was a kid I went to a Church of England primary school, and every autumn around this time we would celebrate harvest festival. It was the 1970s, and we were no longer the sons and daughters of farmers, so we thought milk magically appeared on doorsteps every morning and potatoes came in packets which you added water to. So when the call went out for charity donations from this autumn’s bounty to be given to ‘the old folk’ of the parish at a special service on a school day, the Reverend Ford invariably found himself with about 60 cans of baked beans and not much else.
That confusion of agriculture and supermarkets led me to this week’s set of strips. But first, a scene setter. We’ve seen this tree before, but last time Smith tried this trick it was an entire branch that fell on him.
The size of the void
“Space is big. Really big. You just won’t believe how vastly, hugely, mind-bogglingly big it is. I mean, you may think it’s a long way down the road to the chemist, but that’s just peanuts to space.” Douglas Adams
More musings inspired by New Scientist, and the books of Stephen Baxter. If you haven’t come across Baxter before, I recommend him highly – his books are rooted in hard science and tend to evoke the same sense of wonder that Arthur C Clarke at his height was able to produce. He can plot a story over aeons of deep time and make you gasp with the way he describes the universe gradually, inexorably winding down to nothingness. Scrumpy’s sense that the universe is ultimately pointless is based to a large extent on his special brand of majestic cosmic miserableness.
The speed of staying still
I love reading the special collected editions of New Scientist. I’m currently working my way through one on cosmology. I only understand every third word but I find it fascinating. This is a bit more entry-level than Hilbert space, but it still makes the head spin.
Hypermoon
This was the strip that set off this space themed bunch of cartoons. I’ve always been annoyed by those Facebook postings that portentiously announce that a Supermoon is going to be happening, like it was something that only happens once every thousand years or so rather than something that naturally occurs every fourteen full moons. Of course, the term was invented by astrologers rather than astronomers, mainly because its easier for them to say than perigee-syzygy, and because it adds another level of self importance to the drivel they write.
This time round the supermoon was coupled with a lunar eclipse (or ‘bllod moon’ if you want to turn the lunacy dial up to 11), which in the UK happened at around 3am. I don’t know what predictions were made because of this awesome coincidence, but Linda and I were celebrating our 13th wedding anniversary at the time in Buxton and missed it.
The final frontier
I had one joke set up for later on in the month and this led to this set of space-themed strips leading up to it. And people seem to like my pontificating strips where I let the cats make obvious points in an obvious way in front of the TV set, so I started the set off with this one as a theme setter.