There’s nothing more 70s than a car with a vinyl roof, and I still think a car with a reconditioned one looks rather swish. But most survivors from the 70s now look like the one in the cartoon.
The car is a British Leyland Princess – a Ford Cortina competitor that could have been a world beater if only they built them well enough to hold together for longer than one week. And if the management had given it the hatchback it was so obviously designed for.
Possibly the only cartoon strip published today that doesn’t mention Back to the Future Pt 2. Instead I used time travel in a slightly different way, creating a never ending temporal loop. This is regularly enacted in our house, with Bella in the hammock and Billy underneath her, playing with her tail.
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.
“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.
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.
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.
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.
