Billy and Bella invite you to admire their handiwork.
Not actually an exaggeration for comic effect
Billy and Bella invite you to admire their handiwork.
Tag / Jones
Just following instructions
If you don’t want your journal wrecked, don’t call it ‘Wreck This Journal’. Obviously.
More philosophical mewsings
Smell the irony
Of course, on the day I publicise the blog in the strip, I forget to update the blog until sometime in the evening. Irony, thy name is Pilcher.
This and the next few strips were sparked off by an article in a book called “The Things that Nobody Knows” on the nature of consciousness. It debates whether it is ever possible to know how a cat thinks, when we have no idea if it has anything even slightly analagous to the self awareness that a human has, or how its vastly different sensory inputs skew the way it sees the world. Of course, all the cats in this strip are highly anthropomorphic in their outlook, so they find this question rather ridiculous.
Besides, from their point of view, the question is more like “How on earth did humans get to be the dominant species when they can’t smell anything worth smelling (and when they can they can only interpret it in the crudest way), hear anything worth hearing or see anything unless they’re under a floodlight?”
Snugger
This is one of those strips that was a direct result of the one before it. Having drawn Jones in earmuffs in Wednesday’s strip I started to wonder how Scrumpy would appear in them, and whether they would even fit.
Snug
It’s winter, so it’s time to come out with the cold jokes. Inspired by the many woolen hats that Linda wears at this time of year – I’ll have to take some photos and post a gallery of them some time.
As you can tell I’m still running slightly behind schedule on this blog – that ice storm has meant I’ve had to prioritize catching up with my work on my real job in publishing, as I’ve had so many projects deadlining at the same time on dates unhelpfully close to the New Year. I’ve battled my way through them so I should be running on a more even keel now. I may even find the time to post some more Riverfields strips and a gallery of new Billy and Bella photos. Let’s see what happens…
2015, at last…
Sorry this has been posted so late but I have an excuse. My wife and I got delayed on the way back from visiting her parents in New Mexico over Christmas. I’ve never encountered an ice storm before – they’re deceptively nasty and not at all like the snow storms we get in the UK. Maybe when we passed four overturned SUVs in the space of one mile on the way to the airport we should have realised something was up. Ice built up on the windscreen and was impervious to the windscreen wipers. Linda’s dad was driving and all it took was one slight tap on the brakes to send us spinning gracefully into the shallow ditch at the side of the road. Luckily no damage was done, and we rejoined the road and made it gingerly to the airport in time to discover that all the flights out had been cancelled for the day. Our next flight out was not to be until New Years Day – we were stuck in Lubbock for two days.
We found a hotel in North Lubbock – and as soon as we got there we realised we’d stranded ourselves in a building that was the sole occupant of a vacant lot with nothing around us for at least a mile in any direction. That’s not normally something I’d worry about, but these were not normal conditions. It was dark by the time we reached the hotel and all we could see out the window were the distant lights of a corner drug store on the horizon, with a vast expanse of flat whiteness between us and civilization.
The temperature the next day was -11ºC. We managed to make an expedition to a strip mall by foot in the afternoon and found supplies there.
To cut a long story short, we finally arrived in London at 12 noon on January 2nd, and drove back to Hastings that afternoon, collecting two very pissed off cats on the way home.
It’s taken 24 hours for the cats to forgive us, but they’ve now turned into a couple of cuddle bunnies and quite determined not to let us ever go off on holiday again. Don’t worry cats; after that journey back, I’m not planning to go again for a good while…
Tat
Need I say more? To be fair I haven’t seen much England stuff around anywhere this year – the team’s performance in the World Cup was so abysmal that it’s been like an unspoken agreement between all Brits to never refer to it again. And with FIFA gradually drowning in sleaze and lots of European teams grumbling about the next two tournaments taking place in the obviously uncorrupt countries of Russia and Qatar, I can see the entire edifice of the World Cup crumbling to dust in the near future. Which is a good thing.
I own nothing with an England flag on it. That’s for footballists and UKIP supporters. I’m strictly a Union Jack man.
Wednesday’s strip may be late – as I write this the day before I fly off to spend time with Linda’s family in New Mexico I haven’t drawn the New Year’s Eve strip yet. You may end up with a photo of a strip taken with an iPod. Normal service will be resumed on 2 Jan – I’ll be back by that point.
If I don’t get to say it to you on Wednesday, have a happy new year, everyone!
Gimme dat ding
Happy Boxing Day, everyone. Don’t forget, this is but the 2nd day of Christmas, and you don’t actually have to pack your tree away until January 5th. It always depresses me to be in America and watch Christmas be dismantled with an unseemly haste as soon as the big day is over.
Merry Christmas!
‘A Merry Christmas to all our readers’, as they say. May you have a great day, whether your with your families or with friends, and remember, Christmas is for all time, not just for Christmas. And may you recieve better presents than Smith and Jones did.