Peaceful Rise

There is a cute row of sculpted plant people engaging in various Olympic sports on display near Baishiqiao.  The artists behind the installations must have run out of time or funds by the time they decided to furnish these green creatures with actual sports equipment, to quite an amusing effect: The tennis and badminton players each have a ball and birdie respectively dangling sadly by a wire from their rackets.  I'd guess the tennis player is not actually supposed to be holding a tennis racket; he'd look much more comfortable with a kendo sword in his hands.  And I think the rifleman is aiming with something that might have been picked off a construction site across the street.

This bus is parked in the alley outside my window. It's filled with fruit, and I don't think it can move. When I moved in, the wall behind it enclosed a field of rubble. Maybe there were houses there before. A couple of months ago work crews came and started drilling the ground and digging a pit, and shipping out truckful after truckful of dirt. There is now such a massive deep pit behind the wall that I can't see the bottom of it from my window. But the wall is still there and the bus is still parked beside the wall, as though there were no menacing gaping chasm behind it. I imagine some big yellow metal arm of a crane or digging machine reaching up out of the pit, chomping down on the bus and snatching it back over the wall.

Endlessly inspired by Beijing's androgenous mascots, I drew this at work the other week.  My teammates on the B team going to the frisbee tournament in Shanghai liked it so much that they decided to name the team "Beijing Bling" or "Bei-bling," hence the hat in my recent Flickr uploads .  I paid 35 RMB for the hat at Yashow, plus the half hour or so of walking in and out of the store it took me to get the price to that level.  The silver glitter came off on my fingers once I brought it outside.  They don't make bling here like they do back home.

   

I spent the last couple of days playing around with my new camera and free video editing software. I uploaded the video to YouTube:

I feel that my creative juices will start flowing soon... but in the meantime here are some comics from my old website: More to come...

I have but few words tonight. I will first share with you a cartoon I drew several years back when I was a fiery little upstart, before I had truly learned to appreciate the glory of the Communist Party: