Letters to Holly

Friday, March 20

Running on Fume-accinos.

Despite what used to be a robust metabolism, I developed a pudge, and I blame my addiction to frappuccinos. Oddly though, they help one run for days and days. I've run hard this week, going farther and with longer strides to get myself back in shape. I ran last night for just at 3 miles and ran earlier this week for a full 5k. I can already see a difference. Also, I'm trying to give up my lunchtime Sprites. I knew they swelled my gut, but their siren song was too alluring. [shakes fist at Sprite, swears vengeance]

Of course someone brought a box of fresh doughnuts to the office today. And I must eat them. It's the agreement doughnuts and I struck at the Treaty of Delicious after the Revolutionary War.

I bought new pens to try out. They're a step up from my bargain-basement ink pens, and I really need to find the high-end stuff. I intend to use a brush to ink this noir comic because the blacks must be deep and opaque. Pen ink is thin and can fade easily. But I'm nervous about starting the inking. I want this art to be better than that of the six-pager. I want to be proud of this, even if it is a ten-panel joke.

Also, I'll draw Your Sister's headshot for her school webpage this weekend.

Picture of the Day
One of Seattle's two dailies closed this week, and the obituary editor added it to their last listing.


No one asked me what can be done to save papers, but two things are vital:
1) Buy them cheap from the morons who bought them and ran them into the ground. Most papers are drying because their syndicate owners didn't know how to run papers, and tried to make every paper nationally relevant. Papers were trying to compete with USAToday and the Wall Street Journal and New York Times. They burned out. Also, people stopped buying the papers when they reduced their local copy to reach a national audience.

2) Papers should perceive themselves less as newspaper companies and more as new agencies that have a printer. With online options, papers can produce audio and video along side text and graphics. They can be TV channels, radio channels, and newspapers every day. They have to diversify.

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