Name that Mini-Corporation

My friend Stuart and I are involved in packaging a graphic novel for a third party.

Towards this end, we'll be needing to form a two-person company so that we can do our taxes correctly as well as pay each other and our artists.

And so we must name ourselves. The current frontrunner is Botfriend Books...which is an inside joke based on a typo by someone I last saw in 1982 or 1983. He doesn't even know he might have named our company. Yet.

(Oops, now he knows.)

So...who wants to name our graphic novel production company? Or does "Botfriend Books" work for you? My friend Jessica runs Friendly Robot Studios, so perhaps she'd think we swiped her, and we wouldn't want that.

The Road to Sharm

After the events of last week, where an Egyptian newspaper used Photoshop to move their leader to the head of this pack, Yasir issued a challenge.

"Make your own reality," he said.

So here. In my reality, a hippo shall lead them.

Africa Bus Travel Addendum

One of my blog posts that frequently land strangers here is this one, from 2005:

Blueprint for Independent Africa Travel.

The post is not the most exciting, but the information is useful. Or was useful, until I just now read that the most reputable bus line in East Africa—Scandinavia Express—went bust earlier this year.

But the news isn't all bad. I checked the bus schedules on the website for The Eye, a free monthly magazine in Kampala, and found links that led me to this:

Kampala Coach not only services similar routes to the now-defunct Scandinavia, but it goes a step farther and provides, or plans to provide, transportation from Nairobi to to Ethiopia.

A quick Google search indicated a lot of people talking about this bus. Perhaps it is in the works and not yet active. Perhaps it runs once a week. Perhaps it never existed at all. But the map on the Kampala Coach site means...well, your guess is as good as mine, but mine thinks there might actually be a bus here, maybe on Wednesdays when there are not bandits along the road.

The Marsabit to Moyale leg was one of the last puzzle pieces needed for an almost seamless public transport route from Cape Town to Cairo. And by seamless, I mean regularly scheduled and enclosed, with actual seats. This still leaves tough parts in Sudan. But you need to have some fun, right?

Coloring Lesson

In one of my past identities, I colored comics.

Attached is page one of the first big assignment I ever got. I had this out of its binder to show my class on Tuesday, so I scanned it in.

The year was 1991, and I had no idea what I was doing. My friend Steve Buccellato was a successful colorist, though, and while I did the physical act of coloring this book, he told me exactly what to do.

Proxy-coloring seems odd to me now, but with Steve walking me through this issue (he penciled in the codes on the paper, and I mixed the colors and painted them onto the page), I gained the confidence to do the next issue by myself. And the next, and the next, until I'd colored comic books for four years. In 1995, we slowly moved into using this newfangled software called Photoshop, but the transition from old-school to total digital coloring took more than five more years.

Before Photoshop, the colorist painted a guide like this one. We used transparent watercolor dyes, which had the benefit of only showing up on the white areas of the page. Digitally, it's like saving the artwork into an alpha channel or different layer, so you can see it but won't color over it by accident.

The numbers are the CMYK values. Back then, we could only choose from yellow (Y), magenta (R), and cyan (B), and could only chose one of these values: 25 (marked as 2), 50 (marked as 3), 70 (marked as 4), 100 (represented just by the letter). Y2R2, for example, meant Yellow 25 mixed with Magenta 25.

Another person would cut a screen of Rubylith—a colored semi-transparent screen—to match the shape, and would adhere it to the master film.

Now, of course, I outline a polygon with my lasso and hit fill to get the same effect. Times have changed.

Saturday Night in JC

I was out walking with Denise on Saturday night, and took this with my little automatic camera.

We then stopped in at the bubble tea shop by the PATH, and noticed some odd items on their menu.

Snacks, 2001

While contemplating both the nutritional value of bedbugs—(solves the problems of bedbug infestation and world hunger at the same time!) and the disturbing thought that 1) they are nutritious because they are filled with blood and 2) that would be people-blood, giving edible bedbugs something in common with Soylent Green—it occurred to me to re-scan some edible bug photos from 2001.

These bugs were in China, in a small city (Luoyang?) that I was in with Yancey and Turbo and a bunch of Intrepid Travel clients. Bugs are supposed to be good for you. Did I eat them? I admit that I did not. Food allergies, you know.

Bugs. It's what for dinner.

Anniversary

Yesterday was the five-year anniversary of my first (and last, I hope) close-up encounter with a Ugandan Nile hippo.

Since then, I've made the acquaintance of a few more.

Added Bonus: You Can Send Stuff

I was in the Hoboken post office yesterday and noticed this sign in the vestibule.



Er, what? The post office is named after Sinatra? Named so by CONGRESS? Seriously, WTF? It's a post office...

Vital Reminder

I'm looking at some options for a short-term consulting gig I might take down the road (don't ask...YET), and thinking about Afghanistan, which is smack-dab in the middle of the process I'd be involved in.

Would I really go in? I don't know. I was reading up on local info on the Lonely Planet message boards, and there are perfectly safe parts and absolutely unsafe parts. Khyber Pass, where I was in 1998, sounds unsafe and is out.

But here is the most useful link I stumbled over this morning.

Always cover your butt.

A Day On Governors Island

After our kayaking adventure on Saturday, Roberta dropped me off at home. I rushed into the shower and then to the World Trade Center PATH. Grateful for the shade of the skyscrapers of Wall Street, I raced across Manhattan to the Governors Island ferry.

Governors Island—which is a half-mile off of the southeastern tip of Manhattan—was a US Coast Guard property for thirty years of my life. Now it's property of the Department of the Interior and the State of New York. And they like us all right, so it's a 172-acre park that we can all go to for free on ferries from Manhattan and Brooklyn.

I was searching for my friend Jessica and her family, because they were having a birthday picnic for her six-year-old daughter. I don't usually attend children's birthday celebrations, but the family lives in Seattle and was visiting, and I only see them once a year.

It took me half an hour to find them, even with the aid of text messages such as "We're near the jazz." Once I did locate the group, Jessica and I ditched them and went to look at artwork that was on display. One piece was by a friend's mother, so naturally I had to pose with the sculpture and a can of Cafe Bustelo.

At another installment, we were invited to visit the notary.

Huh?

Jessica was notarized as beginning the citizenship process to the place she loves best, which, as it turns out, is her studio, Friendly Robot Studios. I witnessed.

In the process of the assimilation, she was required to write a song about her studio. To the tune of Yankee Doodle. She did. We sang it. I quietly hit "Record" on my camera.

When it was over, we thought we'd sung okay for two people not known for their spectacular singing voices. But the notary told us we were flat.

You can judge for yourself.