Landscape of Virginia

Why didn't we learn anything from the last oil crises, with our efforts to find alternative energy sources falling short as soon as the price of gas became reasonable again for us to stomach. Well now we are living on a planet that could easily be cooked by our not changing our gas guzzling automobiles to a non-burning engines like we should have thirty years ago during our first gas crises. Now big oil has us by the balls and there is nothing we can do about it but scramble to develop alternative means of going from place to place with the stuff we want without using gasoline to do it. I am using my car as little as possible. Now when I drive I do three to four things on one trip. And whenever feasible I ride my bike at all other times. Don't wimp out, think about how this planet suffers each time we sit in traffic at a light just burning, burning, and burning....no wonder this planet is warming up so....think of how many people around the world must be sitti...

Remember the election of 2004 when they announced that they were missing 10's of thousands of votes from a mostly black precient in Florida, I was wondering how that happened and just where did those votes go. So I came up with this cartoon while wondering about it. I suppose anything could have happened but as it turned out that many votes could have turned the election of George W. Bush over to Al Gore if they had been counted, that is if those votes really were lost to the winds and not counted. I only heard one account of it on the news back then, I wonder if it was true or not. I never really heard much more about it.

Working on a new painting today, I was able to visit a historic house in a part of town where you wouldn't think it would be located, but there in the woods was a very nicely designed house. It belongs to a couple at least one of whom (it maybe that both were) was once the Mayor of this city. I had the good fortune to meet both members of the house and a couple of grandchildren as I was set up painting in their front yard. The house is a beauty, it's been added on to with a nice southern exposure sun room which is very long and gets good light during the day. The front of the house reminded me of the Jeffersonian style with large columns and old red brick highlighted with white wood trim. It had a massive structure around the front entrance but it really wasn't that big of a porch once you stood on it, it just had strong presence when you were looking at it from the front yard or as you approached the house from the driveway. I only got a start on it, but I...

Beginning with the summer break, the world opened up to be a pretty nice place mostly because many of my aches have gone away. I've had time to paint, draw, workout, go to many NA meetings and otherwise do whatever I wanted to with my day. I got to draw. That's had me reflecting upon the election material on the news. It's the people watching the candidate that I find interesting, watching them in the background of a photo or video on the news is really interesting to me. All the various 'listening' expressions and the excitement shown in the faces of those in attendance of a political rally of their choosing is so unique and a real feast of facial expressions. It's something that I have been enjoying this long long election season. It's also brought me a lot of new information about the way people dress now, that I have really incorporated into my caricatures features when I draw them. I need to study them once again to get these peopl...

Today is our last school day for this year of 07-08 and I'm looking forward to seeing all the students off for the summer and then going to a teacher unwinding party at the High School. One thing that seems to have been done lately is to put cameras into the High School as a way of cutting down the trouble they have in curbing the problem of violence and just "bad behavior".. It's been in place for a couple of years I it's done that, but in thinking about it, would you want yourself to be on camera at all points when you were out in public spaces? Would you feel ok about it? What if those cameras were being manned by a group of people who wanted to keep citizens from gathering in groups of three or more and exchanging ideas? I know, it's not that way right now, but what if society changed so that it was, their cameras and computers which watched those cameras for suspecious signs could be in place by the time they took power, then what would you d...