I’ve Long Tried To Do Something Creative Every Day If Possible, Whether It Be Something Huge And Refined

One fine evening in the lobby of the radio station WBAI, where I work on Off the Hook, I was doodling in my sketchbook to kill some time.  I decided to draw the file cabinet, plant, and telephone which happened to be in front of me.

When the drawing was complete I stuck it to the wall behind the cabinet, natch.  It was suddenly inaccurate, though, so I added the picture on the wall to the picture, and so on.  It's cabinets, plants, and phones, all the way down.

I figured someone at the station would get rid of this before too long, but as you can see from this photo taken a couple of months later (note the plant's growth) it's still in place. In that time I've witnessed a few other denizens of the place notice, do a double-take, and get at least a slight chuckle out of it.  RESULT!

2013 UPDATE: The sketch, which I posted in November of 2010, surprisingly ended up staying on the wall for a couple of years.  It remained even after the plant had grown larger, the phone had been replaced, and the cabinet had been moved.  The lobby closed down, and the station and its contents hurriedly transferred to other facilities, when the building was damaged by Hurricane Sandy in October 2012; the drawing's fate remains unknown.

My current business card.  The design was slightly accidental; I was playing with some vintage photos of my ancestors to pass the time while trying to come up with a new business card design, when I realized the distraction I'd been fooling around with would be just the thing to use.  It's a bit more "me" than my previous business cards.  I'd like to think my late great-grandparents would approve.

Background skyline is adapted from this public domain image.

Printed on 3x2" cardstock, with glossy coating on the front and rounded corners.  The reverse is blank, the better for writing any additional information the situation may require.  The cards are also quite useful for getting old food out from between one's teeth, though I always make sure to not use my relatives' corners for that.

Some days you find yourself illustrating venerable Irish actor and Star Trek alumnus Colm Meaney, and affixing him to an ancient meme.

Today, for me, is one of those days.

Modified from this original Keep Calm poster.

A fascinating fact about the latest Doctor Who trailer.

Support the WHOFAX Kickstarter!

A true story starring myself, my cats, and nypl.

Grace Hopper (December 9, 1906-January 1, 1992)

Rear Admiral Grace Hopper, USN, Ph.D., or "Amazing Grace" as she is often known to her admirers, was a computer scientist and programmer whose pioneering work on early computers as well as her amiably no-nonsense attitude when teaching continues to inspire.

She is known for distributing "nanoseconds," lengths of wire spanning the distance light travels in that amount of time, at her speaking engagements.

Acrylic on canvas, 7x5″.  From my September 2015 set Luminaries of the Hacker World.

Motorola MicroTAC 9800X 1989

The MicroTAC 9800X was not only the smallest and lightest mobile phone of its time, it was the first to feature the trend-setting "clamshell" type design where a mouthpiece flipped to cover the keypad when not in use.

Featuring a dot-matrix LED display, very advanced for the day, the MicroTAC and its immediate variants remained in production well into the 1990s and formed the basis for much of the world’s idea of what a "cellular phone" looked like.

Acrylic on canvas, 5x7″.  From my series of paintings of historical telephones.

Some more captchart.  The 1963 Wostro, the herpderpiest automobile the swinging sixties and a wonky captcha had to offer!

Public domain source images: 1 2 3 4 5 6

I started playing with recording over my own voice in multitrack, and after about an hour and a half this accidentally happened.

If you're one of the poor unfortunate souls who haven't experienced the glorious original version, here's the video and here's the Wikipedia article.  I put together these lyrics based on multiple English translations floating around out there; I think I've kept the basic gist of each line intact.

I have no regrets; if nothing else, at least I actually hit every sour note without pitch-bending or autotuning of any kind.

Download this track here if you're unwell enough to want to do such a thing.

There's a music video now as well.

For today’s daily doodle I played a self-administered drawing game a teacher taught me ages ago which is perfect for getting over doodler’s block, so I decided to share the game here as well.

The original game used a paper encyclopedia or dictionary (which were things people had back then) flipped to a random page, I updated it for the Wikipedia era.

Once you master doing this in ten minutes, try for five!