Gene Weingarten Blows Lid Off Subway Fiddler Mystery; Wins Pulitzer

And richly deserved too. I hope you all read his Wash Post Mag story about Joshua Bell busking in the DC Metro. If not, go do it now . And watch the video of Bell in the subway. It's a fascinating piece, and it makes you wonder, what would you do if you were unexpectedly confronted with Beauty, Art & Genius in a wholly unlikely place? Especially if Beauty, Art & Genius was playing for throw money?

And my apologies for the above image. In several years of drawing Gene for his column this is the only one that looked remotely like him. Back in the early 90s, for about 5 years, I illustrated a column by Joel Achenback called Why Things Are that Gene edited (Joel & Gene, along with several others Post staffers, had migrated north from he Miami Herald when that paper took an editorial nose-dive). When Joel ended the column Gene asked me if I'd like to try a weekly cartoon, which eventually became Richard's Poor Almanac, and he was my editor for the first few years. So I owe Gene bigtime. And for a while on the side I illustrated Gene's column in the Post Magazine, where I'd often get to draw him and his fabulous mustache.

Update, here's another one, and not as mean, kinda-

Belated Haydn's Birthday Fun Facts

Oops, his birthday was March 31st.

Today's Poor Almanack

Thanks to recent advances in technology I can now offer the latest up-to-the-minute Almanack the same day it appears in the Washington Post. So here's the one for today. As far as I can tell the only real joke is that it's all about comics but there's almost no actual drawing in it. Next time I'll try for no drawing at all, and no jokes either, and sign it "George F. Will" and see if anybody notices.

Enterprising Reporter Blows Lid Off Cartoonist's Embarrassing Secret

If you read it in the San Antoinio Express-News it must be true !

A Handy Map for Your Visit to the Damn Cherry Blossoms

We're going down to the Tidal Basin tomorrow to see what's left of the cherry blossoms.My wife's aunt & uncle, two of my favorite people, will join us down there, so I hope the blossoms haven't washed away in the rain.

When I was a kid we'd go down to the Tidal Basin at night to see the blossoms, and there'd be 3 or 4 military searchlight trucks positioned at intervals around the Basin. They'd sweep across the water, lighting up the blossoms and it was nice to see. I always loved searchlights when I was a kid and whenever we'd see one in the sky I'd want to go find it, which led my obliging parents to take me to a number of car dealerships and store openings. But I remember the lights down at the Basin in particular, and how whatever was used to fuel the flare in its central lamp (magnesium?) would hiss and how you couldnt look directly at it for more than a few seconds. I still like searchlights and whenever I see one in the sky (or several, as everybody uses those synchronized quadruple light gizmos) I get all excited and want to go find them. I'm easily amused.

Take a Poet to Lunch!

It's true! It's National Poetry Month! Here, something to help you celebrate, and so much better than that lousy CGI movie.

More Damn Cherry Blossoms

It's still Cherry Blossom Time in DC. And look, another cherry blossom cartoon. Did I mention I've got a million of these? Thankfully, it's in black and white instead of some vivid pink that sticks in your retina all day.

First Petey

This is the first appearance of Petey, on February 15th 2004, in the second strip published in the Wash Post Magazine. He's changed only slightly; I think I like his hair better here. And below this strip is an Almanac cartoon from maybe ten years ago. See? It all fits together. Someday I'll figure out how every drawing I've ever done is a small piece of a larger picture, and my personality will then be so integrated that I'll be issued a certificate of guaranteed sanity by whoever's in charge of such things. Then I won't know what to do with myself.



I think the Captain Busybody strip just proves that superheroes are impossible to parody, unless the parody takes the form of Herbie or the Tick.

Did You Know?

A public service announcement from the American Society for the Cripplingly Self Conscious.

More Cherry Blossom Time

Haha! I've got a million of 'em!

Okay, well, three or four maybe.

Cherry Blossom Time

This is Cherry Blossom Time in DC, which means the Cherry Blossom Festival, Parade, Princes and Tourists. At their peak the cherry blossom trees around the Tidal Basin are just overwhelmingly lovely, and as jam-packed as the trail circling the Basin gets it's always worth the hassle to get down there and see them. I doubt I'll make it this year but I hope you all will. For those who don't there's this Almanac from about 7 years ago. At least some of the facts are true (the number of pancakes is pretty accurate if my math's right) but one thing's completely wrong; the blossoms are nowhere near this pink, they're a luminous white with a pinkish cast. But vivid pink's more fun to draw, or paint, and I have kitschy taste.

Save Spot the Frog

Mark Heath, who draws the poetically comic strip Spot the Frog, is trying to keep the first Spot book in print. He's got a pretty ingenious way to do it, too. Click here to learn what you can do. Hurry! Remember, frogs are the parakeets in the global mineshaft!

Deadline Zombie

Tom Richmond's got a Deadline Demon on his blog. So I'm calling mine a Deadline Zombie, and I'm fightin' him right now.

Easter (at least the bunny part)

And let's celebrate Easter a day early. This makes slightly more sense if you know that the Almanac runs in the Post Style section right next to Doonesbury. If I remember right, the editor's only question was if the spelling of "Bunsy" was intentional. I do remember that drawing the rabbit was a lot of fun. It makes me want to illustrate some Beatrix Potter stories, which'd be a classic case of carrying coals to Newcastle.

A few years ago the Smithsonian hosted a traveling exhibition of Beatrix Potter that included a lot of drawings, letters and ephemera. One of the first things you saw when you walked in was a huge blow up of one of the iconic Peter Rabbit illustrations, the one where he's gnawing on a carrot, enlarged to like ten feet tall. On the opposite wall was the original drawing, and it was so small you could've hidden it with your thumb. Something about drawing little twee English animals wearing vests and cravats and such is awfully appealing. Though probably the dream job for an illustrator would be Alice in Wonderland, which has the little twee animals plus an assortment of visually arresting creatures and grotesques. It's hard to improve on the original drawings by John Tenniel, but many have tried and a few have succeeded to some extent, like Ralph Steadman and Peter Newell and Deloss McGraw.

But anyway, Happy Easter, and may all your chocolate rabbits be solid.

Spring

Let's welcome Spring just a coupla days late.

Higher Pie

Make the Pie Higher is something from a simpler time, when it was sufficien to make fun of Bush's tongue-tied pronouncments instead of tearing him a new one for his disastrous policies. It was drawn the week of Bush's first inaugural, when the lack of an Official Inaugural Poet who'd read an Official Inaugural Poem caused a mild controversy. It's a free verse poem assembled from old Bush malapropisms, and when I did it I was a little nervous that it made no sense and not much of a point. But it leaked out on the web and got a little notoriety, and it got set to music five or six times. If I knew how to market this stuff I'd've made some money, but as it is I'm glad that whoever first posted it on the web put my name to it, though mistakenly elevating me to a Washington Post writer. The drawing hasn't been published since its first appearance 7 years ago and for a while it was lost somewhere in my studio, which swallows drawings at a volume way out of proportion to its size.


See also here.

St. Patrick's Day SpecPatular!

March

March is one of my favorite months. It seems to have more character than most months, with all the Lion/Lamb stuff, and during March the weather goes a littlte crazy. Which, as long as it's not too crazy, is just fine by me, especially as the Vernal Equinox hits around the 20th of March.

I did this Almanac poem to March about 8 years ago. The day after it appeared snow fell briefly in DC. It's the one instance of actual prescience I can claim. And I liked the poem enough to shorten it up and use it as a jump rope rhyme for Alice.



Here's another March poem which I falsely attribute to Carl Sandburg.

March comes in on Lion's paws,
Then more Sheepishly withdraws.,
Makes a big mess while it's here,
Drunk on green-dyed Irish beer.

Local History; James Thurber in Falls Church

I live in Arlington, Virginia, which is both a town and a county. About a mile west from my house is the county line beyond which is the city of Falls Church, Virignia. If you head in the other direction and go four miles east you'll cross the Potomac and then you're in Washington DC.

From 1901 to 1903 cartoonist and author James Thurber lived with his family in Washington. He wasn't yet a cartoonist or author, he was mostly a small boy, who'd been born in Columbus Ohio in 1894. His father, Charles Thurber, had moved the family to DC when he was hired as a stenographer to a Justice Department commission headed by an Ohio congressman, and the Thurbers rented a house on I street in Washington. The hot summers and thick humidity DC is known for prompted them to rent a second house out of town for the month of August in 1902. They picked one at 319 Maple Avenue in Falls Church, VA, away from the city heat.

The house had a large yard with apple trees and pear trees, and a hedge around it, a good yard to play in for James and his brothers William and Robert. One Sunday afternoon, William was fooling around with a toy bow and arrow set, and he told James to stand over by the fence and he'd shoot him in the back with one of the rubber arrows. William took his time lining up his shot and James got impatient and turned around just as William let fly. The arrow struck James square in the left eye. His mother took him to a GP who dressed the eye, which hurt some but wasn't bothering him too much. But several days later it seemed to worsen and she took him to an opthamologist who recommended the eye be removed immediately.

The accident eventually caused Thurber's blindness later in life and he blamed the lack of more immediate drastic care for the effect it had on his right eye. And the accident profoundly affected his work, as he drew larger and larger and used ever thicker lenses to make sense of the visual world.

If you leave my house, drive about a mile and a quarter down Lee Highway and turn right on West Columbia Street, then left on North Maple Avenue, you'll come to a dead end street called James Thurber Court.The name of the court is thanks to Mrs. Elizabeth Acosta, a Thurber fan from Falls Church who struck up a correspondence with him in the late fifties, during the course of which she discovered that she was living in the house next to where he lived as a boy in August of 1902. When 319 Maple Ave. was pulled down in the early 60s to make way for townhouses, Mrs. Acosta pushed for the newly created cul-de-sac to be called after its most famous previous resident.



I'm going to walk over there some day this spring and take a photo of the street sign, but I'll keep my head down. Sounds like a dangerous neighborhood.

My thanks to Bob Burnett for telling me about this.

That Woman Again

This was drawn last week for the New Yorker. Smack dab in the middle of doing sketches of Hillary falling off pedestals, falling off a donkey, falling off everything, she won some more state primaries and the whole story changed. I was also doing sketches for a similar story for the Atlantic. So everybody scrambled and this drawing was the result, at least of my scrambling. Whatever you may think of Hillary Clinton, we can all agree that she does have a pretty rubbery face, for which I'm grateful.



And I gotta say, every time I pick up a copy of the New Yorker I'm awed by the caricatures Tom Bachtell draws for them, sometimes five or six in each issue. Every face is spot on and he never repeats himself. Makes me cry.