Today was great. First, a guy sitting next to me on the train almost knocked off my glasses when he accidentally hit my face with his jacket while putting it on. Then, I was almost crushed between the magazine shelves in the library, because this one guy was too stupid to check if someone was between the other shelves before he started cranking apart the shelves he was interested in.

At the incident on the train, I felt like faking a 'karate reflex' that would make me 'accidentally' almost punch him in the face, but since that seemed a bit too violent, I just demonstratively shoved his jacket away and got up, not really caring whether he would learn anything from that experience.
In the library, however, the man's behaviour made me really angry, so I shouted at him that he should perhaps look between the shelves before starting to move them ...

I know all my male friends and relations will be angry now, but I can't help but think about the fact that I personally have never experienced anything like this - people hurting or bothering others out of pure oblivion - happening because of any *woman*, except myself and perhaps one or another teenage girl.
However, I've witnessed how *men* have done this kind of things on quite many occasions. Throwing themselves down on benches so that the whole bench, and everyone sitting on it, shakes, shoving people with their bags, jackets or body parts, thumping their foot loudly at the floor in movie theaters, being loud and noisy and taking space to the point of it being harmful to others.

The emphasis here is on it being accidental, with no ill intention. I've been shoved by quite many girls and women walking past on the sidewalk, but they all did it intentionally (because I'm too good-looking or something ...!?).

It's a fact that boys are generally encouraged to take a lot of space and be noisy as they grow up, while girls are told to suppress those sides. I guess that this in some men and boys has gone to the point of forgetting that someone can actually be hurt if they don't watch out where their body parts are going ... or, as in the case of the man in the library (a middle-aged, well-dressed man in designer spectacles), forgetting that there are actually other people in the world except they themselves.

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Anyway, I recently came across the amazing song "Cold, Cold Water" by an artist called Mirah (with the cool full name of Mirah Yom Tov Zeitlyn). I have myself been playing with the thought of a drumbeat imitating a horse's gallop, and this song incorporates exactly that. I can neither sing nor play any instrument, so I'm very happy that someone else has had the same idea and made it real. However, I don't know what kind of horses Mirah and Elvrum (her partner with the instruments) have been riding, but the hoofbeat in this song is basically like this:

DU-du-du-dum - du-du - DU-du-du-dum - du-du - DU-du-du-dum

Whereas the hoofbeat in my head goes like this:

du-du-DUM - du-du-DUM - du-du-DUM

That's the way it really sounds (and feels) when a horse is galloping. (Hear for yourself in a movie at Equine Online.)

While the beat in "Cold, Cold Water" is certainly more sophisticated (and is given many variations in the song), I've yet to hear a more monotonous - and more authentic - beat like the one in my head being used in a song.

Below I was complaining about someone hijacking one of my web pages. Was I ever surprised that the popup ad was back again, after I had changed the page and its address.

After a little bit of research, it turns out that the company that took over my former statistics service Nedstat, Webstats4U, did it. Read more:

http://www.robcottingham.ca/20050913/free-web-statistics-dont-count-on-it/

So, I guess I'll have to find a new statistics service ...

Click the picture below to see it in full size.



Anyway, I just want to see Ainur as soon as possible after she comes back from her conference in Jerusalem, so she can tell me all about it ...

It's funny how this year was supposed to be the one year when I would have SO much time for drawing comics, because I took this semester off from studying, and have only been working sporadically and part-time (rent and food is all I need ...).

Actually, I've drawn quite a lot compared to previous years, but the one-page-a-day routine of my school years has mostly stayed unattainable. Maybe I just need firm, unquestionable routines. But the problem is - how to establish *unquestionable* routines when you live alone? Maybe I should get a pet or two ...

No, I'll just have to get a grip on myself, so that I can focus myself despite any distractions that might encounter me. When I was younger, my comics were the most important thing in the world to me (well, next to my family, that is). I have to get back tlo that. I have to do it for MYSELF, because I WANT TO, because I LIKE DOING IT, regardless of what kind of interest other people might have in it.

Anyway, in order to get inspiration in this time of writer's block (drawer's block?), I've been watching Hong Kong films (it has worked quite well before). But maybe I've seen too many such films, because it takes a lot more nowadays to get me interested. Yesterday, I watched "Supercop" with Jackie Chan and Michelle Yeoh. I hadn't seen any film with Jackie Chan before, but I'd read somewhere how someone thought his martial arts were far superior to Jet Li's, so I wanted to check him out. (Jet Li is my favourite martial arts filmstar - but that's actually because I want to *be him*, not because I'd want to be *with* him, as Mihai falsely seems to think, the way he always gets performance anxiety after watching a Jet Li flick with me ...)
Well, I somehow didn't get any too good idea about Jackie Chan's martial arts from that film, so I wouldn't know how 'good' he is compared to Jet Li. And while I really like Michelle Yeoh, the best (almost: the only good) part of the film were the 'behind the scenes' shots at the end, where you could see how Jackie Chan and Michelle Yeoh did their own stunts. Pretty cool!

It seems someone has in some way hijacked a page on my website - http://www.kommiekomiks.com/evas_eskapader.htm. There is a popup ad that usually appears when you open that page, though it doesn't show in the source code. Oh well, I had been planning to do a complete makover for it, anyway ...

... 4 hours later:

Okay, I've done a complete makeover for Eva's page. Check it out. I also added the Q&A section that I had written for the book (intended to be published next year, if I can get my ass off the wagon) to the web page, because, well, the more text you have on a page, the more it will show up in search engines, and the more people will consider reading your comic.

Waxing Gibbous, 95% of Full, according the thingie in Ainur's blog.

How cool it would be to have a powerful telescope and look at all the stuff in the cosmos. Something like the Spitzer, perhaps ... (See also NASA's "Astronomy Picture of the Day Archive".)

Unfortunately, it didn't find any nice poems about spiders ...

Vampirates is about a bunch of pretty boys who are vampires, pirates and probably fancying each other in one way or another. It's set in the modern world - Canada, to be more precise - and the story sets off on a ferry in Newfoundland.

Needless to say, I like comics that begin with a ferry trip (for certain personal reasons). And Vampirates is very, very well made. The one thing I could possibly complain about is that Hassan Qasim, one of the main characters, doesn't seem to have much body hair, despite his Middle Eastern genes. (Oh well, I'll just have to tell myself that the drawings are so stylized that the body hair doesn't show, although it's certainly there ...)

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The only manga-inspired online comic with pretty boys, that I know of, where they actually have body hair (though not enough ... it's never enough!) and even a bit of muscles is Jesse Hajicek's Metanoia.

Today I watched the film "Audition" by Takashi Miike. It is a story about a middle-aged man, Aoyama, who some time after his wife's death from illness decides to remarry. In order to find a suitable wife, his friend arranges a fake audition for a film.

Aoyama instantly falls in love with one of the women, Asami. They start dating, and Asami seems to be a wonderful girl. But Aoyama is ridden by guilt - for planning to remarry after his wife's death, for arranging a fake audition, for being so much older than Asami.

*Spoiler warning!!!* Click and drag your mouse over the following paragraph ONLY if you don't mind a major spoiler ...

His subconscious starts playing tricks on him, and his guilt, his friend's hunches that something is wrong with Asami, her hints about some sort of trauma in her past, and the fact that none of the contacts she mentioned during the audition can be reached warp into a powerful nightmare that seems all too real, where Asami is a serial killer slowly torturing her victims to death in order to deal with the trauma caused by a childhood of endless abuse ... softly whispering "kiri kiri kiri kiri" ("kiri" = 'deeper') as she drives needles into Aoyama's body.

*End spoiler warning.*

This film kicks a lot of ass. It's not a horror movie as such, but more of a psychological drama with a bad, *very* bad, twist. It doesn't say much about Asami or any of the other side chracters, but it's a deep exploration of Aoyama's character.

The little doggie's mistress went into the Chinese restaurant under my apartment, and he cried all the time until she came back ... He looks like a mix between border collie and German shepherd (or something).