Your Weekly Dose of Dangle

My miniature tikis

I just got back to my office after two weeks in Hawaii. Yes, readers, eat your hearts out. It was great. We were on my favorite island, Kauai. I love to hang out on the beach and do nothing for days on end and it’s especially great because Oscar loves the water. I mean he really loves the water. He goes into the ocean in the morning and comes out in the late afternoon. He even asks me to bring him a drink of water out in the waves because he can’t bear to get out. You might think it’s irresponsible parenting to let him stay in the water so long, that it might be unsafe or whatever, but he’s virtually an aquatic animal. Hard pounding surf means nothing to him. Some of my friends were taking a surf lesson and the wizened old native Hawaiian surf instructor commented on my son’s swimming: “Oscar da fish.”

Since we’ve been back it’s been typical San Francisco summer, foggy, overcast, cold. I have been getting back into writing but I don’t seem able to put two words together in a coherent order.



I was asked by Andrew at the Cartoon Art Museum in San Francisco to have a Troubletown retrospective exhibit in the fall. What an honor. The problem is that my friends at the Mercury Cafe also asked me to have a show and an “End of Troubletown” party at the same time. It’s difficult to know what to do. Would it be weird to have two shows in the same town going on at once? I’m in a conundrum. The other problem with having a retrospective is that I used the wrong adhesive on my comics for nineteen years. Rubber cement doesn’t stand the test of time. I’ve been going through the archives. The entire year of 1995 is falling apart. A lot of the comics sucked too.

Review of the iPad, continued

I took my iPad to Hawaii with me and tried to find some use for it. The email program is a mess. Two emails that I had intended to reply to simply disappeared after I read them. (E Yarber, if you're out there, thanks for your message!) After a while I got a notice that my mail server was full. On a laptop I could’ve gone in and deleted a bunch of junk mail, but the iPad only let me select one email at a time so it would’ve taken me forever to throw out enough to make a difference.

The other problem with the iPad is the apps. Apps are mini-applications that are supposed to make the iPad act a little bit like a computer, but unlike most software they are all released while still in early stages of development so they’re buggy as hell and work like shit. You are supposed to be checking the app store all the time to discover the ones that actually do what they’re supposed to without crashing your iPad. I don’t have time for that, I just want things that work reliably. If anybody has any apps that are good let me know about them.

My reaction to the iPad is one of those things that makes me feel the disconnect between me and the American people. They all love this gadget. It puts me another step behind the techno-savvy youth. I asked my friend Pete what he uses his iPad for. He loves to have it in the kitchen so he can watch a movie or listen to NPR while he chops up onions. It’s a thousand dollar radio and TV with a small screen. When I tried watching a movie on mine it kept having to reload. I guess I have to shell out for a faster connection. iPad. Anybody want to buy one slightly used?