Design & Execution

  Long and low, a howl pierced the night. In warm houses near the frozen lake, dogs perked their ears. A child hugged her dog’s neck as he whined at the window. “What’s wrong?” she asked. Again the wolf howled. The dog barked.  Woof!  Woof! “It’s all right,” the girl whispered. “I’m here.” His cries met only with silence, the wolf curled in the snow. His breath frosted his thick black fur as he slept alone in a sliver of moonlight. (2-3) When dawn flooded the sky, the wolf stretched in front of a blue-streaked glacier. At a rustle from under the snow, he cocked his head.  With his big front paws he pounced and pounced until at last he caught a small vole for breakfast. (4-5)  His hunger satisfied, the wolf warmed himself in the s­un on a big rock, an erratic left by the glacier. He waited and watched. Maybe this was the day another wolf would appear. A playmate. A friend. Or maybe a who...

Let's pretend that you're an unsuspecting pug-dog on a day trip near Mendenhall Glacier in Juneau, Alaska. Let's pretend that you throw caution to the wind and wander a little out of leash-radius without even wearing your hand-knit sweater. Before you know it, you find yourself snatched up in the jaws of a black wolf, carried out of rescue range, and suddenly acutely aware that you are shape and size of a meatloaf. What are your odds of survival? Odds are pretty good, it turns out, if the wolf is Romeo--the main character of Black Wolf of the Glacier , a forthcoming book by Deb Vanasse. Now you see why I am back from my blogging hiatus. Black Wolf will tell the true (if somewhat apocryphal) story of Romeo, a wolf who frequented the Mendenhall Glacier near Juneau, Alaska. Romeo never appeared with a pack, but fraternized regularly with local and visiting dogs. He was known for approaching people and dogs without menace or interest in food, though he was...

. . . or it will be on April 22. Recent business of life has crippled my blogging effort, but I enjoyed creating this commissioned sketch for Buffalo Exchange's Earth Day Dollar Sale benefiting the Humane Society. Is the squirrel eating the earth or protecting it? This is a question I often ask about myself.

It is common knowledge that if a suitor is well-liked by a girl's parents, the girl herself will most likely find him unsuitable. And absolutely: if an infant of mysterious origin appears on an orphanage/farmhouse doorstep and has qualities that set him apart from the other children, he/she is the offspring of royalty, and will one day reassume his/her rightful throne. So decrees the Law of Narrative Necessity. I stole the term "Law of Narrative Necessity" from Terry Pratchett 's Discworld fantasy/satire series, which frequently parodies popular myth. According to the L of NN, as soon as you recognize the story, you must play by its rules, be they comic, tragic, or Whedon esque tragicomic. Riding the story flow is all well in fiction, but it may be a fallacy when applied to the interpretation of everyday facts. I first encountered the narrative fallacy in Nassim Taleb's book, The Black Swan , which discusses the difficulty in predicting the influence of ran...

In lieu of illustrating another snail fallacy this past weekend, I drafted this hand-drawn logo for a friend's etsy-shop-in-progress. Said shop will sell eclectic, feathery, saloon-chic headpieces and accessories. The moment the shop goes live, I will hastily post a link for your shopping pleasure. The name, however, has since come under some dispute with the proprietor's significant other for resembling "the name of about four NYC nightclubs in nineties." Personally, I'm a fan of the name, but I could be biased. I decided to post the drawing, perhaps prematurely, because I have developed a kind of twitch that sets in if I haven't posted anything for over ten days. In between sessions of putzing around with chiaroscuro and striation, I admired the detail work of the woodblock engravings that illluminated Webster's early dictionaries. Thousands of such engravings have been whimsically arranged in  Pictorial Webster's: A Visual Dictionary of Curiosit...

The Pathetic Fallacy (PF) appears more often in literary textbooks than in philosophical ones. As a sometime fan of the gothic romantic period, I thought for a while that the PF dealt entirely with the weather, especially cases in which weather echoes the emotions of the protagonist. Lightening flashes around castle Dracula. A rainstorm gathers around Heathcliff and Catherine on the moor. The sky clamors with trumpets and heraldry during a quest for a Holy Grail (OK, Monty Python may be more romanticized than romantic). THE PATHETIC FALLACY:  the treatment of inanimate objects as though they had human feelings, thoughts, or sensations. Also known as the anthropomorphic fallacy.  Here the word "pathetic" is "non-pejorative" (not disrespectful) and means something more like "empathetic," or "sympathetic."  In an argument, the PF might be used poetically to make nearby objects seem to agree with one's point. For instance, you ate your friend...

The Moving Goalpost fallacy seemed a fitting topic for the new year, when people's personal goalposts are sliding about like ice skaters. People are lacing up, some sailing around, triple-axeling; some colliding with things, toppling, getting up again, or just inching along with a white knuckle grip on the rink edge of aspiration. Most personal goals are born ambitiously (I will no longer drink mimosas during bubble baths), then wobble a little, moving closer, allowing us to drink two mimosas, which is not as wicked as our usual five, but better than no mimosas at all (unreasonable!). The moving goalpost fallacy usually deals with the opposite: cases in which the rules tighten, goal post moves farther away, for the standard is reset by someone else who doesn't want that goal to be achieved.  The Moving Goalpost is not about building arguments, but about testing theories. It deals more with venturing into real-world testing of claims. How many times must a statem...