Design & Execution

This installation of Black Wolf of the Glacier drawings should probably appear in black, a tone of mourning. Since I last posted illustrations, I have lost the company of my generously-sized Intuos3 Wacom, the drawing tablet I used to complete all of my illustrations for Lucy's Dance . I never went as far as naming it, but its flat grey countenance had borne the tracing of some of my best current line drawings. It weathered my dropping it, tripping on its cord, and sullying it with foodstuffs enough that like the Velveteen Rabbit, it became real. Then a loose power cord did it in at last. and I watched its blue connection LED flicker away like a fairy, and yes, I did try clapping it back to life. When hope seemed distant, I also resorted to prying it open and looking inside, but it was no use. My new wireless Intuos4 is pulling its slight weight. The smaller 8x5" surface doesn't feel restrictive, considering I draw primarily from my wrist; rather, it makes each movem...

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...

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...

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...

When I was seventeen, I filled a one-month vacancy at a historically-themed boardwalk called Alaskaland .* All the shops were housed in reclaimed pioneer cabins, and I was required to wear a very Presbyterian-looking calico frock to maintain historical authenticity. My job was to man the counter in a historically-inauthentic soft-serve ice cream establishment called Frosty Paws. Frosty Paws' owner was a stickler for consistency. Our flavor selection ranged a whopping six flavors, and never more than four at once. The owner required that I weigh my sweet creations after dispensing them in order to assure a standard 8 or 16-oz. serving. Before the month was out, my cone-holding wrist could count to 8 oz. as well as any dealer of addictive substances. Furthermore, I had mastered the symmtrical twirl of the cone to create a regular spiral, an art which later, in the college cafeteria, lent me that charming, robotic air that every freshman covets. How would I have reacted if Ralph Wal...

The slippery slope  fallacy posed an obstacle to my creative process. Someone else has already come up with a memorable, concrete metaphor. I suppose I could have thrown up my hands and drawn a snail at a water slide, but that would have been a cop out. This blog is about (mostly) original material. The slippery slope fallacy involves predicting that one small move, say, dropping a hook, will ignite a series of actions that lead to whale-sized results. Once you give them an inch, start down that path, open that can of worms, the worms escape and chastise you for your horrible taste in canned food. The fallacy knits causes and effects together as if they are logically connected.  If they happen to be logically connected, you don't really have a fallacy. You have a valid prediction. In the case of my fish, however, fallacy abounds.  The food chain doesn't always work in nesting-doll order, from large to small. Sometimes slender lampreys feed upon the skin of larger sh...

The Argument from Incredulity (AFI): I cannot explain or understand this, therefore it cannot be true. The AFI is a reactive fallacy, an irrational form of rebuttal to opposing ideas. Arguing from Incredulity takes arrogance, gerrymandering the borders of possibility to suit an incumbent imagination. If it cannot fit my brain, it cannot fit the world, either --a solipsistic thought at best. A special kind of character fancies his brain larger than the world. That character is Vizzini from The Princess Bride . Vizzini: "He didn't fall?" Inconceivable!" Inigo: "You keep using that word. I do not think it means what you think it means." Inigo wisely sticks to semantics in his response. Inigo dabbles a bit in wordplay, and knows better than to question Vizzini's overall strategy because, well, Vizzini is never wrong. Genius though Vizzini may be ("Ever heard of Plato? Aristotle? Socrates? Morons."), his hubris and his intolerance for ...

This Christmas, I find myself surrounded with a banquet of non-electronic sources of entertainment, including silly putty, books, family, as well a literal banquet. However, I also find myself without internet for some ten days this Christmas. Today, the withdrawal symptoms have been punctuated with a trip to a local Panera. I feel like an alcoholic slipping down to the corner bar, only my cup contains mango ceylon tea which delivers a fresh smack of fishtank pebbles with each sip. The wi-fi, however, is slicker than I-80 in January. In a brief (and and slightly overdue) detour from Lucy's Dance , the book for which I will shortly produce my first polished illustration, I thought I'd post a Christmas illustration I recently revised for Buffalo Exchange . The request: "I'd like to show a bunch of buffalo pulling Santa's sleigh, which will be driven by a [Star Wars] stormtrooper . . . all drawn in the approximate style of Ralph Steadman ." I did my best. ...

At times, the Wikipedia list of fallacies seems endless, as though it will take all the snails in French butter to illustrate. Recently, I noticed that the Skeptic's Guide contains a list of its "Top Twenty" fallacies , worded in new and precise ways. This delighted me, as cross-referencing is a mischievous habit of mine. My eye landed on the false continuum. It seemed to lend itself to illustration, and at very reasonable rates, so I complied. The SG defines the false continuum as: "The idea that because there is no definitive demarcation line between two extremes, that the distinction between the extremes is not real or meaningful." Wikipedia offers the example of baldness and non-baldness. We know a bald man (or woman) when we see one, though he/she may still have a few hairs left. We probably can't name the minimum number of hairs a person can have before qualifying, yet the distinction exists. For a colorful, Grecian example of this dilemma, see the Sor...