"Cauffee"

Speaking as a transplanted Yankee living out in the northwest, one of the things that made me stick out like a sore thumb were the different pronunciations of everyone's favorite breakfast drink... Being asked by waiters all over Seattle what "cauffee" was got old after the first week.

Tardiness

Considering how late I was finishing today's strip I think I feel obligated to apologize for the lateness of this strip and the occasional tardiness of others in the past. Part of me wants to say "well this is just a glorified hobby why should you care? Here's how it goes personal pride aside I feel that REAL deadlines are what keeps me going. I I sometimes imagine my muse as an irritable riotgrrl with a stopwatch and a lead pipe standing behind me. Knowing that I have to finish a comic strip before 12:00 whether I like it or not I believe guarantees it. Writers Block ceases to be an excuse and if the joke turns out to be mediocre because of it well that is my punishment. But every once in a I have a where I have been completely useless and uncreative and I finally have to ask myself do I want to post a piece of sloppy and unfunny gibberish created by a sleep deprived mind or do I want to get a good nights sleep and do presentable albeit late strip the next day. It's not something I like to do for one thing its a matter of pride and the other thing there my punishment of having to do TWO strips that day but there you are and I'll try to keep it down to an absolute minimum.

Celestial Bureaucracy

One of my favorite concepts in Chinese Mythology is the celestial bureaucracy. What the gist of it is is that Heaven is an even bigger mess of red tape than anything that we have down here. This can best be seen in Wu Cheng'en's Journey to the West. To me this was a cosmology that reflected the society of the time (In this case the late Ming Dynasty) and I always wondered why this concept never caught on I mean for all the west's societal progress our view of religion doesn't stray far from the original Hellenic template that the writers of the gospels had been raised with. So anyway I thought it would be fun to look at it again... or at least at one of the smaller departments in the Department of Minor Nuisances a Subdivision of Fate.

Independence Day

Since this is indeed Fourth of July I would like to say a few words about it. We all like to wave our flags and shoot our fireworks when we’re drinking our beer but just to make it clear when we say “Birth of the nation” we’re not talking about Washington and Rochambeau kicking Cornwallis’s ass in Yorktown. We’re talking about the men sitting in an oven of a meeting hall and somehow through debate and painful compromise squeezing out the document that made it politically official.

So with that in mind I would like to give a very special thanks to Josiah Bartlett, William Whipple, Matthew Thornton, Samuel Adams, John Adams, John Hancock, Robert Treat Paine, Elbridge Gerry, Stephen Hopkins, William Ellery, Roger Sherman, Samuel Huntington, William Williams, Oliver Wolcott, William Floyd, Philip Livingston, Francis Lewis, Lewis Morris, Richard Stockton, John Witherspoon, Francis Hopkinson, John Hart, Abraham Clark, Robert Morris, Benjamin Rush, Benjamin Franklin, John Morton, George Clymer, James Smith, George Taylor, James Wilson, George Ross, George Read, Caesar Rodney, Thomas McKean, Samuel Chase, William Paca, Thomas Stone, Charles Carroll of Carrollton, George Wythe, Richard Henry Lee, Thomas Jefferson, Benjamin Harrison, Thomas Nelson, Jr., Francis Lightfoot Lee, Carter Braxton, William Hooper, Joseph Hewes, John Penn, Edward Rutledge, Thomas Heyward, Jr., Thomas Lynch, Jr., Arthur Middleton, Button Gwinnett, Lyman Hall and George Walton