Well heckfire, no one showed up for my comics class this morning. I wish I could have seen myself hanging around the (locked) classroom door for half-an-hour before I left; I would have stayed asleep instead of waking up and finishing my class notes through a fugue of hangover. Well I’m awake now. Time to get productive Dharbin! Or at least continue waking up, because boy oh boy, that is a work in progress today.
I have been thinking this week about the Oscars: I just don’t get them. Is there a reason for them? I understand the awards part, but isn’t it just a reason for movie studios to promote their movies, get more people to go see The Hurt Locker or whatever?
And even that isn’t bad, that’s how our government is run too right? People spend millions AND MILLIONS of dollars to get into office, then spend their time their struggling to raise more money so they can stay in that office. Somewhere in there they make a lot of speeches cynically aimed at the stupidest and most impressionable parts of their perceived constituencies, and at least once or twice they vote for or against something. Afterwards I think there’s a party, with a lot of backslapping and cigar smoking.
But the thing that KILLS me about the Oscars is all the money that’s spent on the actual event. Not just the production costs, swag bags, all that–it’s the clothes baby, what’s the deal with all those clothes?? In a time when the entire nation of Haiti is more or less a pile of treeless rubble, sprinkled with tarp lean-to’s, and the rainy season about to begin… the best thing we as a society can do is throw a party for the movie industry.
And just to remind us of how important this party is, everyone should show up in $20,000 designer dresses or Versace tuxedoes, casually displaying their fancy shoes or handbags or dogs or whatever, as they pause to endure 2 minutes of flashbulbs on the (tented) red carpet before entering and practicing not looking directly into any of the hundred or so moving cameras.
Afterwards, they will complain bitterly about how celebrities have no privacy, how fame ruins everything, how “regular” people just don’t understand the incredible pressure.
That sounds pretty negative, I guess. But it’s gross, honestly. The idea of spending tens of millions of dollars on a big party when there are starving people literally everywhere is just nuts. Or sending a rocket to the moon for… for what? I love space, I love astronauts, NASA is like a codeword for “awesome.” But worrying about sending a manned mission to Mars when we have two very foggy wars going on, 10% unemployment, an increasingly monetized political system, and natural disasters all over the place.
Well, pardon me for saying that it sucks. But it does. SUXXXXX2000
Oh! I nearly forgot to mention that I put these three spreads up in my Flickr set, which will eventually comprise this entire 108-page or so sketchbook. You can click on any of the pictures to see them in Flickr, or here for the whole set. Hope you like it yo!
I agree with you on your observations… up til the space program connection. Research science is not a waste of finances– although it seems Our Leader doesn't have much interest in the future of manned space flights so I don't expect getting to Mars to be a high national priority for decades (if ever), so you don't have THAT to worry about. Often technologies developed for the space program have secondary civilian applications (Jeep has an experimental model I've seen which uses tech designed for the lunar buggy). The value of our space telescopes (Casini and Hubble etc) and other exploratory robots (Viking, Mars Lander etc) bring back a commensurate measure of value for their relative expense. Unlike the foolish spending of the career politician. Not to mention the expenses politicians can claim as necessary (private jetting to Oslo to basically do nothing about global climate change, except work on the size of their carbon footprint for example).
One note– I'm baffled that you seem to do fully finished comics originals facing side by side to various ink drawings–(how big are those anyhow?)– I'd be careful about that–moisture or exposure could affect the pages and you might wind up with some F'ed up original art!
Lovely work as always old boy!
Those "originals" were a series of autobio strips I did last summer, in an effort to do something quick and loose during con season when I was crazy busy. So those are in my moleskine, I think they're about 4" wide? But as part of the sketchbook, they of course have no value as originals.
For the purposes of "is this the right way to spend money?", let's separate "research" from "space travel", just to keep it simple. For instance, I don't think telescopes, even space telescopes, are a waste of money. There's was a great article in a National Geographic last year, about the usage of increasingly massive telescopes in changing ways. For instance, as ever larger/more powerful telescopes are built, the smaller ones don't become obsolete. Rather, they're used almost like telescope RAM–the biggest ones find new "big" concepts, then the smaller ones are used to zoom in on this, allowing teams of scientists to focus on smaller concepts using those scientists.
My problem with space travel is more the jingoistic side of it. For instance, landing a man on the moon just to do it is a waste of money. If Mars had some real value, whether for resources or some magical science, or whatever, it's easier to imagine. But to spend hundred of billions of dollars to get there, it's hard to justify. Not that there's NO justification, just not justification commensurate with the truly vast outlay of dollars.
OR to simplify: we should spend those hundreds of billions curing cancer and AIDS and malaria.
There is a theory that the moons of Jupiter could provide a Pandora (Avatar film) planet for offworld living–I think it's Titan they think has a breathable atmosphere and water. Mars could be a halfway stop for deeper space exploration. Do we just decide to stop all plans to develop space technology form here on out? I can't see that as being a good idea. The rest of the world will be continuing with space exploration, once the current shuttle series is grounded (next year) and now that the administration has scrapped plans for the Aries rocket series, we'll have no craft able to get out of the atmosphere.
But don't you think this is the sort of thing the private sector is better at? I feel like a competitive market place is a better place for this technology to develop, rather than the government paying for everything and tech companies profiting on the sidelines from the extra applications that are discovered along the way.
I guess what I'm saying is that I don't think that space exploration is the best use of a governmental role. I'm not saying no government money for science, but to me the direct benefit to society is somewhat murky when compared to much more immediate and pressing needs.
The thing about manned space travel, agreeing that robots and such would be a far more efficient use of resources, is that manned space travel is the way it has to be. Forget things like exploration for the sake of exploration, and the rewards that has historically brought (you never know what you'll find, etc), people just aren't interested, no, inspired, by unmanned space travel. See the current lack of interest in, um, space travel.
As for the private sector getting into it–I think of the Dutch East India Company, I think about space, and then I get very nervous.
As for the Oscars, jeezus, you've never seen a more smug and self-satisfied group, have you?
Phil