New sketch

Nothing much to say today, just that there's a new sketch posted in the sketchbook. One of my cats.

I watched some of the WBC quarterfinal between Team USA and Canada yesterday, and as I was rooting for the Canadians it didn't go well. Surprise advancee Team "Italy" is playing now. I haven't checked, but I expect they're getting beaten by Puerto Rico in a contest of two teams of Americans. At least the Puerto Ricans can actually lay legitimate claim to Puerto Rico, unlike 90% of the Italian team. But the one I care about starts in a few hours, Japan vs. Venezuela. I'll be watching.

Tagged Sketches, WBC, Posted on March 14, 2026 at 2:29PM   |   Permalink   |     |  

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New sketch, the WBC, SFA, and cabinet chaos

Masataka Yoshida homers against Korea, demonstrating that the Red Sox have criminally underused him the last two years

A few disparate things today...

• ITEM: I've Just Seen a Face! The sketch I was working on the other day is now finished and can be seen in the sketchbook.
• ITEM: Dig It! Kristi Noem got taken to the metaphorical gravel pit! May she be but the first of many to fall. Meanwhile, the nominee to replace her is quite possibly the dumbest person in either house of Congress.
• ITEM: I'm Only Sleeping! This week saw the start of the 2026 World Baseball Classic, which opened with games held in Puerto Rico, Miami, Houston, and Tokyo. Naturally, the ones I'm most interested in are being played in Tokyo and they start at 2:00am PST. So I've been even more nocturnal than usual, staying up to watch Team Japan live rather than wait and watch a recording of the game during normal waking hours like a sane person would do. And they've been really fun games, too! In the opener, Japan clobbered Taiwan in a fashion that was reminiscent of some softball games I've both played in and umpired in recent years: the 13-0 drubbing ended early by WBC mercy rule, and one 6th-inning single is all that kept Taiwan from being no-hit by the loaded Japanese squad. Last night/this morning was more of a fair fight, with the Koreans nearly matching Japan play-for-play until the home 7th, when Korea brought in Young Kyu Kim (one of their many Kims) to pitch with one on and two out and poor Kim couldn't find the strike zone. Which, to be fair, was rather variable. The home plate ump in that game—Todd Tichenor, who is generally well regarded as an MLB ump—was truly bad, not remotely consistent with high strikes, low strikes, edge strikes, pretty much nothing was certain unless it was down the middle. Even so, Kim was wild and walked Kensuke Kondoh and Seya Suzuki after intentionally walking Shohei Ohtani, forcing in the go-ahead run, then Masataka Yoshida delivered a 2-RBI hit to put Japan up by three. That was enough for closer Taisei Ota to seal the deal in the 9th with help from Ukyo Shuto, just into the game in center field after pinch-running in the home 8th, who made a leaping catch against the wall for the second out.
• ITEM: She Came in Through the Bathroom Window! Once again, the eligibility rules in the WBC are a little too lax for my taste, though I get the rationale. Players can be on a nation-team's roster not only if they're citizens or permanent residents of the country, but if one or both of their parents are/were citizens or were born in the country or if they would be granted citizenship if desired under the country's laws. That last one is mostly for Team Israel, basically if you're Jewish you can play for the land of King David. So we have, for example, three Americans playing for Korea (named Dunning, O'Brien, and Whitcomb) who have never lived in Korea but have Korean-born moms; a Great Britain team with only two British players; a Team Italy with only three Italians; 13 Americans playing for Mexico; and an entirely American Israeli team. The Latin American teams have no trouble filling out their squads (you'd think Mexico would be fine under stricter rules too), of course Japan is a baseball powerhouse, the Netherlands is well-stocked because of that kingdom's Caribbean territories, Canada has plenty of Canadians, Taiwan is stocked with their own pros, and, kind of a surprise, Team Australia is almost entirely Australian, save for a couple of guys born in South Africa to Australians. So it's improving, but between Team USA, Team Puerto Rico, Team Israel, Team Italy, and Team Great Britain, the tournament has basically five American squads out of 20. I'd say it feels like stacking the deck, but only USA and Puerto Rico have a prayer of moving on.
• ITEM: It's All Too Much! On a less pleasant topic, Kristi Noem may be out of a job, but ICE hasn't changed its ways. The new American Gestapo have a betting pool going at their El Paso area detention camp, but instead of picking winners of football games they're betting on which of the incarcerated will kill themselves. In addition to being unconscionable and cruel and spot-on emblematic of our current presidential regime, this is encouragement for these thugs to treat their prisoners—you can call them "detainees" if you want, but they're prisoners—even worse than they otherwise would. It's a low bar to begin with, but this is insane. More insane, I mean.
• ITEM: Everybody's Got Something to Hide Except for Me and My Monkey! Alleged attorney general Pam Bondi has been subpoenaed to testify in Congress and there have been articles of impeachment filed against her over her coverup of the Epstein files. About fucking time. Bounce her ass out, then bring her up on charges. (I know it isn't likely to get anywhere real, but we've got to try anyway, repeatedly, and with many other Cabinet officials, preparatory to when we have a majority and can impeach Felon47 and his bearded bootlicker.)
• ITEM: Don't Let Me Down! Starfleet Academy has been surprisingly good, and dropped it's ninth episode this week. The season finale streams Wednesday night, and I'm looking forward to it—when the series started, I had no idea what to expect; could be good, could suck. But it's been largely excellent considering its target audience as a YA show. It's improved on the other streaming-era Star Trek series by having an apparent quality control process with scripts. The writing is better structured and when there are holes in the stories they're forgivable. Like in this week's penultimate episode, the villain's dastardly plan is revealed to be, essentially, a blockade of the reborn Federation of Planets; how this was accomplished stretches my suspension of disbelief, that's an enormous area of space to cover even with this post-Burn mini-Federation. But the twist worked, the story that plot point is in service of is valuable, the situation it sets up for next week's finale is compelling, so I forgive the implausibility. It helped that this week's ep was a Jonathan Frakes episode, Frakes in the director's chair always elevates the material. But, the real make-or-break for this new show will be episode ten. Will it continue to be solidly written and character-focused and maintain its themes, or will it take a page from Discovery or the first two seasons of Picard and completely drop the ball at the end of the season, wrapping things up in a sort of, "shit, we're out of time, I guess just shrug off what we did earlier and invent some deus ex machina that we can forget later?" I'd be more optimistic if Alex Kurtzman wasn't a credited writer on episode ten. At least he's just the co-scripter of the teleplay. (Am I too hard on Kurtzman? Is my bias against anyone involved with writing the JJ movies too strong? I guess we'll see next week.)
• ITEM: Get Back! Or, more accurately, go forward—we begin our annual 8-month-long social engineering trickery tonight, turning the clocks ahead an hour for no good reason. The tyranny of morning people continues, and we night owls are shoved to the ground in our grogginess and given the finger. Tonight's WBC game in Tokyo will now start at 3:00am, which is so much worse than 2:00am, because the Japanese are smarter than we are and don't do stupid Daylight Saving Time.

That's all I have for now. Umping this week was good, no highlights/lowlights to speak of. Back out there Monday evening.

 

Tagged Baseball, Sketches, Politics, Republicans, Star Trek, Daylight Saving Time, The Beatles, WBC, Posted on March 7, 2026 at 7:45PM   |   Permalink   |     |  

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Lennon & McCartney

I recently watched the three-part Peter Jackson-helmed documentary series "Get Back," a compilation of footage from rehearsal and recording sessions the Beatles had that eventually led to their final public appearance, the rooftop session in London. It's a great film if you're a Beatle fan, getting a look behind the scenes, as it were, of the band at the beginning of the end.

Watching it you can see things fray apart in real time, more or less, then come back together for a bit, then fray again, and the doc ends with things in a sort of limbo. We know that they go on to record and release another album ("Abbey Road") before the one they're making here ("Let it Be") is released, but we also know that the guy they break to meet with at one point, Allen Klein, is going to screw them over and ratchet up the conflicts that break them.

I'm not as well-read on the subject as plenty of other Beatle scholars out there, I lack some of the details in my understanding of what broke the fab four apart in the end, but I have a general sense of it and have occasionally wondered what the world would be like, or at least what pop culture would be like, had Brian Epstein survived. Losing their manager to a drug overdose—barbiturates and alcohol in a self-medicated attempt to deal with chronic insomnia—in 1967 put the band in new territory. Deciding to manage themselves was probably a mistake, and the frictions of a few years later when they were looking for a new business manager, the machinations pulled by Klein (the guy ultimately hired by three of the band), Paul's prescient refusal to sign on with Klein (John, George, and Ringo would later sue Klein for breach of fiduciary duty and misrepresentation), and so forth would not have occurred if Brian Epstein was still handling the band. The smaller issues of personal conflict had to do with their self-managing as well, with Paul as the most responsible of the four assuming a "boss" role he did not want that irritated the others. Much is made of the Yoko Factor, but as Paul himself says in the "Get Back" footage, frustrated at John's distractions they were really feeling the absence of a grown-up figure to tell them to focus. They missed Brain a lot more than they were annoyed about Yoko.

I always have loved The Beatles, and in particular I've always found John Lennon to be fascinating. Not in a "favorite Beatle" kind of way, but because he was such a complicated person. Coming out of a horrendous childhood with absentee parents and a mom with mental health issues, when he meets Paul McCartney John's a thoughtful but very angry, tremendously insecure 16-year-old kid with a wealth of talent and on the road to trouble. Paul comes from a much different background, he's from a stable family of relative means (relative to John, anyway) but equally talented, and becoming fast friends gives them both a needed balance. John was one of those kids that either had to grow up too fast or never had a real childhood, depending on how you look at it, and had to grow up in his 20s while being one of the most famous people in the world; eventually he got to a point of internal peace and happiness, but only after going through Beatlemania, a failed and unhappy shotgun marriage, loss of important intimates (Stu Sutcliffe, Brian Epstein), an overly-intense nearly all-consuming new romance that alienated people (including his young son whom he became an absentee dad to himself), heroin addiction, all the end-stage Beatle drama, estrangement from Yoko, and a year-long largely drunken "lost weekend" first. Associations with the other Beatles makes him more worldly, he explores cultures. Between that and meeting Yoko he gets overtly political. Ideologically he goes from writing the misogynistic "Run For Your Life" to writing the feminist "Woman is the Nigger of the World" seven years later. Ultimately, he finds his place as a stay-at-home dad to a new son he's determined not to be absent from. The evolution of John Lennon is rather profound and very human.

Anyway, the bulk of the third installment of "Get Back" is around the rooftop concert, for which there's a lot of video out there. There's a brief moment in one of the clips where John goes to hug Paul, and John grips Paul in a bear hug with an intense expression, very emotional, while Paul embraces John back in a more relaxed manner with a tender expression that appears more tired than anything else. It's fleeting, but it struck me as such a distillation of the bond between them as the end of the band neared. A moment that's so at odds with the public feud they'd have in the early ’70s, that really shows how that feud to come was based in pain and resentment at the other parties and outside factors that their conflicts were based in, because these guys really, deeply missed each other.

It was an image I wanted to capture, so I'm now trying to draw it. Here's an in progress snapshot of it, with the first two layers (6H and 2B pencils) only; it's going to require several more gradations, probably from 8H to 6B, maybe 8B, before it's done. Paul's still raw, it's not him yet, and I'm not getting John's expression right—he looks too calm. It needs something more around the eyes, I think.

Tagged The Beatles, Sketches, Posted on March 2, 2026 at 10:04PM   |   Permalink   |     |  

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Drawing

I've been away from the drawing board/sketchbooks for a long while, save for a few small commissioned projects. I've gotten back into it a little bit as I climb out of the Black Hole, so there's a new one on the sketchbook page now. One of these days I still intend to populate that section of the site with older stuff that needs to be scanned/rescanned in—a lot was included in prior versions of this site, but that was in the days of 800 × 600 CRT monitors, so those scans are puny now—but that's a project for a later date.

I've been watching Get Back, so maybe the next sketch will be bearded Paul or mustachioed Ringo or something.

Tagged Sketches, Posted on February 28, 2026 at 1:06AM   |   Permalink   |     |  

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Exercise

Once upon a time I filled a sketchbook every six months or so. That was along time ago, though, and in recent years I've let my drawing muscles atrophy a bit. So, in climbing out of my latest Black Hole episode, I broke out the pencils and pens and tried to see if I still had what it takes.

As with all skills, practice is required to maintain whatever level of excellence one might attain, and being decidedly out of practice I have noticeably backslid, particularly when a likeness is involved Still, after a few false starts I cranked out a couple of OK pages. Here are the sharable (i.e. not terrible) ones. (Includes a couple of nekkid ladies, so if you're in a cubicle, scroll at your own risk.)

I'd recently watched Aubrey Plaza's new film "My Old Ass" and have been enjoying a rewatch of "Parks and Rec" after seeing Michael Schur's new show, so I tried capturing Aubrey. It's OK, something not quite right there, but at least she's recognizable.

Pen and ink. Not the best medium for gradations.

Ethan Peck's younger Spock from "Strange New Worlds." Like Aubrey, not dead-on, but at least recognizable. I think.

Trying a little Photoshop lens flare for the hell of it.

Back when I built this site I included a "sketches" page, but it's sat empty all this time. I'll add populate sketches page to my to-do list and maybe that will prompt some more practicing.

Tagged Sketches, Posted on November 26, 2024 at 11:15PM   |   Permalink   |     |  

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Let's See if I Remember How to Do This

I used to draw. All the time as a kid, less so as an adult, sporadically in recent years. Not at all in ... well, I'm not sure. Months, anyway, and then just one or two things. For whatever reason, I was inspired to pick up the sketchbook again a few weeks back, and doodled some. And it sucked. Like anything else, drawing is a use-it-or-lose-it kind of thing, and I had nothing. I was hearing the Toby Ziegler line from "Enemies," when he and Sam are choking on a puff assignment, about how his and Sam's talent couldn't have gone far. "Somewhere in this building is our talent."

Anyway, it took a few attempts, but I got to a point that was ... less bad ... and I turned out this:

 Not terrible, but not up to standard, either, but I figured, hey, better is better. Don't know what's going on with Superman's left eye. And the likeness on the other ... well, still. Progress.

Couple more mixed-result pages over a week or so, and I started to feel a bit more in the groove, turning out a page of Morena Baccarins. Pretty OK, especially the one on the right.

 Keeping with the theme of Pretty Women on TV, I went back to Rosario Dawson. First one on the page (top right — I'm left-handed, so I start on the right) isn't quite right, something in the jaw; it looks more like Jessica Biel or someone else. But the next one — THAT'S MORE LIKE IT. I'M BACK, BABY!

 OK, the bottom one was a step back, some issues with the tones. Her eyes are not that baggy. But I still like it.

Next up in the TV Crush lineup is Ming-Na Wen:

 The larger one here gave me fits, and I'm not completely pleased with it. Proportions are a bitch sometimes and I still don't think I have the eyeline quite right. But in general, solid.

Now I'm feeling pretty confident, and I go to the old standby: figure drawing with a bit of T&A.

 I've always been more partial to the T than the A, but that last one still turned out really well. The one on the bottom I'll finish later.

Tagged Sketches, Posted on December 22, 2016 at 5:09AM   |   Permalink   |     |  

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