Calvin & Hobbes

Is It Stealing Or Is It Art?

Within the last month two of the blogs I regularly read and are linked to the side there have commented on Bill Watterson and unauthorized Calvin stickers. If they read my blog they would know that I have commissioned a vinyl decal place I found on the web to make me a Calvin & Hobbes sticker for my car. Have they stopped reading my blog because of this? If not, are they aiding and abetting a known criminal? Or is their only real objection that they found the image of Calvin peeing on “insert object” offensive?

I scanned the image I’m having made into a sticker from a C&H collection book I bought. The fellow that is making the sticker for me feels as if I have commissioned a piece of art from him. Is this sticker fair use for me? Is it art? Is it a tribute to my favorite cartoon characters?

My local newspaper just started carrying Calvin & Hobbes on the funny pages again. Not new stuff, but 20 year old strips. C & H will only be running from now until December the announcing article said. It is mainly a way to help sell Mr. Waterson’s new book, The Complete Calvin & Hobbes, a $150 set of books that reprints ever strip that ever appeared in the newspaper over it’s 10 year run. To make room for adding Calvin & Hobbes the paper stopped running Shoe daily and a couple of other smaller comics on Sunday. I sure hope Mr. Waterson is compensating the authors of the strips he is misplacing in this self-promotion scheme…

Started down, still down.
Miata Top Transitions since 01/01/05: 291

Half Right & All Wrong

When I mentioned in yesterday’s post that I would be buying gas next week and it would probably be $3.50 a gallon, I was half right. Down to about a quarter of a tank tonight on the way home from the MMC monthly meeting, I stopped and filled up at $3.499 a gallon. There were a couple of gas stations that were advertising $3.199, but I guess that was what they were selling it for when they had it, both places had bags over the pump nozzles in the internationally know signal for “I’m Out of Gas, But Come In and Buy a 6-Pack of Beer, You’ll Feel Better.”

After one misdirected envelope, the second arrived today with my Calvin & Hobbes sticker. I put it on the bumper, snapped one picture and took it off. There were three reasons for this; 1) it was larger than we expected, 2) silver, while not bad, seemed kind of blah and 3) I placed it too low on the bumper and with too much of a slant. So back to the sticker guy I go with a request for another sticker that will be in dark yellow and 5″ tall instead of six. Maybe the first one won’t get lost in the mail and I can get this in a week instead of two.

Started down, still down.
Miata Top Transitions since 01/01/05: 291

Whatever.

Free to a good home, one MGW Gripper Shift Knob painted Garnet Red. I’ll even toss in the extra gripper ring because it might be easier to surgically remove the current one, than try and pry it off. Paypal me $3 for postage and I’ll priority mail right to your home.

Vacuumed the car and then removed the week’s accumulated dirty using some Quik Detailer because this afternoon was the MMC’s showing at the Sno-Cap Drive-In’s 41st anniversary.

Yellow Sandwich

That and this week’s photo meme pictures came from the party. Through the magic that is MT’s editable Authored On data field, Wednesday, Thursday & Friday’s pictures were posted before the event.

I found someone to make my Calvin & Hobbes sticker and he mailed it late last week. Not here yet. I hope that they didn’t take a detour in time on their way here and were eaten by a T-rex.

Birthday present update: Window tinting is off the list, just doesn’t make sense for me. Rear lip spoiler is fading fast. Current front runner is a mild computer upgrade. This Dell was purchased in March of 2003 and while it 2.53Ghz processor is plenty strong enough for what I use it for, I’m thinking bumping the RAM from 512M to 1024M and getting a faster and bigger hard drive might be a nice thing. Hey, afterall I spend more time in the seat in front of the PC than I do in the driver’s seat of the Miata.

Started down, still down.
Miata Top Transitions since 01/01/05: 285

Calvin Hates Fall Too!

I’m beginning to think that Bill Watterson was modeling Calvin after me. I hate Sundays, Calvin hates Sundays too. I hate fall, Calvin hates fall too. I was going to post an image of the cartoon here, but the quality was already iffy and shrinking it to fit made it illegible, so you just have to look at a pop-up.

Started down, went up, back down, up again, still up.
Miata Top Transitions since 01/01/05: 284

Don’t Tell Mr. Watterson

Forget the Japanese lettering stickers. Nostalgia rules. Way back when, on our first Miata, one of only a couple of mods made to that car, was a red sticker of Calvin and Hobbes in a cardboard box on the back bumper. Stumbled on the sticker in a T-shirt screen printer’s shop and seeing as we both enjoyed C & H we bought it. There was something synergetic about what that box represented to them and what the Miata meant to us, it was perfect. Before trading in the car in 1995 I tried to peel the sticker off carefully in hopes of saving it, but couldn’t. It looked like this:

CnH_Box.gif

We will probably go with that one, but a close second would be this:

CnH_Wagon.gif

Now all I have to do is find an outlaw sticker maker…

Started down, still down.
Miata Top Transitions since 01/01/05: 273

Bambi Goes Hunting

Calvin & Hobbes has to be my all-time favorite comic strip. I really hated that Bill Watterson stopped doing original strips a few years back, but I can definately sympathize with getting burnt out on something) and wanting to stop. Fortunately uComics.com is keeping the spirit of C & H alive by publishing the strip each day eleven years after they were originally printed in the paper. Every Monday when I come in to work I download the Sunday strip and post it outside on my cubical wall. This last Sunday’s is one of my favorites:

Calvin & Hobbes

Calvin Hates Sundays Too!

I’ve said it here before (more than once), I hate Sundays because it is followed by Monday. I even hate fall for sort of the same reason, it is followed by something I don’t like, winter. Well I’m not alone…

I Hate Sundays