Wildlife: This Whitetail Deer was waiting on the side of my neighborhood road for me to pass her -- at least it LOOKED like she was waiting! She moseyed across when I was safely down the hill.



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Weather: Cold, but that bright sun warms things up by mid-afternoon.
(Rumors of rain this the weekend.)

Charity Alert: The Hunger Site Click to facilitate sponsor contributions.

Media Watch: NPR had John Updike and Susan Stamberg talking about Edwin Hopper and a couple of other artists this morning while I was shaving. Updike studied drawing and painting in college before he wrote novels. There's a pretty good page about Updike's newest book of essays on their site: 'Still Looking' Collects John Updike Essays on Art
I remember reading Rabbit Run when I was about 14 -- I'd just been told not to use the second person point of view when writing, and there was a whole book chock-full of it ... and graphic sexual encounters too. Hmmm -- what did that say about the "rules?" It was Number One on every best-seller list, so that was good -- no authority figure could challenge me for reading it. I think Updike's going to be all over the media for awhile -- an author's gotta do what an author's gotta do when a new book is out.
Muhammad Ali and Aretha Franklin were among 14 new recipients of the Medal of Freedom (along with two co-inventors of the World Wide Web). They surely deserve our country's highest honors -- too bad it was the unworthy G.W. Bush handing them out.

Muhammad Ali "Whups" on Superman
(Aretha must have sang before the fight began.)
Cover design by Joe Kubert for the mid-70's comic,
drawn by Neal Adams (see interview excerpt below)
Fighting under a red sun, Supe is outclassed in the ring, but won't fall down until Ali turns and strides away, refusing to hit him anymore.
Adams: My agreement with DC Comics was that I couldn't commit to a deadline, and it was agreed it would be done when it was done. That was the agreement-the full measure of the agreement-and it took a year to get the thing done! If there was a deadline, certainly the book would've been pulled long before the year went by. Everybody agreed there was no problem, and it was a big project to do.
Interviewer: The ironic thing is that Ali was champion when the project was announced, and in a bitter irony, by the time the book came out, he was....
Adams: In between his second championship and the third. Then, almost on the occasion of the book's release, he won the championship back a third time. So, I actually liked that the coincidence worked out very nicely. I had no problem with it. It was clear the book was very popular all over the world. It appeared in more languages than you can possibly imagine, and it was very, very popular. Superman, of course, is a popular character around the world; Muhammad Ali-even though he got rapped in the United States-you must remember that Ali is the champion of the world. He was certainly the champion of people whose color isn't exactly white. And for people like myself, he's our champion, too, because he stood up for what he believed in, and was willing to go to jail for it [i.e., refusing to fight in Vietnam, citing his religious beliefs].
Interviewer: And he forfeited the crown.
Adams: These are not small things. People do make light of them, but I don't. I really feel very strongly about it.
Interviewer: Actually, they don't make light of him now.
Adams: They did, they don't so much now. I'm doing the cover for ESPN Magazine featuring the 100 greatest athletes in the last century, and you can pretty much guess about right where Muhammad Ali is located. In fact, I was asked by ESPN to do it very much like the cover for Superman Vs. Muhammad Ali, because the editor remembered that book.
From Comic Book Artist Special Edition c)2003 www.twomorrows.com