Hobbes is the sardonic stuffed tiger owned by Calvin, a precocious, mischievous and adventurous six-year-old boy. Calvin and Hobbes is a daily comic strip by American cartoonist Bill Watterson that was syndicated from 1985 to 1995. The strip depicts Calvin’s humorous antics, his flights of fancy and his friendship with Hobbes. To Calvin, Hobbes is a live anthropomorphic tiger, but all the other characters see him as an inanimate stuffed toy. The pair is named after John Calvin, a 16th-century French Reformation theologian, and Thomas Hobbes, a 17th-century English political philosopher. At the height of its popularity, Calvin and Hobbes was featured in over 2,400 newspapers worldwide. Reruns of the strip still appear in more than 50 countries. There are 20 Calvin and Hobbes books, which encompass all newspaper strips plus extra content.
P.S. It was exactly 30 years ago today (November 18, 1985) that we first met a boy and his tiger. Happy birthday!
Calvin is a precocious, mischievous and adventurous six-year-old boy. Calvin and Hobbes is a daily comic strip by American cartoonist Bill Watterson that was syndicated from 1985 to 1995. The strip follows Calvin’s humorous antics, his flights of fancy and his friendship with Hobbes, a sardonic stuffed tiger. To Calvin, Hobbes is a live anthropomorphic tiger, but all the other characters see him as an inanimate stuffed toy. The pair is named after John Calvin, a 16th-century French Reformation theologian, and Thomas Hobbes, a 17th-century English political philosopher. At the height of its popularity, Calvin and Hobbes was featured in over 2,400 newspapers worldwide. Reruns of the strip still appear in more than 50 countries. There are 20 Calvin and Hobbes books, which encompass all newspaper strips plus extra content.
I’m excited for the day when my daughter is old enough to appreciate the humor of Calvin and Hobbes, especially the relationship of Calvin and his dad. I plan to read all of Watterson’s books to her just like my dad did for my sister and me. When I was in junior high school in the early 1990s, I expressed my fondness for Calvin and Hobbes by meticulously shaping and painting a papier-mâché head of Calvin (spiked hair and all) for a Mardi Gras art project. My second Mardi Gras head was of the Fat Kid from The Far Side by Gary Larson. Those were my two favorite newspaper comics. It was exactly 30 years ago tomorrow (November 18, 1985) that we first met a boy and his tiger.
Scorpion is a recurring player character and occasional boss character from the Mortal Kombat fighting game franchise created by Ed Boon and John Tobias. Making his debut as one of the original seven playable characters in Mortal Kombat in 1992, he is an undead ninja specter seeking revenge for his own death at the hands of Sub-Zero. Arguably the series’ most iconic character, Scorpion has been playable in nearly every Mortal Kombat game. Scorpion yells one of two taunts at his opponents when he hits them with his spear. His most notable catchphrase is “Get over here!”
Sub-Zero is a video game character from the Mortal Kombat fighting game franchise and one of the original characters in the first Mortal Kombat game in 1992. A mainstay of the series, Sub-Zero is the only character who has appeared in every main Mortal Kombat game. The character is a formidable fighter possessing the innate ability to control ice in many forms. In his first return appearance in Mortal Kombat II, it was revealed that the original Sub-Zero had died during the events of the first game and was replaced by his younger brother. In subsequent games, the younger brother remained as Sub-Zero, while the elder brother became Noob Saibot. The most defining trait of the character is his fierce rivalry with his archnemesis Scorpion.
Happy Veterans Day! This week I’ve had my 14-year anniversary as an Oregon resident, my 11-year anniversary as lead web developer/designer at Oregon State University, and my five-year anniversary (three years married) with my wife Heidi. These major life events all happened within three days of each other (November 8-11) in different years.
Stimpy is a good-natured, dimwitted cat. He is one of the title characters of The Ren & Stimpy Show, an American animated television series created by John Kricfalusi for Nickelodeon. The series follows the adventures of Stimpy and his pal Ren, an emotionally unstable chihuahua. Ren & Stimpy premiered in 1991 as one of the “original three” Nicktoons, along with Rugrats and Doug. Throughout its run, the TV show was controversial for its off-color humor, sexual innuendo and violence. Ren & Stimpy received critical acclaim, and has developed a cult following. It is often credited, along with The Simpsons, for paving the way for satirical animated shows like Beavis and Butt-head, South Park and Family Guy, and for helping revive television animation in the 1990s.
Last night our oldest cat, The King, passed away. I’ll miss that scruffy guy. With his orange and white fur, in cartoon form he’d actually look a bit like Stimpy. The King is dead, long live The King.
Ren, an emotionally unstable chihuahua, is one of the title characters of The Ren & Stimpy Show, an American animated television series created by John Kricfalusi for Nickelodeon. The series follows the adventures of Ren and his pal Stimpy, a good-natured, dimwitted cat. Ren & Stimpy premiered in 1991 as one of the “original three” Nicktoons, along with Rugrats and Doug. Throughout its run, the TV show was controversial for its off-color humor, sexual innuendo and violence. Ren & Stimpy received critical acclaim, and has developed a cult following. It is often credited, along with The Simpsons, for paving the way for satirical animated shows like Beavis and Butt-head, South Park and Family Guy, and for helping revive television animation in the 1990s.
Beavis is one of the title characters of Beavis and Butt-head, an American animated sitcom created and designed by Mike Judge. The series originated from Frog Baseball, a 1992 short film by Judge. After seeing the short, MTV signed Judge to develop the concept. Beavis and Butt-head first ran on MTV from 1993 to 1997. In 1996, the series was adapted into the animated feature film Beavis and Butt-head Do America. In 1997, Daria, a spin-off show based on their classmate Daria Morgendorffer, was created. During a short-lived revival in 2011, new episodes of Beavis and Butt-head aired on MTV.
Butt-head is one of the title characters of Beavis and Butt-head, an American animated sitcom created and designed by Mike Judge. The series originated from Frog Baseball, a 1992 short film by Judge. After seeing the short, MTV signed Judge to develop the concept. Beavis and Butt-head first ran on MTV from 1993 to 1997. In 1996, the series was adapted into the animated feature film Beavis and Butt-head Do America. In 1997, Daria, a spin-off show based on their classmate Daria Morgendorffer, was created. During a short-lived revival in 2011, new episodes of Beavis and Butt-head aired on MTV.
Stuart is one of the minions from the Despicable Me franchise. Minions are small, yellow, cylindrical creatures with one or two eyes and metal goggles. One-eyed Stuart is the shortest minion in the first movie. He has a slim body with flat, center-parted hair. Stuart is among the most sincere and innocent of the minions. He is also always hungry and at one point attempted to eat minions Kevin and Bob by visualizing them as bananas. In another scene, while in a dark ventilation shaft, Stuart’s minion friend Jerry picks him up and cracks him, which turns him into a glow stick.
My two-year-old daughter Ramona has a small Stuart doll given to her by my dad. She’s never seen the movies and knows nothing about minions, but Stuart is among her favorite dolls and stuffed animals, which also include Pooh Bear, Margot, Lufkin, Domo-kun and Garfield.
Marty McFly is a fictional character in the Back to the Future trilogy. In 1985, Marty plays guitar with his group The Pinheads and is a talented skateboarder. His girlfriend is Jennifer Parker and his best friend is Emmett Brown, a scientist whom Marty and Jennifer call “Doc.” Marty is portrayed by actor Michael J. Fox. Marty also appears in the animated TV series (1991-92) and the episodic video game (2010-11).
Popeye the Sailor Man is a cartoon fictional character, created by E. C. Segar, who has appeared in comic strips and theatrical and television animated cartoons. He first appeared in the daily King Features comic strip Thimble Theatre in 1929; Popeye became the strip’s title in later years. In 1933, Fleischer Studios adapted the Thimble Theatre characters into a series of Popeye the Sailor theatrical cartoon shorts for Paramount Pictures. These cartoons proved to be among the most popular of the 1930s, and the Fleischers—and later Paramount’s own Famous Studios—continued production through 1957.
Faheem Najm, better known by his stage name T-Pain, is an American singer, songwriter, rapper, record producer and actor. His discography includes Rappa Ternt Sanga (2005), Epiphany (2007) and Thr33 Ringz (2008). T-Pain has earned two Grammy Awards alongside artists Kanye West and Jamie Foxx. T-Pain is the founder of the record label Nappy Boy Entertainment, established in 2005. He is known for using and popularizing the Auto-Tune pitch shift effect. From 2006 to 2010, T-Pain was featured on more than 50 chart-topping singles, including Flo Rida’s “Low” and The Lonely Island’s “I’m on a Boat.” T-Pain was born on September 30, 1985.
F. Scott Fitzgerald was an American author of novels and short stories, whose works are the paradigmatic writings of the Jazz Age. He is widely regarded as one of the greatest American writers of the 20th century. Fitzgerald is considered a member of the “Lost Generation” of the 1920s. He finished four novels: This Side of Paradise, The Beautiful and Damned, The Great Gatsby (his best known) and Tender Is the Night. A fifth, unfinished novel, The Love of the Last Tycoon, was published posthumously. Fitzgerald also wrote many short stories that treat themes of youth and promise along with age and despair. He was born on September 24, 1896 and died on December 21, 1940.
Banksy is a pseudonymous English graffiti artist, political activist, film director and painter. His satirical street art and subversive epigrams combine dark humor with graffiti executed in a distinctive stenciling technique. His works of political and social commentary have been featured on streets, walls and bridges of cities throughout the world. Banksy’s work grew out of the Bristol underground scene. Observers have noted that his style is similar to Blek le Rat, who began to work with stencils in 1981 in Paris. Banksy’s first film, Exit Through the Gift Shop, billed as “the world’s first street art disaster movie,” made its debut at the 2010 Sundance Film Festival and was nominated for the Academy Award for Best Documentary. In August 2015, Banksy opened Dismaland, a theme park-styled art installation in the UK that is scheduled to run until September 27, 2015.
Jack Vigliatura was the vocalist for For Squirrels, a Florida-based alternative rock band. The band was founded in 1992 by Vigliatura and two childhood friends who had gone off to college together at the University of Florida. Their single “Mighty K.C.” was a minor radio hit, but the band is perhaps most remembered for the tragic touring van accident and claimed the lives of founding members Vigliatura and bassist Bill White, along with tour manager Tim Bender. On the way home from a show in New York, the band’s tour van blew a tire and overturned on Interstate 95 in Georgia. The accident happened less than a month before the release of Example (1995), right as the band was on the cusp of national recognition. After recovering from serious injuries, the two surviving members changed the band’s name to Subrosa and ultimately disbanded in 2001. Vigliatura was born on December 20, 1973 and died on September 8, 1995 at age 21.
It’s been exactly 20 years since the tragic tour van accident. As a high school student just a few years younger than the band members, I remember hearing about the accident on the radio while flipping through CDs at a local music store. You just never know what’s going to happen in life. To get a sense of what the band was like, watch the live performance (and Vigliatura’s mid-song emotional breakdown) of an early version of “Mighty K.C.” in Miami Beach on May 27, 1994. The song is about Kurt Cobain and the many suicides by fans following his death (which went under-reported by the media for fear of escalation). I love this song so much but it always hurts to listen to, especially considering that the lyrics seem to foreshadow the death of Vigliatura and the band the following year. You should also listen to my favorite track “Disenchanted” (and their full album), if you haven’t. ♥ “Into the great unknown / Things are gonna change in our favor.”
Doug Martsch is an American singer and musician. He is best known for his distinctive vocals and guitar-playing style in the band Built to Spill. Martsch’s first band was Farm Days in the early 1980s. His second band was Treepeople, with whom he released three albums and two EPs. He has been the lead singer and guitarist of Built to Spill since 1992. Built to Spill has released released eight full-length albums, including this year’s Untethered Moon (2015). Martsch was born in Twin Falls, Idaho in September 1969.
Lufkin is a large stuffed ape I was given as a baby in 1979. A gift from my uncle, he’s one of my most beloved childhood toys. Lufkin’s body type strongly suggests that he is a gorilla, despite his chimpanzee-like ears. He was handmade by a South Dakota artist and sold at a craft fair in Aberdeen, SD. Lufkin came with an adult-size red cap, which he wore for my entire childhood. His name comes from this red Lufkin cap, which had an embroidered Lufkin measuring tools patch on the white polyester front, with red mesh and a snapback adjustable strap in back. We have always pronounced the gorilla’s name “Loofkin,” I suppose because my parents didn’t know much about the measuring tools company. The gorilla is now one of my two-year-old daughter Ramona’s favorite toys/pillows, though we’re not sure where his red trucker hat is these days.
Winnie-the-Pooh, also called Pooh Bear, is a fictional anthropomorphic teddy bear created by English author A. A. Milne. The first collection of stories about the character was the book Winnie-the-Pooh (1926). This was followed by The House at Pooh Corner (1928) and two children’s verse books. All four volumes were illustrated by E. H. Shepard. In the 1940s, Agnes Brush created the first plush dolls with Pooh in his red shirt. Rights to Winnie-the-Pooh were first licensed to Walt Disney in 1961. Disney has released numerous animated productions starring Pooh and related characters, including theatrical featurettes, television series, and direct-to-video films, as well as theatrical feature-length films.
A stuffed Pooh Bear from my 1980s childhood is one of my daughter’s favorite toys. She also believes that old Pooh and Baby Margot are some kind of inseparable team. It’s sweet. I am often reminded of the final passage of On the Road by Jack Kerouac: “So in America when the sun goes down and I sit on the old broken-down river pier watching the long, long skies over New Jersey and sense all that raw land that rolls in one unbelievable huge bulge over to the West Coast, and all that road going, and all the people dreaming in the immensity of it, and in Iowa I know by now the children must be crying in the land where they let the children cry, and tonight the stars’ll be out, and don’t you know that God is Pooh Bear? the evening star must be drooping and shedding her sparkler dims on the prairie, which is just before the coming of complete night that blesses the earth, darkens all the rivers, cups the peaks and folds the final shore in, and nobody, nobody knows what’s going to happen to anybody besides the forlorn rags of growing old, I think of Dean Moriarty, I even think of Old Dean Moriarty the father we never found, I think of Dean Moriarty.”
Robert Diggs, better known by his stage names RZA and Bobby Digital, is an American music producer, multi-instrumentalist, author, rapper, actor, director, composer and screenwriter. A prominent figure in hip-hop, RZA is a founding member of the Wu-Tang Clan and its de facto leader. He is a cousin of GZA and late band-mate Ol’ Dirty Bastard. RZA has produced almost all of Wu-Tang Clan’s albums as well as many Wu-Tang solo and affiliate projects. In addition to the Wu-Tang Clan and his solo releases, RZA was also a founding member of the horrorcore hip-hop group Gravediggaz where he used the name the RZArector. He has acted in numerous movies and TV series, including Ghost Dog: The Way of the Samurai (1999), Coffee and Cigarettes (2003) and American Gangster (2007). He has also written, arranged and/or produced music for more than 40 film soundtracks. RZA directed, co-wrote and starred in The Man with the Iron Fists (2012). He was born on July 5, 1969.
Gary Grice, better known by his stage names GZA and the Genius, is an American rapper and songwriter. A founding member of the hip-hop group, the Wu-Tang Clan, GZA is known as the group’s “spiritual head,” being both the oldest and the first within the group to receive a record deal. He has appeared on his fellow Clan members’ solo projects, and has maintained a successful solo career since the release of his critically acclaimed solo album Liquid Swords (1995). An analysis of GZA’s lyrics found that he has the second-largest vocabulary in hip-hop music, behind Aesop Rock. GZA was born on August 22, 1966.
Calvin – No. 934
Calvin is a precocious, mischievous and adventurous six-year-old boy. Calvin and Hobbes is a daily comic strip by American cartoonist Bill Watterson that was syndicated from 1985 to 1995. The strip follows Calvin’s humorous antics, his flights of fancy and his friendship with Hobbes, a sardonic stuffed tiger. To Calvin, Hobbes is a live anthropomorphic tiger, but all the other characters see him as an inanimate stuffed toy. The pair is named after John Calvin, a 16th-century French Reformation theologian, and Thomas Hobbes, a 17th-century English political philosopher. At the height of its popularity, Calvin and Hobbes was featured in over 2,400 newspapers worldwide. Reruns of the strip still appear in more than 50 countries. There are 20 Calvin and Hobbes books, which encompass all newspaper strips plus extra content.
I’m excited for the day when my daughter is old enough to appreciate the humor of Calvin and Hobbes, especially the relationship of Calvin and his dad. I plan to read all of Watterson’s books to her just like my dad did for my sister and me. When I was in junior high school in the early 1990s, I expressed my fondness for Calvin and Hobbes by meticulously shaping and painting a papier-mâché head of Calvin (spiked hair and all) for a Mardi Gras art project. My second Mardi Gras head was of the Fat Kid from The Far Side by Gary Larson. Those were my two favorite newspaper comics. It was exactly 30 years ago tomorrow (November 18, 1985) that we first met a boy and his tiger.