This is one I grew up with from my Dad’s folk music collection. Burl Ives always had a “favorite uncle” quality about him that I pictured long before I ever saw him as the Snowman in Rudolph the Red-Nosed Reindeer, but his version of “My Good Old Man” has this wonderful haunting scary quality to it even before it gets to the song’s punchline.
Well it’s been almost exactly a month since my first “jog” and not counting a week of being floored by something seasonal and nasty after my first week I’ve been keeping at it pretty steady.
I changed two things after the first day around Greenlake. First while I’m sticking to the same basic route I’m using the road around the park and not the park itself, no more dodging joggers for me. Second I had an exercise app, called Runkeeper, recommended to me that not only times my ride but, using the phone’s gps, also monitors my speed, distances, route and calorie burning.
This has helped me quite a bit it tells me how well I’m doing and pesters me if I don’t do a workout after two days. So now I’m doing approximately 9.15 miles around Greenlake (this includes getting there and going home) three times a week (I quickly realized that since I still commuted on the bike there was no need to kill myself doing it every morning) I average around 39 minutes barring certain factors like traffic and traffic lights (i’m occasionally tempted to use the pause button when I’m stopped at a light but I’d probably forget to turn it on again) Runkeeper can be quite ruthless about what it records this is sometimes confusing (I don’t know how I break elevation records when I’m doing the same route every morning) and sometimes frustrating (the only reason my best distance is 9.41 miles is because I had a late start and couldn’t make my usual final right turn in rush hour traffic)
But today felt like a particularly great hurdle. I made my best time in this entire month. I admit that a good time is dependent on not being caught by a certain red light on Ravenna Blvd (or getting an early enough start that the traffic is light enough to ignore it) but even by that standard this one was sweet. After doing the same route for a while you begin to memorize the five minute points that Runkeeper will tell you you’ve crossed. On my route the first mark is usually somewhere before the corner of Ravenna and Woodlawn Av and for the last month I’ve yet to do .8 miles whether I got caught by that damn light or not… Today I did 1.2!
It got better from there. Sometimes I passed a traditional five minute point by so much I was almost certain Runkeeper had stopped working (for once I wasn’t being neurotic. I’d put in my iPhone into a pocket that was getting jostled a lot. In fact it was messing with the audiobook playlist I was listening to enough I had to turn it off so it was a possibility.) And in the end I finished my route in 37.4 minutes a record! and probably one that’s going to be hard to beat. So forgive me as I crow, I’m psyched!
Oh yes… I also saw a rabbit.
Drew another one that was challenging, because it was potentially boring and cliche, again. This time it was a ghost. Nothing specific, just ghosts. Not wanting to do the usual cliches, like the sheets and chains. But then once you get past that how do you even make it obvious that they are ghosts?… without having them with visible fatal wounds anyway. Transparency is difficult to pull off in pencil and… This would probably would have been easier in color.
I realized after the fact that I used yesterdat’s song last year… Mia culpa!
Anyway. Today’s music is from Evil Dead: The Musical, yes really. I couldn’t believe it when I first heard of it, but it actually has a pretty good soundtrack and it’s just as sickly humerous and self reverential as the original. However despite the subject matter the only one that feels Halloweeny and makes sense out of the context of the show to me is “Do the Necronomicon.”
Enjoy
I’m trying to be a little picky in my selection for this year’s playlist so there has to be more to a song than just Halloween subject matter to make the cut. Mood and tone are equally important. This song, Warren Zevon’s Werewolves in London will probably be the exception but I’ve got a good excuse.
See I have this recurring character who I’ve been trying to fit into various side projects, I may recycle him as a villain for my current idea for an adventure strip. Anyway he’s a werewolf antihero (technically he’s more of a Mr. Hyde figure as he rarely goes beyond the fangs and general hairiness (growing claws would spoil his manicure)) who’s a bit of an urbane thug who is very much the “hairy handed gent” described in the song (though running amuck in Kent, Washington is a bit more challenging and not quite as fun.)
Anyway I thought it was appropriate… Enjoy
Today’s sketch almost felt like a cheat. When I pulled Black Dog from the Halloween drawing box my immediate reaction was: “But I did a canid on Monday!” And started to obsess about how to make it different from that drawing. But in this case the solution of how to do it was simple: a black silhouette with glowing eyes which was simplicity itself. In fact thinking about this it’s easy to see how this legend became widespread. On a foggy night on the moors with the right lighting anything larger than a terrier would look frightening.
In the end the only thing remotely difficult in this sketch was getting good fog effects with a pencil.
