Cartoon Inspiration

Not much time for posting and too much work at the moment, heading to Utah tomorrow. In the meantime here is a post I wrote a while ago...
___________________________________________
When I was doing my PhD, back in the stone age, before the internet or mobile phones, (1990 to be precise), I was working on the Permian desert sediments of the southern North Sea. Since the southern North Sea is under water all the data came from borehole cores and logs. I spent a lot of time in various warehouses looking at wooden boxes full of sandstone while my various PhD colleagues disappeared to exotic parts of the World for field work.

I was trying (and failing) to get financial support to go and study some modern deserts to get a better feel for what I was trying to model. One day I was on train travelling back from a fairly long core logging trip to London when I picked up an abandoned newspaper. Don’t remember which one it was, something hideous like the Mail or the Express. I flicked through it, quickly getting annoyed at the petty small mindedness of middle England and I stopped at the cartoons hoping for a more informed World opinion. To my surprise that was exactly what I got!

There was a cartoon about a little boy and a tiger. The boy was trying to model a desert for a school project and bemoaning the fact that he had never been to one. Pure inspiration!

At that point I had never heard of Calvin and Hobbes* but from that day on I was a convert. It’s extremely cleaver and works at so many different levels.

Last week JT sent a link to a website which contains the entire back catalogue – so the first think I did was to search for desert. And here it is...














*or as it is known in Norway “Tommy og Tiggeren”. I have never figured out why the felt the need to change the name, other than to avoid offending the calvinist population of southern Norway?