Sketching

Oooh, slept way later than I oughta have, then wasted too much time online. Hung out a bit at Ground, sketching. Today’s lesson is about the interaction of Pilot Precise V5 pens and Faber-Castell Pitt brush markers: the latter can go over and around the former without trouble, but the former blur a bit over the latter. Yeah, that’s not how I expected it to work either. You can see a bit of that going on in the left eye of the drawing on the left, right above the noseward corner of the eye.

( Sketches )

These are both the same woman, though neither one really captures her. I feel like my skills have deteriorated a bit in the past few months.

I canna do it Cap’n!

Donald Rumsfeld fields questions from the troops after watching too much Star Trek:

Q:  Yes, Mr. Secretary.  Our soldiers have been fighting in Iraq for coming up on three years.  A lot of us are getting ready to move north relatively soon.  Our vehicles are not armored.  We’re digging pieces of rusted scrap metal and compromised ballistic glass that’s already been shot up, dropped, busted, picking the best out of this scrap to put on our vehicles to take into combat.  We do not have proper armament vehicles to carry with us north.

SEC. RUMSFELD:  I talked to the General coming out here about the pace at which the vehicles are being armored.  They have been brought from all over the world, wherever they’re not needed, to a place here where they are needed.  I’m told that they are being – the Army is – I think it’s something like 400 a month are being done.  And it’s essentially a matter of physics.  It isn’t a matter of money.  It isn’t a matter on the part of the Army of desire.  It’s a matter of production and capability of doing it.

Incidentally, he’s lying about the production capacity.

(Links via Eschaton)

Rising again

Students in a North Carolina Christian school are being given a book, Southern Slavery, As It Was that teaches that Southern slavery wasn’t so bad. One of the book’s authors is a member of the board of directors of a neo-Confederate group, the League of the South. Some excerpts from the book:

• “Slavery as it existed in the South was not an adversarial relationship with pervasive racial animosity. Because of its dominantly patriarchal character, it was a relationship based upon mutual affection and confidence.”
• “There has never been a multi-racial society which has existed with such mutual intimacy and harmony in the history of the world.”
• “Slave life was to them a life of plenty, of simple pleasures, of food, clothes, and good medical care.”

Do I detect a hint of a Bush administration health care plan?