Blast from the Past #179: The Thinker (apologies to Rodin)

Back in the late 1970's and early 1980's, I was involved for a while with a local anti-nuke group which was working for what was being called the "Nuclear Freeze" -- basically, a pretty common sense proposition which said that we had enough nuclear weapons (I think it was something like 20,000 at that time) -- how 'bout we just don't make any more? I offered my illustrative skills to the group and actually did a fair amount of work for them.



This illustration was done around that time, but I'm not sure if it was ever used for anything. It's one of my favorites -- I obviously copped the pose from Rodin's famous sculpture, but so have hundreds of other artists. -- PL

Timing is everything

We had two great days of riding weather in a row this weekend -- yesterday was sunny and 90º (!), while today was almost as sunny but a few degrees cooler. I got out both days, yesterday exploring some areas of northeast Connecticut I had never been in before, and today doing one of my favorite rides up the Mohawk Trail to Williamstown (and gazpacho at Desperados).



On my way back home I was surprised to see a rainbow -- surprised because as far as I could tell, it had not rained at all. It took me a few minutes to find a place to safely pull over, one with a good field of view of the area in which I had seen the rainbow. Alas, this optical phenomenon was as ephemeral as it was beautiful -- by the time I got my camera out, it had almost vanished. I did manage to catch a tiny bit of it in this panorama -- can you see it? -- PL

Blast from the Past #178: fantasy castle

I think this piece is from the late 1970's... one of the rare times I played around with watercolors over inks. I did this one just for fun. -- PL

Blast from the Past #177: Man fighting dragon

Here's another one of my drawings of dragons, from some time in the early 1980's, I think. I'm pretty sure Kevin Eastman did a colored version of this one back in the early days of Mirage Studios, but I can't lay my hands on it right now.



Check out the crazed look in this dude's eyes! I guess he's really into this dragon-clubbing thing. -- PL

Blast from the Past #176: "Childhood's End" alien

I can't recall exactly when I did this piece, but it was probably in the late 1970's or early 1980's. This is my imagining of what the aliens from Arthur C. Clarke's "Childhood's End" (one of my favorite science fiction tales) might look like.



This is one of the few times that I have worked with color without doing any inking first. -- PL

Hazardville

Today I went out on the Victory for an exploratory ride -- instead of taking one of my usual favorite routes, I decided I would scope out the roads in northeast Connecticut leading to a roadside restaurant -- the Vanilla Bean -- that I've been wanting to try after seeing a write-up of it in a motorcycle magazine. I wanted to see if I could find a good route now, so that when my wife decides it's warm enough to ride with me, I can take her there without getting lost.

Which is what I ended up doing today. I screwed up two turns and ended up getting turned around and heading WEST instead of EAST. Although I didn't get to the Vanilla Bean, it wasn't a total loss -- I had a nice ride and saw some interesting roads, and learned a little bit more about that part of Connecticut.

So I decided to head back home on some roads with which I was familiar. Route 190 would take me west to Enfield, CT, and from there I could just blast up Route 91. I decided to stop at a video store along the way to see if the DVD of the movie "The Wrestler" had come out yet (it hasn't). Coming out of the store and putting my helmet on, my eye was caught by something odd on my rear tire -- it looked like a stick caught in the tread. On closer exmination -- as you can see from these photos -- it was no stick.





Nope, it as a long, rusty nail in my rear tire -- just the thing you want to see when you're forty miles from home. Looking at it some more, I couldn't tell if it had actually punctured the tire (which would let air out) or just poked through the sidewall. I decided to take a chance on it, based on my observation of it and the fact that the tire seemed to be completely fine, pressure-wise. But it was a slightly white-knuckle ride home, and I was glad to roll into my garage. The tire still seems to be as firm as before, and I didn't notice any odd squirmy behavior during the ride... but it's going to have to be replaced. The weird thing is that this nail COULD have been in the tire for days, weeks, mabe even months without me noticing it.

Oh, and the town where I stopped to go into the video store? Hazardville, CT. -- PL

Two bike trips

With the warm weather finally, grudgingly arriving, it's been fun getting out on the bicycle again, without having to bundle up so much that it makes pedaling a pain. I usually do my rides on the paved bike path between Northampton and Florence or Northampton and Amherst, but this week I got off the path.

Thursday I rode with my friends Rick and Rob out to a new lunch place called Barstow's on Route 47 heading towards South Hadley. It's a nice joint with great sandwiches and fresh-baked goodies. Here's a view (incorporating Rob) from their outdoor dining area, looking west toward the Connecticut River (which I don't think you can see in this image, but it's really just about a half mile away).



Then on Friday I took another ride with Rick, this time from Northampton over to Easthampton (coincidentally, to have lunch with Rob again). We took the back way on the dirt road which runs past the bird sanctuary. It can be a beautiful ride, with great scenery, even now when the trees are still pretty much bare of foliage. Unfortunately, there are a number of idiots who think it's a good idea to drive down this road and dump some of their trash along the way. I've see stuffed chairs, mattresses, couches -- even a DVD player. On this ride, I counted five different discarded Christmas trees (one of which you can see in this panorama). This is a swampy area along the way which doesn't fully dry up until later in the summer, and even then will sometimes get filled up again if we have heavy rains. We stopped here so Rick could check his email on his iPhone. -- PL