Brian's quite remarkable blog of wonder.

First the facebook account, then the cell phone, then the trendy shoes, now this?

All just part of consciously making myself less of an anti-social Luddite. Or, put another way, rendering obsolete things that work perfectly well because everybody else does it.

Oh, how seriously we take ourselves.

Today I was driving my bus, and a guy, after proclaiming that, dude, he was totally stoned, took up my garbage can and vomited mightily into it. Pretty much the same sequence of events immortalized in this cartoon. Cosmic powers surge through me...

Back to school. Back to drawing political cartoons, back to giving free bus rides to vomiting bastards, back to no time to do anything. Also I caught a cold and my internet's out again.

I just like to complain, really. Things are actually going great; I've got great classes, and - get this - all my professors and TAs are enthusiastic, helpful and competent. I'm quite inspired: maybe college isn't yet another stupid institution after all! Let's see what I'm saying more than a week into the semester.

I'm considering getting a new blog. I know, there's really no logical reason, but "drippy sporks" is an expression from my youth that has no meaning or significance to me anymore, and this blog is a little bit like that sometimes. More often than is desireable, it evidences a selfish, emotional idiot that I'm trying to abandon. And sometimes it just feels good to begin a new volume, as it were, as if giving your personal standards just a bit of a boost.

I bought a digital camera. Today I traipsed through Goosetown (the old part of Iowa City once populated by Bohemian settlers) and Hickory Hill Park to get some pictures. Here are some of the good ones:



Tornado siren looming over Brown and Governor.


This one probably could have been framed better.


Fairchild Street.


Cliche enough for you?


Some sort of... thing in the middle of the woods.


Civilization, in the form of an obscenely huge housing development called "Hickory Heights".


I like the juxtaposition of groceries and death.

Break is almost over. I've accomplished a lot! Updated the site (almost done with that anyway), got a lot of reading done, listened to a ton of great music (working on a blog post about that), drove a few buses, practiced the piano, had some fantastic parties, played some chess with Michael Tabor, even drew some comics. This is what life should be like! I haven't been depressed yet this year! Of course the shit is going to hit the fan once school starts.

This week I'm training to be a Bionic driver. It sounds a lot cooler than it is. The Bionic bus is Cambus's para-transit service for disabled folks. It's still a little cool, I guess.

We've got this game called "Poor Pussy." Basically, one person kneels in front of another person and meows at them three times. The goal for the other person is to NOT laugh. You kind of have to see it. I'm not very good at it. Usually, I crack up before they even start the first meow!

Stay with me, I'm going somewhere with this. So the one time I tried it as the meower instead of the meow-ee ended in disaster: I got up from the couch, kneeled, meowed once (an extra-long one)... then I felt dizzy so I stood up, completely blacked out, ran into a wall, and fell unconscious to the ground. Of course, everyone thought I was trying to get the person to laugh. What was really happening was I didn't have any oxygen flow to my brain, having suddenly stood up and then exhaled completely. I woke up on the floor, hurting where my face smacked the wall and where I hit the coffee table on the way down (spilling beer all over myself and others). It was scary and weird.

Lately I seem to be injuring myself a lot in ways that require a lot of explanation.

I've stumbled upon this video of Sergei Prokofiev playing the piano and then briefly being interviewed in the late 1940s in his dacha outside of Moscow. So that's what his voice sounds like! I don't know what piece he plays at the beginning, nor do I have any idea what he's saying. Anybody know Russian? I can, however, tell you that the piece he's playing in the silent snippet at the end of the video (a totally different piece of film from years earlier) is the very end of his own 4th piano sonata. I am very proud of myself for figuring this out.

This is the sort of thing that kept me off the streets in high school.

The first one of these found its way to the drivers' board at the Cambus office. It's always weird when your art gets a different audience than the one you thought it was going to get.

Because I just love it when you see things on January 1st that are already copyright that year, I'm updating my web site. The new index page is lookin' pretty good.

Oh, and you might notice that there's a thing under "Comics" that no one's heard of before. It's called "Brian W. Lenth in..." and it's the name of a new thing I'm trying. It started with this comic, remember, back in May? I started toying with the idea of doing a partially-to-fully fictional "autobiographical" comic. I haven't made the page for it yet, so you people who care enough about me to read my blog will be the first ones to see the next one in the series:



I plan to do these whenever the inspiration strikes.