A Brief Moment of Culture, Part XII
Commentary: On
August 21, 2011 ~ 5 Comments
The illustrations for this installment are mostly just close-ups of Artie digging around in yogurt, which, I admit, isn’t the most exciting visual. It was also hard to find illustrations from the Oz books that roughly corresponded. On the plus side, it was easy to draw. Artie is basically the easiest thing to draw ever.
This installment is dedicated “to quolls,” because Jeff and I had been discussing quolls in an email conversation. It was part of a discussion about why furries hardly ever want to be marsupials. Don’t judge us. Anyway, quolls are really cute, is the important thing.
That third paragraph has a satisfying ’19th century explorer’ tone to it.
And I like that yoghurt monsters ‘burble’. It seems to be just the right antique word to deploy in a storyline whose very title espouses class and rarefication.
“Burble” was coined by Lewis Carroll about 1855 in his poem Jabberwocky, which makes it a new-fangled contrivance compared to some of the other words in that sentence, which date back past Beowulf.
Having seen my gerbil escape his terrarium by chewing through steel wire mesh, I wouldn’t think yogurt with the consistency of strong plywood should slow Artie down much.
And I’d never heard of a quoll, so I deployed Google, and one of the results it brought up was this article, which, if not mad science, precisely, is definitely at least slightly off-kilter. Also, apparently, inspired by Little Red Riding Hood, so it should fit in just fine over in Skin Horse.
I had a mouse once that managed to chew through a plastic terrarium. He worked hard on it for weeks. It was very Shawshank.
For some reason, I’m very happy I got to use the phrase “Gerbil Containment Failure”. It’s just so very Helen to have a gerbil containment failure alarm.
Big Freakin’ ™ Gun Count = 45