Artsplosion, Ideas and Tees, Oh My!

For a person who often feels like I really don't do anything, it sure appears as if I've been very busy! Over the weekend, I was tackling the Amazon rainforest that was my backyard, transforming it from a home to lost 1930s adventurers and junglemen swinging from vines, to a reasonably tame Secret Garden.

I'm pleased with the results-- the evicted anaconda and piranha, less so. Plus, George Challenger's served me with cease and desist papers and Tarzan's been picketing. So there's that to deal with.

But, while I was scything back the underbrush, it gave me plenty of time to think about scenes for the last book in my There Goes the Galaxy trilogy, Tryfling Matters. I'm about 100 manuscript pages in and I know where I want it to end, but I'm plotting out the structure for a strong, fun middle. You know the kind; if it were a person, it would be a middle with good abs.

In the evenings, to help keep the creativity going, I've been doing a lot of drawing. Some have been illustrations from scenes from my first two books. And some of it has been whatever's popped in mind. 

You can see above, I attempted David Tennant as the Tenth Doctor of Doctor Who last night. I thought he turned out pretty Tennanty, but I've since been informed that he looks like: 1.) Harrison Ford 2.) both Japanese AND Korean 3.) His nose is wibbly-wobbly. (I imagine that last one is because it's half-stuck in another dimension. The TARDIS is clearly rough on the sinuses.)

So I'm glad I was set straight on all that. :)

I also decided to try my hand at ol' Captain Jack Sparrow.

I had to try to draw one of my favorite superheroes from childhood, Batgirl...

(The book she's reading is "Work-Life Balance.")

I did another couple of doodles based on There Goes the Galaxy characters... Bertram and Rollie in the Shop-o-Drome on Golgi-Beta from the first book...

And a Charlie's Angels spoof of Tseethe, Fess and Rollie, all characters from my Intergalactic Underworld. There's no slight intended in making Kate Jackson's character a squidoid, by the way. That's just Fess. :)

I did a few Alice in Wonderland doodles using a steampunk theme. This is Alice searching for the Jabberwock with her Vorpal Sword...

And her companion, the Cheshire Clock, all by himself in a paper umbrella tree.

I tried a more traditional Alice down the rabbit hole, really testing out that gravity...

And one of my favorites, the White Rabbit, chillaxing there in his favorite chair...

Here is a different version of the Queen of Hearts I attempted... I wanted her to be less Queen Elizabeth or Queen Victoria influenced and more Scarlett O'Hara, for a change...

And this was followed by a drawing of The White Queen, which turned out kind of creepy and intense. I was going for a little Galadriel and Joan of Arc...

An investment in some monochrome grey markers had me try a little Dorothy in Kansas action...

And I thought I'd do one in color as well.

Because I had some folks on social media forums request it, I've posted a few of these and some other ones as small posters in a Zazzle shop. I have those there along with some t-shirt designs based on the There Goes the Galaxy stories. Folks who have read the books will understand the references. You can check them out here: 

http://www.zazzle.com/jennthorsondesigns*

So that's about it for me right now! This weekend, I plan to finish the rest of my book's metaphorical ab workout, and we'll see what else awaits. I probably should do something about Tarzan and his chimp buddies picketing outside my house. I've explained to him he doesn't have squatter's rights, but it's like talking to a brick wall.

Car's Stick Figure People Exterminated Through Dalek Invasion

Not a molecule of that stick figure family left!


This was a photo I took this morning driving into work. I think I made the driver a little paranoid as he/she looked in the rearview, but paranoia is the price one must pay when your car flair is entertaining and Doctor Who-centric.

Doctor Who Versus the Daleks Verus the Dickens Christmas Village

Who stands tall (or at least disproportionately out of scale) when the Dickens Christmas Village in the living room is overrun by invaders from another planet? Why, our dashing Doctor Who, of course!

Last year, it was All Silent on the Porcelain Dickensian London Landmarks. But this year, Daleks have developed a fleet of evil green minions....
Okay, so they LOOK like Christmas bottle brush trees. But what better way to infiltrate and conquer a sleeping city during the holidays than to disguise your crazed robot machines as docile holiday firs?

As a space ship hovers above Big Ben, casting inordinate glare over Doctor Who-- which looks strikingly like an over-exposed camera flash but really isn't at all in the least, move along please-- the Doctor prepares his battle plan...

He's hoping to keep the potential peril under wraps from the general populace as long as possible. Though he suspects even bustling, absorbed, energetically-shopping Londoners might eventually notice the crashed flying saucer on the Tower Bridge...

Remarkable how advanced alien technology resembles two styrofoam dinner plates glued together, isn't it?

"What do you think, Rose?" begins the Doctor. "How long before they start to get suspicious that it's going to be yet another year the world nearly ends on Christmas?"

"Two, three hours tops," Rose suggests, peering thoughtfully at the scene below. "Think I have enough time to pick up some tea for my mum at Harrods? I'm not quite done shopping."

"Focus, Rose. Focus."

The TARDIS-- which is not, in any way, a DVD storage box my friend Scoobie made for me, even though it is completely filled with awesome-- waits by, ready to leap into action at the Doctor's command.

Will everyone at St. Martin-in-the-Fields cathedral be exterminated before they can finish their brass rubbings and tea in the crypt?...

Will the alien villaness Cassandra turn the Dalek pine trees against the Daleks for her own nefarious purposes... Or at least for a really freshly pine-scented space ship?...

Will Rose be the last human left in London, and have to take over the duties as Queen and do all of that bored waving?
And the biggest question of all...

How long will it take my dad to realize that the standard Christmas Dickens village has been wholly invaded by alien lifeforms this year?

Stay tuned, Friends of Cabbages! And happy holidays!
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Doctor Who and the Retail Time Warp

Step through the threshold of department stores like Target or Wal-Mart and you find yourself transported to a time that is not your own.

When snow slicks the parking lot, frost glazes the windshields, and little kids turn into wobbling, wind-resistant cocoons with eyes-- inside these capsules of consumerism you will discover a land of bright bikinis... beach bags... charcoal grills and swizzle sticks.

Or in the steamy days of summer, when sweat runs in rivulets and the bra-straps of the populace get a good public airing-- inside the realm of retail, school supplies remind us darkly that freedom is fleeting... hairy sweaters smother standing displays... and, wait-- is that a faint jingle of sleigh bells we hear underlying the Muzak?

How is this possible?

Well, yes, of course you could say that it's corporate greed, plain and simple.

But do these manufacturing giants really believe that we will stand shivering in a changing room, swimsuit pressed against pasty-white, with the taste of Christmas fruitcake still lingering on our hips... er, lips?

Do they really believe we'll have an itch to shrug into that 100% wool sweater while the chlorine from Sandcastle Water Park still scents our skin?

I think it's proof of the existence of Doctor Who.

Yep. The way I see it, Target's mysterious seasonal shift forward is actually an unfortunate residue resulting from repeated alien invasion of the planet and resetting of the space-time continuum, to protect our human minds!...

Months of oppression under evil extra-terrestrial overlords!...

And the good Doctor, putting things right for all of us and wiping our minds clean of the terrors once more.

Ever feel like you've been working at the same stupid stuff for months, even though you know it couldn't possibly be that long?

Ever feel like you're life's at a complete stand-still, and you're going nowhere, and you don't know where your motivation went?

Well, there you go! That's the effects of Repeated Earthling Enslavement and Time-Foolery!

And while the Doctor is clearly very, very good at what he does... Unfortunately, he just hasn't figured out how to set shop inventory back to the correct season.

It's truly the only decent theory that explains why stores would believe I'd be interested in snow boots and a shovel for the Fourth of July.

Still unconvinced? Well, just you walk around your favorite department store this weekend, and see if there isn't something to this.

Resistance is futile, you know. Time for a nice big cup of hot cocoa. And pass me that gingerbread man, would you?

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Today's questions: What's the most surprising off-season item you spotted in stores? And have you ever bought something totally off-season for later?

Also-- is it me, or is Christmas now starting somewhere in September? Didn't it used to be after Thanksgiving?

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My Super-Nerd Sense is Tingling

There's this store in our local mall that's like my entire childhood wrapped into a room-- Minus the being beat up on the playground, the noisy tan corduroys and the harvest colors, of course.

In this mecca of retro media, Star Wars figures wield the Force....

The Heat Miser and Snow Miser strut their stuff...

The Superfriends chat in stilted overly-obvious discussions...

And The Tick struggles to break through nigh-invulnerable packaging.

Anything and everything you can imagine from cartoons and campy films over the years, and this store seems to have it.

The place calls to my inner-nerd every time I venture there. And my inner-nerd actually gets out quite a bit.

I mean, okay, I still have some of my old comic books. And my collection of Johnny Depp-related action figures seems to be overtaking the surface of one filing cabinet...

I think fondly of the original Star Wars, I met b-movie actor Bruce Campbell once (that's a whole other story), and I seem to have developed an inexplicable crush on Dr. Who.

So while my inner dork does pretty much run the joint, I realized, it still might not be enough.

"What?" you're wondering. "How can it not be enough?-- There's the Dr. Who thing." Well, see... This is what happened.

As I was strolling around this collectibles store, the cashier was having an in-depth discussion with two friends who'd stopped by. It was lengthy, passionate and loud. And the conversation seemed to run like this:

Cashier: Well, Episode One largely sucked because it needed a further integration of Darth Maul...

Friends: Mummmm... yeah.

Cashier: That character needed to be pulled more thoroughly throughout that trilogy for it to be worthy of the build up. And so the only scenes that didn't suck were the battle at 15:07 minutes into the film between Darth Maul and Zaphod Beeblebrox where he used the Klingon nunchucks, and then the part at 47:12 where the Ferengi brought in the AT-AT and...

Okay, okay, I know Darth Maul never did fight Zaphod Beeblebrox. (Zaphod would have totally lost his head in that sort of fight. Well, at least ONE of his heads...) And I know the Ferengi and Klingons have nothing to do with Star Wars... And...

Suffice it to say, I'm aware. Remember: dork here.

But on and on this dissection went, with scene after scene bucketed into "sucked," and "didn't suck" with a sort of detailed examination worthy of a doctoral thesis.

And I didn't understand half of it.

I mean, I watched Star Wars Episode One once. Mostly what I got out of it was that, apparently, when you're a Queen faced with a choice between a rather dishy Ewan MacGregor and an annoying kid half your age for your love interest, you choose the annoying kid.

And that's when they lost me.

Anything, beyond that, and I can't say I remember it. I remember something vaguely about a Jamaican lizard-rabbit. And drag-racing, space-style. But that's about it.

So, I think I'm going to have to work on my general nerdishness. None of this halvsies stuff for me. I mean, I was the one who hadn't realized that "Darth" was a title and wasn't just the guy's first name...

"Hi, I'm Darth. Darth Vader?... This is my brother Zek."

See? Hopeless!

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The Force is always with Humor-blogs.

Separated at Birth?

There are only so many configurations for the human face, what with most of us limited to having just two eyes and one nose, and the general placement of them being fairly restricted unless you're a Picasso.

But every now and then I'm watching TV and still find myself surprised at HOW MUCH someone on there looks like somebody else.

So instead of me making comments about these things to my television set-- which almost NEVER answers back-- I thought I'd post some of my favorite celebrity look-alikes here.

Like how about James Dyson of the Dyson vacuum cleaner commercials...


And Julian Sands, the actor who was in Warlock and Stephen King's Rose Red...?


I always find myself rooting on James Dyson, just because the guy's entire life seems to be about making vacuum cleaner prototypes. He's probably not a lot of fun at parties, but I bet he has a really clean house. And I think having Julian Sands play him in a film version of the Dyson story could be entertaining, because Julian is usually evil. So maybe the vacuum cleaners could turn out to be possessed or something... sort of like Christine, but with more suction and fewer traffic accidents.

Okay, next we have Doctor Who's David Tennant...


And Top Gear presenter Richard Hammond...


Okay, yes, David Tennant is well over six feet tall, and Richard Hammond is about 5 foot seven. But still... (And yep, I do watch a lot of BBC America, why do you ask?)

All righty, how about actor Dax Shepard...



And actor Zach Braff, "Newbie" from Scrubs?...

Not initially knowing Dax Shepard, but watching Scrubs, I admit, I spent a good portion of Zathura trying to figure out why Zach Braff's voice sounded strange.

So what do you think, folks-- am I way off base here? Has there been anyone you think bears a striking resemblance to someone you'd care to share?

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Humor-blogs has no look-alikes. But that's probably because of all the plastic surgery.