The Friday Doodle pt1
I think I start trying to post a drawing of some sort every Friday. In the past I’ve posted a Wolverine and a Beer Clock and this week is an Astroboy that I did a few years back. I spent ages trying to draw him shooting his butt-lasers but was left with a desk of pretty suspect looking scribbles. Despite being drawn from memory I don’t think I really captured that retro feel that I get when I think back on Astroboy but it is an Astroboy none the less.
I don’t think I really nailed the hair either… ah well. Enjoy
Up, up and away!
Filed under 
Asian Adventure: Part 2
The view from the pool... to the street
Singapore
By far the most efficient airport I’ve ever experienced. We were off the plane, through customs and in a cab to the hotel before I knew what had happened. My favourite part was at the baggage claim. There was a driver waiting for someone holding a sign up for a “Mr Yap”. I immediately imagined one of those small celebrity dogs coming through the airport to be picked up in his own limo. Of course, the classic Seinfeld steal the limo caper came to mind:
“He doesn’t know O’Brien, if he knew O’Brien he wouldn’t have a sign”
But I don’t think I’d pass for a Mr Yap… nor a small celebrity dog.
Singapore is a beautiful, clean, polite city… almost too much so. Sometimes you feel like Big Brother is watching and if you miss the bin with your rubbish they’ll pull a van up and take you away screaming and everyone will just watch on, not helping out of fear that they too might get taken… Or something like that. Or maybe they all just respect their city and act civil to one another (looks at Sydney).
For a city with a population in the millions I never saw the streets bustling with people or the roads congested, they all move around like ninjas. I don’t mean to imply that just because they’re Asian that they’re ninjas, I meant in the sneaky way… not that Asians are sneaky.
We did all the sites and touristy stuff. The Flyer (think London eye), the night Safari (which was pretty awesome), the cruise on the river thingy (*yawn*). This was all made all that more interesting by the fact I was now deaf in one ear.
In the days before we left I spent 2 days confined to my bed with the trifecta: Shakes, sweats and sniffles. While I was feeling much better when it came time to fly out I was still stuck with a head full of mucus. The flight was excruciating enough as it were but when my ears didn’t pop properly on landing I knew something was wrong. I had got an ear infection from flying that left me deaf in my left ear and every time I spoke I lost my hearing entirely. This added a whole new dimension (or rather, removed one) to being in a foreign place.
The hotel we were in had an infinity pool that was 5 stories up. The whole external side of the pool was clear glass so if I were able to put my head under water (damn ear infection) I could’ve looked through to the street below. This was cool except that every time I went for a swim I was expecting it to crack sending me to the street in a waterfall… but it never did
Another good thing about Singapore is that they still have a Starbucks on every corner, which is great for me as I’m addicted to White Mocha Frapachino’s (No joke here, just the facts). Generally, I’m like a small child when you take me shopping. I moan and drag my feel and complain the whole time. I love a good whinge. But put a White Mocha Frapachino in my hands and I’m golden. I just walk around sucking on it quiet as a mouse for hours. My girlfriend would make a point of our first stop when going on a shopping expedition to be to pop into a Starbucks and load me up with the frozen coffee goodness. She’d then get a couple of hours of polite, co-operating Mitchell to take shopping before my eventual regression into being a moany prick.
And just like that our whirlwind couple of days in Singapore were over. It was back through the spotless streets (is that someone being dragged into a van for littering?) to the super-swift airport to begin the second stage of the holiday. Penang, Malaysia.
Asian Adventure: Part 1
So, for the last two years my girlfriend has been trying to kill me. No she isn’t poisoning my cereal. Nor is she cutting my brake lines. No, she is going a much more subtle route. She keeps taking me, a fair-skinned ginger to the hottest, sunniest part of the world that is Tropical Asia. She imagines that by taking me to these dangerously UV heavy places that I’d burn so badly she’d be bringing me home as a pile of ash in an urn.
Last year we went to Bali which I managed to survive (much to her disappointment). This years attempt on my life she decided we’d do a hop-scotch from Singapore to Malaysia to Thailand. Surely one of these countries would cause my ghost-white skin to burst in to flames?
The first part of the trip, as is the case with nearly all trips, is the act of getting there. We flew out from Sydney to Darwin. Too easy (except for the small child sitting behind me who kept kicking my seat). The next stage was Darwin to Singapore, our first port of stay. Sounds easy enough, right? Well, this is where things started to fall apart.
We all boarded the plane alright in Darwin, all eager to get on the road, so to speak, to Singapore and begin our adventures. After 30 minutes of sitting in the plane still on the runway the planes Captain came over the speakers to let us know the engineers were fixing something and assured us we’d be in the air in 30 minutes.
40 Minutes later…
The Captain again comes over the speakers and informs us that the problem is a bit worse than they first anticipated and that we’d have to disembark the plane and they’d be bringing the back-up plane around. The estimated time of prepping the new plane and taking off would be about an hour. My question is, if the back-up plane is so good, why wasn’t it the main plane in the first place?
So we all shuffle off the plane and back into the terminal. Remember, this is Darwin terminal so it isn’t really the glitziest of all airports. It had very few seats, 2 vending machines (one of which didn’t work) and if it did have AC it wasn’t very effective. While we sat there waiting for our second plane to be prepared I began to check out my fellow postponed passengers.
There is a dude taking this extra time in the terminal to drink 6 more Bundy & Coke cans while (pretending) to read his Matthew Reilly book. He was trying to impress the attractive young girls who were also reading… as far as I could tell, he’d drunk more rums than he’d read pages.
There was Adventure Granny. An old woman who was on her own and looked like she was off to trek through the jungles of Malaysia barefoot. If the planes pilot died and the plane was going down, I imagined she’d be the one to jump in and land it safely… whilst fighting off the bad-guys… and dispensing granny-isms like “in my day we didn’t shoot at our elders, darling!” as she did it.
Then there was Clown Dad who was doing his best to keep his 3 young kids entertained while we all waited for the flight. He went through all the good dad joke gear, from the elevator behind the lounge to the got your nose. He must have got low on material because he then proceeded to pretend to shop-lift books from a closed book store… not the best way to entertain your kids, family shop-lifting.
And then there were ze Germans, a couple who if you close your eye and picture the most stereotypical German backpackers you’d be spot on. Attractive, dark skin, blonde hair, just oozing sexiness. They were all over each other, I though they were going to do it right there in the terminal in front of everyone… certainly would’ve made the waiting go a bit quicker.
70 Minutes Later…
The poor air hostess came over the mic with the obligatory feedback sound. She told us that the back-up plane that had begun to be made into our main plane also had a defect and that it would be easier to fix the problem with the original plane than the back-up plane so they’d be bringing back our first defective plane and fixing it then we’d be off. Brilliant.
50 minutes later
We’d all boarded again and were all keenly anticipating the second attempt (well, third kind of) to get to Singapore. We were all set and in the air before I knew it. Finally. Cue baby crying…
Beer O’Clock
This image was done as a project back when I was in uni. I think we had to think of a product and do a visual mock-up of it… or something.
The amazing Beer O'Clock!
It is a design for a digital clock but not just any digital cloack. It would constantly displayed the LED time of ‘BEER’ with the idea that it was always beer o’clock (yeah, I know, lame, but I was in uni). It would have alarm settings built in for drinking games, a radio for music and a place for a deck of cards (a drinking games must!).
While it was well received as a “fictional product that would never actually exist because no one would buy it” (teachers words, not mine) I still think it wouldn’t be out of place in any novelty shop or online…
So if you’re interested in producing the Beer O’Clock, please, contact me.
Weekend Wolverine
It’s been a wee bit since my last post, I’ve been a bit busy. So, here is something from the vaults, an old drawing I did when I was first starting out with scanning the doodles I’d been doing. Enjoy : )
