Web comics and other cartoons by by Helen E. H. Madden
I remember watching lots of guys get their hair cut in the dorm hallways by other cadets. After my own experience with the local barber, I completely understand why. Still, getting your bud to give you a haircut did not guarantee you’d come out looking good. ‘Nuff said.
This one is so true it’s almost painful. For the record, I only drink a glass of wine about once every couple of months, but when I drink it, it’s because I’ve really been pushed to the limit by the kids, work, house cleaning… everything.
We’ve all had those days, I’m sure. Days where there’s more whine than wine. Lately, the girls have both been driving me nuts, especially Pixie. Every other word out of her mouth is “NO!” The words in between are all “WAAAAAAAAAAH!!” And this has been going on for weeks now. We took her to a local Greek festival on Friday and could not get that kid to do anything. Didn’t want to try the food. Didn’t want to sit down and watch the dancers. Didn’t want to look at the craft stalls. Didn’t want to go on the jumbo slide with her sister. Didn’t want go home. Didn’t want to stay. All evening long. After two hours, I was at my limit. I told Hubster I was going into the church to buy some pastries and then we were all heading home. He handed me a couple of twenties, which I thought was odd until I got inside and saw they were also selling bottles of Greek wine. So I bought wine and pastries and Hubster laughed when I came back out and he saw the bottle.
“I knew it!” he said.
“Hell yes you knew it! Why else would you hand me an extra $20? How much baklava do you think we could eat?!”
Any way, Pixie is still fussy and farty, and Princess is still chawing my ear off about her sister keeps copying her fart noises (among other things), and I still have 2/3rds a bottle of red Greek wine. I wonder how long that bottle will last.
Click on the thumbnail above to see the cartoon.
Yea verily, I am seriously behind this week on blog posts, and this one almost didn’t make it today. Blame it on Balticon, people. That con wipes me out every year.
But I did get this week’s episode of Rats! up before the end of the day. I dedicate this episode to all LOST fans who were frustrated by the series finale. Personally, I thought it worked with only a few minor flaws, but I know some people are hopping mad about it. My condolences to you 😉
I spent many a weekend in Jefferson National Forrest with my Army ROTC unit, tramping through the woods, camping out in the snow and the rain, getting mud in all my various hard to reach spots, and eating lots of MREs, the ultimate in haute cuisine. And let me just say to this day, I do not miss it one bit. I hated going out on Field Training Exercises (FTX). I think those things were specifically designed to screw me over. I have said it before and I’ll say it again. I was a lousy cadet. I made a fairly decent officer once I got into the actual Army, but ROTC was not for me.
Anyway, here’s hoping all this past year’s rats at the good ol’ VTCC survived the year. Good luck being upper classmen next year. I’ve got cartoons all about that too.
My dear friend Treed created a bitstrip about his Balticon experience that I thought I would share with you, just so you could compare and contrast the two points of view. His comic is here – http://www.bitstrips.com/series/18339/read.php?comic_id=629085&sc=0.
By the way, if you’re a fan of podcasting and podcast books, Treed’s bitstrips offer some very funny insight into that realm. He’s a funny guy. Really 😉
Sorry today’s cartoon is late. As you can see from the image above, there was a reason.
Balticon is the biggest convention I go to every year. I love it. I love seeing everybody I know from writing and podcasting and webcomics. I love attending the panels and learning new things. I love doing and attending readings. And yes, I love the parties.
The best party at Balticon is the one hosted by Chooch and Viv of the “Into the Blender” podcast. This year’s theme was Sci Fi Prom. I just happened to come across an old costume of mine in the closet while I was packing last Thursday and I decided to bring it to the prom. The outfit had been in storage for 9 years or so, and I’d only worn it once because I got pregnant soon after that, so it seemed like it was time to wear it again. I was rather surprised at people’s reactions to my outfit (all of which were overwhelmingly positive), especially since a) it’s an old costume that’s been in storage all these years and b) there were some really killer costumes at the prom. But I guess I must still have my costuming mojo because yours truly was crowned queen of the Sci Fi Prom. I promised Viv I’d crown next year’s queen, just as soon as someone pried my tiara from my cold dead fingers.
All in all, I had a great time. Here are a few quick photos from the con. Like me, there are a bit skewed and out of focus. Hopefully I will recover from such conditions even if the photos won’t.
My best friend, Mary, lacing me into my flame-print corset. She had way too much fun doing this.
My reading on Saturday night. I bought the corset at Farpoint earlier this year. It’s a good thing I decided to wear a shirt under it. I didn’t realize how low the corset would settle once I was strapped in, and even with the shirt I worried about being “over-exposed.”
Kim, the Comic Book Godess. She’s got a fantastic voice and writes and performs wonderful songs. She’s also the founder of the Secret Society for Delayed World Conquest.
My partner in crime, Nobilis Reed, at his book launch for Scouts on Saturday night. He hosted a fake orgasm contest and a massage contest. And yes, that was as intersting as it sounds. Find out more about Scouts and Nobilis at http://www.nobiliserotica.com/.
Me and DDog at the Sci Fi Prom. DDog was probably one of the neatest, most fashionable people there, and by fashionable I mean he does his own thing and does it very well. He’s dressed in this picture as the latest incarnation of the Doctor. I was dressed as the Empress Xena. And yes, I do get satellite TV on that headdress I’m wearing. To get OnStar, I just push the big red jewel at the top.
The woman I would have voted for, for Sci Fi Prom Queen, the lovely J.R. Blackwell, who is probably one of the most creative and talented people I know. Photography, costuming, writing… She does it all.
Mr. Snacky Cake, aka John Cmar, and Jared Axelrod, J.R.’s equally talented husband. Jared has a graphic novel coming out called “Fables of the Flying City” that I am very much looking forward to seeing. Meanwhile, Dr. John Cmar performs the best medical procedures, including the boob flattening he did on me the moment I arrived at Balticon. It was a very professional job, I tell you.
My prom king, Dave Slusher of the Evil Genius Chronicles. I couldn’t have been paired with a better guy.
Vivid Muse, the hostess with the mostest at the Sci Fi Prom…
And here’s Viv’s stud-boy, Chooch. He plays a mean bass!
A dear friend of mine, Elf, whom I’ve known since college, and who’s shown up at every event I’ve done in Maryland in the last three years. Love you, Elf!
And last but far from least, podcaster and prolific author Nathan Lowell who’s book “Quarter Share” is now out and is a must read. In this pic, Nathan is demonstrating his “Second Life He-Man” pose. Oy! Muy macho, Nate!
I wish I’d had the chance to take more pictures, because this is just a small sampling of what went on this weekend. However the con goes by so fast! Maybe next year I’ll be a little quicker with the camera.
Ah, Land Navigation. Ladies and gentlemen, there was a time when, if you handed me a compass, an azimuth, a twelve-digit grid coordinate, and a topographical map, I could have told you exactly where we were, were we were going, and how long it would take us to get there. It was one of the very few things I was good at as an Army ROTC cadet, and I was a bit proud of myself when I successfully completed the Land Navigation course at Camp All American while some of my fellow ROTC cadets who outstripped me in all other areas couldn’t find their way to the first point on the list.
But Land Navigation was pretty much the only thing I was good at, sad to say.
My career as an ROTC cadet was pretty miserable. I was mediocre at weapons qualification. I stunk at PT. I couldn’t understand Troop Leadership or basic squad tactics if my life depended on it. I was a lousy cadet. And yet somehow I graduated and was commissioned into the Army Reserves. Now as an officer, I did much better, but then I was in the Transportation Corps, where we worked with vehicles and… maps! I was always good with maps.
For those of you not familiar with Land Navigation, allow me to explain the cartoon above. Cadets were always sent out in pairs for training (though for the Land Nav course at Camp All American, we were on our own). This was a safety precaution, of course. You’ll see in the cartoon the one rat lists off the course direction in degrees (which can be measured on a compass) and a distance of 1000 meters. The other rat is counting paces. Before every Land Nav course, we had to do a pace count, where we counted how many paces we had to take to match a 50 meter distance. That way we could count off the paces to mark how far we were traveling as we followed the course direction (or azimuth) on our compass and thus got from point A to point B.
Sounds simple, right? Except that not all Land Nav problems were that straight forward. Sometimes you were given a description of a landmark and it’s direction relative to you. Then you had to calculate the distance to get there. Or you were given a distance and a landmark, but had to find the direction by finding the landmark on the map. Or maybe you were just given a 12-digit grid coordinate and had to figure out all the other info from there. Or…
Simply put, Land Navigation was the same problem over and over again – figure out how to get from point A to point B – but configured many different ways. I understood that. But it was about the only thing I understood in the Army.
Good thing I went into Transportation, huh?
(**Interesting little tidbit. I write these posts the Sunday before they go up. I just realized as I write this that tonight is the season finale of my favorite show LOST, which is also the final word in this week’s cartoon. Imagine the forces of fate that had to line up to make that happen! Okay, yeah. I’m stretching it, I know. But still!**)
By strange coincidence, Pixie managed to injure herself by sitting on a cat tent right after I finished drawing this. The cat tent is made of PVC pipe and canvas, and when she sat on it, it collapsed beneath her and the pipes went everywhere. The end result is that she now has a perfectly circular bruise on her left butt cheek. Not even filled in, just the outline of a small, perfect circle where she managed to land on the tip of one of the pipes. Of course, she wanted a bandage for it.
This week is my mom’s birthday. My mom is a nurse, so unlike me, she knows how to handle any medical emergency. Even after I grew up and moved out of the house, she continued to take care of me when I was sick. She was with me when I had my gall bladder removed. She was with me when I had surgery for endometriosis. She and my dad drove all the way up from Arkansas to help out when I had my c-section for Princess, and they were both there when I gave birth to Pixie. Mom always knows what to do and when to apply that Band Aid. So here’s a big “Happy Birthday!” to the woman who brought me into the world and has managed to keep me in it no matter how many times I’ve ended up in the hospital!
So I know I said last week that there were more Great General Pumpkin cartoons coming up, and there should have been but for the life of me, I can’t find them! I know I have them. I’ve seen them! But they weren’t in my Year 01 or Year 02 folder, and it’s too late at this point for me to hunt them down.
Therefore, we move on to first aid. In Army ROTC, the junior and senior cadets were expected to teach classes on common tasks to the freshmen and sophomores. First aid was one of those subjects. I tell you, there’s nothing like standing in front of a bunch of freshmen, struggling to remember the symptoms for shock or how to splint a broken leg while your ROTC instructor is standing behind you with a clip board grading every little thing you do. And it doesn’t get any easier because once you actually get into the Army (or the Air Force or the Navy or the Marines), you must continue to teach other folks how to do things like this. In fact, one of my jobs in the Army Reserves was training officer. Not only did I have to teach class, but I also had to put together the training plan for the entire unit every single month. Not an easy task to do.
Anyway, it was always kind of fun to be a freshman watching the upper classmen try to run a class, but not so much fun a couple years down the line when it was your turn to teach someone else.
I’ll keep looking for the Great General Pumpkin cartoons. I know I have them somewhere. But if I don’t find them, we’ll continue on with the Army ROTC cartoons for a few weeks, ‘kay?
As opposed to the non-feral ones, you mean?
What kills me about this one is the word ‘feral.’ What the hell does that have to do with Egyptian queens? I swear, at any given moment one of my kids will say the strangest damned thing I’ve ever heard. When Princess was about 18 months old, she talked about tiny nipples floating to the sky. Pixie sings about rotten tomatoes and her eyeballs falling out. And then the two of them get together to play “Let’s Pretend” and I wonder if I should have them both medicated based on what I overhear during the course of their play.
I’m sure there will be plenty more of these “Say what?!” cartoons coming in the future. Pixie and Princess have dropped some seriously deranged one-liners on me lately, and on more than one occasion have caused me to spew Darjeeling through my nose. So be warned. It only gets weirder from here.
Mea culpa. I don’t know why this didn’t go up first thing this morning, but you know, sometimes life happens.
Anyway, this is where the cartoons start to get out of sync with the current calendar date. Right now, in the real world, it’s Spring, it’s balmy, things are turning green everywhere and summer isn’t too far off. But in the world of Rats…
We’re into a series of cartoons I drew for October of 1989, and the subject was Pumpkin Wars. Every October, the freshman/rats had to come up with a jack o’lantern that the upper classmen dubbed the Great General Pumpkin. The Great General Pumpkin was stationed in the company area on the desk where the announcements board was posted. So long as he was there, we had to speak up and act as normal in the company area. But if the Great General Pumpkin disappeared from the company area, the rats got to be “at ease” in the halls and didn’t have to speak up to anyone. I can’t recall if it was just in the company area halls or the entire dorm. Part of me wants to say the entire dorm because I have this vague memory of being in Kilo Company area (which was where all the 2nd Battalion female dorm rooms were, regardless of what company you were in) and seeing a lot of upper classmen scowling at me because they knew our pumpkin had gone missing and I didn’t have to speak up. But I can’t be sure because my memory on that is not so clear.
Anyway, the promise of “at ease” in the hallways and no speaking up lead to some pretty wild antics on the part of the freshmen to hide the Great General Pumpkin, which in turn led to some pretty wild antics on the part of the upper classmen to find him and restore him to his place. You’ll see that play out over the next few weeks, as I drew a few more strips on the subject.
Sorry again about being late today. Honestly, I have no idea why this did not go up on time today!
