Edward, the Baby Rhino

Victoria and Edward from http://endextinction.org

It’s been a frustrating couple of weeks, and it’s been a little tougher for me to stay positive. Thanks to social media (which I am pulling further and further away from except for Instagram; feel free to follow me at @RumpleDumple there), it is harder and harder for me to avoid all the bad news in the world. I mean, I don’t want to bury my head in the sand, but I get that the world is currently a literal dumpster fire. but I don’t need to know all the details all the time. Fortunately, in the past month or so, we’ve seen some really good news: the birth of Edward, the first baby rhinoceros born by artificial insemination in North America. Watching the videos from San Diego Zoo Safari Park have filled me with so much joy, I thought this week I would share them with you.

Arizona-Sonora Desert Museum in Tucson, AZ

At the end of July, I took a quick trip to Tucson to attend the Botany 2019 conference. Well, to attend just a tiny bit of it: my dad was a prominent botanist, and my family is funding an award to help fund the work of graduate students in his name. That award was announced at the Botanical Society of America’s annual conference this year. My mother and brother weren’t able to attend, so I decided to head out there to represent the family.

I Decorated a Sushi Roll Cake!

Due to traveling out of town for a few days (which I will probably talk about in my next post), I have neither the time nor the energy to write about comics this week. Well, more like I lack the energy to pull together the images for any comics-related posts. Fortunately, this isn’t a comics blog, it’s a “things that make me happy” blog. And my wife and I had an experience recently that was a lot of fun that I want to tell you about: we took a cake decorating class at Freed’s Bakery, where we decorated a sushi roll cake.

Roy of the Rovers

It should come as no surprise to anyone who knows me that I am not much of a sports person. I don’t play any, and I don’t really follow any. However, I am obviously a comics person, and a fan of British comics on top of that. Even so, it surprises me a lot that one of my current favorite comics is a series about soccer (or football, in the UK). But that is exactly the case with Roy of the Rovers, the recent revival of the classic British football comic.

Stumptown

I’ve been a fan of Greg Rucka’s writing since his first comic, Whiteout. He was a novelist before that, but I came to his novels after his comics. I loved them, too. He’s done a lot of work for DC, and some for Marvel, but what I love the best are his creator-owned comics. Right now, he’s got two series ongoing: Black Magick, a supernatural thriller about a cop who is also a witch, and Lazarus, a series set in the near future where a handful of ultra-rich families own and control the entire world, with the rest of the world entirely subservient to them. (My joke is that I like Lazarus just fine, but I prefer reading fiction.) Truth is, both those series are fantastic. But I think my favorite Greg Rucka comic may be his Portland-set private eye series Stumptown.

Newbury & Hobbes

As I write about some of my favorite things here, over and over again I find myself feeling as if they were created just for me. I guess I feel lucky that I can find so many comics, books, movies, TV shows, and more to enjoy and talk about, rather than complaining about not being able to find any. (Seeing complaints like that was the impetus for creating this blog, after all.) A favorite book series of mine is Newbury and Hobbes, by George Mann, which feels as if he went into my head, picked out some of my favorite things, and put them altogether into one steampunk-y stew. I don’t talk a lot about books here, because they're not very visual. However, since Titan Comics has just published the collection of Mann’s (hopefully first) Newbury and Hobbes comic book miniseries, so now I can finally showcase it.

Trekker:Darkstar Zephyr

Trekker is back! Ron Randall has launched a Kickstarter for the next book in his science fiction series about bounty hunter Mercy St Clair, so this seems like an opportune time to talk about the most recent volume, The Darkstar Zephyr. I’ve written about the previous stories here and here, so I’m going to focus less on the background and more on the current book. Also, I have a pretty cool personal connection to this one.