LOOK! Trees.

Here's one of those trees that will keep Campbell out of trouble while his head is on the mend. He'd always photograph something like that, saying you could never rememember it or make it up. In fact, we're not sure how you'd go about drawing it either.
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In his absence we should mention this event:
Posy Simmonds Signing at Page 45! Thursday, October 25, 2007

Ladies And Gentlemen, We Have Comicbook Royalty! That's Posy Simmonds MBE (for services to the newspaper industries), creator of GEMMA BOVERY, LITERARY LIFE and TAMARA DREWE (out early November), as serialised in The Guardian. Posy Simmonds does not sign at comic shops! She rarely even signs in posho shops like Waterstones! Do you remember during the Bryan Talbot interview, that I promised you news? Here is the news: Posy Simmonds is coming to sign and sketch with us for free! "How The...?!"
Bryan. Bryan Talbot. I don't have that sort of clout!
Bryan asked her as a favour for us, and she said yes.
This a very, very rare opportunity to come and chat with one of the most respected comicbook creators that Britain has ever known.

We suspect that Campbell would not approve of sullying the great cartoonist Posy Simmonds with the description of 'comicbook creator'*, in fact we're pretty sure of it but durst not mention the matter to him lest we aggravate his condition.
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We're pretty sure Campbell would applaud Tom Tomorrow at the Huffington Post with his long summary of the Nate Fisher business in Conneticut. He's the teacher who gave Clowes' Ice Haven to a thirteen year old student and had to resign. Graphic Novels: Threat or Menace? - Posted October 25.
Falls somewhat short of the obvious: the teacher should be hired back, with an abject public apology and full back pay.
DAMN RIGHT!
While in the vicinity of that post we came across this one by Jonathan Schwartz, explaining how Edmund Burke wrote in support of blogging in 1770.
(from long quote within long article) "No man, who is not inflamed by vain-glory into enthusiasm, can flatter himself that his single, unsupported, desultory, unsystematic endeavours, are of power to defeat the subtle designs and united cabals of ambitious citizens."
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Questions You Should Never Ask a Writer- By DORIS LESSING- NY Times- October 13, 2007 (republished from June 1992)

WHILE we have seen the apparent death of Communism, ways of thinking that were either born under Communism or strengthened by Communism still govern our lives. Not all of them are as immediately evident as a legacy of Communism as political correctness.
The first point: language. It is not a new thought that Communism debased language and, with language, thought. There is a Communist jargon recognizable after a single sentence. .. Words confined to the left as corralled animals had passed into general use and, with them, ideas. One might read whole articles in the conservative and liberal press that were Marxist, but the writers did not know it. But there is an aspect of this heritage that is much harder to see... the heritage of dead and empty language these days is to be found in academia, and particularly in some areas of sociology and psychology.

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*When he said he thought ‘comic book’ is still one of the useful terms he meant it’s useful because everybody knows what it means: American style comic books that are almost always about superheroes, so much so that you can use it to mean a genre of popular fiction; as you would say a ‘western movie’ or ‘a gangster movie’, so can you say ‘a comic book movie.’