i was in town today to visit the dentist, due to the mishap mentioned here on Saturday. I popped into Folio Books, where my pal mr j works. he showed me all sorts of wonderful things. I bought a book which I'll write about later, but right now I'll give a quick mention to the one I didn't buy as it is a recent release and relevant to yesterday's celebration of James Kochalka. James is one of the fifty "artists, illustrators, designers," featured in


An Illustrated Life: Drawing Inspiration from the Private Sketchbooks of Artists, Illustrators and Designers (Paperback) There are six pages devoted to Kochalka's sketchbook diaries, including some close up photos of the objects, which invite us to see them in quite a different way from his online digitally-colored scans.

It was released in December 2008 and Amazon included it in their best books of that month.

And since I haven't mentioned my pal mr j here in quite some time, you can see what he's been up to on his blog, ON THE MAT, which is all about his wrestling cartoons, of which this is a sample:



Meanwhile, there is abeautiful big white whale that we love to watch for along our coast here.

Migaloo, a 14-meter, 35-ton pure white humpback whale, has been spotted off the New South Wales mid-north coast and could soon be in Queensland waters, where hefty new fines apply to anyone who gets too close.
"Migaloo has been declared a special-interest whale, granting him more space to swim up the Queensland coast," Ms Jones said.
The first reported sighting of Migaloo was in 1991 off Byron Bay, when he was three to five years old.
His unusual colouring makes him easy to track.
In winter humpbacks migrate north to warm tropical waters, where females give birth. 2005 PHOTO AT THE LINK