This drawing blog is both a return to form and merely the latest in a string of weird projects.  The former because, years ago, I used to do a bunch of sketches on a half-broken Palm IIIc each day and then post them in the evening—it’s nice to be drawing every day again, and to be again making some sort of visible proof of it.

The latter because I, uh, have a lot of ideas.  Too many, really, and sometimes not nearly enough editorial judgement about which ones to pursue.  I brainstorm and get pretty enthusiastic about things.  Once, a few years back, I wrote a little chat bot for an IRC channel, and what this chat bot would do was sit in the channel and every once in a while spew out a randomly-constructed joke in the style of Yakov Smirnoff:

“In Soviet Russia, foo bars YOU!”

YakovBot got annoying after a while—shocking, that—but it gave my friends and I a word for my maybe-too-enthusiastic brainstorming: Yakovian ideas.  I have a lot of those, the Yakovian moments.

At some point, my wife and I were brainstorming about how a person could sell t-shirts on the internet, and several logical shifts later we came up with an idea: a singing newspaper.  Headlines in song!  We sing the news so you don’t have to!  Yes!

And I actually went and did it, founding The Aural Times in February of 2006 and updating (with rare exception) three times a week for six months, before getting burnt out on the pace (3-4 hours a night of extra work, 3 nights a week) and the goddam depressing nature of US and world news.

I did sell a few t-shirts, though.