RIP John Hope Franklin, 1915-2009

Duke has a nicely put-together memorial site that documents Dr. Franklin's life and work. The photo here is by Derek Anderson, from this 2007 Independent Weekly article.

Updated with water-marked image 3/29/09

random dog kitsch

$12.50 bobbleheads on display at the Mark Jacobson Toyota dealership in Durham (proceeds to go to the local Animal Protection Society).

sad animals

Adam Meuse, author of the wrily absurdist Sad Animals, is doing a signing at Chapel Hill Comics today. Besides the self-castigating sea horse below, some of my favorite panels feature a jelly fish thinking, "I think too much" and a tiny caterpillar, dangling from a tree, wondering if it's "living a lie."

dogs & public sentiment

Seen at a Durham restaurant, homemade flyers from the Coalition to Unchain Dogs (subject of this earlier blog entry):

ghost cheetah

moth, ghost

When I was a kid I had a deathly fear of moths. I had seen an episode of a Twilight Zone-type horror TV serial in Hong Kong, in which a moth, possessed by the vengeful ghost of a murder victim, haunted its/her murderer. I have no memory of how the haunting worked in the plot - especially given the physical limitations of the lepidoptera. All I remember is a backlit close up of a moth at rest with folded, mottled wings, and an eerie female voice-over intoning... something.

Perhaps I don't even really remember that. But for years I hung onto a vague but tenacious belief that moths were so many human spirits in insect form, flitting through the night or, worse, perched silently on one's bedroom walls, nursing some unreadable, malevolent intent.

Also in the flying ghost category: ghost pigeons.

president dog

From the flickr photostream of the comic artist and illustrator Andrice Arp.